The Bulwark Podcast
Heather Cox Richardson: The Reality Show-ification of the Government
Thu, 19 Dec 2024
We are seeing in real time what it looks like to turn a democracy over to an oligarch, namely the unstable guy from South Africa who thinks he's going to be emperor of the universe. It's also authoritarian for that one unstable guy to threaten members of congress with job loss if they vote to provide hurricane relief or to rebuild part of the interstate highway system. Plus, the need for a pro-democracy media ecosystem, the difference between liberal and left, and the terribleness of the William McKinley era. Heather Cox Richardson joins Tim Miller. show notes Some of Heather's books: “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America" "Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre" "West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War"
Need parts now? O'ReillyAuto.com offers in-store pickup, same-day home delivery, or next-day home shipping. Get more parts your way at O'Reilly Auto Parts.
O, O, O, O'Reilly Auto Parts.
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I couldn't be more delighted to welcome to the Bulwark the professor of history at Boston College, teaching 19th century American history. She also writes the newsletter Letters from an American on Substack with over 1.8 million subscribers. Her books include Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America.
It's Heather Cox Richardson. How are you doing?
I'm good and I'm so pleased to be here.
So delightful. Obviously, given the fact that lots of people are reading your newsletter, many are familiar with you. But I kind of just wanted to start, for those who aren't, a little bit about your backstory. And then we'll get into the Elon of it all and what's our new... you know, kind of deputy shadow president. And we'll talk a little bit about that and historical parallels.
But, you know, you, at least to me, I just emerged from the ether, right? It's like, hey, there's this professor that has a newsletter everybody reads. And I'm just curious, like how that kind of came to pass and what, you know, got you into all this.
So it's funny because I shouldn't maybe use the past tense, but I will. I was a pretty well-known American history professor. I had a number of books out, very well-received books out in American political and economic history. But you know, in many ways in our country, our different professions are siloed.
So while I think you would have been hard-pressed to find an academic historian who didn't know who I was, the crossover to the popular audience had been, you know, the Washington Post, the Guardian, places like that, where again, I wrote a lot. I even had a column for Salon years ago under Dave Daly, which was, you know, a really interesting experience. Yeah, he was a great, really great editor.
But I had a presence on Facebook in part because I'm a teacher and people always ask me questions and that was a good place to answer those questions. And I love to write. So I wrote essays there on any number of things, you know, about once a week. And in 2019, in September of 2019, I said to people what I thought the world looked like at that moment. And I just got flooded with questions.
So I started answering questions and one thing led to another. And I think I had a million followers on Facebook within a matter of weeks. And then it turned over into the newsletter as well. So I didn't really come out of nowhere. I just came from a different silo to a more popular audience.
Yeah, it's actually in some ways an important lesson for our politics right now. I think that a lot of times that the Democrats are talking to people in just their silo and not kind of aware of what's happening in other silos, maybe more lowbrow than the American history silo. But, you know, there are other silos out there that it's important to reach.
Well, yeah, and I would say something that I've really learned, and that's that the other part of my story that I think is perhaps one of the things that people find interesting is I really am from a very small town in Maine, and I still live here, and I'm married to a lobsterman.
And there is a sense sometimes that people who don't have college degrees, as my husband does not, or that people who work in manual labor, as so many of my friends do, are stupid. And I know that's not the case because this is my world.
And so there has never been a sense for me of talking down to people or trying to explain things to people who, you know, maybe don't have the intellectual power to do it because these are the people I've grown up with. I know they're incredibly smart. They just took a different path than some of the rest of us do.
One of the things that I have discovered is not only that writing for a popular audience does not mean dumbing anything down. To the contrary, it usually means smartening it up because there are no shortcuts. But also that if you do something even so simple as putting a click through, so an organization that offers its clients,
information for free but you have to click onto that website it cuts the audience by huge magnitudes so going to facebook directly to facebook means that that i can reach you know tens of thousands of people instantly or on instagram or whatever but if i do it behind a wall that you have to click through even if it's free the numbers drop down into the low hundreds
I love that you mentioned that about your husband. And for our YouTube viewers, you can see it seems like you're in a cabin in rural Maine. And you also speak plainly. And I think people get confused about this, right? That it's like, no, you don't have to dumb things down for your people. But it is important to speak plainly, to not use unnecessary language that is jargon, right?
That doesn't relate to their lives. You know, you hear the James Carvilles of the world complain about the Democrats talking too much like college faculty lounges. You know, we have the CR that we're going to be talking about today. There are things and they're like, we're going to change the phrase out of school youth to opportunity youth. What is what is an opportunity?
I was going to say, I'm trying to figure that one out over here right now.
Yeah, exactly. But it's that you buck that, you know what I mean? Like you take the audience seriously, and you write about serious weighty matters with leaning on history, but it's not, you know, some of the frou-frou stuff that I do think that sometimes people on the left get get wrapped around the axle about.
Well, maybe, and I want to emphasize that I'm not on the left, but part of it, I think... Yeah, I mean, I think it's really important that you understand... How do you define yourself? I'll get back to that.
Let me finish this part, and that's that I think that one of the things that has made my writing popular is that I'm not afraid to ask the questions that everybody pretends they know the answer to, but they really don't. Quick, what's the difference between the G7 and the G20? Uh... I have to look it up every single time. And I'm not embarrassed to say I have to look it up every single time.
You know, what's the difference between NORAD and Five Eyes? You know, that sort of thing.
Who is the fifth country in Five Eyes? I always am trying to remember. It's New Zealand. I believe it's New Zealand. I think it's New Zealand too.
But willingness to say, hey, I don't know, that's a product of the fact I probably never grew out of being a toddler. But I think that's the difference. It's not the words you use or anything else. It's saying, what's a CR? Well, it's a continuing resolution. What's a continuing resolution and why it's important?
Because if you're doing anything else, the chances that you can sit there and remember all that stuff when you're doing the laundry and putting food on the table and crap you forgot to take the car in and all that, you can sit there and read something about the G7 and know what it's about. I mean, you're a better person than I am if you can do that. So I think there is a lot of that.
going into why people find it easier to read me than other places potentially, because there's great stuff out there that's a little harder to read. But one of the distinctions that I really think is important in the moment we're in in the United States is that if you think about the political spectrum theoretically and historically in the United States,
One of the things that the radical right has done very effectively is it has taken every liberal and said they are of the left.
And the difference between the left and the right in the United States and the liberals in the United States are that people on the right do not believe in American democracy because they believe it's messy and you shouldn't let poor people vote because they make poor decisions or uneducated people vote because they make bad decisions.
And they want to get rid of American democracy and replace it with a form of either oligarchy or authoritarianism, which is what we're seeing right now.
People on the left want to do the same thing because they believe that the democracy as we have it in the United States is too sexist and racist and was conceived under such racism and sexism that it too needs to be dismantled and something else to replace it with.
The vast majority of us, Republicans or Democrats or independents or, you know, Martians who want to preserve democracy believe that the guardrails of democracy, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the laws that have followed since are flawed in many ways for sure, but that that framework needs to be preserved. And that has nothing to do with partisanship.
So one of the things that the right very effectively did after about 1990, and really Newt Gingrich was a master at this, was to say that all those people who believe in democracy, including Republicans, remember Republicans in name only, were somehow on the left.
I was one.
That is, exactly. That is the left trying to destroy the framework of American democracy. And I think it's really important for those of us in the middle, regardless of your political background, leanings to say we care about democracy.
We might disagree about the degree to which we should support education or the degree to which we should fill in the blank there, tax people or whatever, but we do agree that democracy should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights, which is what a liberal democracy is supposed to do.
That is such a great and important definition and distinction of terms. I'm glad that you made me be more precise there because sometimes it's good to choose interchangeably as shorthand, right? It's like the left is a stand-in for Democrats and other times not. And that's confusing sometimes.
I literally did this yesterday where I was criticizing the left in the way you describe it, right, for some of their attacks on the Harris campaign. And I was speaking specifically about the group that are the, whatever you want to call it, the populist left, right? That does not really want to be in coalition with the Liz Cheney's of the world.
And you see these folks on social media and they have a defined worldview that they want to redefine liberal democracy and not lumping that in with old fashioned liberals, right? Like people that like the rule of law, want to protect it, right? want to reform it in various ways to make sure it's more fair. That is a real distinction.
And I think that we're going to see that fissure a lot over the next four years.
It is important to realize because one of the things that Russian disinformation has done very effectively, for example, is taken the extremes on both sides and pitted them against the middle. And if you look at the statistics of what Americans actually support, the vast majority of us, again, regardless of our partisan leanings, support things like common sense gun safety legislation.
We support by about 65% the codification of Roe versus Wade into law. We support higher taxes on the extremely wealthy. I mean, and when I say we support these, not by like 50.2%, by like 85%.
And the idea that we are permitting politicians who wish us ill and perhaps other countries who wish us ill to pit the minorities on the far right and the far left against the middle is, you know, frankly, suicidal. And One of the things that I hope we do going forward is to reclaim that middle and to stop talking about how bitterly divided we are as a country, because we're really not.
We are being divided rhetorically and politically by a very small group of people who benefit from that.
And one of the challenges, I think you're uniquely suited to talk about this, because one of the challenges is elevating voices from that, the broad middle, right? Not maybe centrism, as some people might define it, but that broad middle that believes in those values you laid out.
Because just the nature of the algorithms of these social media feeds, in addition to the Russian disinformation and the bot farms and the trolls that are paid to contaminate our discourse, right? But just the algorithms themselves, they reward things that are inflammatory, right? And so they reward people on the far left and they reward most of MAGA.
I don't even want to call it the far right because it's not really kind of equivalent. It's like 10% of one side versus 40% of the other side. But they reward the most inflammatory rhetoric. And you've managed to kind of break through that without succumbing to that.
The algorithms are a huge problem. I'm a First Amendment, I think I'm going to say absolutist, although I hate to say absolutist about anything, but I really, really don't want the government involved in what people can express in the United States, and for various historical reasons, but also some pretty obvious presentist reasons.
But that being said, what we have done by not regulating the algorithms and the engagement farming that is now not only permissible, but privileged in our public discourse is we have essentially taken that public sphere, we talk about the, you know, the public square where people can put all their ideas.
And rather than simply letting somebody stand on a soapbox, which is how we get that expression to be on a soapbox is you literally stood on a soapbox over a crack.
We have taken one voice in that public sphere or public square and made it sound as if it's 10,000 voices so that the rest of the people in the square sort of cower and say, well, that's what everybody thinks, when in fact it's a recipe for authoritarianism or for the warping of our society by a very minority voice that has managed to amplify itself. And I think that's a huge problem right now.
But I do think there are ways to push back against it. One of the things on my Facebook page where people comment, I have a moderator who throws out the live porn and throws out the ad hominem attacks and throws out the stuff that is just right-wing talking points. Argue all you want. I love argument, but cleaning that up.
I think is one of the reasons that has become, you know, it's got more than 2 million followers because you can go there and you can have a conversation and not feel like you're in danger. As I say, the day that I was doing something live and there was live porn going on in the comments was amazing. probably the most distracted I've ever been when I'm trying to talk, but we can do that.
I mean, we could moderate those things ourselves. It's a nuisance, but we could do that. But I think we can also convince people not to respond to engagement farming. And I think you're seeing that on Blue Sky.
But I also think that one of the things that we are looking forward to in 2025 and going forward is I think what the election of 2024 taught us was that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans very deliberately created their own information sphere while the Democrats continued to try and work with legacy media.
And that didn't really do a whole heck of a lot of good for winning an election because the people who were following the legacy media, even things like the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is quite far toward the right, voted for Kamala Harris.
But the people who were only in that right-wing information sphere where the Democrats really weren't engaging went overwhelmingly for Trump because they believed in a world that didn't exist. And one of the ways that you create that information sphere is the cross-pollinization of the
different people in that liberal medium, not media, but liberal medium, people like you, people like me, and you can just go on down the list. And one of the things that I think the Democrats are going to need to do, and the opposition people who are opposing the rise of authoritarianism, are going to be to go on those smaller podcasts and
and to cross-pollinate them all and create our own reality-based media. I think we've got really smart people. I think they're doing incredibly good stuff. I think it's not clear yet that we have built our own media ecosystem in a way that the far right did.
Totally agree. Could not agree more, especially about going on to those other podcasts. It's something that I have on my to-do list for 2025. And I'm actually going to the Turning Point USA Festival as soon as I'm finished with you today. Because I think it's important to hear what they're actually saying, rather than just hear the snippets that you get on social media.
and understand their arguments at a deep level. It's important to do that if you're going to be able to rebut them in any way. And look, there are certain people that are just going to be down this rabbit hole and be red-pilled and be an occult, but there are other people that we can pull back from the brink, but we've got to understand what they're consuming.
Yeah, we should talk a little bit about that. I do think one of the things that I didn't throw into that mix I just described is the degree to which there is huge money to be made on the right by lying people. And Charlie Kirk came out of nowhere in 2016, fall of 2016, with a really hastily made and not just a crappy website that got attention by calling people like me.
And I was on that first professor watch list when it first came out. you know, anti-American and all that. And I know where he got my name, which was from a, I mean, I don't know. I assume I know where he got my name. And it had nothing to do with my teaching or anything else. It was really a way to dox somebody essentially before we had doxing.
And that's a part of our media, the idea that politics is a reality show and you can get money and you can get clicks for being as outrageous as possible. You know, I hope that that
idea of turning our government into a reality show so that people can make bank will be a moment that we that we get beyond because you know i think in many ways what we're seeing right now in capitol hill is the reality showification of the american government and it's one thing when you have a young you know
college dropout making money or an older one like alex jones did making money by being outrageous it's another thing when that idea that oh this is great let's see what what trauma we can create is actually running our government because i think people are about to find out what happens when you put a fantasy in charge of the strongest and most visible government on the globe
Packing for a trip this holiday season? Tired of wasting time trying to figure out how to best pack for your travels? I recently discovered Unbound Merino, a travel company that is perfect for every traveler in your life. Unbound Merino was created by three friends who are looking to solve the age-old problem of how to pack light but also look great when jet-setting.
They offer timeless, versatile clothing made of merino wool, which is moisture-wicking, and most importantly, super comfortable. Unbound makes it simple to pack for short or long trips, since their clothes can be worn for weeks on end without needing a wash.
With Unbound's versatile pieces, you can go from the plane to outdoor adventures to that swanky dinner without the headaches of overpacking or needing to change outfits for every leg of your journey. Unbound's clothing allows travelers to pack lighter, save unchecked baggage fees, and spend more time focusing on creating travel memories.
Head on over to their website, unboundmarino.com, where new customers can use our code THEBULLWORK for 10% off their order. on the TPUSA thing, my remit in attending and observing those things is to actually talk to the attendees, right? It's not like the porn of, let's give these people the attention that they want, right?
And like, let them dunk on me so that they get more money for their YouTube, you know, so they can be like, oh, I attacked an Ever Trumper. I don't like to get involved in that kind of stuff. But I do think that engaging with the people that are consuming their, which you're right, their lies, just to be blunt about it, is something that is, I think, required. Some people have to do it.
Not everybody's got to do it. But I think that it's important to engage with those folks.
It comes back to what you were saying earlier, and I don't remember if it was on or off the recording, about the whole idea of what's the matter with Kansas, you know? And not literally Kansas in this case, but the idea there is why do people vote for a fantasy that actually damages their economic security? And, you know, I live in that world.
And again, I have extremely little patience with let's talk about rural America and what's wrong with rural America, because my first reaction is always like, you know, we're not zoo animals.
But my second is the difference financially, socially, everything between the people who vote for the MAGA Republicans, who I maintain are not real Republicans, but the people who vote for the MAGA Republicans versus the people who vote against the MAGA Republicans. is whether or not they consume the Fox News channel and talk radio. That's it. That's the dividing line.
And that, you know, everyone's like, whoa, they're left behind. I'm like, no, they're not. They got a million dollar boat in the harbor, you know?
Yeah, let's talk about that. So the number one person, maybe not number one anymore, but aspiring to be number one person they're consuming is Elon Musk, who now is running not the Fox News, but online, a very influential digital media channel that includes a lot of right-wing propaganda that he propagates to his millions of followers.
He is also, I guess, the deputy president or co-president or shadow president and potentially the Speaker of the House coming in. So we have over on the Hill... There was this continuing resolution, as we referenced earlier, which is going to fund the government for three more months.
Among the things that it was going to fund was assistance for rural America, for farm workers who are struggling because of some of the natural disasters because of interest rates. It was going to include a disaster relief for people directly suffering from the natural disasters and just, you know. paying federal government employees at Christmas, among other things. So Elon scuttles this himself.
And I'm interested in your take on what's happening. And then I want to get into your expertise of 19th century American history and talk about the parallels of what we've seen before when these kinds of oligarchs get their hands on the kitty.
Well, I'm going to correct one thing there to make it really clear. Elon didn't scuttle this bill. The Republicans in Congress who did what he said scuttled the bill.
Thank you. They have agency. I broke my own rule. Republicans have agency. They scuttled it because Elon told them to. Thank you. That's a good correction.
And the same thing happened with the immigration bill in the last Congress when everyone said, oh, Trump broke, you know, Trump scuttled this. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. It was the, you know, the Republicans who chose to follow Trump, who at the time was not in power. And that's actually a really important part of this dynamic.
What's happening on Capitol Hill right now is that Elon Musk, who is not eligible to be the president of the United States...
and who has never held an elected office, but who put more than $150 million into the Trump presidential campaign, and in addition to his work with X, that supported Trump, and really, I think we can say was behind Trump being elected to the office, is now apparently calling all the shots. And That has been disturbing for a number of us that I think maybe we should talk a little bit about.
But what happened yesterday was that the House of Representatives, which has been run by Republicans since 2023, January 2023, has not managed to pass an appropriations bill for 2024, which is almost over. It was supposed to be done in September of 2023, and it didn't happen. And now we're at the end.
And what they have done repeatedly is issued these continuing resolutions which say, we're going to continue to fund the government at this level for another few months until we can finally get our acts together. And the deadline, the last deadline from September, that continuing resolution that happened in September, was Friday. Right. The 20th of December.
And very quietly, the House and the Senate leadership worked out a 1500 page bill that was essentially a continuing resolution that maintained levels of spending from the previous two years now, but added, as you say, the disaster relief and relief for farmers because they also never passed a farm bill.
And the Farm Bill is huge because it's everything to do with our agricultural policy and also our supplemental nutrition programs, as is what used to be called food stamps. So this is not like, you know, feeding the chickens. This is like feeding the country. And that hadn't been done as well. So they folded a little bit, a teeny bit of the Farm Bill into this continuing resolution and
Immediately, the far right Freedom Caucus in the House said, we hate it. We hate Johnson. We hate everything. We want to go home. And I'm paraphrasing, but not by much. But it still seemed like it had to go through because by Friday, if there is not a continuing resolution in place, we're going to have a government shutdown right before Christmas, which again is political suicide.
So it looked like it was going to go forward. And Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy came out against it and said, if you vote for this, we will essentially make sure that we can use our money to guarantee that you don't get reelected in two years. And the Republicans all ran scared. And now the whole thing is around their ankles. And we don't have a way to fund the government.
And all of the farmers are mad and all of the people who are suffering under the disasters from the hurricanes in the last few months are, you know, unable to rebuild. And I knew that we were going to have to grapple with what it would mean in the United States if an authoritarian took over our government. And we saw that yesterday with the calls for investigating and arresting Liz Cheney.
And we saw it with the attacks on first ABC News and then the Des Moines Register. But those are things that many people don't really care about. They're going to care about losing this continuing resolution and Musk saying, well, you know what, let's just not fund anything until Trump gets back in office.
A month without funding the United States of America is uncharted territory, but it also really highlights early on what it means to turn a democracy over to an oligarch or over to an authoritarian. And listen to me, stammering. I do not see how this plays out.
Because all of a sudden, the American people who have been somewhat complacent, but who showed they were really angry over the lionization of the guy who assassinated Brian Thompson... the CEO of the healthcare company, are looking at the fact that it's pretty clear that the government got taken over by an unelected rich guy from South Africa. I don't know how this plays out.
And it was taken over quite easily by him, you know, because what he did was he, he just revealed the truth of what is happening in Washington. And here's like the thing that the Republicans are able to get away with.
And I think that the Democrats need to take this lesson very seriously going forward is that Washington has been run for quite a while by a secret Congress, essentially, like you're saying this was done in secret. It was run by the, a secret majority of adults, right? Right.
Which was most of the entire Democratic Party, basically, along with a handful of Republicans and Republican leadership that would work with them to do these CRs and to keep the basic functions running because they didn't want to deal with this crisis that they're dealing with now. And they did so and hopefully didn't get that much attention. Right.
Especially when Steve Bannon was in jail, it got less attention for four months. So things moved a lot more slowly. Right. But those Republicans who are willing to be responsible only in secret are Now, we get to, you know, see the truth, right? Now, the curtain has been brought back by Elon Musk and by Trump, you know, with their huge megaphones.
And they're out there and they're saying, no, Elon in particular, no, we shouldn't do this. We shouldn't fund this. And now these Republicans are like, oh, wait, I can't go along with this. I'm going to get kicked out. You know, I'm going to have the same fate as Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. Right. I'm going to be pushed out by these guys. And so I can't go along with this.
And so now you see that really it was the Democrats that were the only governing party, whether you have criticisms about the way they governed, like they were the only ones that were doing the responsible elements of governing, you know, compromise, you know. giving a little bit to get a little bit, right? The types of things you have to do in a legislative system.
And so where it goes from here, I think is the open question. I sent the, there was a press release by the Farm Bureau today that was like, farmers can't wait a month. They need this assistance now.
And my response to that is kind of like, well, you probably should have thought about that before, you know, prioritize tampons and boys bathrooms over actual, having actual adults in charge of the government. So here's where we are.
Well, and I think that one of the things that I wrote about recently was the degree to which people voted for Trump literally believing he would not do the things he said he was going to do. And I don't quite know what one does with that because, of course, there was such pressure on Vice President Kamala Harris to give every detail of her plans, and they did exist. I read them.
They got very little coverage. Whereas Trump would say these outrageous things, and people would just shrug and say he's not really going to do that. And, you know, the funny thing about it is, as you're talking, I am thinking about the Republican lawmakers as being in a way, I've said for a long time that the American people are in an abusive relationship with the Republican Party.
But the Republican lawmakers appear to be in an abusive relationship with Trump and now Elon Musk and perhaps Vivek Ramaswamy. And that is they somehow believe that if they keep appeasing this guy, it's going to make the difference. and he's gonna suddenly start behaving well.
And one of the things that has made me just bonkers throughout this whole thing is anybody who studies anything having to do with politics knows that you must stop these people. They cannot stop themselves.
And think about what would have happened if the Republican establishment, which by the way, I had a lot of problems with, had said to Trump in 2015, thanks, but no thanks, we're gonna come out against you. or if they had insisted on making sure in that convention that he couldn't manipulate the delegate votes the way he did to get that. I mean, we could go straight on.
The first impeachment, the second impeachment.
The second impeachment, the key one.
They could have stopped him, but they wanted his votes. And now in this moment, one of the things that I find is really interesting is you can tell that the Republican Party is at civil war. Mitch McConnell has made that very clear. And Trump really doesn't have anything to offer the elected,
Republicans any longer that is he has not been effective in down ballot races he's 78 years old and clearly slipping last night in the middle of the night after a dinner with some people he wanted to impress he tweeted something to the effect of everybody likes me or something and you're like really you're the president-elect of the United States and you're like everybody is my friend isn't this just great and he has never been able to transfer his voters to somebody else so
So the question for me has been, when will the Republican lawmakers wake up and go, you know what, what are you doing for me now? Because you're not going to be able to deliver any more voters to me. So I'm going to have to jump and find a new base because the MAGA base is extraordinarily loyal to Trump, but to no one else.
But what's been added to that now, which I did not see coming, is Musk with this extraordinary war chest saying, anybody who doesn't do what I want, I'm going to throw out of government, which is essentially what he's saying. And if that's not the definition of an authoritarian slash king, I don't know what is. And, you know, whether or not the Republican lawmakers will finally find some...
backbone at least to say well maybe it's not important for me to be a representative so or a senator so much as it is for me to get rid of this really unstable fellow who is apparently going to become the the emperor of the universe yeah the richest man in the world and the largest government contractor live tweeting fake things on ketamine being in charge of the of the country does seems like it might have some problems nuclear weapons baby
Isn't it funny how the people we love most are often the hardest to shop for? Luckily, there's one gift that everyone on your list is sure to enjoy, an Aura digital picture frame. Named number one by Wirecutter, Aura frames make it incredibly easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame.
When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it and preload it with a thoughtful message and photos using the Aura app, making it an ideal present for long-distance loved ones. It's a gift so special, they'll use it every day. I was in Sarah Longwell's office yesterday. I came into D.C. We did this debate with reason. We won the debate. We crushed them, actually, in the debate.
Me and Sarah did. There was a vote. They lost voters. We won every single undecided voter. It was a sweep. Just saying. I was at our office. We were doing a little prep. Not much prep. It was a pretty easy debate. Not much prep. We were doing a little prep. Talked about the bulwark. And I look over. I was like, boom, there's a picture of me. There's a picture of me inside the Aura digital frame.
It looked wonderful next to her desk. You know, you see, think about this as a gift for a grandma to just send pictures of the kids. Nope. This was, you know, one of the kids preloaded it for Sarah. It had pictures of all of us, the Bulwark people, all of our live shows, all of you right there in her office. It was awesome. Great gift for Sarah.
Save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames by using promo code BULLWORK at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code BULLWORK. This deal is exclusive to listeners, so get yours now in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions apply. I'm curious to talk about the parallels, to go back to kind of McKinley.
Trump has dinner last night with Bezos and Musk. You mentioned how he said that all these people like me. He's really talking about a few people, Zuckerberg.
benny off right that andretian like these big billionaires that have gone down to kiss the ring and who you know want to get their piece of the pie now from the next government musk it's tbd whether musk is financially motivated or whether he's motivated by like he just is getting high off this power and and you know wanting to be in control of everything all these other guys you know they want to get theirs out of this uh out of this coming government so i'm wondering the parallels between kind of that era that you've written about and
You know, particularly McKinley, who Trump has referenced several times.
Can you believe we're talking about William McKinley? I mean, I just listen. I love the late 19th century for a number of reasons. But if there were like one president that you didn't want to know more about. I mean, maybe it's Benjamin Harrison or Martin Van Buren, I'll give you as well. But William McKinley? Like, really? We're going to lionize William McKinley?
So the reason that this matters, William McKinley is a really interesting character because of what he represents. And that is when Trump talks about William McKinley, and obviously somebody told him that William McKinley had these incredibly high tariffs, which he did. But one of the things that I think people maybe misunderstood is that wasn't just about the tariffs.
What William McKinley really stood for was an economic system in which a very few people got extraordinarily wealthy and everybody else served them. So think, for example, of what we now know as the Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie. And in that was originally known as wealth.
And in that, Carnegie makes an argument that is very similar to that of the elite Southern enslavers before the Civil War, in which he says, listen, the wealthy, the extremely wealthy are really the stewards of America's wealth. That you don't, and I'm paraphrasing, the stewards of wealth is not paraphrased, but the rest of this is.
But what he says is that, you know, you don't really want to make sure your workers have a living wage. And, you know, strikers are against America and all that. And people should live the way they are living. Because if you give your workers more of what they have created through their labor, then they're going to waste it in housing and clothes and leisure time.
And that's not going to move society forward. What you really need to do is have those people's labor directed and their habits and their lives overseen by their betters, by their masters of industry in this case, in order to accumulate all this wealth at the very top. And then those people at the very top will make decisions about how the people's wealth should be spent.
And this was their idea of a great society. And when Trump used to talk about how this was the richest time in American history, it was not the richest time in American history for all Americans by any stretch of the imagination. It was the richest time in American history for people like Andrew Carnegie and J.D.
Rockefeller and, you know, and Nelson Aldrich and all those people who were running the government. And what they did in that period was there was a marriage of government and big business. Quite literally, you know, J.D. Rockefeller's son married Nelson Aldrich's daughter. And that's who Nelson Rockefeller was, the child of those two.
There was literally this marriage of the extremely wealthy and the government. And senators would literally introduce themselves as the senator for the sugar trust, for example. And the idea was that you had created this world where the very wealthy, the capitalists, and this I think is where we got our concept of American capitalism, very wealthy people running the government.
that would move everything forward. Well, of course, what happened was that even people like, who were part of the Republican Party, by the way, the Democrats recognized that this was a problem. And one of the people who really spoke up about this was Grover Cleveland.
And it's interesting that he's been completely written out of our history books for the most part, because he kept saying, this is not a democracy when a few rich guys buy it all. And the Republicans come down on him again and again saying, well, you're an anarchist, you're a communist, you're trying to destroy this wonderful American system.
And one of the people who listens to him, although does not leave the Republican Party, is Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge as well, who's a senior partner in that relationship early on. And they look at this and they're like, we cannot have a democracy when you have literally children who have no education, who are working and living in the streets and so on.
And they pick up that critique of industrial capitalism and its marriage to government, and they create the progressive era. And William McKinley, when he is elected in 96, is elected as this reaction to Grover Cleveland. And with the idea that he's gonna bring this government to fruition, of big business and the lawmakers.
And of course, there is a, let's just call it a pushback to that in the form of glass worker slash steel worker who has been blacklisted for his work with the union, a guy named Leon Chalgos. And when that backlash happens, Theodore Roosevelt becomes president, we get the progressive era.
Do you have any Grover Cleveland reading recommendations for me? I know there's a lot of the parallels between there now are pretty striking.
So it's funny because everybody who studies Grover Cleveland falls in love with him. And somebody said, and I did the same. I read about it in one of my books. And somebody said, why don't you write a book? Why don't you write a biography of him? And I said, because there's three on the market from the other three people who have studied him. And I would be the fourth.
And there's only four readers for those three books or those four books. So Cleveland is, and I'm making fun, but like I say, I've written about him a lot. He desegregated the New York City police force. He, I mean, there's a number of things he did that,
He's a really interesting switch because the Democratic Party had been really wedded to the former Confederates after the Civil War, and they lose the 1880 election quite unexpectedly to everybody, not just to them. And that's when we get James Garfield, who's really kind of a Lincoln Republican. He's assassinated, so we never really see what that would have become.
But the Democratic Party says, we can't stick with these old unreconstructed Southerners. We're going to move to the urban cities. And that's when they get Grover Cleveland. And Grover Cleveland really builds up the idea of politics as sort of that urban idea of taking care of everybody within the party that becomes Tammany Hall. It's already Tammany Hall, but he links to that.
And that quite directly becomes FDR. Anyway, Cleveland gave a bunch of great speeches. There's a bunch of these old biographies of him. I've written about him in Western Appomattox, I think, and in The Wounded Knee, the massacre book. I don't know. I'm not sure you need to spend the rest of your life on him, but he's interesting.
I don't know. Do you have a late 19th century history class that I could take on the side when I'm not podcasting over the next six months? It feels quite relevant.
That's actually a really good idea. I taught one at, I think, most of the universities I've been at called Race Riots and Rodeos. And my Western mathematics is based on that course. But, you know, maybe I'll do it. That would be a great spring project, wouldn't it? Because I do these courses online. That might be fun.
I mean, the late 19th century is a great period, not just because of the politics and the economics, which everybody sort of has this gut sense of. But because in this moment when nobody quite knew what was going to materialize in the relationship between government and individuals, you get all these new voices. You get indigenous Americans writing newspapers and coming to fight in Washington.
And you get sculpture and you get art and you get, you know, the rise of cowboy poetry and you get Scott Joplin out of Texas. And there's just this it's this incredibly powerful. time of fervor and new creativity that sometimes I think we don't pay enough attention to.
So when you get in 1913, when you get the Armory Show in New York, which is when people really start paying attention to changes in modern art, that comes from the 19th century. That's not like somebody says in 1912, hey, let's invent a whole new kind of art. That comes from all this incredible ferment of maybe we don't have to have representational art. Maybe we can just do lines.
Maybe, you know, anyway, I love that period.
I can already tell you that the commenters on the sub stack are going to be like, I will sign up for the Carnegie Cleveland McKinley. We can do a little bit on the cowboy art on the side for fun. But I think that more apt to our moment is how we're going to deal with this situation. marriage of the big tech oligarchs and the aspiring anti-democratic Republican Party.
I have one final question for you. It's the toughest one I've got. Susan Collins is up in two years. Have you considered leaving Substack and running for Senate?
You know, people ask me that a lot. And what I would answer is that this is maybe a mirror of some of the things that are problematic in our politics. And that is that, you know, I'm a good historian and I have become a good writer and I'm a good teacher. None of those skill sets really translate to what you need to do to be a good senator.
That is, you know, for me to sit in a meeting is physically painful. And what do senators do? They sit in meetings.
This is your sacrifice. I'm asking you to sacrifice by sitting in these meetings with these awful people. I trust me. I'm not asking you to get all that's not going to be like, oh, candy and rainbows. I get to be a senator. I get a detail. No, it's going to be terrible. But you might you might be needed for the moment.
So if I did not think that I would expletive everything up, I promise you I would do it. But the truth is where I would be good in the Senate is as a staffer. you know, the person that they hand the big books to and say, tell me the three lines that you need out of this.
Because, you know, one of the things I think you really need in today's Senate is somebody like Angus King, who is our other main senator, who is really good with people and really listens and is really empathetic. Whereas I am much more like, Really? You're going to waste my time with that? You know, and that, you know, I say what I think.
That's fair. But the Democrats could use some people that say what they think, that have lobsterman husbands, that talk bluntly. This is a thing that I think the Democrats are missing a little bit. So anyway, well, prey on it. We have a week. You have a couple of months.
No, no. The rest of the world should pray on it because if I went into the Senate or if I were even elected, you would all need to be praying. I promise.
Thank you. Heather Cox Richardson. It was such a delight. Please come back. Her newsletter is Letters from an American on Substack, the book. I'm sorry. I had to go deep on Grover Cleveland, so we didn't even get to it. Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America. I assume that the shorthand there is the state of America is creaky.
The State of America is the last section of that book is a how-to manual for protecting democracy. It's how we've done it in the past.
All right. Everybody go check that out. Heather Cock Richardson, thank you so much. Have a wonderful Christmas and holiday season and hope to talk to you soon.
Thanks. It's been a real pleasure.
All right. Tomorrow we got one more podcast before I go on a skiing vacation. So come back. He's a friend of the pod. You'll enjoy it. See you all then. Peace.
Hey, maybe I'll dye my hair. Maybe I'll move somewhere Maybe I'll get a car Maybe I'll drive so far they'll all lose track Me, I'll bounce right back Maybe I'll sleep real late Maybe I'll lose some weight Maybe I'll clear my junk Maybe I'll just get drunk on cheap red wine I'll be just fine and dandy. Lord, it's like a hard candy Christmas. I'm barely getting through tomorrow.
Still, I can't let sorrow bring me way down. Hey, maybe I'll learn to sew Maybe I'll just lie low Maybe I'll hit the bars Maybe I'll count the stars until the dawn Me, I will go on Maybe I'll settle down Maybe I'll just leave town Maybe I'll have some fun Maybe I'll meet someone and make you mine
I'll be just fine and dandy Lord, it's like a hard candy Christmas I'm barely getting through tomorrow Still, I can't let sorrow bring me way down
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.