Cycles of Redemption and Reconstruction

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Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the purorting resources the Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and much, much more Go to the Guardian d. com slash stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube That's the Guardian dot. com slash stateside I'm Jhn Hill, host of Explain It to me, and I'm filling in for Sean Today, I'll be talking with Kermit Roosevelt III He's a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book, The Nation That Never Was, Reconstructing America's story The stories we tell ourselves shape the way we live. They tell us who we are. So what's our collective story as a country I think that's a really important question to ask ourselves. There's this big question mark over who we are as a country If we even have a single identity especially as we inch closer to the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of America's founding In my conversation with Kermit, we talk about the narrative we've told ourselves through the years alternative ways of thinking of our identity, and whether a national identity is something we even really need in the first place Hermit Roosevelt, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me You published your book The Nation That Never Was backack in twenty twenty two I want to go back there. prompted you to write it Well, I'd been teaching cononstitutional law for twenty years at that point. And just going through the same cases and thinking about the Supreme Court and American values I had started to see some things and I'd started to notice some sort of conflict between the way that we normally tell the story and the story that was emerging to me through conversations with my students and through my study of the materials and It started to seem to me that there was something really false in the story that we were telling And that's interesting to me, you know from an academic perspective, sort of what's not true about what we're saying. And then also from a narrative perspective, sort of why do we tell the story that we do? And is there some alternative So I started thinking about all these things and it was a different time. You know, we were going through COVID, it was Black Lives Matter. It was a time when I thought America was open to a lot of new ideas and maybe we were you know ready to face some truth that we hadn't faced before and sort of rethink our national identity. So it seemed like a really promising time for the story. Now things took a turn after that. You know, I think we're not in as good a place as we were, but I still think that it is very important to try to understand who we are as a people and where we come from and where our ideals really come from. This year, there are going to be so many celebrations marking America's two hundred fiftieth birthday. But you argue in your book that America has two foundings. What are they? Go ahead and lay that out for us Well, so we've got the first founding, of course, which is seventeen seventy six. Everyone knows about this. We've got the Declaration of Independence Yeah, right? That creates a nation, sort of. It creates thirteen independent states And then they form a Confederation with the Articles of Confederation, and then they form a more perfect union with the Constitution that's written in seventeen eighty seven. America is still at that point really a collection of states. You know, onene of the ways you can see this is the Constitution. When it talks about the United States, it says they It uses the United States as a plural. It's a collection of states. It's not a single nation. And it's definitely not a single nation dedicated to particular values. because one of the big ideas in the seventeen eighty seven Constitution is the states are going to make their own choices about a lot of things So There is sort of a national value of unity. Maybe. There isn't a national value of equality, there isn't a national value of liberty, there isn't a national value of anti slavery. Certainly, because all of the states are slave states in seventeen seventy six, that America is really not our America. It's not a single nation. It's not anti slavery. It's not dedicated to the values that we believe in now. All of that comes about through the Civil War and reconstruction. and It's really important, I think, to understand how dramatic a break reconstruction is Because that gets us the thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the fourteenth Amendment, creating birthrights citizenship, giving people equality rights and some liberty rights protect them from state governments and not just the national government. And the fifteenth Amendment, which is our first pro democracy constitutional provision prohibiting race discrimination with respect to the right to vote The southern states have agreed that slavery is over at least in name Their vision for going forward is we're still going to be a white supremacist society. We're still going to have a clearly defined racial hierarchy And the Reconstruction Congress, which is a radical Congress because there are no Southern senators or representatives. So this is a conongress representing really just the North. The Reconstruction Congress says that's not what we're going to do, right? We have a different vision of America And they are the body that really gives us the vision of America as a nation single nation where the national government is really suupreme dedicated to certain values, an anti slavery nation, a pro equality nation. And they put that in the fourteenth Amendment and they send that out to the states, and the states reject it ten of the former Confederate states reject it Um, Delaware rejects it. Marilyland rejects it So you know the America of the foundounding really is faced with this question, are we going to take a new path Are we going to accept black people as full and equal citizens? Because that's what the fourteenth Amendment does And the America of the founding really says, no The Reconstruction Congress then, as I said, wipes out The governments's intent of those former Confederate states, they put the South under military control And then they basically make new states So they tell the people of the states to form new governments, to hold constitutional conventions and write constitutions. and they say the formerly enslaved can participate in these, and the former Confederates can't So they've created a new political community for these states. They create new legislatures. It's those legislatures that ratify the fourteenth Amendment, right? It's not the states that sueded, it's the new states that Congress made So bothoth in its substance, its values And in its process, reconstruction is every bit as much a dramatic break, a revolution as the founding And it's this second founding that gives us our real American values and our sense of who we are now. Okay, so we have these two different foundings of America in America simultaneously. Who are the descendants of these two versions? There's the seventeen seventy six version and this reconstruction version Right now, who is buying into which version of the story This is, I think a really important thing to understand because Americans, you know, we like to tell one story. We like to think we've got a single narrative and there's one group of people who are the true Americans who reflect true American values What I'm saying is if you look back, you see these two different ideologies basasically And the ideology of the founding is what I call exclusive individualism So the idea there is one We're a political community that excludes some people,? We're sort of defined by that And you know, in the Declaration of Independence You can look at what it says about outsiders It talks about Native Americans and calls them merciless savages who are out to kill the colonists It talks about Hessian mercenaries that King George is transporting across the seas again to kill the colonists And it talks about the people that the Americans are enslaving And again, it says, King George is inciting them to rise up against us and kill us. So basically, everyone who's not one of us is trying to kill us And then the Supreme Court later in eighteen fifty seven is in the Dred Scott decision going to say, there's a racial line around the American political community. and as a matter of law, black people descended from slaves can never be US citizens So there's a very clear us them line that's really hard to cross And then in terms of the individualism The founding focus is sort of on liberty and individual rights. and there's a real skepticism about the idea that you can ask people to bear burdens for the good of the community, that you can sort of take from people who have a lot and give to people who have little, that you can lift up disadvantaged in society by putting burdens on other people So that's the ideology that found it Now reconstruction comes along And it says a lot of things that are directly in conflict this. So birthright citizenship That means the states can't decide who their citizens are If you're born in the United States, you're one of us regardless of what the states want And of course, regardless of what the Supreme Court said in Dred Scott, where they were trying to create this racial boundary, the whole point of birthright citizenship is we will not have a class of perpetual hereditary outsiders You can't have this second class group living amongst us who aren't citizens And then in terms of individualism Reconstruction has a focus on equality and it tries to achieve equality in large part through redistribution. So The thirirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery. The fourteenth Amendment says, there shall be no claims based on emancipation And that seems sort of obviously right to us now, like, off course, we're not going to allow our claims based on emancipation But this was a massive source of wealth for white southerners, for slave owners And what reconstruction is saying is, in the name of equality, we're going to deprive you of all of that And we're going to create a more equal society through redistribution, basically. And then Congress goes on and tries to do that more during Reconstruction with the Freedmen's Bureau Act and so on. and they get into a big fight with Andrew Johnson about it Reconstruction is trying to promote equality basically by asking people to accept burdens to lift up the disadvantaged I think it's really interesting because, you know, you have sort of these two mindsets when it comes to what America is, when it comes to the story of its founding. But I think a lot of people who maybe believe in that second story are very invested in the seventeen seventy six story and don't necessarily see that as a conflict That's the thing. the way that we tell this story now is we take the values of reconstruction So nationhood Right The nation is more important than the states. We're a single nation and equality and anti slavery And we say, thoseose are the American values And we committed to them in seventeen seventy six in the Declaration of Independence But if you do the historical work, turnurns out That's really pretty clearly not true So You can look at the Declaration of Independence and the way that it was understood in seventeen seventy six And you'll see, people didn't think that the preamble was very important They didn't makeak the phrase, all men are created equal. Wow. That's like the important parts for us now. It is now. yeah. So you know, we've got a very different understanding of the Declaration of Independence now We've got, I think you could say, sort of a different document But the document that we have is not the one that Thomas Jefferson wrote in seventeen seventy six. It's not the one that the Continental Congress reviewed, right The draft that Jefferson wrote had a criticism of the international slave trade in there. Congress takes it out, right? They are not writing an antis slavery document. How does it become an antis slavery document? It's abolitionists starting in the late eighteenth century and then going through up until the Civil War, abolitionists start reinterpreting the Dclaration, because of course, they want to say slavery is contrary to American principles. They can't really say that, right? I mean, what does the Declaration of Independence say about slavery? It says King George is wrong for encouraging slave rebellions If you ignore that part and you go back to the preamble and you just focus on all men are created equal you can say, oh, look, there's this broad principle. that's anti slavery. and that's what the abolitionists did. and it was persuasive But even through the Civil War, there's a battle over the meaning and the ownership of the Declaration And when the Southern states secede, they cite the Delaration a lot Sometimes they quote it in the letters that they send to Congress. They say we're doing exactly what the Patriots of seventeen seventy six did. And through the Civil War for a while, the Confederates celebrate july fourth And they say we are the true heirs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence And I think as a historical matter, right they're pretty much right there because they're declaring their independence. They're saying you, we consented to the authority of the national government. We signed up for a particular deal. and now we think we're not getting what we signed up for. We think the free states and the national government are going against this the terms of the bargain that we struck. And so we're withdrawing our consent and we're starting over, which is exactly what the Patriots of seventeen seventy six said supportort for the Greay arerea comes from Mint Mobile When you hear a deal that's too good to be true, you usually wonder, what's the catch But sometimes the catch is that there is no catch. Like MitMobile offering premium wireless for just fifteen dollars a month. That's it. No catch, justust a good deal, plain and simple. Catches be gone. MitMobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right with preremium wireless for fifteen bucks a month. You can even bring your current phone and your number. It's incredibly easy to get started. 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Go to theguardian dot com slash dateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcast or watch on YouTube starting may thirteenth So much of this centers around story Why is having a national story so important in the first place The point of a national story or the point of a narrative, really, is to sort of give people a sense of meaning So you know, you can think about life is a series of unconnected events. and then it's sort of hard to know who you are or what you should do or who your friends are The point of history generally and the point of narrative more specifically is it takes those otherwise disconnected events and it puts them together and it gives them meaning It gives you a sense of like what the themes of your life are and who your heroes should be and who you should look down on who you should try to be like, who you should try to be different from And it's especially important for Americans, I think, Because our national identity isn't based on race or religion It's supposed to be based on a set of shared ideals. It's supposed to be based on the Constitution. and in order for that to work as a story that brings Americans together You want to be able to say something about how These are great ideals and We've fought for them and we've championed them over time you want to be able to tell American history as sort of a success story H Do do we have to have one story though? like Is it not possible to succeed as a nation and have multiple stories, we're telling ourselves about ourselves? Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, it depends on How strong a sense of national identity you want Yeah, do countries have to have a strong sense of national identity Well, you know it depends on what you want your country to do. If you want people to be willing to make sacrifices for the country, you know, to lay their lives on the line. If you want your country to be player on the international stage, then I think it does really help to have a citizenry that you can mobilize in the name of national ideals. How important is accuracy to that story? Like does that story have to be true or Is it just any story we willll do? Well, so it doesn't have to be completely true. And you know, I think it can't be completely true. I think that anytime we do history, we're engaging in a sort of creative interpretive process. There are always different ways to look at things So I don't think that there is an objective standard of truth But I do think you get problems if your story is just sort of grossly inaccurate because people point it out and they don't believe it So for example, You know, I was probably guilty of this as a young constitutional law professor. You know, you tell people, Thomas Jefferson, what a great American. He really expressed what it means to be American with that phrase, All men are created equal, and we should try to live up to his example And then people come back at you and're like, oh yeah, the example of enslaving his own children. Is that what you mean is a great America That kind of tension is going to give you a problem So I think you can't be that inaccurate And we are just really inaccurate in what we're saying about the origin of our ideals But if there is no objective truth when it comes to a story, does that mean we'll just always be arguing about what that story is and who we are. Like how do you find a solution when that's the case. Well, so yes, we will always be arguing better, and we will always be refining and improving, I hope, our idea of what it means to be American. And that's healthy, you know, that's the process of civic maturation, that's the process of debating our ideals. What's probleblematic, I think, is when you have two stories that are really opposed and incompatible. And those stories are kind of fighting it out again and again. And that, I think, is what you see in American history You've got these exclusive individualist values of the founding. you've got these inclusive egalitarian ideals of reconstruction and People fight over which of those is the real America. And that's what the Civil War was about And that's sort of what the backlash to reconstruction was about. It's about the civil rights movement. It's the backlash to the civil rightights movement. We just sort of cycle through American history. And if we can see that pattern I think maybe we can understand better what the choice that's facing us is. You brought up success earlier and I'd love to get into that a little bit Why did that OG seventeen seventy six story work for so long? I mean, this is not the moment we're in is not the first time the country has been divided But yet returning time and time again to seventeen seventy six for a really long time Well, it's worked for a really long time because seventeen seventy six is a moment that can unite a lot of people So you know, you see this really Starting most obviously, I think with Lincoln where Lincoln says, the nation is divided We want to go back to the great days of seventeen seventy six. when We were united in a common cause. know fighting an external enemy, fighting for independence, That's something that really does bring Americans together. Then Lincoln also tries to say, and back in seventeen seventy six, we really believed in equality. And now we've sort of fallen away from that. So seventeen seventy six is a moment that lots of Americans can rally around you know, maybe not all Americans because if you're an American C isn't willing to make a compromise with slavery. then seventeen seventy six is not a great moment because in seventeen seventy six pro slavery and anti slavery people come together and they agree to shelve their differences about slavery in order to fight for independence Same thing happens with the Constitution in seventeen eighty seven There are some free states by then. There's a difference of opinion about slavery, and they basically agree to put that to the side, with some pro slavery elements to the Constitution, but they put that to the side in order to achieve unity. seventeen se six, seventeen eighty seven, those are really moments where we do get unity, but we get it by setting aside some really pressing questions about racial justice How important is success? to the American story you know, like Everyone likes winning But How important is winning to us as a country I think that winning is more important than it should be. You know, I think we've got this America can do no wrong. America wins all its wars. America never loses Dia Uh, you know, this kind of unrealistic. and it's one of the things that makes us sort of hypersensitive. when that idea of invincibility is punctured. This comes about in part because I think we do tell ourselves a story where America is born with these noble ideals and then we face challenges along the way Every time we face a challenge, we overcome it And I think You shouldn't think of the Civil War as a challenge to the Founder's Constitution that the Founder's Constitution overcame. You should think of the Civil War as a catastrophic failure of the Founder' Constitution, which shows that the whole thing didn't work Right? I mean, what are the goals of the Constitution a more perfect union, common defense Domestic tranquility. The Civil War is the failure of all of those things, right? It didn't work the Union broke apart And then we made a very different one. differentiff values and a different structure. You know, we got a much stronger national government after the Civil War. I I could hear people being like, what do you mean? What do you mean? we the nation failed and we started over? Like, I don't know. I think it's a spicy take to a degree, no? Well, yeah, but it did. So you know, a lot of people are like, oh, the Founders Constitution, sure it had these pro slavery provisions, but it also had within it the seeds of slavery's demise, as you can see because we you know got rid of slavery through the Constitution Dt Right? We got rid of slavery because of the Civil War If the Southern states had not seceded If you stay with like thirteen slave states, when do you have enough free states to get rid of slavery through the Constitution through an Article V amendment? when you have fifty two states? It never would have happened without the Civil War you know, the Constitution did not end slavery. The South ended slavery basically because they massively overplayed their hand and seceded and they thought that they could just walk away. But Lincoln wouldn't let them. If they had stayed in the Union and used their political power It would have been a very long time before anyone was able to end slavery I think Failure is really important on a personal level, you know It builds character It makes us who we are It teaches us that we're a lot. tougher than maybe we initially realized we were That sense of failure work for a nation too. or Is that too much for a country to survive Well, no, I think that is actually a good Ccept for a country And you know, I think about it actually sort of from a parenting perspective. because if you raise your kids so that they never fail. then there's going to be a moment where you're not there as the parent and you can't do that for them and they encounter failure for the first time and it's devastating to them and it has terrible consequences for their sense of self. But If you teach them Mistakes are how you learn. And you know, if you prepare the child for the road so that the child can handle the bumps and the stumbles and learn from mistakes and understand that failure can help you learn and make you stronger thenen they go on and they can function independently And I feel that Americans politically, you know, think in some ways, we're very immature. We're like a child that has never been allowed to confront the possibility that we were wrong And so that's why it's so psychologically devastating for us to think, you know, something went wrong, something didn't work But you can instead tell the story of America, and I think it's a much more inspiring story as a story of people who work within the system As long as they think that it can deliver the results that they need And when it becomes clear the system can't do it, then they break the system. and they make something new. And they're like, what we were doing has failed. So that's what the revolutionaries say. You know, we were trying to work it out with King George, but it's not going to work. We just have to admit this isn't this isn't working we have to do something new. I think that's really interesting. I think a lot of I think it's interesting that you bring up parenting because there's a lot of discussion now about The lack of friction in children's lives. you know you can Google things, you can use AI Yeah It's very easy to problem solve in a way it wasn't previously. And so there's this idea of, you know, friction maxing. creating sort of tension so that kids can build character and learn those skills. I don't know, is America, should we be in our friction mask maxing era? Is it the fact that I don't know, we've kind of been a frictionless country for a while. I think that's a good way to look at it. You know, I think America was just incredibly lucky. in a lot of ways. You know, we've got our oceans, so we didn't really have to worry about invasion. We've got incredible natural resources We had this incredible steady influx of immigrants giving us talented, hungry, ambitious people Um, and, you know, we were playing on Ey mode for a long time At least some of us were, right? Others of us were being exploited and oppressed and held down and some of us were being eradicated and In terms of our national self conception, like a lot of things were really easy for America And I do think we have to understand that The world is not necessarily just the kind of place where everything goes right for us all the time You know, you write in the book, the drafterters of the articles set out to create a government that was too weak to become a tyrant I'm curious when it when it comes to that particular piece of it Did the founders succeed or did they fail Well, so with the Articles of Confederation They succeeded in creating a government that was too weak to become a tyrant, right? They didn't want another king and They succeeded, but of course, the articles themselves were a failure because the nation couldn't hold together And the states were starting to fight and the states were ignoring treaty obligations And so that's why we get the Constitution And there was a big concern, you, have we gone too far? Is the national government going to be too strong and It's very interesting, I think, to look at federalist forty six which is written by James Madison trying to reassure people the states will always be important The states will always be more important than the national government And then he goes on to say, and they will defeat it in a war if necessary So if push comes to shove, the states will fight the national government, the states will win He's kind of describing the Civil War A actuallyctually But of course, in the real Civil War, the states lost. So I think you could really say from the founder's perspective, The bad guys won Right? Ifre If you're a founder, you believe in the states Congress comes along and eradicates ten states, says your governments don't exist, puts them under military control. That's exactly what you were afraid of the national government taking things over and becoming a tyrant martial law throughout the South Right? They did it from the perspective of the founders. I think you could say the Constitution failed in that sense too, because the tyrant emerged It turned out that the tyrant was actually on the side of liberty and eequality The tyrant was trying to free enslave people and give people equal rights and create birthrights citizenship. and all of that But we did get this really powerful national government And then it just grew more powerful And all of that power got consolidated in the executive branch with one person, And we put ourselves in a situation where if you get the wrong person in charge of the executive branch If you get a bad president You're in a lot of trouble becausecause there's not a lot that can stand up to a bad president Mm And that's so interesting because I think in a way, people who are on the side of that reconstruction story kind of get pretty seventeen seventy six like when confronted with a president with a lot of power that they really don't agree with. And also, you know, if you're thinking of the seventeen seventy six vein, actions like january sixth They start to make a lot more sense Yes. Well, you know, I mean, if you If you want to say The people of seventeen seventy six, there are heroes The patriots of seventeen seventy six, you have to face the fact that they're traitors under British law Now we don't care about that because the rebellion succeeded These are people who are like, the government is inringing on my rights I'm going to fight it. And there's a direct line from that to january sixth. you know, So if you are pro America, if you're pro the America of the founding, you are pro revolution You are pro this idea that the people can reject the authority of their government And you know, actually, James Madison wanted to put that in the preamble of the Constitution that people have an indefasible right to alter or amend their government, which is, of course, what the Declaration of Independence says Yeah. I thought it was interesting because in the book You also put Malcolm X in that same vein Yeah, so Malcolm X, I think, understood the Declaration of Independence as setting out what your remedies are when your government is oppressing you. And that's what I think the Declaration of Independence is about And you know, I think he was right. And I think he had a pretty good argument that his government was oppressing him Bloomington, Indiana has always been a town of lifelong learners, lectures that run long Dinner table debates that run longer We're always studying something This year, the syllvus changed We learned about blitzes and blocks, pickstixes and play action and what the inside of that outside stadium looks like on a sunny Saturday afternoon We may not always understand the whole thing, but man If it isn't fun to learn. Visit Bloomington learned something new Support for this show comes from Better Help. 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Terms and conditions apply Need too hire? This is a job for indndeed sponsored jobs. Ancestors and our relationship with their ancestors are something that I personally spend a lot of time thinking about. You know, I think of the way ancestor veneration shows up culturally, it shows up spiritually But I think it's also very much a part of our political lives. you know, there's the Lincoln Memorial. The city I live in Washington, DC, it's named after George Washington. The Citol Dome is painted with an image of a picture of him ascending into heaven I'm not sure the place these images hold in our consciousness, we're will ever really be stripped away. likeike we're very attached to not just the seventeen seventy six story but the men who develop the story Yeah, we are very attached to the founders. But the important thing to understand about that, I think, is One, it's actually a relatively recent development. So you before Lincoln, when people talked about America's founders, they were talking about seventeenth century founders. They were talking about people like William Penn Um So this idea of the founders of seventeen seventy six as the founding fathers, Lincoln has a lot to do with that The phrase founding fathers, it's a twentieth century thing And We could still have a lot of that, I think. So it's nice to look back to your ancestors and like hear these great inspirational figures from history Everyone likes to do that they don't. always have to be the same ones. You, we could switch And you know, we could say we're thinking about Lincoln instead of George Washington U We're thinking about Charles Sumner and Thadda Stevens. meembers of the Reconstruction Congress instead of, you know, James Madison We're thinking about the people who drafted the fourteenth Amendment rather than the people who drafted the Constitution And there is some benefit because if you're like my heroes are Uh Union army in the Civil War, you know, and Douglas and Harriet Tubman and the Black troops. to fifty fourth, Massachusetts and Abraham Lincoln, Thaddy Stevens, Charles Smoner, you don't have to perform all of these mental acrobatics to explain why they're your heroes, but yes, they enslave their own children like Thomas Jefferson You know, it's a better set of heroes. It lets us tell the story in a cleaner way. So like we want to say sort of most fundamentally, America is an anti slavery nation and we've been that way since our founding And that is not true if the founding is seventeen seventy six, but it is true if the founding is eighteen sixty three or eighteen sixty eight Then what do we do with what we have now? You know, The city is named after Washington, who was a slave holder There is the Jefferson Memorial who is also a slave holder, like do you tear them down? Do you name them after someone else? What are we supposed to do? So the question of how to sort of change the national story is a really interesting one And obviously this is something that people feel strongly about So for a bunch of reasons, I think it's a bad idea to try to attack it directly and say, you know, rename Washington, DC tear down the Jefferson Memorial You don't want to do that. What you want to do, I think, is people to understand The values that we hold dear that we think define us as Americans really come to us much more from reconstruction then from the fain and then peopleeople will start to identify more with the heroes of Reconstruction, who I think are a better bunch of people than the heroes of the foundounding And eventually, you know, you'll put up some new monuments maybe to Frederick Douglas and Harry Tubman and Charl Summer and Thaddy Steven And people will walk around and they'll see them and they'll be like, you know, I kind of like this better than Jefferson I feel like I have more in common with this guy. I don't get that weird feeling that I get when I think about Thomas Jefferson What do you think it will take for people to do that? Like what will it take for America to say, actually, let's think about Reconstruction, way more. let's invest ourselves in that part of our national story Well, it'll take a couple of things. People will have to stop identifying with the Confederacy for one thing. So you know, that's why we don't talk about reconstruction so much, I think, because there's a substantial part of white America that Until recently, maybe still identifies with the Confederacy So seventeen seventy six, I was saying, is a unifying moment for white Americans, at least. You can look back and be like, yeah, we were all on the same side there. The reason that we can look back and say we were all on the same side there is that the one third of Americans who remained loyal were basically driven out of the country afterwards, So there were a lot of loyalists, but we wrote them out of the American story And we didn't do that with the Confederates. The Confederates are like one fifth of the white American population. They're a smaller minority than the looyalists but we preserve them And we are like, yes, you are true Americans You were fighting for what you believed was right. We can be proud of you And there's all of this pride in the Confederacy that prevents people from thinking of Reonstruction as a unifying moment. You write that America's going through an identity crisis If things remain the same, If what's going on now continues to go out go on Where we headed? who are we Well, we are a confused and divided people is who we are, I think. And the way to understand American history, I think, is as cycles between these two different sets of values, between the exclusive individualism of the foundounding, and the inclusive equality of reconstruction. And I would say foundounding values have the upper hand basically up until the Civil War, then you get about eight years of reconstruction. And it's a time of tremendous change. You get the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth ammendments. It's a brief period of time. And then there's the compromise of eighteen seventy seven. The federal troops stand down. They stop. holding back the white supremacists paramilitaries that are basically the remnants of the Confederate armies and the former Confederates take back power in the south. This is what historians call redemption So they overthrow the racially integrated reconstruction governments And then you've got almost a hundred years O again this exclusive individualism going up until basically Brown Reboard of Education, the Civil rightights movevement which is what historians often call the second reconstruction So you've got the civil rightights movement maybe roughly sort of coextensive with the Warren courourt, so say like nineteen fifty three to nineteen sixty nine, That's sixteen years. It lasts longer this time. And there's a lot of changes. There's the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. for instance, which brings back the promise of multiracial democracy There's a backlash again And starting about in nineteen eighty, maybe With the election of Ronald Reagan, you see this real turn back towards states rights. This is a moment in our culture when the founding becomes a lot more celebrated. People get really more interested in the founders This is when originalism really starts coming out as a jurisprudential idea The idea being we're going to go back to the founding. Weirdly, the originalistals don't talk about going back to eighteen sixty eight and really understanding the fourteenth Amendment They want to go back to seventeen eighty seven And that's what I would say is the second redemption It's sort of the backlash to the second reconstruction of the civil rightights movement And once again We've entered this long period. where the values of exclusive individualism are coming out on top So like what we're living through now, I think, is the second redemption. This is what I tell my constitutional law students. and How long is it going to go on? It's going to go on until we get the third reconstruction until we get another civil rights movement So it sounds like we go reconstruction, redemption, reconstruction, redemption. It's this pendulum that swings back and forth. You know, like you said, we have the Voting Rights Act Recently, a lot of the teeth have been taken out of it. Do we just swing on this pendulum back and forth? forever and ever or at some point do we make a decision and say This is the direction we're headed in. and we pick a path. I would like us to make a decision about that. You know, I would like us to pick the side of reconstruction and that's that's sort of one of the things that I'm calling for people to do Realistically, I think what happens is we swing back and forth,