Mobilizing Voters for Meaningful Change

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In two thousand one, the first generation iPod went on sale. Tue story, my son asked me what it was like to be married and I said, just delete every song but one off of your iPod G go, go Welcome to the Foreign and first episode of the Prop GPod. What's happening? In today's episode, we're sharing our live conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. We commemorated our nation's two hundred fiftieth birthday and discuss power, institutions, technology and the future of American democracy If you don't want to miss our next live stream or other content exclusive to Substack, you can subscribe at prorofGmedia. com Anyway We hope you enjoy our conversation with the one and only Heather Cox Richardson Heather, thanks so much for being with us today. Always a pleasure, Professor Galloway. How are you doing Uh, you know, I'm doing all right. Um I guess is I'm in a constant state of Anxiety low I would call low level anxiety. How are you feeling same You know, and one of the things that really jumps out to me is how many different stories are coming at us from so many different places where you not only have to read what is in front of you, but also guess what is really happening. And that's just a lot of mental work And you know, you and I devote our lives to it. But for people who are trying to pay half attention, I just don't know how they're getting through their days. Yeah, it's sort of which story to focus on and where to allocate your attention and your not your outrage but your concern, if you will. So Let's start with something you wrote in the past week. It's been sort of a masterclass into two of Trump's defining moves, cheating the system and spectacle The reflecting pool renovation cost sixteen million do ten X what he claimed and is now fouled with green algae. The Kennedy Center Tarp is stilloped, UFC fight sponsored by his own family's crypto company And in your view Talk a little bit, is the cheating getting more brazen or are we just more aware and sensitive to it Prob both. And the fact that we're getting more aware of it is interesting, and I'd love to pick that back up. But the thing that really jumped out to me in the last week was the members of the Kennedy Center board being really clear about the fact that they had fulfilled the court order to take Trump's name off the building, which they may or may not have done, and we assume it's been done because they certified to the court they had done it. But then they covered it with a tarp, obviously now a tarp that's designed to stay there for a long time because they've actually cut pieces through it to access the doors of the Kennedy Center. And that just jumped out to me that Literally, they said, we did what you told us to Obviously while they filled the letter of it, they did not fill the spirit of the order. They went ahead and made it sure that people couldn' see that Trump's name was off and they covered up Kennedy's name as well. And it just jumped out to me that this is J such a hallmark of the Trump family business and certainly Trump himself to always find a work aroundound, always find a way to cheat the system. And it's not just being a con man, which is something else. It's I am cheating the system. And that to me, I think illuminates not only Trump, but also many of the people who follow him because they're like, yeah, he's just a smart businessman. This is the way you're supposed to do business. And in a way, that's a real dengration and destruction of what the system is, which is the American people trying to make rules under which to govern themselves. So I actually thought that was a really big deal in terms of illuminating the way that Trump thinks Yeah I wonder sometimes if those of us who followed this stuff are it occupies a decent amount of our bandwidth, whereas the majority of Americans are just freaked out about the cost of eggs. you know, is this it's another example of how weird the guy is. And you know, I felt like when he put his name up, it was the equivalent of spray painting or initials on a monument. You know, I thought I was fairly confident it was going to come off Does he Do you think he plans this knowing it's eventually going to come off, but it's a distraction from the real work of governance, which is not you know, where he does not acquit himself well. Is this a purposeful distraction? Oh yeah. you know, I think what is really going on with him and again, not a psychologist here at all. somebody who studies people in power I think he can't move backward. He always has to be testing the limits. He always has to find a new way forward. And I remember, you know back when OJ Simpson was in his white van trying to get away from the cops and talking to a friend who was in LA at the time and saying, Oh my God, this is it. this is the end. And the guy said to me, No, you don't understand this kind of a personality. He will never stop moving forward. There is no way for him to say he's sorry to move backward or to to try and work within the lines because he's always got to push that envelope until he has stopped. And I think that's Trump to a te. You know, if you say to him, you can't do this, he's going to find a workaround and do it some other way until, you know, the system really does finally stop him I want to put forward a thesis to my co hosts at Pivot, Karis Swisher, and Rachel Moters Jest Tarlv have pushed back on. and I want to get your response and that is I think that we have a tendency in the media or the people that we or at least my bubble who I hear from a lot, are fairly progressive and have embraced or have not embraced what I'll call a more aspirational vision of masculinity. And or interested in it quite frankly. And I love what David Frum said about the border that if progressives want toforce the border, fascists will and When I think about the USC fight, I actually believe that it was a win for Trump and that is If Democrats can't come up or progressives can't come up with some sort of aspirational form of masculinity around strength and service that Republicans or Trump is happy to fill that void with misogyny and violence. But I would argue that the UFC fight was at a minimum a distraction from Iran and most likely a win for a large portion of his base. What are your thoughts I'm going to disagree with the first and partially agree with the second. And that is one of the things that jumps out to me that I find fascinating right now is the degree to which new rising Democrats are embracing the American military. And the Republicans are walking away from the military. They're really treating them, you know, really sometimes I think inadvertently in really poor ways. know, when Trump kept saying that only losing thirteen people in Iran was not that many people, well you know It mated a lot to the thirteen people and all their friends and family and the people who recognizeed the service that that entailed, but also in the ways that they're like undercutting them the VA and the many ways in which they are not treating service members well, and the Democrats in contrast are supporting them, are stepping up and are articulating the idea of an American military that not only protects America, but but also contributes to this larger civic body So I think that's a really big difference in terms of the way you approach masculinity in that case Now in terms of the UFC fight I agree with you. I think it was designed to be not only a distraction, but also an embrace of that kind of violence at the heart Macho. Yeah. But is it macho? I mean, that's the interesting thing about it that you know, a lot of if you look at the number of people who approved it the idea of there being a cage match the White House, which is different than a sport elsewhere. Only about sixteen percent thought it was a good idea to have it at the White House and That idea that masculinity involves simply beating the crap out of each other I'm not sure flies with an awful lot of people So is it a win in general because he managed to grab it? Maybe. But more than that, you know, the fact that it was at the White House, and for me, the real thing about what happened with the UFC match was the fact that they were openly selling branding at the White House you know, and somebody made the comparison between it and well, you know, there have been a lot of cellists and, you know, you had, you know, we had to suck that up. you have to suck up the UFC fight. I'm like, yeah, but a cellist and I'm, you know, I don't I'm not really real up on a lot of cellists, but I don't remember them saying, you know, here's an ad for whoever the shellist company is. and that Comercialization of not only the White House, but also the United States of America. I think it's deeply off putting to an awful lot of people who recognize that it's our country And somebody else is cashing cashing in on that. And at the end of the day, there's going to be somebody holding the bag and it sure looks increasing like and it's going to be the American taxpayer. And that's something that I think as to go back to your comment about eggs You know, I don't think people are real keen on that idea that we seem to be spending money like water while ordinary people can't make rent. That's a good segue into what is What is the kind of the dominant story in the news right now and that's Iran. And Trump announced The Iran deal, I think he's taking license with the term deal.'s I understand it a memo of understanding from his birthday cage match, posting that he was fully authorizing the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormz and that ships of the world start your engines. National security scholar Tom Nichols wrote that Iran leaves the conflict stronger than before goovernment attack, now controlled by the RRGC, missile stocks reserved Heather, give us your take on this quote unquote deal. Of course we don't know what's in it We do know that what is being signed in Geneva on Friday is a memorandum of understanding. That being said, both Iran and the United States have gone in the media to talk about what they say is in it. It's already being picked up in right wing media as well as across the spectrum, that if in fact, it's such a great deal for the United States of America, why aren't they releasing at least the terms as they are understood? And just this morning, JD Vance was sort of backtracking and trying to say that people's criticisms of it were because that was Iranian disinformation. But if that's the case, let's see it, right That being said, you know From the beginning, when this conflict that clearly Trump designed to look a great deal like Venezuela, he always even still continues to compare the two. when it didn't work out as he planned He didn't have a lot of options, and he doesn't have a lot of options now. I mean, Iran has figured out that it can use the Strait of Hormz for real as leverage And there's not a lot of things that people can do about it. The United States has not turned out looking real good against a mediocre power It certainly looks as if the United States is a lot weaker than Iran and you know, coming out of this. You know, I actually sat around On more than one occasion, thinking, how does the United States get out of this in a way that ends up somethingomet that looks at least like february twenty seventh, twenty twenty six, the day before Trump began the airirstrikes along with Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel You know, I'm not a negotiator for sure, but I did not see a way to come out of this in any way that looked like a win. And I think that's just where he is. All the criticism, which I think is quite warranted, we shouldn't have gone in there I don't see a good deal coming out of this. What do you think Well, I go to the term memo of understanding. It's a business term and I've received and have written several memoos of understanding. What they are is typically in an M andA environment where you someone gives you a memo of understanding saying, all right Heather, you have a really robust substack and newsletter business and we'd like to acquire it. And this is our understanding of the business, the revenues Mutual NDAs and this is kind of a valuation range, and now we're going to do the hard work to see if we can get to a deal And I would bet somewhere between thirty per and fifty percent of memos of understanding actually result in a deal And it strikes me that to position this as a deal is disingenuous. It's it's an agreement to pursue an agreement So to celebrate seems premature. in my general read of the situation and I want to get yours Is that every day this is extended without a very, very definitive deal. advantage and leverage is ceded from America to Iran and that they are just playing delay and Ovescape, recognizing the American people have no appetite to go back into Iran. And so memo of understanding, stop bombing us u more and more u Ricense to get reengage militarily in Iran and we are going to the IRGC will, if they want, have control of the Stit of Hormuz, start to rebuild and enrich uranium This to me feels like we have The most expensive boomerang in history, and that is we have essentially paid a ton of money and credibility in terms of US brand equity such that we could get a worse deal than we had with the JCPOA. I apologize, Lord Sald there, Y your thoughts I agree with you. I agree across the board on that. I do wonder about two things though. One is that if you look at the timing of the announcements of understandings, which have been thirty nine of them, I think, at this point, it certainly seems to be designed, at least in part to affect the market And that idea is you know, again, there's a lot to untangle there, but somebody's making money off this deal and it's not just the Iranians. And that, I think is also something to factor in here. But I agree with you. You know, the United States can't withstand the oil pressures the way that the Iranians can right now. And that, if you look at the declining stocks in reserves of oil across the United States. And I thought it was really interesting a few days ago when leaders of some of the major oil companies actually went to the press and said, we have told the White House that we're running low on stocks and something has to happen. I thought it was interesting that they were concerned enough that rather than simply quietly saying it, they actually went to major outlets to make sure the American people saw that I think you're right, the U S. like I say is, I hate to say it And I'm really sorry over a barrel Yeah. ye As a historian, can I ask one question, though? Sure. goo ahead. So when you talk about the language of the memorandum of understanding? One of the things that I'm really curious about is the times in which Trump writes at the bottom of his social media posts Thank you for your attention to this matter You said Am I correct that that tends to be associated with dunning somebody for bills that have not been paid Yeah, that feels like that's really interesting. It does feel like a collection notice. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah, or an attempt to collect a debt, right Um, but it's not Well, I'll put forward another thesis that when you value fealty over competence, These agreements have nothing to do typically with the leaders of the IRGC and the president. These agreements have to do with one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty well trained, deep, experienced diplomats of which we have gutted our diplomatic Corps and the level of incompetence or opting for failty over compompetence, bubbling up with agreements that are built on very tenuous sands that ultimately, I don't believe this is going to result in anything close to an enforceable agreement. Y thoughts So my thoughts are that this raises the next question. I agree with you. by the way, I think that he's like I say that I don't see a clean way out. And you know, you've seen this. He says there's an agreement iss things within it leak. There's an outcry, especially from the right outcry, and then he backs off and he blows the whole thing up. And I don't see any reason to think that this should be different except for that pressure of the rising prices that are going to be hitting with the reduction of oil stocks. does raise a larger question, I think, about where the United States is in this moment, and that is Obviously, this is hitting consumers incredibly hard. They were already hurting from the tariffs. Now they're going to be hurting even more from the rising cost of diesel and the cost of what that's going to do to food and gasoline and so on. To what degree is the Corruption and the incompetence and the self dealing among Trump and his inner circle affecting the way that Ordinary Americans who are not paying a lot of attention to that because they're working three jobs to put food on the table You know, to what degree do those things speak to each other? And I have an idea about that, but I'd love to hear what you have to say about it This is your trick. You asked me what I think. Well, we know, but this is the problem because I know what I think and that's not very interesting. So I'm I think it's a lot more interesting than what I think. but as someone who loves to hear the sound of their own voice, I'll answer I think in America it has become a national pastime ofit being critical of our government, and I would argue our government is the best performing organization in history And I think we have just taken for granted at every level how how thoughtful and ential people in the CDC are and the diplomats who try to hammer out and cross the T's and dot the I's of an incredibly complex deal like this and that we have essentially u gutted and neutered the competence of the best organization in the world. And Americans have taken for granted believing that that these things just operate on some sort of autopilot And I think we're about to figure out in a very painful way that No, there were very smart people working at the TSA. There were very smart people working in the IRS. The CDC, those people were there for a reason And when we decide to take out our entire Iranian diplomatic corps staff our intelligence agencies and our security apparatus with loyalists as opposed to people who have any background. that eventually you end up with u po execution. And think I think a lot of this is our fault. I think a lot of Americans have taken for granted the commitment and expertise that is resant in our government. And I think that Those chickens are coming home to roost I agree with you. The question is whether or not people are going to recognize that. And I would say a couple of things about it. If you wanted to hear a stuff coming out of my head on this The first is that one of the things that really has jumped out to me lately in the last Some week or so, so maybe it's fleeting is what happened after the Great crash in twenty nine was that if you think about the twenties, they were times in which the production increased dramatically, but the benefits of that really stayed in a very small group of people. And yet the popular imagery of that time, especially coming out of World War one, with all of its advertising, for example, and all that new technology, was one in which people who read the popular magazines and paid attention to the radio and did all those sort of newfangled things thought that the world the United States was really this incredibly prosperous place and they didn't pay a lot of attention to farmers and wage workers and to marginalized Americans, especially racial minorities, saying, hey, things aren't so great over here But what happened after ' twenty nine was that with that crash, when the entire economic facade just came tumbling down All the sudden Americans, especially white Americans, who had previously disagreed with the idea that there was anything wrong with the economy, started to look at their former bank accounts and started to look at the people who had ripped them off. And their fury at that point was overwhelming. And that's how we go from the twenty eight election, which is a landslide for Hoover to the thirty two election, which is a landslide for FDR. And I wonder, you know, there was a story that came out the other day about how when he was Governor of Ohio, John Kasit had done this deal with tech companies absolving them from a need to contribute to Ohio state taxes for I think it was up to forty years so long as they met certain standards. And you know it didn't really make a lot of waves until all of a sudden people are now discovering it with the advent of data centers raged. And that just seemed to me like that sort of for it look to lot like the backward look of the nineteen early nineteen thirties before FDR comes in when people are so mad at, you know the head of the stock exchange and people around Hoover and Mellon and so on that they decide that when Herbert Hoover walks down the street, Flowers die when he walks by. And I wonder if maybe we' going to see as this economy gets more and more stringent, a furious look back at how we got here over the past couple of decades We right back after a quick break Support for the show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one Agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections Then you review and publish what goes live Framer is the pro side buildilder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI generated ideas and production ready website work The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed and published, and lands on the canvas, stays editable and can be published when the team is ready. 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There was a twenty five percent destruction in labor. in the first few months of COVID. And the response was Sift And some people argue we overdid it Janet Yellen said the risk of underoing it was much greater than overdoing it. and the government response was I would argue was outstanding in terms of the economy. We never really had the full recession, I would hope that what we're seeing now on a lot of levels would inspire a reckoning The issue is whether or not the incumbents or the Republican partarty is able to frame primary signal of prosperity is the stock market versus affordability or inflation or generally how people feel that they're doing, but that brings up a question in that is you brought up a reference to the late twenties In terms of Trump's fore approach to foreign policy What is the analog in terms of another president or leadership in terms of a similar approach And also you referenced this time maybe being somewhat like the late twenties, are there other periods you can look at domestically in our history that feel V twenty twenty six. Yeah, the Gilded Age for sure. but also the entire late nineteenth century, really. So you know one of the things We're looking at right now is the upcoming midterm elections and whether or not they're going to be free and fair. And people often say, especially those of us who came of age after the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act, you, this has never happened before where our vote has been endangered. And the answer to that is, you let's take a look at the American South from about eighteen seventy four to about nineteen sixty five but certainly from ' seventy four into the early twentieth century, when you know, quite literally at the time the parties were reversed and the Democrats actually held a shooting U contests on the edge of Republican political rallies in the late nineteenth century in the American South. So there is the holdover for Reonstruction, but certainly the gilded age when you had what the people that we often now call Rober Barons, the industrialists of that period, literally buying up senators. You know, the senators would say, I'm the senator for the suugar Trust, for example and the consolidation of wealth and power. That only goes so far though with the idea that at least in that period, and I would argue right up until the post war period, the Andrew Carnegies of the world, the JD Rockefellers of the world, still maintained the idea of social responsibility and a commitment to democracy. Now their version of democracy might not have looked the same as yours and mine But they believed in the United States of America and in the separation of powers, for example, and so on, even if they were trying to stack it toward themselves. I think in this moment, we have aab a group of people in power who no longer have any faith in democracy and are really actively trying to destroy it and to destroy the post World War two rules based international order in part so they can carve up the globe again in a way that looks very much like that late nineteenth, early twentieth century period when countries were jockeying to carve up Africa, for example, or to carve up Asia. And the United States was part of that, not to the same degree that some other countries were, but the idea that what you were really doing was building a strong country at home taking the resources out of countries that really couldn't fend off the military power of those suuperpowers at the time I think one of the wonderful things about America is we have a tendency to pick different. you know, the next one, I always feel like every president is pretty distinctly different from the previous president that we have a tendency to want different And Regardless of the reality of how we're doing in terms of prosperity or well beinging, the American public It does not feel as if we're doing well. It feels like it's setting itself up for a change Both in terms of the midterms and maybe in terms of the election the presidential election in twenty eight When you look historically at this type of situation And you look at the candidates ar ranged on the Democratic side from the moderate side to the very progressive Do we have a tendency in this type of situation to swing hard left What type of candidate usually comes after a situation like this So you're going to hate this answer because it starts with the premises If you look at where the Democrats are right now, Fr those you would call the more moderate ones to the progressive ones, they still are extraordinarily centrist to the point that most of them are to the right of Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Republican, of course. And what I'm referring to especially there is with Eisenhower's upper tax bracket at ninety one percent or ninety two percent with his call for universal health carere, with all these things that coming out of World War II, were absolutely centrist positions So what I say to you that normally what we do is reaction to this kind of concentration of wealth. I'm going to talk about it less in terms of political parties and more in terms of where the American people are So if you look at a moment like this You should see a backlash that people on the right will say is a wildly leftist sort of thing the way FDR did in nineteen thirty three and going forward. But as FDR said, what he was really trying to do was preserve democracy and capitalism Because if he didn't do the sorts of things he did, we were going to lose it all togetherether with the rise of either fascism or communism And so what I would kind of expect to see in this moment is a reassertion of, first of all, the recognition that the system is not working for the vast majority of Americans, which, you know,'ve moved at least fifty trillion dollars from the bottom ninety percent of the top. one percent since nineteen seventy five that it's not working for the majority of Americans. And at this point is it is being gamed by a very few people. And you know, people like Elon Musk are helping that argument a lot And if you recognize that and then you say, this is not what America is supposed to be, this is the moment when you go back to, and I'm thinking FDR here, when he would honor Theodore Roosevelt, his relative, or Abraham Lincoln, you know sort of talk about the luminaries in our past and the things that they had called for. The truth is really since Lincoln, those people who represent the American people champion the same principles. And I would expect to see more and more of that. and you're already seeing it. You're seeing it out of John Ossoff in Georgia who's using that formula exactly And that I suspect you will see people coalescing around, not only on the Democratic side, but honestly, if I were an up and coming Republican right now and h you know for fun, sometimes I write speeches in my head And I could write these speeches. That's exactly what I would do. And frankly, it's exactly what Theodore Roosevelt did. He essentially repackaged Grover Cleveland's ideas in language that would appeal to Republicans and therefore became the leader of the progressive movement. But you know that's what I expect to see. We'll hear about how this is left wing or you know, crazy progressive and so on, when it's really common sense Well let's talk about the GOP. You laid out kind of the full arc for the GOP from the Motor Votor Act operation Red map to Citizens United to january sixth as a deliberate decades long project to delegitimize democratic opposition That was the diagnosis What's your prognosis for the Republican Party right now? Is it reformable or is it cross some sort of rubicon where it'll take a time to come back into what Id call a more traditional American fold, if you will I think the MAGA movement has really corrupted the association of the Republican Party the name. I mean, because one of the things about the name Republican and Democrat is that they you know their names and their organizations, but their principles have changed really profoundly in both of their histories, which is itself a really interesting story. By the way, when I started the letters, which take almost all my time, I was writing history of the Democrats, because I'd written the Republicans and I was writing the Democrats. and someday I will actually finish that book. It's somewhat interesting M more than somewhat interesting, It's quite interesting. I have argued all along that the principles at the heart of the Republican Party, which are not the opposite of the Democrats. They're just a different set of ideological principles, that they are baked into our DNA and were baked into our DNA by the Civil War, and that we will get those principles back, whether the name is Republican or Democratic or something entirely different We can't live without those principles again. Now who's going to do it is another question. And I know there areready candidates running in, especially in the Midwest, which is interesting who are trying to call back the Republican word and to go back to the idea of the sort of Eisenhower Republicans, The Republicans who were read out of the party in the nineteen nineties as being Republicans in name only, but who in fact were the ideological heirs of people like Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Now there's something though that you said earlier that I would love to pick up on. You talked about the destruction of the idea of expertise and you what was really this amazing an amazingly talented set of people in the American government really since World War two, when the government got as big as it did And I want to throw out to you that there has always been a strand in American history of The idea that by virtue of your connection to something else, usually God coming out of the G Aakening in the secondecond Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century There has always been this idea that the person of the people because he or she, because a lot of religious revivals are going to center around women, have a hotline to God, and therefore, their concerns or their ideas about governance or about life are more valuable than people who went to Harvard That has always been a strand in our history. And one of the things that jumps out to me about the people in power right now is the degree to which they have simply said, well, I'm going to put the best people in charge. or I read a book. I then can go in and I can negotiate Middle East peace in a way that nobody who's studied this and been trained and so on has been able to do for forty years And the thing about that is we have never put those people at the highest levels of our government before. The idea that you just have a hotline to the universe or God or to intelligence. And in this moment, it seems to me that that idea overlaps strongly with Trump's sort of fascist traditional ideas about some people being better than others And that, I think is interesting because think that's one of the reasons that evangelicals adhere to him as closely as they do And I I I don't really know how to grapple with that. What do you think about that Well, it's interesting you say that because I don't know if you've seen Jadie Vance this new book, you know, haven't read it c of out playbook around if you're running for president, you put out a book, right? Newsom just put out No one reads it And they're usually not very good because they're starched of anything that can come back to H. I will give Governor Newsom some credit. I thought his was more authentic and vulnerable than most of these books. But JD Vanceces is called Communion and he states that his cononversion to, I think it's Catholicism has reshaped his view towards politics And I find that in among itself really I was disturbed when Justice Kavanaugh and her confirmation said that ultimately she serves in the kingdom of God. My question was, well, which God is that and the fact that We have a tendency to describe our enemies oftentimes and say to them, say that they they' theory theocratic It feels to me like we're becoming much more theocratic and that the fact that a candidate who's clearly running for president feels comfortable talking about his faith shaping his viewpoint on politics, that that is exactly contrary to what the foundounding fathers had envisioned around a separation of church and stage. Are we increasingly becoming normalizing that the US. is in fact becoming a bit more theocratic? Well, certainly that was what was behind Project twenty twenty five. And Russell Vode, who's the director of the Office of Management Budget as part of Project twenty twenty five has been very clear about that's exactly what he intends to do And certainly JD Vance has said that and a number of the Supreme Court justices have said that. it remains unpopular in the United States of America to the suggestion I was making about what does one do when one puts those people in power And I shouldn't say they've never been in power because they certainly were with the Puritans. and it didn't go real well in a lot of ways, and went very well in others. But one of the reasons that's been on my mind is when the Defense Department the other day got rid of about one hundred and eighty faith traditions that it was no longer going to recognize Mike Lee, the Mormon from Utah who is a staunch supporter of MAGA He spent the entire weekend fighting desperately to say, wait, wait, wait, Mormons are Christians, Mormons are Christians. And this just goes back to the one of the reasons The framers didn't want to have inpower people who believed that they had some version of the force with them because then you have to decide which religion is the one that you're going to adhere to. And in a way, that theme, which I know about because me and my master's is in literature and it really heavily runs through American literature and also American art and film In a way, you can also argue it's a real excuse to say, I don't actually have to learn anything. I don't have to go to college. I don't have to learn to be a negotiator. I don't have to work my way up. I can just say that God favors me And therefore, I can do it all without putting in any hard work, which is really antithetical to what America has stood for until pretty recently Doesn't even it extend beyond our shores when I think about the prosperity, the unprecedented prosperity of the West post World War I A lot of it is from cooperation, right? Global trade brought down the price of everything, security twow thirds of the world's GDP is on kind of a similar operating system, turning our enemies, Japan and Germany into our allies But it was based on a lot of it was based on this pillar of We use evidence and argument and history and norms and economics and logic and science to have a common language. a common understanding And at the moment we start think for one of the five thousand five hundred gods and a belief that somehow our Our values are superior based on the blessing of one of those five thousand five hundred gods Doesn't matter? I mean, quite frankly, just risk the entire global social order that's created so much. Even these deeply religious leaders, when they come to the table and try and negotiate a nuclear arms treaty or a trade agreement They deferred to science, they deferred to norms, they deferred to history. they deferred to proable evidence and argument, and they put their own beliefs aside recognizing that that made the argument or an inability to find bridges of agreement almost impossible. doesnesn't when the world's most powerful nation slides into I don't want to say theocracy, but a belief that I've got an invisible friend that's behind me. Doesn't that threaten the ent doesnn't that threaten the entire shooting match I think so, and that's certainly what the framers talked about and the founders talked about because they had the experience not only of wars of religion in Europe, but also of the use of state governments to discriminate against certain people, certain different members of at the time, Protestant sects in the United States. know you could get imprisoned in Virginia for preaching against One of the other established leaders, established religious leaders, and they recognize that you know you must have the right of conscience. That's something that James Madison talks about a lot. People have to be able to pay their debt to their God however they wish. and that's a paraphrase, but that's the idea of it. But that you can create a government that operates within the known world in reaction to to natural laws. and that's what they were trying to set up for that very reason, whichich is, again, one of the reasons that American literature is so interesting because starting with the Puritan sermons and then moving forward at least through the Civil War question of how your duty to your God intersects with your duty to society. That's really the central theme of American literature throughout that period. And you think of even things like the Scarlet letter, right, which everybody suffered through in high school is really about that question. know to whom are you loyal It's one thing to have it in the realm of humanity and trying to figure out your own position in society. It's another thing to have leaders who say, Well, God told me to do this And the obvious answer to that is, well, God told me to do the opposite. So we can't actually go with what God recommended because God will speak to the two of us very differently. Again, all over early American literature, but it seems to me something we have forgotten, especially since the nineteen eighties when people like Ronald Reagan really emphasized, you know, I didn't need an education, you know, I just and for him it wasn't necessarily God. I remember when he kept saying and really taking pot shots at Harvard, I remember at the time, my mother saying, of all the legac the legacies he leaves, the attacks on higher education are going to be the most and the idea that you don't need education are going to be the most lasting. And here we are Almost fifty years later and thinking, you know, she knew where she spoke Mhm So I want to ask you who your favorite candidates are, but given your understanding of history and typically what type of candidates surface and bubble up and do well in this type of moment or if in fact, there is a reckoning Wh type which candidates on both sides of the aisle do you think are giving off the type of energy It is usually successful in this moment So once again, I'm going to be annoying. The Democratic bench is incredibly deep which' for everything, which is great. And that I think, in part reflects how many people are getting involved in elections that weren't previously getting involved in them. And by that, I don't just mean the candidates because there's a certain type of person who tends to run for office. But I mean the people who support those candidates. So you're getting new ideas in that Democratic bench And in terms of who I like right now I don't really like anybody right now, and I don't dislike anybody right now because again, in a moment like this, with this multiplicity of candidates, I think what you're seeing is a ferment coming from below that's tossing up new people who will begin to coalesce And my comparison here is always the eighteen fifties If you started to pay attention to politics in the United States in say eighteen fifty four It was the Whigs and the Democrats, and you know, you probably weren't paying huge attention except when they were having their barbecues before an election because there didn't seem to be a whole lot of difference between the two of them Over the course of the eighteen fifties, with the increasing awareness that a very small group elite southern enslavers was taking over the national government. You started to pay attention to Salmon Pete Chase and to you know, a whole realm of people William Henry Sewward in New York, you started to pay attention to a whole bunch of people, and you'll notice I didn't say Abraham Lincoln there. Because Lincoln is kind of a late start into this idea of a new party. He was actually very tightly tied to the whigs. And so he doesn't really start to get out in front with the Republicans until fifty seven fifty eight fifty eight, he's in the Lincoln Doul debates and beginning to get real national attention. And by fifty nine, he has begun to articulate a new ideology for a new party. I always like to emphasize we created Lincoln. He didn't He didn't come from the gods. The American people created Lincoln. And I think we're looking at something very similar right now. So I mentioned John Ossoff a minute ago. John Ossoff to me, has sort of come a little bit out of nowhere with this really, you know, he was we all knew he was running for reelection as a senator, but he's clearly starting to get this sense of what is bubbling up. and he's using this old formula for how one vaults to the top of the political spectrum using that formula and all of the sudden people are talking about him as a presidential candidate in a way that they weren't a few years ago or even a few months ago. And you're seeing different people sort of take the lead briefly and someone else take the lead briefly. I would not take a bet right now on who's going to emerge at the top What will emerge at the top is a newly articulated ideology. The Republicans have the opposite problem, I think, and that is that becausecause Trump is so dominating the MAGA Republicans right now, he's stifling exactly what they need, which is people articulating ways to identify policies that will address the needs of their voters or of the American people at large, because if they abandon MAGA, which is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, they're going to have to tack back to getting more voters. And right now, I am not seeing that except as I say and those people who are basically walking away from MAGA and saying, okay I'm not going to get any voters right now, but I want to advertise it's possible to be a Republican and a respectable Republican. You know, in the short term, they just don't seem to have much of a bench and they just, you know, their their best candidates seem to have abandoned the party and become independents and are challenging the Democrats that way What do you think Well, I agree with you. Osoo is giving off the most camelot like energy The great thing about the primary process when you let it run. It not only surfaces the right person, but the right person for the moment and Whoever's leading right now, which Nsom is is usually means they're not going to be. I mean, Herman C Kaine, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson. Th those were all people leading in the polls at this moment I think America likes someone who comes up and is a new shiny face and quite frankly, we don't know them well enough to hate them yet or find all their wards So a Bashir, I think is someone we're going to hear more from Pritzker's giving off great dad energy Governors more, you know, governors More and Shapiro are very Well position. I agree with you. I think our bench is really deep. What I want to put forward to you or a thesis is when people ask me who I think the Republican nominee is, I say that Trump is the equivalent of political Chernobyl name anybody from his first administration with the exception of Ambassador Haley, who I think will be a formidable formidable candidate perhaps on the Republican side, no one survives Everyone gets political leukemia if they're around him long enough. He's the Chernobyl politics. The person, if I had to pick a nominee For the Republican partarty if had to bet on anyone, it would be Tucker Carlson What are your thoughts? I don't think that's unreasonable. I think he's certainly in the running for it. I think there will also be an attempt to keep a Trump on the ticket. I think there I think that Trump himself probably would love to see Trump jior, a Don Junr. on the ticket. The question again is what the Republican voters will put up with. And Niki Haley's interesting. I would not have put her on that list because she so infuriated so many of her voters when she ended up endorsing Trump. I mean, it would have been one thing to walk into the sunset as a never Trumper. But in that case, she basically managed to piss off both sides. Now one of the people that I wonder about about whom we have heard nothing for months and months and months, which could very well be deliveate is Liz Cheney that you know, one of the things and I'm going to go all historical on you here, one of the ways and I don't mean to make a comparison except in the timing, not in the people One of the ways we got James Buchanan in eighteen fifty six was he had been in Europe for the years before he was an ambassador to the United Kingdom. So he had been out of the country for the incredibly heated eighteen fifties. So when he did burst into the scene in ' fifty six for the election of eighteen fifty six, he could say, I have nothing to do with all that trouble. I am just here, you, serving my country. And of course, it turned out to be a disastrous. Nomination, but he did had his opponents split and he did win the election So it's entirely possible that on the Republican side, we will see somebody who has been out of the fray. And you know, Carlson is clearly trying to position himself in that and I don't think doing a bad job of doing it. But he's got an awful lot of haters as well. So I wonder about somebody who is invisible right now, but may spring back, especially as Trump continues to crumble which he is both physically and mentally, and as his movement crumbles as well right back after a quick break S support for the show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't speak to each other. 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With America two hundred fifty coming We're about to be flooded with brands performing patriotism Heather, what's the difference between a company that has generally become part of the American story and one that's just opportunistically running the flag Oh, let's both answer that one. That's a great question. I mean One of the things to look for, of course is are the things that that comp or corporation doing advancing the principles of American democracy, which is supporting causes that make sure we're treated equally before the law supporting the idea of everybody having a say in their government and making sure people have equal access to resources And you know, that's one of the I mean, actually, I'm going to throw this back to you, Scott, because one of the things again, that fascinates me about branding right now and about corporations right now, is that it often seems to me that they are selling less a product for the American people or a service for the American people, so much as they are selling themselves that is put money into my company because I'm one of the cool kids. And they don't actually produce much that the rest of us care about. And that's overstated, of course There does seem to be an extraordinary divorce right now between the stock market and the companies that are hot and what the American people actually need and the companies that are providing that. Is that unfair Oh, not at all. I think the outrage around data centers is Americans's frustration, looking for a vessel to place their frustration that while the market hits new highs and people have seemed to be you know, we have our first trillionaire. I can't afford gas. and And what I do think is fair is that happiness or wellbeing is not only a function of what you have because there's a lot of economists who would argue that People at all income levels actually aren't doing as poorly sometimes as the media would portray But your happiness in general sense of wellbeing is the delta between what you have and your expectations And because of social media vomiting one hundred and five times a day, how well everyone else is doing, the expectations, especially amongst young people is that if they don't have a boyfriend with a six pack and they haven't made three million dollars on the SpaceX IPO that they're failing So people are just upset. and angry in terms of branding Wrapping yourself in the flag is as old as time. The difference now is that three quarters of people of our generation professors feel good about America. Only one quarter of younger people feel good about America. So if you're a brand appealing to people of our age, if it's insurance or You know, CPAP or or my pillow guy. Yeah, wrap yourself in the flag Younger people, not so much. I don't know if going to the kind of America well is the right thing for them to do right now It does seem to me that one of the things that we are suffering from in this particular moment is the conversion of wealth That is the things that make a life worth living, you know, family, church, if that's your thing, open spaces, time with friends. education, libraries, whatever, that that is essentially being turned into cash. and that you know, we're liquidating it and turning it into cash and then giving it to a very few people And so maybe part of branding is recovering that idea of community and so on Free and fair elections are very much of concern to everybody here. I mentioned before, we've come through periods when we have lost free and fair elections, and that's something that everybody should be all over, both at the local level and the state level, reaffirming the idea that our elections are safe and secure and that those people who are attacking them by saying that they are rigged are, in fact, I'm going to go for it here, un American and that we have to support those things. I'm very concerned about it. But it's not a done deal. We don't have to sit here and take what comes next At the end of the day, we retain agency over our country and over our government, and we need to exercise that Yeah, I like that and um Just going back to this notion about American branding, I've just spent time in Northern Europe and my takeaway there is And I just think it's such an important lesson is that we need to settle the argument. And I think Sweden and I was just in the Netherlands settle it You don't have to choose between billionaires and universal healthcare You can have a society with both you know, these societies have high tax rates and produce incredible companies that go on to makeoney billions of dollars in trillion dollar market caps, and they have billionaires. The two are not mutually exclusive in America, I worry that Some of the incumbents have tried to convince people that you have to pick one or the other And it's just not true. You know, I was just fascinated spending time in Sweden. you have German industrialization, Silicon Valley innovation, and Bernie Sanders like social policies. And they can peacefully coexist Isn't that by definition that they can peacefully coexist? becausecause if in fact you create a healthy, educated workforce, they're able to innovate and do better work. Yeah. And that's actually how it works. I think you can make an argument that this idea of deliberately creating an undeducated, impoverished population is an attempt to establish an extractive economy over the United States, over all of the United States so that a very few people get it all, but it actually will create less economic growth than doing the opposite would. It just means that fewer people will be able to monopolize the wealth and therefore they can say, hey, I'm a trillionaire and the world is small enough that none of you are ever going to get to be there. I mean, that's the honest of God, That's the argument that you heard literally from Abraham Lincoln forward on both the Republican and the Democratic sides And when we talk about language that pololiticans should be picking up That's it. As you say, they are not mutually exclusive, that that's how you create a successful economy. Unfortunately, that's pretty much what Biden tried to do and he ended up getting destroyed for it. So whether or not another politician will think it's a good idea is an open question So we'll do one more question here. Kristen says or asks, eighty million eligible voters, eighty million eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. How can we foment some sort of meaningful change here?