Reclaiming Patriotism and Natural Law

Welcome to Podsave of America. I'm Alex Wagner. On today's show, historian Heather Cox Richardson on America at two hundred and fifty . With the administration gearing up for july fourth celebrations and gearing down from celebrations of Trump's eightieth, I thought I'd check in with someone who can situate all of the pomp and circumstance in historical context. You likely know Heather from her insanely popular substack, letters from an American, where she writes every damn day about the history behind today's increasingly a historical politics. Heather has a new series out to celebr ate America's two hundred fiftieth. It is aptly named two hundred fifty to two hundred fifty , where she tells the story of the Americans who, over the course of a quarter millennium, work to make real the founding ideals of this nation , that all people are created equal. We're going to talk about that series and Trump's Fourth of July celebrations as well as so much more. Trump's efforts to make DC just as tacky as he is, JD Vance's Catholic faith and how the lefts can embrace patriotism once again. It was a great conversation with Heather, and we're going to get to it in a minute, but before we do, guys, there's a new episode of Pod Save America Only Friends Out Now with me and Hysteria's Aron Ryan . Go check it out. Only Friends is the Friends of the Pod Subscriber Exclusive Show where Podsave of America hosts and contributors dive into even more news stories from the week. In this episode, Erin and I unpack the Justice Department's latest investigation into Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. We check in on whatever was going on at the turning point women's leadership summit, no that is not an oxymoron , and much more. So hit pause and subscribe to Friends of the Pod at crooked dot com slash friends. Also, please, if you would, check out my podcast, Runaway Country, where I this week talked to California Attorney General Robonta about JD Vance's war on Blue States, the other war that he's tasked with, and then graded the Vice's salesmanship efforts this week on the Iran surrender with the great Sam Cedar. All right, here is Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for joining us today on Podse of America, and also preemptively thank you for offering wisdom and perspective on this insane American moment. Alex, it's always so much fun to be with you. Oh , we should do it more often. Anytime, literally, you just say the word. I'm here. Let's start first upcoming two hundred fiftieth celebration, the semi quincentennial and how the president has chosen to celebrate this momentous occasion. Last Sunday, he of course hosted a UFC fight on the south lawn of the White House. And then next week on the fourth, he is going to be hosting the self proclaimed most spectacular Trump rally of them all on the National Mall. I don't have the same lens onto history as you do, but can you recall any sort of parallel to such a monstrous display of presidential ego in the name of patriotic celebration . Any time in our history as a country? No, of course not. We're in a really different moment than ever before in American history with an administration that's rejecting the basic principles of our democratic government . So one of the things that's interesting is how that's playing out not only in celebrations of the two hundred fiftieth, but also in the memorials in Washington, DC . And but there's a larger story. I mean, everybody knows what I'm talking about. The reflecting pool, which might be a really interesting dive, so to speak for us to go into . The Kennedy Center, the, you know, the gilded horses behind the Lincoln Memorial, the arch, you know, all the things we the destruction of the Ben , the proposed destruction of the Ben Shawn Murals, all that stuff . But what's really interesting as you look over it, when you think about democracy is that if you think about our great presidents, the ones we remember , people like Lyndon Baines Johnson or Theodore Roosevelt or Eisenhower or we could go on and on , they're the ones who carved their memory into the American people by making their lives better , by having social security or health care or by trying to eliminate poverty, by suggesting that the way you create a monument to yourself is by changing the lives of the American people for the better . And it's just really interesting when you think about legacies , the fact that Trump somehow thinks that slapping his name on stuff matters, but that doesn't matter at all . And similarly, if you think about our history, you know, you can write and people do write books celebrating the absolute genius of and I'm going to poll somebody here at random Benjamin Harrison . But it just doesn't stick if in fact it's clear that all you're doing is trying to celebrate a certain kind of dominant lifestyle versus something that actually made the American people better. So I would suggest that right now in American history, for example, a lot more people have heard of the Wounded Knee massac than have heard of Benjamin Harrison's great successes. Yeah, I mean people can talk to the trail of tears, but they're not sure what old Hickory did in terms of interior decorations of the White House. Maga types have pointed to the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, I believe, hosted and fought in a boxing match at the White House during the president This is actually great . So if you want to talk about this, I would love to do this. Yeah , because what happens in the Theodore Roosevelt presidency is this is coming, first of all, Teddy Roosevelt really jumps into some sort of American prominence in eighteen eighty four, which is an important year politically because that's really when the younger Republicans are coming of age and they're looking at the corruption of the Republican Party and saying we can't be Democrats because of the Civil War, but we also can't be that kind of Republican. So one of the things that they are trying to do is figure out how to return America to its democratic small D emocratic principles . And this is happening at a time of industrialization. And during that time of industrialization , the industrialists are essentially arranging the systems in the United States to create an undereducated, underpaid , underclass that will continue. Yeah, does it sound familiar? It's kind of familiar . But so one of the things that is driving Theodore Roosevelt is he's very concerned about the terrible conditions in the urban areas, especially in the East. Remember he loses both his mother and his wife on the same day to diseases that have come out of that sort of urban soup before we really understood germ theory . And he wants to clean up the cities, but he also wants to return the country to a place where we can actually create good citizens . And so he's going to support cleaning up the cities. He's going to support education, and he's going to support the wide open spaces that he's going to try and protect through conservation. But he is also going to try to reclaim a kind of American masculinity that says, you know, we're not just cogs in a machine of a larger system. And that speaks to his own sort of rediscovering his ability , his physical abilities from his youthful asthma through boxing. So this is when you get and he also protects football. Football, somebody had actually died playing a college football game. It was such a rough sport. So he actually managed to . This is also the same period when we get indigenous names attached to sports teams because the idea was that you wanted men to be savage, and I'm going to put that in air quotes, but only on the football field, for example. So but you think about what Teddy Roosevelt was trying to do and a lot of people look down on it because all the bare knuckle fighting and all that and there's all this is sort of an era of cockfighting and prize fighting and so on in the cities. It was not considered higher level entertainment. But there's some really big differences , I think between and maybe at the time people would not have said so. There's one really major difference between Teddy Roosevelt and boxing and his exhibition boxing, which was not the same bloody stuff that was going on in five points in New York . And what happened at the White House? And the really big difference, two, really big differences is one , taxpayer money didn't go into Teddy Roosevelt's fighting . And it was not a branding opportunity . And for sure, it was not the corruption opportunity that the UFC fight on the in the White House has been. So even though it both involved flying fists . The systems that they are either accepting or critiquing were virtually opposite. A very important distinction. There was no cryptocurrency sponsorship and paramount plus requirement to see the match. You could just be a human being there on the white. Do you have any idea how many people attended that White House match that Redfeld fought in? Oh , there wouldn't have been I don't I don't have any idea, but it would not have been huge. Because remember, what makes things huge is the ability to get places quickly and to know that they're happening. Neither of which would have happened. It would have been written up in the newspapers afterward. And I'm sorry to have gone on so long about that, but literally nobody has ever asked me about No, this is, I love this. And just so you know, Lincoln was also a fighter, which you get nobody's ever asked me about? Like a boxing fighter? No, worse. Lincoln, I mean, worse if you're not into kind of grabbing your he was remember he was from the frontier and he was quite a big man and he had quite long arms and legs and that made him a really good guy in a fight. And in those days and there's an argument about how deeply he went into this, this was the era of eye gouging and ear biting and so on . And there's big fights about whether or not he did that. Lots of people want to say, Oh, he would never have done that. Maybe maybe not. But remember, he gets his political start in Illinois and he is backed on a bipartisan basis because there's a gang who supports him and they're actually from the opposite party. He's a whig and they're Democrats and they, support him because he's such a great fighter. He has fought with them before. Did he bite ears? Do we know if he bought ears? We don't know the answer to that. And people who listen to this podcast now are going to write you and me probably hate m fromale both sides saying course he, Of did or no he didn't. But he came up through that era because you had to survive on the frontier and it turned out in his case to be a springboard into politics. Well, I mean, yeah, Trump was a public was a fight promoter, basically, through much of his career in the eighties. So here we are, and he's promoting fights to enrich himself and line the pockets of his allies on the White House grounds with taxpayer money. You mentioned Lincoln, and I'm kind of interested in asking you whether this moment there's a lot that's reminiscent. History tells us the future as much as it is a detail of the past . But Trump has other plans to celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary, including the indie drag race around the streets of Washington, DC and the Great American State Fair , which several states we already know how they are skipping at least eight states, Connecticut , Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Maine, Oregon, Washington, and Pennsylvania, all blue states have said they will not take part in the fair. Maybe they don't have any like butter butter sculptures that they want to send in, but I feel like it's a little bit more political than that . Is this what it felt like in the summer of eighteen sixty when you had states just opting out of like fourth of July celebrations because they just did not see themselves as part of the Union. I mean, I'm not saying that that's what's happening right now, but the division, the steep division in a moment of that is supposed to be about national pride, but obviously Trump is insured is not . So in the eighteen sixties and before Four Jthuly of would have been celebrated at a state level. And there really wouldn't, there are fourth of July speeches in a lot of places, but you wouldn't have been able to make a statement like that. And in fact, everybody would have harked back to the framers and the founders, the framers of the Constitution and the founders of the Declaration of Independence. So eighteen sixty is a little bit too early to go, but what is interesting is if you popped forward to something like eighteen seventy six . And in eighteen seventy six , there is real concern that the United States is going to fall apart. Remember, this is the year before eighteen seventy seven and the American South taking back control of the states from the governments that were trying to protect civil rights in the southern states . And that idea that we are celebrating different histories is actually part of a lot of our celebrations . But I would say something different in this moment. And that's that what really jumps out to me is far less that different states are saying we're not going to play with Trump than that Trump is saying, this is my holiday . This is about me . And this is about me dictating the state of Washington and also the state of our history. And he's been tripping up over history right and left lately as he's been trying to dictate how we remember it. And one of the things I love about that is that as that happens, people are stepping up and saying, wait a minute, I want to know the real history. Tell me the real history . So one of the things that you are seeing as freedom two hundred and fifty, Trump's group has basically taken almost all of the money from the bipartisan congressionally backed America two hundred and fifty that Americans themselves are finding their own ways to celebrate. So if you looked on june eighteenth at the NIC celebration in New York City, oh my god that was a fourth of July celebration, except they weren't actually talking about the fourth. Absolutely. And the opening of the Obama presidential center in Chicago on the same day , people were actually putting on social media happy fourth of July. Yeah, yeah. And I actually spent last week I did a substack live with Joy Reed and we were talking about june , which I think this year more than any year that I can remember has become kind of an alternative fourth of July for a lot of people who feel completely excluded from Trump's malignant narcissism that's cast a paller over the Fourth of July. And juneteenth, in many ways, represents kind of our reconciliation with our very, very troubled and dark past on slavery or not reconciliation, but acknowledges it and also moves the ball forward and reminds us that we are, you know, living in a we are in communion with one another . We are part of the fabric of democracy. In some ways, I feel like to your point, Americans have been sort of A forced to reckon with their history in a way that they haven't before, and also find ways to plant a flag, pardon the metaphor in patriotism in a way that feels authentic and honest. And that is like a weird downstream effect that is kind of positive, I think, from all of the Trump nonsense and garbage . I think that's right. And I had the same observation about june myself this year that it felt much more like an American celebration of recognizing what one does when the system is designed to strip away your freedom . And one of the things that the Trump administration has done, I think, is it has made people realize that the, I'm sorry, but the villains we found in our past that seem someedhow as if they were overdone, like truly nobody could really do X are around us even still . And while you could always say that because you know human nature watching some of these people take positions of power in the same sorts of ways that the segregationists did in the eighteen I'm sorry nineteen sixty's and eighteen sixty's as well, but nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. I mean, Baul Connor still walks among us . And for those people who were not old enough to remember those days , you know, watching somebody like Greg Bavino giving Nazi salutes and talking about ethnic cleansing , and recogniz ing he really was running our immigration policy is an eye opener, I think that reminds people we must act in solidarity against those who are trying to destroy American democracy, not by party, not by any of the other divisions that people tend to emphasize or have tended to emphasize since the nineteen eighties , but really this is an existential struggle for the survival of American democracy and we could actually get it right this time Fingers crossed . The mere existence of Stephen Miller is a reminder that we can indeed go back to our very, very violent racist roots. Today's show is sponsored by strawberry. Me. Think about your career. Maybe it looks fine on paper, but does something feel a bit off, Tommy? Yes. Maybe you're stuck burned out, ready to move up to the next level, or maybe you just want clarity on what's next. I wish there was a career coach or a mentor that I had. I would love that. Yeah, you occasionally you have a great boss, you know? We really learned from really Rock Obama, Robert Gibbs. He was he was our strawberry dot me. Josh Ernest, just some great human beings in my lives. You know, when you work for someone like that that really does like kind of mentor you along the way, it's very valuable. Very helpful. I pay for them to call me once a month and yell at me about something. Me too. Honestly. And that's where none of them really yelled. They're all just like disappointed. Right, yeah. 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But when we talk about the actual architecture of all of this, right ? DC was designed to be a piece of civic art . And it is what the New York Times recently called an accumulation of carefully arranged detail s, many quietly referencing one another. I grew up there. There is a through line in many of the buildings, even though they're different styles . And now Trump wants to install a mammoth arch. He's trying to do something to the Lincoln Memorial as well . There's been a lot of pushback. There have been some lawsuits . I see Trump's push for monuments as inextricably linked to a male obsession with phallic objects, but maybe you have a less Freudian interpretation of what's going on here, Heather. Well, I actually don't do a lot of work with Freud. I was always more young person . I got to do a shout out here. I think the New York Times has done a really excellent job of popularizing understandings of the architecture in Washington, DC. They've had a couple of really good issues lately, where they set out what it will mean to have these changes to the landscape and what it looks like. And so that's just, you know, we don't talk necessarily enough about when the media really gets something right . But I think that's exactly right. I mean, one of the things I've always loved about DC is the degree to which when it was laid out it was supposed to reflect the American government, the three separate the three separate nodes of power and so on. And one of the things about proposed ballroom is that it actually breaks the line of sight between the yeah , which you grew up with, right? Down Pennsylvania Avenue, I think it is, that you could look all the way down and see the White House. And similarly, the arch goes from having that bridge between Washington, DC and Virginia , which is really important to the Civil War and the fact that the Arlington National Cemetery sits on General Lee's former plantation, and that itself is a really interesting story . And if you look at how that is laid out, at least according to the renderings by the New York Times, what it does is the arch will frame Robert E Lee's house , which and again, somebody said, we should tear the house down. I fervently disagree with that. The Robert E. Lee House has a different name as well is a really interesting and important historical document itself. The people who've lived there, it's actually got very much biracial history and so on. But I think what you are seeing is somebody who doesn't understand the concept of the people or the majesty, the true majesty of the concept of a government that is controlled by the people who are governed, which is in our Declaration of Independence . So plopping yourself down in the middle of it, you know, it strikes me that that kind of mirr ors when he shows up at foreign dignitary events like the G seven last week or any one of them and basically walks in and says, well, I'm here now . The boss is here and gets laughs is literally that statements like that are greeted with laughter because what a joke . I got to ask if it's our taxpayers at this point putting up those jokes. Wow. And that's the other piece of this that I don't think we have yet grappled with is how much of money is going into those vanity projects. And mind you, I love the idea of upkeep on the gilded horses and all that. That needs to be done, but this isn't his money. It's already money. And you look at the number of people who have been thrown off SNAP, the supplemental nutrition assistance program . And I'm like, Listen, I love a gilded horse as much as the next person, but I would very much rather my neighbors can eat. Children getting free lunches at school or hot lunches, children getting sometimes the only meal they're going to eat . Medicaid recipients having, you know, urgent and life threatening health conditions dealt with. I mean, this is all stuff that has been slashed in the name of putting an extra few centimeters of gold on the horses by the Lincoln Memorial. You mentioned the cost the taxpayers. This week we have new reporting from the Washington Post . The cost of the ballroom, that monstrosity is going to cost six hundred million dollars with approximately half of that coming from taxpayer wallets, heather. Well, and worse, they knew that. The whole if that was a fabulous article. By the way, the Washington Post has had some great exclusives lately too. But when he was out there saying private funds are going to pay for this, which by the way is not okay either , they already had cut checks off the public treasury . And I just again, when I see these people out there talking about waste fraud and abuse and what they mean by that is we're tossing people off Medicaid . And then they're turning around and spending, I believe the number, I believe, don't quote me on this, is three hundred fifty two million doll million dollars of taxpayer money online. Yes without and lying to us . I guess for me that that's sort of the overall I mean it's all part of democracy, right? You either have a democracy that is responsible where the government is responsible of the people , or you have an authoritarian government where everything we have belongs to them and they can spend it however they wish . And those two things should be firmly in front of the American people. But don't lie to me and tell me that you're protecting my money while you are literally picking my pocket. I mean, that to me, and the same thing back to the UFC fight. Don't tell me you're having a party for the American people when you're making bank off it and I can't see it unless I belong to Paramount Place. I would just say this is the stuff that we know about too . We on Runaway Cryount had an episode last week talking about the ways in which the Trump family is basically stealing money from the Department of Defense , lining the pockets of friends and stooges through government contracts or no bid no bid government contracts or government loans. Donald Trump junior sits on the board of a company that just got a six hundred over six hundred million dollars in a federal loan to scale up its rare earth mining or to scale up its rare earth magnet manufacturer. This is a company that didn't exist several years ago. The level of corruption will make your eyes not just water but bleed And that's the stuff, you know, the government the Department of Defense, these government agencies have deep pockets because we appropriate a lot of money towards them. And the Trump administration learned something between Trump one point zero and two point zero. Like if you're going to go corrupt, go big or go home. It makes the Trump hotel emoluments clause debate look like child's play compared to what's happening inside the guts of the federal government. We see what's happening, the corruption on the outside with , you know, just gargantuan betrayals, like the destruction of the East Wing and the attempted construction of the ballroom, which actually I wanted to ask you about Heather , do you think that this thing's actually going to be constructed before Trump's out of office? Personally no . And the reason I say that is I don't I never assume anything's going to happen the next day. I mean, that's one of the perks of being a historian. You know that you get really weird things happening and all of a sudden some bet is off . But there's legal challenges, there's financial challenges. Trump is falling apart, nobody likes that ballroom . Maybe , but you know, if you think about any construction project you have ever done yourself, yes. Like everything all the planets in the universe have to be lined up correctly to get it done on time . And it's almost never on or under budget . And that's when you're not under pressure. So I look at that and I think maybe I mean, maybe if you throw enough money at it, but it's I don't know, just my personal experience says doubtful personally. Yeah, I mean, I just was struck by it that you know, the UF C match in the background is the rubble of the East Wing. And it's , I mean, it's still very much a construction site. It's an open, it's a gaping wound, if you ask me. Has there ever been a parallel? I mean, when Truman installed balcony, like and obviously not on the scale of malignant narcissism that Trump is operating on, but just when presidents have done renovations to the White House, significant ones that the public can see . Has there ever been any sort of flutter of outcry that would pre sage something like this? Well, yes and no that is Americans complain about change all the time, all the time. There is never a change where somebody goes, Oh boy, that was a great idea. I mean, even when we went to the moon, there were people who said this is a total waste of money. Why are we doing this? You know? So you're always going to get pushed back. And basically that's human nature, right? So there's always pushback about everything . But there are only two occasions that I can think of when there were when there was a really big pushback. And one was interesting because it was during the Civil War when the Lincolns move into the White House it's falling apart. And Mary Todd Lincoln, Lincoln's wife was actually a better political instinct than he did, which is saying something because he was a political animal . And she recognized in a way that he didn't, the power of women in Washington to determine what politics were going were going to end up being the most powerful . So she recognizes that the White House is totally shabby and she undertakes the redecorating of it because the guy who desperately wants to be president is the man that Lincoln makes treas ury secretary. His name is Samanon P. Chase. He's from Ohio and he thinks everything should revolve around him . And so he comes to Washington and his woman who is in charge of his house is his daughter, Kate Chase, who's beautiful and who is sort of a very much a socialite . And she redecorates Sam and P. Chase's house to the nines . And then Jay Cook, who's a banker out of Philadelphia , picks up all the tab for it . And yeah, exactly. And then he goes on to do a lot of work with the treasury, which was corrupt would be considered corrupt now. It was considinceered cor hadr grew up then, right? But so Mary Todd Lincoln looks at this and recognizes that Kate Chase is the one who's going to be having all the fancy parties because she's the one who has the beautiful home . And this is going to mean that her husband's presidency is going to be undermined and that Chase will probably get the six ty four years out nomination . Wow. So she redoes the White House . And then she goes to the Congress and says, this is how much it cost. And it was a lot , I mean in dollar terms, but also they're in a fight literally for the survival of the Union and Congress goes ballistic and says we are not paying this. And Lincoln ended up picking up the tab for it himself and it was a it was a major sum of money at the time . Wow. So there was that. But she was right. Then Washington be, I mean the White House became the centerpiece as opposed to Kate Chase's house. And that's actually what led to her bad marriage and I could go on at great length. I'm actually writing a book and I am back in history and I can't tell you how much I love it. Anyway, I'm so jealous. So then there's another time though that is much more applicable applicable . And that is, and I hate to mention him twice today , during Benjamin Harrison's administration, he has this near do well son, which I know you can't imagine would happen to a prison A president with a neer doll son? His name is Russell . And when Benjamin Harrison becomes president, Russell Harrison and his wife and children move into the White House. And they promptly begin to say, this is way too small for a president to live in . And they come up with plans dramatically to redo the White House, to add a green a greenhouse. I'm not sure if there was a ballroom or not, but they did this. They were going to redo it in this huge way because this was fitt ing for the U. S. president. And again, the White House has always been humble because theoretically , the president represents the people and it's supposed to be humble, not that gold stuff everywhere. It's supposed to be plain . And he was absolutely eaten alive in the press and people were like, If it's too small, why did you move in? We didn't elect you. And in fact, that that renovation never goes for ward. It dies. Okay, so they didn't go around hand gluing coins and memorabilia to the walls to spruce up the place like Trump appears to be doing. We have new reporting last week that Trump's literally going around. I guess it's in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's new book regime change, but Trump literally has like, is it a glue gun? It's some kind of guerrilla glue or crazy glue that he's like using it to apply , I guess, more gold objects to the mantle pieces and the walls of the White House, which they said surprise no one in the White House, but should really astound the rest of us because that is not what presidents do. You know, it's actually interesting . I mean, again, not a psychologist, but like if you were crumbling , at least if I were crumbling, yeah , I can't think of a single instance in my, life I have, ever turned to a coin or that kind of a decoration. Yeah. Like I'll buy pens is what I'll do and notebooks. Like they're going to have to take away my wallet . Deepry your notebooks from your hands. He has a very specific psychology. Look at you. Job blessed pen and paper. I'm with you, sister. What do you think should happen to this stuff? Like assuming let's assume he does get the ballroom built. There's a raging debate about whether it should be torn down, whether it should be reappropriated to be something else. What's your opinion on that? I'm afraid right now I don't have an opinion that is, I would very much love to see all the sight lines back and have the White House restored. The ballum the way he is talking about it is huge. It dwarfs the original building . And yet I am not going to rule out the possibility that somebody says a great representation of the American people would be to put here and I don't know what comes next in that space, but certainly it is possible to think of the American people being able to turn a symbol of authoritarianism into a symbol of popular power . And other countries have done it, and somebody who is good at architecture, unlike me would probably be able to say, here's what we really need to do , you know, the same way they have repurposed places in other countries to reaffirm popular power. So I'm an operation. Yeah . Yeah, maybe that's where you have the reconciliation trials. I just have no idea the reconciliation trials, Heather. Podsave of America is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. A new CNBC report highlights that almost half of all hiring managers rank a candidate's enthusiasm as the single most important element when evaluating them for a position. If you need to hire for your business, how can you separate the candidates who are really excited about your opportunity from the ones that are just going through the motions? Zip Recruiter. Zip Recruiter has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested, qualified candidates first, so you meet the right people faster. And now you can try it for free at zipreiter dot com slash crooked. Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder Ziprecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G two. We love zip recruiter. We've used it here at Cricket. It is always very difficult to hire. You have to sort through a lot of resumes . It's a long, arduous process, and Zipreuiter has made it so much easier for us. Use Zip Recruiter and find enthusiastic talent f ast. Four out of five employers who post on Zipreu get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter dot com slash crooked that zipreu. com slash crooked meet your match on Ziprecruiter. It is essential that we mention as we talk about the ways in which Americans are trying to reclaim their own history and think of patriotism in a way that feels authentic and honest . You have embarked on a project because you're not busy enough. Honestly, I think of myself and I'm like, but Heather Cox Richardson is writing today , you have launched a project two hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty , which highlights, quote, the people , places and events that have helped to move us forward toward a more perfect union. First of all, thank you for doing this, great American . And did you intend for that to be a balm on the self aggrandizing staged patriotism that Trump is offering us? Well, first of all, thank you for mentioning them. They have turned out and I will tell you more about the working of them because they have turned out to be a much bigger deal than I think I anyway foresaw. We came up with this idea before Trump had done anything because it's not really an answer to him as it is an answer to American democracy. I firmly believe that the meaning of American democracy is that it has always been contested and that it has been the story of marginalized peoples demanding inclusion in the principles that were laid out in the Declaration of Independence. So it's never done, but it's always about what the American people are willing to do. And one of the things that is central to that is it puts in the middle of that principle marginalized people. You know, if you've got those rights, you're not the one fighting for them. So it's people like Fanny Lou Hamer, for example. And what we wanted to do was make was center the American people in history again because what I have observed really since the nineteen eighties, but you see it in a lot of the curriculum and certainly in the things that Trump is trying to put up in national parks, for example the idea that change simply sort of comes from on high . Like all of a sudden Rosa Parks just decides not to stand up. Rosa Parks had been working for the NAACP doing really deep dives into statistics on rape, especially in the American South for literally decades by the time that she works to challenge segregation. So in that way , so we wanted regain what was missing from that curricula and center the American people and say, you know , if you want change , this is how you do it, even in times when people didn't have rights . And so we started it and it's been really interesting because first of all, we only have a maximum of two hundred fifty stories, which is nothing to a historian. I mean, we could do two hundred and fifty stories on one year of the revolution alone. To a podcaster, it's a lot. Yeah, but for a historian, it's killing, it is killing me. And many people have given us great suggestions we simply can't do. But what's been interesting about it is that we have a maximum of one hundred and twenty four words because we wanted to get them in a minute , a maximum of one hundred and twenty four words , which means that what we've done is we've gotten narrator, fabulous narrators for them and they're great narrators. Yeah. Well because everybody suddenly wanted in, which was great and we wanted to match the narrators to the st ories . And what that means is that if you're going to get what it is, who did it, and why it mattered , you've got to really cond ens theed material. So it turns out that they're actually really good teaching documents as well. Yeah, like the one on the Erie Canal, which Pete Buttig, former Secretary of Transportation State Pete Buttig narrated like that's like my entire lecture on the Earth . That's amazing. Yeah. And then there's some that are just really heart wrenching that are not the one I'm thinking of was not out yet, so I won't drop it on you . But we didn't do live people unless there was some important reason to . And there was one that I did not know who they had gotten to do it. And he's talking and I'm like, well, this is fine, but like, why did they get who is this guy? And then he says who he is. Oh , now I want to know. Yeah . It's coming. When's it dropping? Do you have a date? I don't know. I don't know if I'm not in charge of the calendar. But I got to tell you when he said his name I started to cry. Oh my gosh because I didn't know who he was. I don't think anybody probably knows what this person looks like, but it's a really important story. I was going to ask if his name rhymed with Smarak Obama, but no . You also pick places, right? I mean, you're not living people, but it's not just figures from history. You also have like that everglades and yellowstone are part of this compendium . It's really like thinking of the country both as a land and people . Yes, people places and events. And so we just did one on the new Madrid. It's not Mad Nrewid, who knew it's, the new Madr id earthquakes , which happened in the early eighteen hundreds in sort of the Missouri area of the country and moved the Mississippi River and forced indigenous tribes to go west west , which I mean, I'd heard of them, but I had no idea they were so important. And everybody in that part of the country is like, yeah, we grew up on this stuff. Similarly, we did somewhere I didn't like I didn't, I mean, I obviously wasn't alone in coming up with the topics. We wanted to make sure there were at least two from every state and territory. Oh, cool. So that also means people . Rita Moreno was an early one we did. And Ariana Dubos read that one for us . Like, did you know that there was one twenty four hour period when the flags of three different countries flew over St. Louis ? No, like I sorta knew, but like it's all involved. I feel like one of us would maybe know that and that person is not . Well, but you know, it's like it's it has to do with the Louisiana purchase and first France has a territory and then Spain has it, but then France has it, then the U. has S. it and so on . But I was like, let's figure this out. So there's a lot of stuff. What a great project. Well, but the theme was always that we wanted to center the American people. And in many ways, to me, it felt like people have been so good to me. You know, everything I do is available for free, but people pay willingly for the substack and so on. And you know, as I say , Trump walked away with all the funding for so much stuff, and I was like, You know what? This can be my gift back to all the people who gave me the funding to do it. So righteous Yeah, so I love it. So I'm pleased. It's killing us, but we're really all good things with it. All good things do. I mean, it does get back at that. The thing we've been talking about throughout this conversation is how do we celebrate this country and what sort of lessons do we need to remember ? I want to ask you a specifically kind of sociopolitical question, which is Jerusalem Demsis, who is the founder of the argument recently wrote a really provocative piece arguing that the left basically has abandoned patriotism and needs to recapture its sense or reclaim its sense of patriotism in order for democracy to function . To protect democracy, we must reclaim , I think, a form of patriotism that is authentic, but patriotism nonetheless. Does a left seem historically unpatriotic to you, I guess I should ask? Well, so let me let start me by making it very clear that one of the great successes of the radical right has been to take everybody who doesn't adhere to their political ideology and call them of the left The Left has a specific definition . It is an ideological position that critiques liberal democracy by saying that it doesn't work, either because it's too racist or sexist or class ist and it needs to be taken down and rebuilt. And that's a really interesting story, just FYI here, that I'm not going to go into , because I think what that argument does is it identifies that really since the Vietnam War , people who are not part of the radical right, who are either Democrats or centrists have tended to cede the idea of patriotism to that radical right . And so if you take that as a premise for what I'm going to say, one of the things that honest to God has jumped off the charts for me for many years now , really since you started to see veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, especially female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan running for office, because their advertising was very different than any kind of advertising, political advertising I had seen before , but especially taking off in the last two years , let's say, with the insertion into especially the House of Representatives, but also the Senate of so many veterans of wars intelligence agencies on the democratic side . What I think you are seeing is the claiming of patriotism by people who are not of the radical right and redefining it and redefining it as the protection of the United States of course , but also of protection of the people who have defended the country for us . Now, for many years and you know, you think about things like the idea that veterans who came back from Vietnam the Vietnam War were spat on . There is no documented instance of that happening. That was a construction rad of theical right goes on. It gets picked up by Rambo because it went on to live in film as in the nineteen eighties, so much of patriotism lived in film with things like Top Gun and like Red Dawn and so on. But I actually think that what you have identified is central to a new political ideology for those that are not part of the radical right and perhaps not part of the left, although the certainly is closer to the goals of centrists and more left leaning , although you can call them progressives. I think that much of what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wants right now is to my mind very centrist. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt was talking about universe healthcare, right? Yes . So but those people are redefining a new kind of approach to what it means to be an American right now. And in a way that has not happened , I think since World War two wow, the Democrats are getting in on that. And I think it is central. I did an event with Jason Crow at Harvard a month or so ago . And his understanding of the protection of veterans is very much tied up in his idea that the government should be working for ordinary people because he says, you know, who's out there fighting in Afghanistan but people like me and he tells the story of being on the front lines and he was a p , you know, he was a paratrooper and being on the front lines and coming back to the, I don't know if they still call it the mess hall, but coming back to eat. And he said the kid putting mashed potatoes on his tray . They got talking and the guy was making like four times what he made in terms of money. And he said, This is not the way it should be and this is not patriot ism. And that kind of marriage of politics that talks about the ordinary people and talks about our military as those people who are protecting our way of life and are part of that is a really different way than saying we'll just wag wave the flag and claim we love veterans while we're slashing all the funding for the VA. So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think it's central and I don't think people recognize it enough . So thank you for that. Pods of America is brought to you by Tommy John this summer don't be that guy. You know, the one the one who has full sweat pools under his arm sticking to his shirt in the heat. Well eat Tommy John, that's gonna be me. All right . I like your underwear, but don't this is what's gonna happen. I can't stop it. Public transport is a sauna. Your walk to work feels medically unsafe, but Tommy John is covered with breathable underwear and undershirts designed to keep you cool, dry and significantly less swamp like. 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I think that there's probably when you talk about how the left articulates a patriotism that's both urgent and needed , we talk about what patriotism means to the right, what identity that undergirds patriotism means to the right. And I always return in moments like that, and particularly moments like this when we're talking about the Declaration of Independence and the Fourth of July and all the rest, to a speech. And I know you listened to this speech that JD Vance gave at Claremont the Claremont Institute and I believe, it was last year, it was in twenty twenty five , where he basically laid out the MAGA worldview, the nativist worldview that animates, I think, all of the Trump administration's policies if there is such an elegance. Like that insofar as thought does undergird anything that they're doing, this kind of idea about blood and soil nationalism is the essence of Trump and I, think in some ways the T,rum p appeal. At one point in the speech , Vance critiques what he calls the credle principles of the country as not enough on their own . He names the Declaration of Independence as an, example of a document that is both way over inclusive and under inclusive in terms of defining what it means to be an American . And he basically goes on to give an alternative vision of what citizenship and being an American ought to be. He's like, it's not an idea. It's a place and a people. And it's really specifically, I'm paraphrasing, people who fought the Civil War, and maybe against the North . What in that seems to be most dangerous to you in terms of what Vance is arguing . Well, first of all, I'm amused by being able to say , here's the marker. You had to fight in the civil war. Like, there goes Trump's family, right? And right, why fight in the civil war . And just, I mean, again, not that it matters, and I really don't think it matters at all. My ancestors on both sides were here from like the very beginning. And I'm looking at that and I'm like , I shouldn't even know like why pick that why not be like the date april thirtieth thirtieth of eighteen thirty four? I mean, this is an arbitrary date. That exactly, exactly. And you know why and you know why and that's because you actually had when you had if you identify something like that, you can say exactly that. We're looking to fight for a white culture like that of the Old South . And the real thing about the switch that he is making and make no mistake, that is a real switch. That is from the founders of the country , which is what we identify the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence. That's the name we use as the founders, the framers of the Constitution . From that time they were literally saying we are creating a nation built on these ideas . We hold these truths to be self evident . And tucked within that , I think, is another bigger piece that I'll come back to. But they literally say that America is about this idea . Now the people who have tried to say, no, no, no, no, it's about race were people before the Civil War, like the old southern elite enslavers who wanted to say, No, no, no, we're a white country. And when they did that, people like Abraham Lincoln said, you know, why don't we just tear up the Declaration of Independence then? But this idea of blood and soil is actually one that comes out of Europe . It's not one that fits naturally at all over North America because of course if you're going to talk about soil and the origins of the United States of America , you're really looking at thirteen colonies . And those thirteen colonies were never white I mean, they were never a bunch of Europeans. That is such I mean that actually comes from a document from the early twentieth century, the nineteen twenties in the US that tried to say, well, they're all Nordic , you know, which and the Nordics went to England and and you know, it's just about it's all just about garnering political power with an appeal to racism and sexism. I mean, what we don't talk enough about here is the degree to which this idea of you had to fight for your country in the Civil War basically says most women didn't fight. Now they contribut ined other ways and some actually cross dressed and fought . But that's really an attempt to put white wealthy men in charge . But even more profoundly, I think it is an attack on what America means. So what the founders say in the declaration is that it is possible for human beings to accept a series of natural laws, not divine law s , but natural laws that say we can observe the universe around us. And we can say because of our observations that there are natural laws like all men are created equal. Now, again, there's all kinds of caveats they have around that, but the natural laws, the laws that actually rule this planet say people are the same . And they have certain rights. And among those are the right to have a say in how they are governed when they come together as societies and that they have a right to equal access to resources and that we as human beings can observe the natural world and we can construct social systems that reflect that . And that's what American democracy was always supposed to be. And when you have somebody like JD Vance coming in and saying, No, no, no, this is all about what God says or what race says, or any of these systems that are based not in natural law, but rather in human prejudices divine inspiration , that is not only a rejection of sort of the surface level of these are our rights . It's a rejection of the entire enterprise of human self determination . And people ask me why I think we're going to come out of this . And I won't say okay because we've already lost so many people and so much . But the answer to that is I believe in those natural laws and I, believe in the human capacity to say, hey, you know, if we destroy our environment, we're all going to die, so maybe we shouldn't do that . And to reject that and say, No, no, no, no, I get to dictate stuff seems to me to be a position that eventually is going to run headlong up against reality rather as Trump's war in Iran has run up against reality. And that at the end of the day , we are , I think, living in the world that the found ers outlined as being part of a series of natural laws, and we do have the capacity to discover those and to act accordingly. Yeah, it's just when you talk about reality coming crashing through the front door, JD Vance's version of America excludes his own children and his wife. And his wife, yeah. I mean, well, and he's just such an opportunity. He'll say anything. Well, that's and that I think is actually one of the most dangerous things is that he is espousing a belief that's so at odds with what he fundamentally lives and and himself I think believes. So that's dangerous. Well, he said that. He told, you know, when the whole eating cats and dogs thing, he actually said that he was willing to make stuff up because it would call attention to the dire conditions under which people lived or something. And it's like what you're saying is the ends justify the means and so you can lie. And here's the news flash. The ends never justify the means because you never have history. If you are in any way a student of history, you know that to be true. But what is JD Vance a student of other than eless shameless ambition , I guess, and lust for power. Heather, let me ask you one more question before we wrap up our your brilliant analysis of this moment and what patriotism means and how we should be thinking of America's june fiftieth, if you as a historian had to pick another moment other than the signing of the Declaration of Independence to celebrate, to make a national holiday out of, and you can't say June it's already in the holiday . Is there another moment in American history that you think represents in many ways either the establishment of the American ideal or a reaffirmation of American ideals. I know I'm asking you this like totally on the spot, but you're so good, I'm confident. Can I have two? Sure, why not? Fourteenth Amendment , right on. Fourteenth Amendment is my favorite amendment and it should be everybody's because it's the one that says , you know, that whole equality thing , we mean it . And that if in your states you, you know, you and I talked about how the, you know, Bill Connor walks among us still . If in your states, you're run by Bull Connors or you have been bought by corporations that are that are willing to destroy your workers' rights or your women's rights or your environmental rights or whatever, we're going to come in and we're going to change that. And that and it gave the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth are the first amendments that give power to the Congress rather than taking it away. When do you know the date offhand of the ratification for the what month would that be? No, because I think it's august thirteenth. It's a good time for a three day weekend. I'm in. But and I should know that . The issue is it passes Congress and then it goes off to the states for ratification, and I don't remember all those individual dates. They say august thirteenth sticks in my mind, but don't quote me on that. I'm probably wrong . It's also written in eighteen sixty six . It's when it becomes clear the South is not going to permit black equality, they actually write the Congress writes it in sixty six and then it doesn't get ratified until sixty eight . But if I can have that one as the biggie, the voting Rights Act, the signing of the Voting Rights Act , which again, aside from anything else that it does, because it sets in motion a lot of things , including things like having our ballots in different languages , which, you know , has been an issue throughout our entire history. There's a wonderful journal from the colonial era in which a woman is traveling from the or a little after that, I guess, is traveling from the coast to Ohio. And in it she says, you know, everyone thinks it's like JD Vance thinks that this is an English based country . They were certainly an English based government. She gets like almost there and she's like, you know, what I really want when I get to Ohio, I can't wait to hear the language of English spoken again. She hasn't met a single English speaker the whole way she's going across that hallway . So we get from the Voting Rights Act, the idea of ballots in different languages, but we also really put our money where our mouth is and say, yeah, everybody gets a say. For the first time body gets a say in the government and that of course has been what the radical right has been working to dismantle ever since. And so in this era , I'd say both of those, but it's certainly worth celebrating the Voting Rights Act as well as the fourteenth . And for all of you, cracker jack googlers , the ACE production team at Pod of America tells me that the ratification of the fourteenth was july ninth, eighteen sixty eight. Lit but it's so close to july fourth. It all makes sense. Oh, that's a really good change our vacation schedule. That's a really good idea. Hey next year, next year we'll do let's do that. That's a question. Can we do a special episode about it? Yeah, sure. Pat calendar. Yeah. July ninth. Yeah. July ninth babies. It'll be before the book comes out so I'll be foot loose and fancy free. Heather Cox Richardson, the most prolific , the most prolific person in this degraded America in which we live where people have just been content to rest on their on their bums and do nothing. Been called to action have been engaged and we applaud you if you're especially if you're listening to this podcast, but most especially we are so grateful, Heather, for all the things you do to keep us wise and thinking and keep our front porch lights on mentally speaking . It's always just such a real pleasure. And it's always enlighten soing to talk with you . Thank you for reminding us of who we are and who we can be. And good luck with two hundred fifty to two hundred fifty. Everybody should download and watch the clips and always subscribe to Heather Substack. The great Heather C ox Richardson. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. It's always a pleasure. A huge thank you to Heather Cox Richardson for spending some time with me. The gents will be back in your feed on Tuesday. Positive America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Farr Safari, with Reed Churlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt Dr. Ben Heff, Jordan Canter, Charlotte Landis, Carrie Pellev, David Toles, Mia Kelman, R yan Young and Naomi Single, our staff is probably unionized with the Writers Guild of America East