Welcome to this episode from the award-Winning Best of the Left Podcast.
Today is episode 1776 in the year of our Nation's 250th birthday, just as I planned
it when I started the show 20 years ago, and we thought the occasion called for
something big, so we're tracing the full.
Arc from the constitutional compromises that made this country possible to the
authoritarian vanity projects that those compromises eventually also made possible.
We're talking about the history, the structures, and the insecure.
Current but temporary president who thinks a $400 million ballroom
and a coin with his face on both sides will make him a Pharaoh.
For those.
Looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top
takes in about 55 minutes.
Today includes 1619, the political philosophy Podcast,
radio Atlantic, the bunker.
Reveal Velshi and Democracy Paradox.
Then in the additional deeper dives, half of the show there will be
more in three sections, section A Constitution, section B, Trumpland,
and Section C authoritarian nostalgia.
But first, a reminder to check out our new show solved on the
best of left YouTube channel.
We're really proud of the show we're making and think you'll
get real value out of it.
Plus you checking it out will help us find new viewers on YouTube.
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That's all on the best of left YouTube channel.
Linked in the show notes and now onto the show.
So you kind of have to put yourself in the scene.
It is June of 1776 and Thomas Jefferson at the very young age of 33 years
old, has been tasked with drafting the document that is going to declare
to the world why the British North American colonies, the 13 colonies want
to break off from the British Empire.
He goes to Philadelphia and rents two rooms on the edge of town along the river
and sits down to draft what we all know now as a Declaration of Independence.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bans, which have connected them with another.
And to assume among the power.
So he's sitting at this portable mahogany writing desk that he carries
with him and he pulls out some paper and a very nice quill pen, and he
starts to write these words that almost every American can recite by
heart the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
We, these truths to be self-evident are created that all men are created equal.
That all men are created equal.
They become some of the most famous words in the English language.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain, with
certain unalienable, right?
That among these are that among these are life.
Life, liberty.
Liberty and pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of happiness, life and
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That's what makes us unique.
That's what makes us strong.
The shared values that we all hold so dear,
but what most Americans don't know.
Is that while he's writing these lofty words for liberation, he had brought
with him one of the many enslaved people whom he owned in order to
serve him and to keep him comfortable.
Now, that enslaved person was a teenager, and that teenager was the
half brother of Thomas Jefferson's wife.
What that means is Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law had children with
one of the women that he enslaved.
So actually he was Thomas Jefferson's brother-in-law.
As he's writing these ideals, he knows that they will not apply
even to his own family members.
At the time that Thomas Jefferson is drafting the declaration, 150
years have passed since those first Africans were sold into Virginia.
The enslaved population has grown from.
20 to now 500,000 people fully.
One fifth of the population is now enslaved.
It has grown from a conditional institution where some of those
first 20 were able to become free after a term of time to one
where black people are born into.
They die into it and they pass that status onto their children.
You now have generations of black people who have never known a day of freedom
and who will never know a day of freedom,
and yet when Thomas Jefferson's contemporaries.
Talk in public about why the colonists need to be free from England.
They refer to themselves as slaves, as slaves to the King of England.
And so the colonists are being criticized in newspapers for this obvious duplicity
by those who don't believe that they should break off from the British empire.
One of them writes, how is it that we hear the loudest Yelps for
freedom from the drivers of Negroes?
Another writes to Benjamin Franklin.
And says, perhaps you should ask the people who are actually
enslaved what slavery is like.
Thomas Jefferson, of course, is deeply aware of the hypocrisy and aware
of the criticism of the hypocrisy.
So as he's drafting the declaration, he includes a passage in there where he
actually blames the King of England for introducing slavery into the colonies.
He calls slavery a crime, and he says that the King of England committed this crime.
But that's not our fault.
It was not our doing.
This is just one more thing that the King of England did to wrong us.
So he brings this document to the Continental Congress.
It doesn't take long before delegates from the Carolinas and from
Georgia look at that language about slavery, and one can imagine, they
said, what the hell are you doing?
And they say that there's no way that they're gonna sign this document as long
as that passage about slavery remains.
And so it is struck.
Somehow miraculously, these 13 scrappy colonies managed to defeat one of
the most powerful empires in the world, and we become a new nation.
And so the colonists gather and they try to figure out the language that they're
gonna create in the founding document that we, of course come to know as the
Constitution, but now they have a problem.
They were trying to leave behind an old country that they believed
was antithetical to freedom and create a new one that they believed
would be defined by freedom.
This was a country that was going to be based on individual rights,
on a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
But this was also a place that at this time, was still practicing
the institution of slavery.
And so the colonists have a choice to make.
Are they going to be the country of their ideals?
The ideals that they were putting to paper a country based on the idea
that all men were created equal.
And if they were going to be that country, then they were going to have
to abolish the institution of slavery, or were they gonna be wedded to the
institution of slavery because they depended so heavily on the wealth
that was being generated from it.
And in that case, they can't really write the.
That they want to write.
And so what they do is they decide that they're going to try to have it both ways,
and they bake that contradiction right into the constitution, both codifying and
protecting the institution of slavery, but never actually mentioning the word.
And so they have written what is perhaps the most radical
constitution in the world.
And from the beginning, they knew they were going to violate
its most essential principles.
They called this new country a democracy, but it wasn't one.
Not yet.
And sometimes you say, I wonder if we'll ever be free.
We gonna ask the Lord to free the prayer you're going to sing.
Wonder shall I ever reach heaven?
I wonder, shall I fly?
And they would sing that for about an hour
way by and by.
Or I can hear 'em singing now, but I can't, uh, repeat
like I could in them days,
but someday when I'm not ho I can sing it for you.
But I'm through hos now.
Oh, I wish I could s, I wish I could sing it.
So an unwritten constitution means primarily that it's not
a single identifiable written document, but it doesn't mean
that it had nothing written in it.
That said, even though today, exactly as you say, Toby, we could consider
the British Constitution to be an edge case in contemporary parlance
of the use of the word Constitution.
It wasn't an edge case at all.
It was the archetypal case.
And so, you know, when Americans started saying, no, no, A constitution
is a single written document in the 18th century, that was the innovation.
And in fact, one of the problems with looking at us constitutionalism
narrowly through the lens of it being a single document is that can
actually leg lead you to misleading conclusions about what the Constitution
really is in the United States.
'cause it turns out it's something a lot closer to.
A comp, comp a complicated combination of institutions and practices and beliefs
and values than it is to the single piece of paper that you could point to.
So this is a genuine question, um, in that, like, I'm asking you to fill
in the blanks of my knowledge, and it just occurs to me now, but the, the
way we can think about constitutions as written or perhaps exclusively
written documents, and to think about the American constitution that way.
Fill in the gaps of my knowledge.
My understanding is from a historical process that's a bit anachronistic in
that that probably wasn't how people were thinking about it at the time.
The American Constitution sort of almost started a trend of formalizing this,
and even today, the US Constitution is a lot less formalized than something
like the French or the German, which really go into like the ABCs and
the Provisos and the exemptions.
Whereas the American constitution will just save stuff like free speech and
let you figure out what that means.
Am I. Did, did do I have that history right or do you want to complicate
or challenge that in any way?
Broadly speaking, I agree with you that the US Constitution as written was
not intended to cover in every detail, every particularity, um, the great
chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, in an opinion in which he gave
a broad definition of the Constitution.
Unlike some other famous opinions where he gave a more narrow definition,
the same person, but in his broadest definition, um, in a case called
McCulloch against Maryland, said that the Constitution does not speak with
the proxity of a legal code, by which he meant that it does not spell out every
last detail of every last obligation or requirement, but left room under its
great headings for interpretation for a rather broad amount of interpretation.
Constitutions have varied in terms of the degree of detail or if you will, proxity
ever since you have That's a great word.
It is a great word.
It's a, it's still, it's still technically an up-to-date word, even though it's
not prolix doesn't come up a lot in conversation, but it, it, uh, it could do.
Um, but yes, you'll have constitutions today that run to
hundreds and hundreds of pages.
Some countries have very long constitutions.
Some states or in within federal entities have very long constitutions,
and some other constitutions are relatively more compact regardless.
Every constitution, even if it's very detailed, has a body of
interpretation associated with it.
Mm. And that body of interpretation.
Might be very formalized and produced by a constitutional court or a Supreme Court,
or it might be even broader than that.
And include customs and practices of parliaments, of executive agencies, of
ministries, uh, administrative actors.
There are lots of entities that engage in practices that you could
call constitutional interpretation, but that build up a body of defacto
practice that fills out what I would call the actually existing constitution.
Right, right.
And the other argument, well, to get onto your book, the other
feature you really, um, zero in on with the American Constitution
is you use the word compromise.
The Constitution itself does not just, well, I'll let you go there.
What does that word mean to you in the context of the American founding
as background?
I would say that all constitutions, whether written, unwritten,
or interpreted more broadly.
Involve compromise because that was,
that was gonna be a follow up question.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, oh, I'm sorry to over.
But, but all those constitutions, um, all those constitutions, are they purport
to be a common blueprint or framework for how people will choose to, to live
together under conditions of governance.
And to do that, you need agreement of lots of different people.
And except in utopian fantasy, people don't always agree about
how they wish to be governed.
So to the extent that they formalize their agreements, they
have to come to common conclusions.
And that involves compromise.
And I think of compromise in two senses.
There's compromise in the sense that I really don't wish to do something, but I
do it because without agreeing to it, you wouldn't agree to participate with me.
And I think of another kind of compromise, which maybe would be
more properly called cooperation or co-creation or collaboration.
In which you and I agree on some far end, let's say we agree that the government
ought to treat everybody equally.
Mm-hmm.
But we know we're not going to agree in every detail as
to the best way to get there.
And so as a consequence, we might reach an agreement as between us that could be
called a compromise or a co-creation or a collaboration where we are committed
to the same value, but we agree to try it your way first and then to try it my
way second, or to subordinate my way of doing things to your way of doing things.
Hmm.
So those are of the same family as classic compromises, but
they're not exactly the same.
They're not exactly the same thing.
The original US Constitution, the constitution of 1787 was really a
compromise of the first sort because northern whites and southern whites agreed
to preserve the institution of slavery.
Notwithstanding that.
Many people actually in North and south, many white people in
North and south understood already that slavery was morally wrong.
Hmm.
And hoped or fantasized in some cases that it would somehow magically become extinct.
They had different, you know, crackpot theories about how that might happen.
None had very concrete theories about how to get there, but the Southern states made
it really clear that without protections and guarantees for slavery, they weren't
going to enter into the Constitution.
And so the US Constitution protected slavery in at least three concrete ways.
It had a guarantee that the international slave trade, which is different than
holding slaves domestically, and was much more criticized at the time,
even active slaveholders, many of them thought that the international
slave trade was particularly inhumane.
That was preserved for 20 years.
There was the famous or rather infamous three fifths
compromise, which resulted from.
A strange reality, which is that the southern states, which excluded black
people from voting and which also enforced slavery, wanted to count
persons of African descent as full people for purposes of representation
so that they would have more people representing them in Congress.
The northern states said, well, that's preposterous.
If you're not going to allow black people to vote, you certainly shouldn't be able
to count them for purposes of voting.
So black people should count for zero, anyone un, unless they were free and
able to vote, and the compromise they reached was that black people would
count for three-fifths of a person.
So today we think of it as immoral because of the symbolic quality of saying that
anybody is less than a full person.
But as it turns out, it was the pro-slavery people who wanted to
count blacks and the anti-slavery people who didn't want to count them.
Because it was never a question of allowing black people to
vote in that, in that debate.
And then the third compromise, which is in many ways the most devastating, was
the so-called fugitive slave clause.
And that was a clause of the Constitution that said that if an enslaved person
should escape and flee to a state where slavery did not exist, that that
person not only would not become free, but that the, um, that the state to
which they fled would cooperate in the process of recapturing them and
returning them to a state of slavery.
And bad as that sounds, and it sounds very bad, it was even worse than it
sounds because in 1772 in, uh, a common law case, a court of King's bench case
called Somerset Case, Somerset's case, Lord Mansfield, had ruled in the case of
a Jamaican enslaved person who had been brought to England, that the person was
no longer a slave by virtue of being in England because there was no positive law.
Applicable in England to create slavery as opposed to in the colonies.
And because of that holding, it was conceivable to imagine that an enslaved
person who escaped to a place where there was no slavery would just become free.
And the fugitive slave clause, among other things, denied that as a legal
reality and required forced the northern states who agreed to it, which is all of
them, to acquiesce in the continuation of slavery, as it were in their own
courts, and pursuant into their own rules, even if they themselves thought
that slavery was wrong and should not be sanctioned within their states.
So just to close the thought, yeah, all of that amounted to
a compromise of a bad sort.
A kind that was based on the preservation of a practice that not only was immoral,
but was understood by many, not all of the participants in it to be immoral.
And yet without that, there wouldn't have been a constitutional.
Agreement.
And so in that sense, the US Constitution was a compromised
constitution, the Constitution of 1787.
So Clint, as someone who has studied the presentation of history and specifically
Black history, how would you characterize this administration's approach?
Antagonistic.
Um, I think we are witnessing an administration working with
an unsettling intensity to.
Attempts to distort, erase, manipulate the history of this country, and
within that manipulate the history of Black Americans role contributions
and, and experiences in America.
And, and what I mean by that is I think, you know, let's take slavery for example.
The president of the United States said that the Smithsonian Museum,
for example, spends too much time talking about how bad slavery was.
For me, my sense of things is that it is, it is not the case that this
administration believes slavery didn't happen or, or not even that
they believe that slavery wasn't bad.
I think they understand that it was bad.
But what happens is if you talk honestly about the horror and the
brutality and the the cruelty of what slavery was, you then have to talk
about how the residue of that system continues to inform the contemporary
landscape of inequality today.
And I think it would fundamentally reorient people's relationship to not
only the history of this country, but the contemporary reality of this country.
And that's something that I think that.
So many folks in this administration want to avoid because they want to
be able to tell themselves that the America, that they believe to be
true, the America that that exists today is one that that is the result
singularly of, of people's hard work or deservingness when there's, there's
obviously another story to be told there.
And what is that desire about?
Because Adam Trump talks about wanting monuments to be uplifting,
not to cause people shame.
What does that mean?
Yeah, I think so.
When you think about the idea of, of uplifting, right?
It's sort of this notion of celebrating the positives of
someone's character, right?
Um, so as to say George Washington was the founder of the nation and,
um, you know, led the revolution was one of the greatest men of his time.
And if you do that and you sort of say this clean history
of George Washington without.
The additional stories, right?
The fact that George Washington rotated his enslaved workers from um,
Philadelphia to Mount Vernon in Virginia, so that they would not earn their
liberty under Pennsylvania law, right?
Because after six months you started to get your freedom.
And so if you start to add that complicating narrative, it doesn't paint
this sort of clean image of our leaders.
And that just feels bad.
Like what's the,
so there there are a couple of things that that, that does, right?
When you start to question one of the decisions, it also makes you
question the other things, right?
If you start to say, well, this person that we've painted as
someone who did an unqualified good did also unqualified bads.
And I think the other part of this too is that if you have to
tell a new story about Washington.
And you begin to tell a new story about Jefferson that includes the
sort of unsavory, so to speak, parts of their legacy, uh, which is to say
the more honest parts of their legacy.
If you have to tell a new story about these men, it also means you
have to tell a new story about.
America's founding.
If you have to tell a new story about America's founding, it means you have
to tell a new story about this country.
And if for many Americans, if you have to tell a new story about
America, it means you have to tell a new story about yourself.
Exactly.
And that tap into something that is like existential, that serves as a catalyst
to like a fundamental crisis of identity.
Because who people believe they are is.
Consciously and, and subconsciously tied to a story of America that
they have been told over the course of generations, through school,
through family, through community.
And when you untether them, uh, from that.
Notion of reality that they've come to believe.
Um, it's incredibly jarring.
Yeah, I can see it's disorienting.
I feel like we need to ground this conversation in a few examples.
You started by using the word intensity of the things that the
Trump administration has done.
Which one has stuck out to you or which just give us a few examples.
Yeah, there are a handful, right?
It's the renaming of.
Confederate Memorials and Confederate Monument.
It is the, the US Naval Academy removing books from their library.
It's the, uh, air Force stripping back the teaching of the Tuskegee Airmen.
And actually, one of the things that Clint was saying about
people having to reassess.
Their own legacies.
Right.
Um, I remember we had a conversation about his book where he saying, you know,
if you ha are having to ask questions about the ways that your grandparents,
right, the people who took you fishing and the people who, um, you know, you sat
on their laps and, and they read books to you and you were younger and you have
all of these great memories of them.
If you have to reassess how they got to do the things that they got to do, then
it really does like jar you and, and, and makes you fundamentally reassess your
own, um, sort of standing in the world.
And so.
This sort of broader project of saying, well, if we pair back some of the things
that the Tuskegee Airmen had to do to become the Tuskegee airmen, right.
Um, black History Month sort of calls us to remember that these,
these great people did great things.
But the question is like, why did they have to do those great things?
Why did Jackie Robinson have to integrate baseball?
Why did Martin Luther King have to deliver his speech at the March on Washington?
Right?
It is because the nation.
Did not have this clean story of progress.
Clint, I'm curious to put this in some kind of context.
What the Trump administration is doing now, which you described as
having a certain degree of intensity versus previous eras in American
history versus Trump won, because there's always a push and pull.
I mean, I imagine countries rarely do just clean memorialization
of their sins, you know?
Yeah.
You know what's interesting is that.
This is the pushback against Black progress, black history.
That in and of itself is not new.
What, what scholars of Black history and historians talk about all the time
is that in moments in which there are.
Periods of black, social, political, and economic progress, there is
often pushback to that progress.
So after the Civil War and after reconstruction, there was obviously
an intense sort of pushback to the progress that was made following the
Civil War through reconstruction.
Uh, then after the Civil Rights Movement, there was an intense pushback.
And what we're seeing now is a pushback to much of the era, both of Barack
Obama's presidency, but then later the Black Lives Matter movement.
Which sort of intensified following the murder of George Floyd.
But it is important to note that even while we are experiencing the echoes
of this history and we're experiencing this sort of nature of the sort of
cyclical elements that are there, this also is of a pretty unique
iteration of it in the way that it is.
Like state sanctioned, like in the, in the context of the civil rights
movement, there was intense pushback, or even during the Civil rights movement.
Right?
So much of the pushback, you know, it would come from states and it would
come from extra judicial forces, but it was, you know what the civil rights
leaders were appealing to was the federal government to come and protect them.
Oh, that is so important.
I get that.
So what you're saying is mostly the pushback is cultural.
Like it's cultural.
It comes from state governments, but this is.
Completely top down
oftentimes.
Yeah.
I, I don't think that we have seen a level of antagonism from the federal government.
Mm. Um, who historically, you know, the federal government or the Supreme Court
in the context of the Waring Court.
Have been the thing that allowed black folks to have some sort of support
outside of the context of their specific geographic and political reality in, in a
certain state or in a certain community.
And that now is gone.
Uh, there is no.
Federal government to appeal to, um, in fact, the federal
government is the antagonist
The United States of America marks its 250th birthday on
the 4th of July this year.
If like me, you are old enough to remember the bicentennial back
in 1976, you might recall a year of largely innocent celebration.
Commemorative stamps and coins.
Lots of Revolutionary War dress ups in local parades.
A fleet of tall ships visiting east coast ports and a state visit from our queen.
50 years later, though it is the worst look imaginable, that the semi
quincentennial falls under the reign of the most authoritarian president in
America's history, a man bents on remaking the idea of what it means to be American
along divisive nationalist lines, and who also has a taste to a Gordy spectacle.
Already, the celebrations are looking pretty partisan.
There will be a Patriot Games athletic event featuring one
male and one female high school athlete representing each US state.
Everybody admittedly dubbed it.
The Hunger Games counter to the recommendations of
two advisory committees.
Three designs for a new commemorative quarter.
Coin will not Mark Black abolition, women's suffrage or civil
rights, but instead the Mayflower Compact, the Revolutionary War,
and the Gettysburg Address.
There will be a heavily read America slanted $34 million Garden of American
Heroes featuring Neil Armstrong, Davey Crockett, and George Washington,
but also weirdly Alfred Hitchcock.
Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and both Lauren Baco and Humphrey Bogart.
And it's been stipulated that the sculptures should be lifelike and
realistic, not abstract or modernist.
And meanwhile, one planning organization set up by Trump called
Freedom two 50 is charging a million dollars ahead for access to the
President during the celebrations.
And if all that is not enough for you, there will be an indie car race through
Washington and an ultimate fighting championship match on the White House
lawn to coincide with the president's 80th birthday are Trump and his
accolades trying to use America's 250th birthday to engrave the Margo world.
Into America's national identity and will Americans stand for it?
Here to talk it over with me is Mike Bedenbaugh.
He's a political commentator, a historic preservationist who's helped save many of
South Carolina's historical landmarks, a US Navy veteran, and the author of the new
book Reviving Our Republic, which gives pointers on how to get the US government
working for the US people again.
Hello, Mike.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Uh, Andrew.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
How are you?
And where are you?
Well, I am in my home studio in a little town called Prosperity South Carolina.
Mm-hmm.
But where I am is in a state of disbelief because a lot of those things
you read off I have not even heard.
Yeah.
They are quite jaw dropping, aren't they?
It's jaw dropping, but not surprising.
Right.
Well, I mean, you and I are of similar ages.
What, what, let's go back to the bicentennial.
What are your memories of the bicentennial?
Oh, my memories of the bicentennial was our parade that, uh, my aunt
helped organize in prosperity.
Our town was originally called frog level, so I was the guy dressed up as the frog
walking around down the street trying to keep myself from stepping in the horse
manure from the horses in front of me.
You don't get much more real America than that.
Oh, it was awesome.
And it, you know, everybody dressed up.
And it was a joyous occasion of remembering who we were, and it
was, especially at a time when America was still healing from the
blowback of Vietnam, Richard Nixon, all of these things that started
to disrupt American civil life.
Got batted back down and we celebrated and we remembered
who we were there for a while.
Yeah, these were not healthy in times.
The economy was pretty dreadful.
The oil shock was still reverberating.
And as you say, they not two twin national humiliations within a few years.
Vietnam and, and Nixon did.
America kind of really, you, you kind of alluded to it there.
It sort of needs to be reintroduced to what it was all about.
I wanna ask you about the overall message now of the semi quincentennial.
It, it arrives as we've discussed, an exceptionally troubled time.
America more divided than I think anybody can remember.
You know, certainly, you know, you have to go back to the Civil War to
see degrees of division like there is now, and the vision that's been.
Put together is very much a traditional white America, red
America vision, military parades, high school games, women, African
Americans, not on the coinage.
How do you feel about this messaging?
It's patriotism on a protein drink.
I mean, it's absolutely absurd and anybody that saw our State of the
Union address, whatever that was, I call it the state of Disunion.
It was the most horrendous speech American president has ever given
in the halls of our congress.
In our history.
History and we, we we're gonna have a karmic price to pay for this.
Do you think that the semi coincidence program, do you think it's being
designed to be divisive, to say this is what America really is, and
if you are not on board with this, you are not really an American?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely this part of the things I talk about in my book, reviving
Our Republic, is one of the things Washington desperately warned us about
in his farewell address as he left office was that partisan politics will
destroy us, and we have to mitigate the damages of that and focus where
patriotism needs to be and not on the thoughts patriotism that parties elevate.
And Donald Trump is just.
Basically taken advantage of the erosion of norms over the past
50 years and gone all in on them.
Well, I mean, from this side of the Atlantic, the fear is not just that Trump
will turn this into a, a kind of Trumpy event with his, his emphasis elevating
the things that he loves, the Gordy spectacle, but that it will somehow be.
Engraved installed as the American default to the extent that it will outlast him.
I mean, there are more freakish figures on the fringes calling for his face
to go on Mount Rushmore, but that idea that something will be impressed upon
America here that cannot be a faced seems very, very real and very worrying.
It's very real and should be very worrying.
What has happened is Trumpism has allowed the coagulation of an authoritarian
tendency that has always been in America, but it's been marginalized.
I grew up in a Jim Crow South where segregation was real.
And so I saw that authoritarian tendency on the ground there to make sure
certain people were marginalized out.
We have that in our DNA from our founding, and in spite of that, the
constitution has given away of having a rule of law that gave more equity.
Now, it wasn't done perfectly at first, and it had to be developed,
and some things couldn't be corrected until in hindsight, but.
What is happening now is a real shift in a power base that is not going
to go away, and we're looking at a generational turn to make this right.
Listeners to this podcast have heard me say this 101 times,
um, because it's my thing.
But I just believe that America is a pendulum, that it swings hard
one way and then it comes right back and, and swings the other way.
Um, which means that like, you know, in the long term, I don't think America,
Amer America sees progress in inches.
But the swings are where, you know, you can see exactly
where the country is right now.
And so I think if we look at what happened after George Floyd died, uh,
that was a hard swing the other way.
Um, I'm curious if what we see right now coming from, uh, the Trump
administration and not just like.
In military, he's, you know, uh, reverting the names or changing the names
of military bases back to, uh, people whose names have been taken off these
military bases, all of that type of stuff.
But also, uh, he's planning to put an Arc de Trump, um, in dc uh.
East Wing Ballroom, all of that stuff.
Do you feel like that is the, the opposite swing of, um, of what we
saw during George Floyd's, uh, death?
Oh yeah.
And even literally, uh, recently the Trump administration said that they were
going to reverse removal of statues.
So they re-erected, uh, Confederate General statute in DC and they've
said that they're going to put up the Arlington Confederate Monument.
Which would cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to put up.
So we will see if that actually happens.
Um, but it just declaring that you're gonna do it is enough of, uh, propaganda
victory, I think in this search situation.
Right.
It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into.
The Trump administration's aesthetic decisions, all of the golds,
ornamentations, smeared all over the, all of Oval office and ballrooms
and uh, arc triumphs and et cetera.
But the aesthetic is a way to make the political.
Physically present.
It's a way to rally people's energies.
It's a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping
his promises when he's actually not.
I think he hasn't really.
Changed Washington in the way that he's told his base's going to change.
The, the elite are still in control of, of political power and wealth,
but he is literally changing the White House by tearing part of it down.
And you can channel people's attention into rooting for that type of change,
uh, instead of actual change and.
The style choices that he's making are very congruent with his political
message, in that he's appealing to a vision of the past, which is greater
than the present, but in both his political message and his aesthetic style.
This.
Vision of the past is not, you can't pinpoint it.
It's not an actual time.
It's a fuzzy hand wavy.
Things were prettier and nicer then, uh, and so you can't ever, you can't
fact check that type of vision.
You can't see if we've actually gotten closer to it.
And so putting up a gilded tchotchke, uh, counts as progress towards that.
And he can claim the credit, which he's happy to do.
Yeah, and I, I think that's intentional because if you can't land on the
specific time period, you can't be held accountable for how that time period
played out for the disenfranchised or for the, the powerful at that time period.
Right, right.
Exactly.
You know, appealing to making, uh, uh, your.
The White House looked like Versailles.
We all know what happened to the French Kings, but apparently we're
not, uh, paying much attention.
Uh, and there's, there's another current rights, um, tendency to
appeal to the glory of Caesar.
Everybody wants to be like Julius Caesar.
When is, that's really not a good life choice if you wanna end up like him.
I think the other thing, when I think about, um.
Trump's aesthetic.
And so I, I grew up in the south, um, but I am originally from New Jersey.
And, uh, and I remember Trump when I was really young, uh, primarily because my dad
was from, um, Pleasantville, New Jersey, which is right outside of Atlantic City.
And so, um, there were conversations that I didn't understand as a kid,
and Trump was a part of those because he was, you know, he had his casinos
and all of that type of stuff.
And I just remember being a little kid and seeing.
Um, a commercial for I, I guess either it was Trump's properties
or it was a casino or whatever.
And I just remember looking at it on the TV and seeing gold everywhere.
Like that was his, his his thing gold.
And the older I get, the more I realize that.
The way Trump sees gold and all the fittings that he has around really is
like him surrounding himself, what he perceives of as wealth, and what people
who don't have wealth perceive of as wealth, but the actual uber rich usually,
like from what I've seen, do not decorate their houses in all gold, do not, uh,
flaunt their, their, their wealth.
Is present but quiet.
Whereas like Trump's wealth is present but loud and that speaks
to a lot of people who do not have the wealth and in, in a sense, him
putting gold around the White House.
Is a secret, in my opinion, aspirational message to poor folks who do not
have that one day you can have.
I don't know that, that's just like a theory that I've been cooking in
my head since I was a little kid.
I think absolutely.
We have the proverb, all that glitters is not gold because
people keep needing to be reminded.
Mm-hmm.
And.
Again, in our, our primitive lizard brains, we think shiny
equals good, and I want that.
And we don't look below the surface.
And I think that Trump's focus on glitzing up the the White House on making these
new constructions now in his second term, is not accidental because you often see.
Populist leaders focusing on aesthetic projects, uh, towards
the end of their political life.
Um, in Hitler's last days in the Bunker, he was still pouring over
models for a museum that he was, he.
Building in his hometown of Lin, um, in which he was planning to put
all of the, the masterpieces seized from victims of the Holocaust,
from other museums across Europe.
I was gonna have 22 miles of galleries all stuffed full of
the artistic wealth of the world.
And I think there's a comfort in this idea.
Like if I make something spectacular and beautiful enough, all of the cruelty that
went into making it will be justified.
I'll be forgiven.
Um, so when I'm feeling depressed about the, the world, I think maybe
this focus on the golds, uh, now is such, um, uh, an obsession because he
recognizes that he's on his way out.
Uh, and, and Jason, this falls into the propaganda category.
I will say in most of my research, and maybe you have other examples,
um, this stuff doesn't tend to last if you don't actually have a legacy,
but you just sort of imprint one, it, it doesn't have staying power.
Well.
I think you're looking at the past.
There's two ways of looking at this.
Looking at the past, looking at leaders in the past and, uh, who
did this kind of thing and what that behavior correlated with, and
then the immediate future of that.
But presumably, Trump wants to protect against.
His legacy being removed, right?
So let's look at the future and see what that means.
What that means is he cannot ever have, uh, any Democrat in power again, because
that would be the end of his legacy.
He has to make sure that he does not fall into disrepute.
And so the only way to ensure that, and Donald Trump definitely wants to
ensure that is by an thought, by, by preventing, by, by making sure that his
successor regime, uh, will, will prohibit.
His name from coming into dis disrepute.
Of course he will come into disrepute because Nero, like he
has, uh, extraordinary corruption, extraordinary immorality.
So he will come into disrepute.
So he has to make sure that his successor, his successors, uh,
prevent that from happening.
So we can see how that's gonna go.
He is gonna dismantle elections and he's going to.
Ensure that in, uh, perpetuity or as long as he can ensure it is Trump death.
What I think is interesting is that, um.
What the White House even said about this.
When asked the New York Times Chief White House correspondent Peter
Baker asked the White House for comment on this so-called Trump of
personality that Trump has fostered.
Peter Baker WR wrote this.
He said his staff did not reject the notion that he was
fostering a cult of personality.
When asked for comment, indeed it released a statement seeming to
argue that one would be deserved.
He quotes the White House.
Uh.
Uh, communications director Stephen Chung and says, president Trump is going to go
down in history as the most successful and consequential president in our lifetime.
He built the most powerful political and cultural movement ever.
His successes on behalf of the American people will be imprinted upon the fabric
of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him.
Which speaks to what you're saying, at least as far as the goal goes,
that this is a permanent imprint.
Uh, Stephen Chung and Donald Trump know that there will be people
who don't believe that legacy can just be put on a building, that it
has to actually be, be borne out.
Well, especially given what he's transforming the reputation of the
United States into, which is, uh, you know, a sort of cheap vehicle
for his country's, uh, for, for his family's own personal enrichment.
For a, for a sign of, of, uh, America is now a symbol of hatred
and brutality to the world.
We're executing protestors on the street.
Uh, all the while this self aggrandizement is happening, he's saying that he
is much more powerful than America, that really America, uh, transforms
into him that the country is him.
And so all around the world, people see this.
This is not, there are plenty of autocrats who don't do this, but
the autocrats who do do this, uh, you know, are either humili, you
know, humiliating for their country.
Or there are terrifying dictators like Stalin.
And here we have a kind of mixture of those two things.
A tarter, uh, uh, someone who's humiliating the United States by
this incredibly crass behavior and destroying the United States.
He's saying, I am the United States.
There is no America besides me, and he's remaking America into,
uh, you know, a symbol of cruelty.
Uh, for, um, the future to come.
So I wanna just explore this for a second because the thing about
NAV that interests me was how he, some things were very obvious.
You have to read my book in school and you have to name the airport after me.
But, but some things are less obvious.
The idea that there's this day, I didn't name all the months of the year after
me or someone related to me, but this is flag day and it happens to be my birthday.
And so we're gonna celebrate flag day on my birthday.
Donald Trump had that army parade on his birthday.
This lack of separation between.
Leader and country.
I mean, we struggle with the separation between our branches of power.
We struggle with our first amendment rights to separate
church and straight state.
Donald Trump's blurring all those lines.
Yeah, the United States is now Trump, Stan.
So, you know, and that's what he's trying to do.
He is trying to say that America ends with him.
He's the culmination.
He really is.
America.
In the future, it'll will just be war worship.
You know, the admiration will be to a king, to a dictator, uh, rather than.
To the country itself.
He's trying to replace America with himself.
Uh, and you know, this doesn't, this, this what, this, this is
a national humiliation, right?
Trump is, is humiliating America on the world stage because
everybody knows what this is.
This isn't some sophisticated version of autocracy.
This is, uh, a kind of, uh, you know, this is like.
Uh, the cult, the cult of the, a leader, classic European fascism.
The United States has always had, uh, racist, xenophobic, uh, structure to it.
We've always been had this white supremacy that Trump is now
making the hallmark of our nation.
Uh, but now we look, we have this extra element, which is much more like
classic European fascism, Mussolini, uh, and Hitler who sought to.
Create, you know, just try that.
This is how fascism works.
so the way that you believe we should approach the Constitution, which is to
make the constitutional order better, that should be the guiding principle.
Do you think that's broad based enough that anybody with any different type
of interpretation of the constitution can grab hold of that idea and use
it as a principle of their own?
Okay, so if we can back up a little bit.
You put your finger on the main theme of the book, which is the only way to
choose the theory of interpretation is to think what would make our constitutional
order better rather than worse?
I expect some people to hate that argument.
And I know from vetting it that some people do hate that argument, but the
claim is that's the only game in town.
There's no other way.
So you can't haul out some abstraction, call it interpretation.
Say I believe in interpretation.
Therefore, I believe in moral readings.
'cause other people say I believe in interpretation too, and I
follow the original understanding.
So there's nowhere else to go.
Whether that's maddening or liberating, it's the only question we ask.
It's the only question we have.
Now, I think some people will say, I don't like that question because it makes my
preferred theory start to look terrible.
And I say to them, well, maybe your preferred theory is terrible.
Other people will say that my preferred theory rests on some
fervor ground than it's gonna lead to a better constitutional order.
I say, well, what is that firmer brand?
Is it a noun with four syllables?
What does it look like?
Legitimacy, that has four syllables, but that's not going to justify any particular
theory without getting pretty fine grain.
So I've had an exchange actually with the leading originalists within the last
week who, I'm not sure if there's a word in English, the rest we want in Germany.
It's a positive word.
I was honored.
I think that's the closest I get to it.
I was honored that this originalist said, I like your book and there's a
lot of it I agree with and uh, what I liked about that was that if you're a
believer in the original understanding.
You might be prepared to say, look, I don't trust the judges.
I don't trust their moral readings.
Their concept of democracy might be really screwy.
I think stability in the law is very important.
I know the original constitution wasn't, you know, broadly democratic, but it's
really good they hit the jackpot there.
And if we follow the original understanding, we're going to have
a terrific but imperfect order.
Now, I strongly disagree with that view, but I salute it because at
least it's making the view on the right terrain and then we can talk
about whether those things are true.
And I would say such things as if you're originalist, then freedom of speech.
As we live and breathe, it goes in the toilet and that's a terrible thing.
And the national government can discriminate on the basis of race and sex.
It can say we're not hiring women here, and that's also a terrible thing.
There are 1,001 or maybe 101 terrible things that follow from
originalism, and then the originalist has a number of possible responses.
One is, I respect precedent, so the things you're worried about won't happen.
I think Justice Barrett would say that the Not Justice Thomas the
Originalists could say Those terrible things actually won't happen.
My method will stop them from happening.
I think Justice Thomas would say that, but these are all
very good discussions to have.
Your approach by thinking about what makes the constitutional order better.
One of the critiques that I've heard is that you're focused on the
outcomes of decisions rather than the process to be able to get there.
Do you think that's a fair assessment and why should we focus on outcomes
rather than the process first?
Okay, so, uh, that is fair.
If we're building a hammer or a cell phone.
We want the cell phone to work and we want the hammer to drive the nail in.
And if the process involves some materials or some speed or some ingenuity, but the
cell phone will work or the hammer is defeated by the nail, that's not good.
So if we have outcomes that are horrific.
Brutal and Savage and freedom denying.
Why would we think that some process is self justify?
So originalism or moral readings?
The only thing that's good about the process is the outcomes it produces.
Now it might be you're gonna bite some bullets.
I don't think the Constitution has anything to say about animal rights.
It's really hard to get there, and I regret that.
But there we are.
The Constitution doesn't say much in support of Franklin De Roosevelt's,
second Bill of Rights, which included a right to education, right to a job,
right to protection if you're disabled.
I think it was, you know, a huge advance in American democratic practice,
the second Bill of Rights, but the Constitution doesn't get us there.
They're not impossible, probably impossible with animals, but there
are things in the structure of, let's say, a. Text precedent, legitimate
argument that mean we're not gonna get every result we like and that's fine.
The question is whether we get too many results we hate, not that we
don't get enough results we love, and if that's the only way to evaluate a
constitutional order, pick a country.
I'm randomly going to say Germany.
If the judge has adopted an approach to interpretation in Germany.
That led to a much worse democracy.
Wouldn't that count very strongly against the approach?
What would be said by those who defend that approach that leads
a worse approach to democracy?
I think only two things.
One is democracies and what they care about.
The other thing, they think it's better, not worse, and,
and now we're off to the races.
Now we're talking, and maybe we're talking a little lower volume.
By the way, one goal of my book is to lower the volume.
So not to lower the intensity with which people believe what they
believe, but to look at people who believe something very differently
with curiosity rather than rage.
We've just heard clips starting with:
1619 tracing how slavery grew from a conditional institution in
1619 to an inherited, permanent condition affecting one-fifth of the
entire colonial population by 1776
The Political Philosophy Podcast distinguished between compromises
born of shared values and those born of pro-slavery coercion
Radio Atlantic stressed that what makes this moment uniquely dangerous is that
the federal government, historically a source of protection for minority
Americans, is now itself the antagonist
The Bunker raised concerns that Trump's 250th birthday celebrations
could permanently engrave a narrow, authoritarian vision
of America into the national identity, outlasting Trump himself
Reveal drew a parallel between Trump's gilded spectacle obsession and how
populist leaders historically fixate on grand aesthetic projects late in power
Velshi warned that Trump's behavior mirrors classic European
fascism, comparing him to Mussolini and Hitler in his effort to
replace the country with himself
And Democracy Paradox expressed hope that the volume of constitutional
debates could be lowered, replacing rage toward opposing interpreters
with curiosity about their reasoning
And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support
of our members who get this show ad-free as well as early and ad-free
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Including a members-only backstage segment, all via podcast.
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The show features our team of producers discussing a carefully curated selection
of articles and ideas to then SOLVE!
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It's important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left
takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce and, SOLVED!
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You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,
or you can simply email me to jay@bestoftheleft.com
As for today's topic,
There's a quote from Thomas Jefferson, from an 1816 letter,
which is now chiseled on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC.
It’s my favorite quote of his.
He wrote:
"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.
As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are
made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change
of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.
We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him
when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen
of their barbarous ancestors."
So,
first, a note to those who would deify the founders.
Just remember that it’s not only the America-hating, blue-haired
lesbians criticizing them.
That quote was Jefferson referring to himself as barbarous as seen through
the eyes of people in the future.
He would clearly hate to think of people who, 250 years later, still
thought of the founders as unassailable.
Besides that, as we’re making clear today, Jefferson and the rest of the founders'
were full of contradictions but what matters for this commentary is that even
among the founders, there was an explicit understanding that the Constitution
was a starting point, not a monument.
It’s a scaffold and they said as much.
Two things have gone wrong since.
We never fully replaced Jefferson’s metaphorical coat.
And there's now a deliberate campaign to make sure we never realize it doesn't fit.
On the coat, the structures we still live under were designed for a slaveholding
republic of about 4 million people.
Today, 340 million people are governed by those same structures.
The Senate gives a voter in Wyoming roughly 68 times the representation
of a voter in California.
The Electoral College has handed the presidency to the loser of the popular
vote twice in just the last 25 years.
The Supreme Court holds lifetime appointments with no binding
ethics code and the power to override democratic majorities
with zero electoral accountability.
We've expanded who gets to participate over the centuries, but the underlying
architecture that distributes power away from majorities was never redesigned.
It just got patched.
Every generation adds amendments, adds legislation, adds new rights on
top of the old structure, but it’s much harder to replace the structure
itself or even suggest that some old systems have outlived their welcome.
And there's a reason for that, which is related to a thought I had while watching
a bit of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.
As you might recall, there were hours and hours of ritual.
Processions with people in costumes so elaborate they looked like the
face cards in a deck of playing cards, which is when it hit me where
those designs probably came from.
The coffin was carried on a gun carriage pulled by 142 Royal Navy
sailors, a tradition dating back to Queen Victoria's funeral in 1901.
And the whole thing took ten days.
So, I was watching that and what struck me was: imagine being the person who
suggests cutting one of those ceremonies.
Imagine raising your hand and saying, "the bit with the second procession feels a
touch redundant, maybe we skip it." You'd be treated like you'd committed treason.
And as much as I would love to tease the British for their pageantry
during episode 1776, the reality is that this is a universal human trait.
It is always easier to add something new than to remove something old.
New laws, new amendments, new traditions feel like progress.
Tearing out something that's been there for 200 years feels dangerous
and potentially disrespectful to the past, even when it's broken.
Now, there's a metaphor you might have heard about society
needing both a left and right wing to fly forward, like a bird.
I've never liked it because both wings on a bird work in concert toward the
same goal while the right and left wings of society are better understood
as being in productive tension with one another rather than cooperation.
A better metaphor is a sailing ship.
Conservatism, the instinct to preserve, is the ballast, the weight below the
waterline that keeps the ship steady.
Progressivism is the sails, the force that actually moves it forward.
All ballast and no sails, you're stable but going nowhere.
All sails and no ballast, you capsize.
Real progressivism isn't about discarding the past.
It's about looking back with honest eyes so you can move forward with real clarity.
But that productive tension between ballast and sails depends on honest
knowledge of what came before.
You can't be effective ballast if you don't actually know
what you're anchoring to.
You can't set sails in the right direction if you don't know where you've been.
And that's exactly what's under attack right now.
In January, the National Park Service removed the President's House
exhibit at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.
Panels naming nine people enslaved by George and Martha Washington, on the
site where the Constitution was signed, torn down on the administration's orders.
Last summer, the White House flagged 20 Smithsonian exhibits
as ideologically objectionable.
States across the country have passed laws restricting how racial
history can be taught in schools.
And the 250th anniversary of the founding is being shaped
into a sanitized celebration.
The fact that this administration is spending enormous political
energy to take down exhibits, gut curricula, and dismantle educational
programs tells you something.
They know exactly what they're doing and why.
If you prevent the progress of the human mind that Jefferson described,
you eliminate the justification for institutional change.
You don't have to defend the ill-fitting boy's coat if nobody's ever allowed
to see how much the body has grown.
And here's what I really want to leave you with.
Historical erasure doesn't just protect the current regime.
It robs all of us of the foundation we need to build from.
Regardless of politics, people are natural collaborators.
That's our superpower as a species and it's what's required to do anything great.
But collaboration depends on shared understanding, shared narratives from
which to organize collective action.
And those narratives have to include the full picture.
The ideals woven into the founding, things like equality and democracy,
those are the shared beliefs that make it possible to organize millions of
people around a common political project.
But the history of how we've fallen short of those ideals, and the history
of how people fought to close the gap, that's the part that tells us
what the work actually looks like.
Erase the failures and you lose the evidence that the coat doesn't fit.
Erase the movements that forced change and you lose the proof that
ordinary people can make institutions live up to their own promises.
Erase the ideals themselves, along with a complicated appreciation of
where they came from, and you lose the shared language that makes collective
action possible in the first place.
That tension between what America says it is and what it's actually been is not
a problem to be solved because it never will be, we’ll never outgrow our origins.
But it's also the engine of the whole project, the challenge
to form a more perfect union.
The past absolutely deserves both appreciation and criticism because
without an honest past to build from, whether you’re on team ballast
or team sails, we're all adrift.
You can't chart a course forward if someone's burned
the maps and the log book.
So the fight is local and it's happening right now.
School boards are deciding curricula.
Museums are deciding what stays on the wall.
Libraries are deciding what stays on the shelf.
Getting involved in those decisions is as concrete and
immediate as political action gets.
Jefferson, for all his failures, articulated the principle that
founder-worshippers now betray.
The document was meant to be outgrown.
The structures were meant to be replaced.
He said so himself.
Our national coat doesn't fit.
The founders knew it wouldn't.
And the entire project of erasing history is the project
of making sure we never notice.
Note that we've begun putting my commentaries on YouTube so if
you find them insightful, check out our channel and share them!
Link in the show notes.
And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics today.
First up, section A, constitution followed by section B, Trump land and
section C, authoritarian nostalgia.
During the American Revolution, the English intellectual Samuel
Johnson sarcastically asks, why do we hear the loudest Yelps for
liberty from the drivers of Negroes?
And of course, it's a very valid question if we think of the heroes
of the revolution, while many of them are opposed to slavery.
John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Jay, the young man, Alexander Hamilton.
Many of the other leaders of the revolution, Washington, Jefferson,
Patrick Henry, the Pinkney in South Carolina, they all own huge numbers of
slaves, and indeed, probably a majority of the revolutionary leadership in terms
of sheer numbers were slave owners.
And this is a question that very few people in the revolution wanted to
think about now as the revolution began.
However.
Liberty began to spread in some parts of the nation.
At the battles of Lexington in Concord, there were black soldiers
fighting along white soldiers in the Massachusetts militias.
And at the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the heroes was a black soldier.
When George Washington arrived in Cambridge to take command of the
American troops, he was shocked to discover that there were hundreds of
black soldiers in his new regiments.
Obviously, for a Virginia slave owner, the site of black men with muskets and
bayonets was something he had never encountered and something that he
probably always feared and worried about.
But gradually, George Washington came to the conclusion that black
soldiers were just like white soldiers.
Some were cowards, some were heroes.
Most were simply men doing their jobs as good soldiers.
And by the end of the revolution, one of Washington's favorite regiments
was the first Rhode Island, which was about 50% black and 50% white.
And most of the blacks in the first Rhode Island.
Had been slaves when the war began.
So we see during the revolution a transition from slavery to freedom.
Some northern states begin to dismantle slavery.
Pennsylvania passes the first piece of legislation in the history
of the world to end slavery.
The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.
The law worked in this way.
The children of all slave women would be born free, and thus, literally
slavery would die out In Pennsylvania eventually, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
New York, New Jersey, and even the Canadian province of Upper Canada today
known as Ontario, would adopt a gradual abolition act based on the Pennsylvania.
Shortly after Pennsylvania passed, its Gradual Abolition Act.
Massachusetts adopted its 1780 Constitution, which declared that
all men were born free and equal.
And by 1783 after the Constitution was adopted, the Massachusetts courts
ruled that this meant that slaves could no longer be held in Massachusetts.
New Hampshire had a similar clause in its constitution and states that joined
the union after the revolution, like Vermont and Ohio, simply prohibited
slavery in their new constitutions.
So at the time of the Constitutional convention in 1787, only Pennsylvania,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island had passed gradual abolition
acts, and only Massachusetts and New Hampshire had ended slavery.
Slavery was legal in all of the other states, and while we think of slavery
as being a southern institution, there were a substantial number of slaves in
both New Jersey and New York at the time.
The constitutional convention met
the US Constitution was of course a complicated document written by
a nation in which slavery was legal and prosperous in most of the states.
At the convention, slavery is debated throughout the summer of 1787.
At the very beginning of the convention, the question is how do you
allocate representation in Congress?
And immediately there is a debate between those people who say, allocation
of representation should be based on the whole number of free people.
Those who would like it based on the whole number of people.
The difference, of course, is critical because Virginia has the
largest population in the nation.
If you count slaves and free people.
But if you only count free people, Pennsylvania has the largest population.
Thus, the debate in the convention is about political power.
Does the South get political power for its slaves or.
Is the national government going to be based only on the contributions of
free people and thus only free people would be counted for representation.
We all know, of course, that in the end the constitutional convention adopts
something called the three fifths clause.
The three fifths clause says that representatives and direct taxes would
be allocated in the country by counting the whole number of free people.
Including indentured servants and others who have some sort of
servitude but are not slaves, and three fifths of all other persons.
So the Constitution requires that you count up all the free people and then you
count up all the slaves and you multiply them by three fifths, 60%, and that
becomes the basis for representation.
Now this clause is often misunderstood.
The three-fifths clause does not say that black people are three-fifths of a person.
It says that political power will be allocated to the
states by counting slaves.
Under a three fifths rule rather than a full rule.
The irony of this is as follows, those who oppose slavery did not want to
count slaves at all for representation.
After all, if you counted slaves for representation, it simply
gave the slave owners more power.
It didn't give the slaves any power.
One of the delegates at the convention mocked the idea of counting slaves and
said, does a voter in Virginia get as many votes as the number of slaves he owns?
And of course, this was laughable and not what was going to happen, but it did
indicate the political issue at stake.
On the other hand, southerners said, you should count all
slaves for representation.
This didn't mean that Southerners thought black people were equal.
Certainly didn't mean they thought slaves were equal.
What it meant was the South wanted to get more political power for
its slaves, and the way to do this would be to count all the slaves.
If this had been done, then the Southern states would've had probably a
majority in the House of Representatives at the beginning of the nation.
However, by doing the three-fifths ratio, the southern states don't get a majority,
although they have close to a majority.
The other place where the three-fifths clause matters.
A great deal is of course, in the election of the President, during the
debate over electing the president, James Madison says the fittest things.
That's the language he uses.
Of course, fittest means the best thing he said would be for the people themselves
to directly elect the president.
But then Madison says there are a couple of problems with that.
One of the problems is there were different rules for
voting in different states.
So that would mean that if you had a popular vote, the state which had
the most expansive voting rules, what they called the franchise at the
time, that that state would have more votes in the presidential election.
But you could easily have solved that problem.
You could have simply said that every free adult male in the country could vote.
No one was considering that women could vote at the time, so that
would not have been on the table.
But Madison said the other problem was if you counted just the popular
vote, our slaves won't count.
He actually says we won't get any power because of our Negroes.
And of course, what he means by that is if you have a direct
election of the president.
The North with a much larger population of free people is
going to overwhelm the south.
One of the delegates at the convention actually put an asterisk in his own
private notes and said that Madison was really trying to make sure that Virginians
got elected president, because if Virginia can't count its slaves in the election
of the President than a New Yorker or a Pennsylvanian or a man from Massachusetts
is going to get elected president.
The end result was that the three-fifths clause is folded into that monstrosity
called the electoral college.
And why do we have the electoral college?
Not because of state's rights, not because the delegates didn't trust voters.
We have the electoral college because it was the only way they could
figure out how to count the numerical power of slaves in a country where
slaves, of course wouldn't vote.
# America kind of had been limping along since the French stepped into
our revolution and effectively ended Britain's claim to its 13 colonies.
And our founding fathers were fearful of a strong central government.
So they first tried governance under the Articles of Confederation.
The articles of Confederation proved to be.
But worthless as they gave almost all the power to the states and none to
the federal government because again, our founding fathers were still pretty
freaked out by a strong central government having just fought a war against a king.
They didn't like kings.
But after several thousand people in Massachusetts staged an armed revolt
called Shay's Rebellion, and the federal government proved to be completely
powerless to do anything about it.
The founders said, all right, let's get back together.
Let's go to Philly one more time.
At first, they were there to amend, but then ultimately they decided
to just throw out the articles of Confederation altogether.
Hmm.
Turns out Confederacy's in America.
Have all proven to be trash.
So they began work on a new constitution.
And although the big names of the founding fathers owned slaves like
Jefferson and Washington, they were at the same time weary of the institution.
Some even blame the British claiming that the British had wrapped this
evil institution around our necks, and now we were stuck with it.
But either way.
They felt economically tied to slavery, both as a nation and rich individuals.
Thomas Jefferson, in fact, referred to slavery in America as quote, holding
a wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.
That's a phrase by the way that the well-read Jefferson got
from the Roman Emperor Tiberius.
Turns out the founding fathers were like big time into the Romans.
In reality, of course, Jefferson could let it go, or at least he,
he, he was always free to let the enslaved people he claimed to own.
Go.
But he did not.
In fact, it was traditional for Richmond to free their quote unquote slaves.
And I put slaves in quotes because you can't own another person
that's like not something you can do, so somebody can't be a slave.
But anyway, it was traditional for Richmond at that time
to free their slaves.
Upon the time of their death, I guess I was considered benevolent.
Washington, for instance, did leave it in his will that his slaves were
be free after his wife Martha died.
But after Washington died, Martha kind of realized that she didn't really
like living in a house with a bunch of people who couldn't wait for you to die.
So she freed Washington slaves early, but Jefferson, who owned.
Upwards of 600 slaves in his lifetime freed only two slaves.
Well, he was alive, and then five others were freed after his death, including
two of his children that he had in his relationship with his quote unquote slave.
And by the way, sister-in-law, Sally Hemmings.
Yes.
We've all heard that Thomas Jefferson had children with his slave, Sally
Hemmings, but did you know she was actually his sister-in-law?
Yeah.
Jefferson's wife's father, I guess it was a tradition, had sex with his slaves.
And kept the slaves as children.
And then Jefferson's wife kept her sister as a slave, and then Jefferson just
keeping in the tradition, did it too.
He had sex with a woman that was subservient to him, whether or not she
had any say in the matter, questionable, and then he kept his own children.
As slaves, 1788,
and that still seems pretty, pretty shitty to me.
Look, these were smart men.
I, I'm not saying they weren't, they were brilliant men, and the document
they wrote was brilliant, but I'm sorry.
I know we're not supposed to view.
People in the past through the morality that we've acquired in the present.
But I'm not gonna say these were good guys.
I mean, we all know they use terms like all men are created equal,
but clearly didn't mean all men.
And I'm gonna just talk about the enslaved people.
They didn't want poor white men to vote either.
The only people who could initially vote were white land owning men.
This excluded the majority of the American population.
This meant that the promise of equality and democracy in the new nation
did not extend to most Americans,
and believe it or not, this struck me as very strange.
But the first movement to expand the vote is known as the universal
white male suffrage movement.
And I guess you could say it was the beginning of the push
to expand voting rights to all.
But something tells me no one is exactly gonna start looking back on that movement
and celebrating the universal white male suffrage movement anytime soon.
At least maybe on Fox News.
Uh, the cer by the way, this, the, the, the white male suffrage
movement was certainly not about equality for all as much.
It was just non land owning white men saying, Hey, could we get into your elite
clubs so we can shit on everyone too?
And eventually the answer was, of course you can.
Okay.
So these were flawed individuals, our founding fathers, but that's
the great thing about the document.
They forged, it had ideals built into it.
These flawed men,
they, they just didn't aspire to be more, but they left room in the document.
So future generations.
Could aspire to be more so we can aspire to be more, to
be more perfect, if you will.
And every generation has amended the US Constitution.
Hell, they added three amendments in the 1960s, then another one in 1971, but
the last time it was amended was 1992.
32 years ago.
I'm starting to think the old constitution, you could
use some help again, maybe.
Maybe that's what we need to do.
Maybe we need to step up.
George Washington, who by the way did, in case you've heard this, have the teeth
of enslaved people for his dentures.
That's not just an urban myth.
But in reading about it, this wasn't just enslaved people selling your teeth used to
be a thing poor people did to make money.
Can you imagine a billboard?
Instead of it saying, we buy used cars, it says We buy your teeth.
I mean, it's not easy being poor now, but.
At least I've never even contemplated selling my teeth.
At any rate, George Washington, our first president, he was the only unelected
president we've ever had so far.
He was George and all the founding fathers.
Every wary of kings look to the Romans and, and in specific he looked to
Cincinnatus Cincinnatus in Roman lore.
And if you look it up, it's.
Possibly a little bit exaggerated, but he was a, a statesman and a military leader,
and he retired and moved to his farm.
Then the state needed him and there was an emergency.
So he took total power and he fixed whatever the problem was,
and then he walked away from power and went back to his farm, and
that was considered the ideal.
That was considered what a great leader did.
So Washington walked away from power after two terms.
He's often called the American Cincinnatus.
So here is an example of where this bargain over slavery in the
three-fifths clause affects not only Congress, but also affects
the president of the United States.
If you look at subsequent debates, if you look at the debate over the
Missouri compromise, which allows slavery to spread into Missouri, west
of the Mississippi, north of where the Ohio River reaches the Mississippi,
the Missouri Compromise could not have been passed if the South had not had a
significant number of representatives based on counting slaves as three fifths
of the population for representation.
Similarly, it's impossible to imagine in 1850 that the fugitive slave law
of 1850 could have been passed if there had been no three-fifths clause.
'cause the votes weren't there.
So what the three-fifths clause does is to change the political dynamic
by giving southern whites, slave holding Southerners greater political
power than northern voters had.
And this will continue from the beginning of the nation,
right up until the Civil War.
It is not insignificant that almost all of the Presidents elected under
the Constitution before Abraham Lincoln were Slaveholding Southerners.
Among the Northerners who become president, you discover that three of
them came from slave holding families.
Martin Van Buren was from New York, but he had owned slaves in New York before
New York completely abolished slavery.
In 1827, William Henry Harrison was elected from Ohio, but of course the
Harrisons were Virginia slave owners.
And William Henry Harrison had owned slaves for much of his life.
Finally, oddly, in 1856, James Buchanan, who is elected president,
turns out to have come from a family in Pennsylvania that owned slaves
and continued to own the descendants of slaves in long-term indentures.
Well, after Pennsylvania had passed the Pennsylvania
Gradual Abolition Act of 1780.
So if you look at the presidency, what you discover is.
Of the 12 presidents between Washington and Buchanan, only four of them.
The two Adams is Fillmore and Pierce had not either owned slaves or
come from slave holding families.
This again indicates the power of slavery in the political process, which
comes from the three-fifths clause in Article one of the Constitution.
The other big debate at the Constitutional convention
concerned the African slave trade.
Almost everybody in America realized that the African slave trade was
horrendously awful and immoral.
Even people who believed in slavery.
Even people like Jefferson who would own slaves all his life, who would buy and
sell human beings throughout his life, who would father children with his own slave,
even some like Jefferson found the African slave trade to be immoral and wrong.
On the other hand, Georgia and South Carolina had lost thousands of slaves
during the American Revolution, and when the British troops left the United States.
Tens of thousands of African Americans went with them to freedom somewhere
else, some to Canada, some to England, some to the British West Indies.
Sadly, some were enslaved in the British West Indies, but most
of these former American slaves lived their lives with liberty.
So at the Constitutional convention, the delegates from Georgia, South
Carolina and North Carolina.
Insisted that the African slave trade get an explicit, specific protection.
Because these delegates knew that the Congress would abolish the African
slave trade immediately because it was popular and because most
Americans thought the African slave trade was just horrible and wrong.
And thus, the Constitution provides, and I will read the clause because it's
such a convoluted clause, and it gives you an idea of how hard the delegates
worked to hide what they were doing.
The Constitution provides an Article one, section nine.
The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states
now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by
the Congress prior to the year 1,808.
If you read this today, you might have no idea what they're talking
about, importations of such persons.
What the Constitution is saying is.
The migration and importation clause, which we refer to as the African
slave trade clause, provided that Congress could not end the African
slave trade until at least 1808.
However, the clause did not require that the African slave trade be ended in 1808.
Sadly, many historians, some political scientists and legal scholars don't
understand this and often write in textbooks that the clause required
an end to the African slave trade.
It did not.
It says it cannot be ended before 1808.
The Deep South delegates, the South Carolinians, the Georgians, they believed
that by 1808, the Deep South would have a bigger population than the North.
They believed that this American population was moving south and west,
and thus states like Alabama and Mississippi would've been brought
into the union by 1808, and the South would have essentially a veto power
over a ban on the African slave trade.
Luckily, it didn't work out that way.
Luckily, Ohio came into the union, but Alabama and Mississippi did not.
Luckily, by 1808, the northern population was substantially larger
than the southern population, and so we could ban the slave trade in 1808.
What happened in the meantime?
At least 60,000 slaves.
Are brought into the United States between 1803 and 1808.
This is the largest importation of slaves into what became the United States
in the entire history of the country.
From the colonial period to 1803, you never had 60,000
slaves brought in in five years.
And then from 1803 to 1808, you got at least 60,000 slaves.
So this is the debate over the slave trade.
Towards the end of the convention, southerners demanded a clause to
allow them to recover runaway slaves and northerners without any great
debate, without very much thought, seemed to be worn out by these
constant debates over slavery.
And they're so worn out that they allow for the fugitive slave clause to be
inserted into the constitution, like the clause on the African slave trade.
The fugitive slave clause is almost impossible to
understand and is convoluted.
The clause read.
No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping
into another shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged
from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to
whom such service or labor may be due.
This is Article four, section two, paragraph three of the Constitution.
Doesn't mention the word slave.
Doesn't mention the word fugitive, but the impact is clear.
If a slave runs away from Virginia to Pennsylvania, he cannot become
free under Pennsylvania law.
If a slave runs from Kentucky into Ohio, she does not become free under
Ohio Law, rather Ohio or Pennsylvania, or obligated to return this upon
the claim of the person to whom such service or labor may be due and.
Of course.
How do you prove that claim?
How do you prove you own someone else?
In 1793, Congress passes the first fugitive slave law, which
has almost no protections for people claimed as fugitive slaves.
But it doesn't work very well, in part because many northerners simply don't
help Southerners capture runaway slaves.
In 1842, the Supreme Court will hear its first case on the fugitive slave.
That's remarkable that the laws passed in 1793, and there's no case that
reaches the Supreme Court before 1842.
But in a case called Privy, Pennsylvania, the court holds
that no state can interfere in the return of a fugitive slave.
That Congress has the constitutional power to pass the fugitive slave law.
Although there were many people who thought Congress did not have this
power, they thought that this was a regulation of state to state relations.
And furthermore, the court ruled that a master had a right
to seize a slave anywhere.
The slave was found without any judicial process.
A slave catcher could simply grab someone, say, this is my slave.
I'm taking him or her back to my state, and the free state
had no right to interfere.
Now, what this led to was a remarkable response by Northern States.
Northern States immediately passed laws prohibiting their state
officials from helping in the return of fugitive slaves prohibiting the
use of jails for fugitive slaves.
Well, it was one thing to cross from Maryland into Pennsylvania, grab
your fugitive slave and go back to Pennsylvania, that you could do in
an afternoon quite another to go up to New York or even to Philadelphia.
Or to Ohio and grab a fugitive slave and try to bring that slave
all the way back to the south.
You can't do it easily, and you can't do it without the help of local officials.
I guess the other answer would be, sorry, I like my hypotheticals is
let's say you turn the offer down now, maybe the people negotiating
on the northern side didn't have the moral and ideological prerequisites
to see slavery as a great enough evil that you would turn the offer down.
But let's say you do, I guess the counterargument to sort of our
modern morality of saying, well, slavery is just this greater evil
would be then what would happen?
You'd have sort of two United States emerging, and the north
would sort of be what, in a race out west with the other one.
What on earth would foreign policy look like with that regime?
Would you try and prevent their import of slaves?
I have no idea.
But you can, you can imagine it going wrong and you ending up with something
a bit like the Civil War anyway.
Right?
I dunno
that that's a hypothetical that is certainly possible to imagine.
I mean, the way to think about it is this, in the actual historical period
of the first half of the 19th century in the US as, um, cotton growing, expanded
westward in the southern part of the United States to newly acquired territory.
It was economically efficient with the use of slaves to grow cotton as a cash crop.
But in those places where cotton was being grown, you were not growing,
um, you were not growing food to feed you, nor were you growing livestock.
That stuff ended up being cultivated and raised further north in the, um,
current, uh, near Midwest, what was called at the time, the Old Northwest,
and which happened to correspond to the places where Lincoln was raised, uh,
Western Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois.
And what happened is that the produce and livestock raised there.
It was then brought down river, down the Mississippi River, which
just coincidentally happens to, you know, flow because of gravity South
on these flat boats that require no power other than the power of
the current and sold to the south.
So the expansion westward in both the southern part of the United States and
in the middle part of the United States was driven by this expansion of the
cotton crop and the expansion of slavery.
And that was a unified economy in which all parts of the
country were participating.
Had there not been a single nation, then that would still have been possible.
You know, tariffs might have stood in the way, internal tariffs might have
stood in the way of that kind of trade and made the advancement, pursue,
proceed, uh, proceed more slowly, but almost certainly it would've proceeded.
And then that also leads to the question of, you know, American expansion across
the continent, eventually to California.
And that too is a process that was sped up by the fact that the United
States was a single, unified nation.
It meant that the conquest, or if you preferred a genocide of Native Americans.
Was more efficient because they were US Army troops to stand behind it.
It meant that the Mexican American war in which the US participated
in a pretty aggressive war against Mexico, that took large parts of, uh,
what had been Mexico for the United States, would also have been much
harder to, to pull off again, because you wouldn't have had unified nation.
There are a range of ways that you could imagine that expansion across the west
would've been slower, and that means that the decimation or destruction of Native
American cultures might also have happened more slowly or in a different pattern.
The way say, uh, it happened in, in Canada where the pro the
process was a different one.
So you could imagine the trajectory being a little bit different.
You'd have to be a pretty strong determinist to say, you know,
white, mostly English speaking people of European descent were
destined to conquer the entirety of.
Continent and that was going to happen whether they were unified
into a single country or not.
And that's not something you could ascribe to the model reasoning
of the people at the time.
Like even if we inject them with mo modern morality, they still couldn't
possibly have foresee all of that.
Um,
well, yes and yes and no.
I mean, to, to be, they were very ambitious.
Mm-hmm.
And the idea of westward expansion was clearly in their
minds and in their practices.
I mean, George Washington, I mentioned he never made much money from his
plantation, but he did make substantial money, all of it in land speculation.
Mm-hmm.
And the structure was to go west, take land, settle it, uh,
and as it were, colonize it, and then it would go up in value.
And so they knew that they could do that in the Ohio Valley, for example,
the Ohio River Valley, and they aspired to do it as far as they could do.
Hmm.
And when, you know, as President Thomas Jefferson sent the
Lewis and Clark Expedition.
You know, out west, across the continent, the stated objective was to see how far
they could go and what roots they could find, especially water roots, to get them
to the Pacific, again, with the intent of eventual expansion and, and conquest.
And that's already in the early 19th century.
So they, they knew the direction they were going.
They just couldn't have aspired realistically in the 1780s to actually
conquering the whole continent.
But once Napoleon had sold a rite of expansion, you know, in the early,
again, in the early 19th century to the United States, it was possible
to imagine that kind of broad continental expansion happening.
It took a long time for it to happen, although in historic
terms, not all that long.
But it took a fair, it took generations for it to happen.
But yeah, the aspiration I think they could have had,
and many actually did have it.
None of this is super edifying for the American founders.
Is it like we have to cut this deal with people who would.
Doing something we regard as very immoral, perhaps not quite as immoral
as contemporary people would, but still.
Um, but we have to cut it for the noble reason of, well, not quite
the liberty and justice for all thing, although that's there.
But because we have to conquer a continent and keep on expanding westwoods and making
money and too bad for whoever happens to be there, none of this, it's hard to put a
positive top spin on that thought process.
Yes.
I mean I think these were, these were humans.
They were self-interested in many ways.
Now to an audience that is interested in political philosophy,
it's important to point out that they had political, philosophical
justifications, nevertheless.
Right?
One was, and this was the crucial idea, driving the constitutional convention.
The, the state said, declared independence from Britain had survived
the Revolutionary War sticking together simply 'cause they had no other choice.
You know that line, we must all hang together, assuredly
we shall all hang separately.
And then with the war completed, there was a real worry.
Madison and others were very concerned that there was insufficient common
interest to hold them together.
And here's the punchline where the political philosophy comes in.
They feared that if they didn't hold together as a single country, that their
experiment in Republican self-government.
Would fail.
And so, you know, if you were in Philadelphia in 1787 and you asked
Madison and others, you know, why is it so important to stay together?
They didn't just say, well, to expand and to do well, I mean, they had those
interests for sure, and they were willing to sometimes articulate them.
But their first answer would've been, we are engaged in an acal experiment
in whether human beings can live together in Federation of Republics.
Hmm.
And they knew that the history of republics wasn't great, and the
history of Federal Republics was especially not very, uh, promising.
And they wanted to achieve the historic transformative victory of winning a,
winning the fight for Republicanism and in their minds against Monarchists.
Hmm.
Now Hamilton and perhaps a few other of the framers, like a man called
James Wilson and on his best day, his worst days, George Washington.
Did sort of think that monarchy was the only way and they wanted
the president of the United States to be a kind of elected monarch.
Mm-hmm.
But that was not something they said very explicitly because after all, a revolution
had just been fought against monarchy.
Um, I mean, it was really against parliamentary, parliamentary
sovereignty and supremacy.
But they had at some point started saying that it was a revolution against monarchy.
And so they were trying to justify in political, theoretical terms, the
normative validity of that project.
So we shouldn't, we shouldn't forget that.
And the truth is, if all they had done was contribute to the
building of, you know, an empire, an American empire, they wouldn't be
venerated in the way that they are.
The veneration comes from the fact that they had a very sophisticated,
if you will, political spin.
Political theoretical spin.
Namely, let's prove that you can have what became the United States.
Let's prove you can have Brazil, let's prove you can have India, you
know, large federal democracies.
Functioning under Republican conditions,
On August 14th, 1862, Abraham Lincoln invites five free black men
to the White House for a meeting.
They are part of the black elite in Washington DC, and he wants
to have a conversation with them.
The Civil War has been going on for about a year, and Abraham Lincoln is worried.
Because the war is not going well and because it's not going
well, he's feeling like he might have to do something drastic.
He's considering taking this very radical step of liberating all of the enslaved
people who are in the Confederate states, and he's thinking about doing this as a
war tactic, understanding that if he takes away the South's labor force, that might
cripple them, or at least the threat of it would force them to remain in the union.
But he is also concerned about what it might mean to suddenly free 4
million enslaved people and what the consequences of that might be.
I can imagine these five distinguished men are very excited
to get Lincoln's invitation.
They are abolitionists.
They have been pressuring Lincoln to abolish slavery, but when they
get there, they are greeted by President Lincoln and another man.
His name is James Mitchell.
Now James Mitchell is a new employee.
He's only been at the White House for a couple of days, and his
job is a new job and it's called Commissioner of Immigration.
Now that's immigration with a e, meaning his job was not to help
people to enter the country, but to help people to exit it.
Lincoln doesn't waste any time, according to documents that
recount what happened that day.
He tells the men that he had gotten funds from Congress to ship black people once
they had been freed to some other country.
And then Lincoln said, you and we are different races, your race suffer very
greatly, many of them by living amongst us while ours suffer from your presence.
In a word he said, we suffer on each side.
We are taught to think of Abraham Lincoln as the great Emancipator, and he was, but
the truth is, like many white Americans, he was opposed to slavery because it
was a. Cruel and unjust institution in opposition to this nation's ideals.
But he was also opposed to black political and social equality.
As he said in a speech that he gave in 1853, he considered black people a
quote, troublesome presence and that they were incompatible with a democracy
that was designed for white people.
As he said in that speech, free them and make them politically and socially.
Our equals my own feelings will not admit of this.
And if mine would, we well know that those of the great
mass of white people will not.
As those five black men stood in the White House, I wonder
what it must have felt like
these men had been fighting for the liberations of millions.
And had waited for this moment only to be told that once they were granted their
freedom, they were going to be asked to leave the country of their birth.
And to make it even worse, Lincoln then tells them that it's their fault that the
country is fighting a civil war at all.
He says, although many men engaged on either side do not
care for you one way or the other.
Without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis,
the war could not have in existence.
That's why the president said it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.
So Lincoln ends the meeting and one of the men tells him that they will
go back and consider his proposal.
Lincoln then tells them, take your full time.
No hurry at all.
After that meeting, those men made it clear that they were not interested
in taking Lincoln up on his offer to leave the country of their birth.
There's a quote by a different group of black abolitionists that really sums up
the way that most black Americans felt, and that quote said, this is our home.
And this is our country beneath its side.
Lay the bones of our fathers here we were born, and here we will die
after everything that black Americans have been through in this country
that they didn't immediately take up Lincoln's offer and go somewhere
else and start over is really an astounding testimony to their belief.
In the American ideals by choosing to stay Black people
were saying, this is our country.
We are American, and we are actually going to work to make
these founding ideals a reality.
And in the years that followed after the Civil War ends, a very short
period called Reconstruction began.
And so you see the formerly enslaved pushing their white allies in Congress to
start to change our founding documents.
And to actually resolve those contradictions that were baked in.
They do this through getting amendments passed, and of course, amendments are
the way that we change our constitution.
So, of course the very first amendment that they have to pass
is the 13th Amendment, which abolishes the institution of slavery.
And what's interesting about that is this is actually the first time
that the word slavery is mentioned in the Constitution, is in the
amendment that finally abolishes it.
They pass the 14th Amendment and the 14th Amendment guarantees that.
All of the enslaved people will finally be citizens of the country of their birth.
It also ensures for the first time that the laws cannot treat people
differently based on their race.
This is called the Equal protection Clause, and this clause will be used
again and again, really all the way up until now to guarantee that all
Americans are treated as equal citizens.
And finally they passed the 15th Amendment, which probably is the most
important amendment when we're considering what a democracy is supposed to be.
The 15th amendment guaranteed the right to vote no matter what your race is.
Now, it didn't include women at that time, but it certainly set the stage
and it for the first time, guaranteed that whether you were born a person who
was enslaved, whether you're white or you were black, you had the right to.
Exercise your vote in this democracy.
The only reason we saw all of these gains in the south was because there
were federal troops there, and those federal troops were holding back the
violence of white southerners who were not interested in seeing these gains.
This all changes with the presidential election of 1876.
It was a contested election.
And Rutherford b Hayes is the Republican candidate.
And remember back then it was Republicans who were the progressive
party, and they were the party of Lincoln that was working to pass
all of this progressive legislation.
But Rutherford b Hayes really wants to win this election.
And so he makes a deal with the Democrats in Congress that if they
give him their electoral votes.
He will withdraw the federal troops from the south and end reconstruction.
So he makes the deal and the troops leave, and we immediately see white
Southerners implement a campaign to force black people back into the position that
they had been in before reconstruction.
The suppression of black life over the next five decades would be so devastating.
That it would come to be known as the Great Nadir.
The second slavery
One thing that struck me about the book too was that I got the
impression that the Constitution itself really means a lot to you.
You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the constitution.
Also how others think about the Constitution, like you just
mentioned, the book even includes the Text of the Constitution.
Why don't we start out by just, then you just mention what the
Constitution actually does mean to you.
Okay.
Well, there's three things I think to say about that, if I may.
The first is the Constitution was forged both in the original and in
the post Civil War amendments by truly amazing people who thought.
Deeply and widely about freedom and self-government and the most
fundamental things, at least with respect to political life.
So to see this as a spectacular historical achievement is right.
Also to feel as an American, that you get to benefit from the
amazingness of what they did is right.
And to think of the Constitution with strong emotions.
The more you understand the founding and the Civil War amendments, I
think the more that just happens.
And so that's the first and the most fundamental.
The second thing I'd say is I follow my former boss, justice Thurgood Marshall,
in celebrating the arc of constitutional history in addition to the post Civil
War amendments and the founding.
So to see the Constitution as not just being something from those two periods,
but something that includes the 1920s, 1930s and the 1890s and the 1970s and
the last 20 years is a way of honoring, I think, the best understanding of
what the founders were actually doing.
They weren't saying, we have it figured out for all time.
Follow us posterity.
More complicated than that.
So to celebrate Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and William Renquist
and Martin Luther King, Malcolm X two, I think that's That's right.
The third thing I'd say is that there are some people who think of our constitution,
certainly in the founding period sense.
As if it was written by Gods and as if we're ants and that we're so
little and they're so big and we're so dumb and they're so smart, and,
uh, we just have to figure out what they thought and then just do it.
That kind of ancestor worship is, I think, not consistent with the best
understanding of American democracy, American constitutional democracy.
So admire them.
Yes.
Revere them.
Uh, I'll go there.
Worship.
No, there were things that the founders thought that were not just,
they allowed slavery after all.
There were things that the 14th Amendment, the Great 14th Amendment, the
Sainted 14th Amendment, though the 14th Amendment has a lot of advances in it.
But we know some things now about sex equality, for example,
that they didn't know back then.
And, uh, to see them as human rather than divine was really, really important.
I think it's really important to recognize that the Constitution was
not made in just one single moment.
Just the amendments themselves are made over the process of hundreds of years now.
So when we talk about the Constitution, like you just discussed, the 13th,
14th, 15th amendments were incredibly important, and many people even call
that as a second founding of the country, and we've had many Constitution
amendments after that that again, rewrote the Constitution in different ways.
When we think about what the Constitution means, it's not just what the founding
fathers meant, but there's many revisions throughout our history where.
The meaning of the Constitution continued to change.
The text of the Constitution continued to change.
Yeah, so the post Civil War amendments are the most important of the textual changes.
To see them as a new constitution, I think we should all get that.
I'm not sure I phrase it exactly that way, but I get it.
And it is true that the equality principle of the 14th Amendment
is new and massively important.
Applying the Bill of Rights to the states.
It's controversial to say that 14th Amendment actually
was understood to do that.
I think the prevailing view is that is the best view, but even if it
isn't to extend an assortment of rights, protections to the states,
that was done after the Civil War.
Before the Civil War, the Bill of Rights supplied only to the national government,
and the due process clause, for example, clearly applies now to the states.
That's really, really important.
And that suggests that to see the document is just frozen in the technical founding
period is inconsistent with the text.
But I, I go further than that freedom of speech as we live and breathe it.
That's really a post 1950s thing.
That's not a post civil war thing that came, I guess technically,
I don't guess I assert not like it's a controversial assertion.
It's just true.
It came from the Supreme Court.
But the Supreme Court doesn't live in a vacuum, so the Supreme Court creates very
broad protection of freedom, of speech.
It's responding to the culture in which it lives, and we can think of
that as our constitutional culture with a small sea, not a document,
but a constitutional culture.
And it has a lot of democracy in it.
And the free speech, which is the most fundamental right
of all, that's pretty new.
That isn't the founding period, and it isn't the Civil War Amendments.
It is the founding period in the text that is in the text.
Thank goodness for that.
But it's a much bigger idea now than it was at the founding.
So how does the court actually use the Constitution to make those decisions,
especially as some of her rights continue to evolve and expand over the course of
decades or even centuries at this point?
Because a lot of the listeners are going to be coming from other
countries where the constitutions are not quite as old, where you actually
know some of the people who wrote the constitutions so that you could go
back to what people actually meant.
So we, we are looking at our constitution, we're revising it and reinterpreting it.
How is the court actually using it to make those reinterpretations?
That's the most fundamental question of all really.
And I think the answer isn't radically different in nations
that amend their constitutions a lot from nations that don't.
I clerked on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court before I
clerked on the US Supreme Court and state constitutions get changed more.
So there are different views.
Here's a view.
It says that the way to interpret the Constitution is to allow the
democratic process to do whatever it wants unless the violation of the
founding document is unambiguous.
So you could say that our fundamental theory is self-government, or it
might be, you know, authoritarian.
But our fundamental theory is there's politics and then there's law.
The Constitution should step in only when we know for sure
that there's a violation of it.
That's a view in some nations, sometimes political officials
want a view of that kind.
There's a law professor from long time ago named James Bradley
Thayer, who defended that view.
It can go left of center, it can go right of center.
That's one approach.
Another approach says we take the original intent as you were signaling where.
We ask about, let's say the first amendment, freedom of speech or
something about freedom of religion.
What did they intend?
And that might produce a very surprising understanding, like there's a recent
paper suggesting if we follow the original intent, blasphemy laws were acceptable,
consistent with the First Amendment.
Okay?
There's a third view, and this is actually, uh, a long list, but I'm
only gonna give you some highlights.
A third view is the original meaning.
That might sound the same as the original intent, but it really isn't.
The idea is we don't try to go into people's heads and elicit their intent.
That's really hard to do.
Maybe it's not the democratic thing to do, you know, to go back to someone's head,
the thing to do is think what was the original public meaning of the document?
So if the original public, meaning of the equal protection clause, let's
say, allowed racial segregation.
That's game over.
That's because the original meeting is authoritative, even if we didn't like it.
That's another view.
There's a fourth view.
So we now have let the government do what it wants there.
We have original intent, we have original meeting.
There's a fourth view, which is read the document where you can, so is to
protect the preconditions for democracy.
So some people, justice Steven Breyer, basically offended this view, said
we're gonna be very big on free speech and very big on voting rights because
democracy is fundamental to everything.
That's not a view of originalism, it's a view of kind of life.
Democracy is fundamental, so we'll understand the Constitution to
protect political dissent, even if the original meaning didn't do that.
We'll, understand the Constitution to.
Strike down restrictions on the right to vote, even if the original meeting
wasn't consistent with that, and otherwise we'll be pretty cautious.
Then I'll just give one more view, let's call it moral readings, where
some people say that what we need to do, what we will inevitably do, and they say
what we should do is take these broad terms like freedom of speech and equal
protection of law, due process of law to understand them in the morally best way.
So that if equal protection is morally best understood to forbid
racial segregation, let's say, then that's the best way to read it.
And if it's not, that's not the best way to read it.
Some people get nervous that moral readings are subjective
and too intrusive on democracy.
Moral readers say you're gonna be doing that even if you don't think you are.
And they're gonna be saying, we allow this way.
Moral progress.
So roughly you can see moral readers, democratic readers, and historically
minded readers who are trying to figure out what was meant at the time.
next section B Trump.
Many years, if you were traveling to the Nation of Turkmenistan, you would
fly in through Turkmenbashi Airport, you'd take a cab down Turkmenbashi
Avenue, you'd maybe tour the campus of Turkmenbashi Secondary School.
The longtime president of the country had them all named after himself,
Turkmen Bai, meaning Father of all Turk men, which was not his legal name.
He named himself father of all Turkmen.
For 20 years.
Shar Murat OV maintained a cult of personality as the
autocratic leader of Turkmenistan.
He declared himself President for Life in 1999.
He mandated that a book he wrote, which I have a copy of, be taught in
all schools and to the civil service.
He changed the name of each day of the week and month in the year.
January was named after him.
April was named after his mother, October after a book that he wrote.
February was named for the country's flag because that was the month in which
the people of Turkmenistan celebrated Flag Day, but they only celebrated Flag
Day because they were forced to, and it also happened to be Nizam's birthday.
The country and the man were celebrated at once.
Citizens were bused into the capitol and made to wave flags.
Parades were held.
Members of the government handed him awards, statues
of him littered the capitol.
Almost always.
Made of gold across the world.
An American man also obsessed with gold and famous for naming buildings
after himself entered the fray of American politics and amassed the
largest cult of personality that our country had seen in decades.
And now he's engaging in a self naming spree that would
rival ni ofv before politics.
Donald Trump stamped his name onto skyscrapers and hotels and ties
and stakes and vodka as president.
He still hawks.
Economists watches phones and sneakers.
But in his second term as President, the habit is mutated into an ugly obsession,
a physical representation of his attempts to remake government in his image.
According to reporting by the New York Times, the Trump administration tried
to pressure the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, to help rename Penn
Station in New York City and Dulles Airport in DC after Donald Trump in
exchange for Trump releasing funding that he had frozen for the Gateway Rail
Tunnel between New York and New Jersey.
The Trump administration has since sent, they will release that
funding, but on other buildings, he's just gone ahead and put a sign
up without congressional backing.
His name sits atop a sign at the US Institute of Peace, which
is an independent government funded research institute.
It was placed there after the agency had been gutted by the so-called
Department of Government Efficiency.
And while the institute was fighting do Donald Trump's power grab in court,
the State Department said the name change was made to reflect the greatest
deal maker in our nation's history.
About a 15 minute walk from that building.
Donald Trump's name has been affixed to the outside of the Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts.
Only Congress has the authority to change its name, but that hasn't stopped.
Trump, who appointed himself, director of the Center elsewhere
in the nation's capitol.
A 50 foot banner of the President's face hung from the US Department of
Agriculture Building, side by side with a banner of Abraham Lincoln.
And in November it was reported that Trump asked DC's pro football
team, the commanders, to name their new stadium after him.
Across government, a range of new initiatives.
Also bear the president's name.
A new website to purchase medication is called Trump Rx.
Investment accounts for newborn babies, partially funded by billionaire.
Donations are being Trump, uh, dubbed Trump accounts by the IRSA fast track
immigration visa costing a million dollars is being dubbed the Trump Gold Card.
The card features a photo of Donald Trump's face.
On the website almost as if to tease you a banner in small print at the
top reads that this is, quote, an official website of the United States
government could have fooled me.
Late last year the US Navy announced a new Trump class of battleship.
And the Air Force is replacing a fleet of F 22 Raptors with new F
47 fighter jets in honor of Donald Trump being the 47th president.
Over 5,000 miles away in the south caucuses, a US developed
trade corridor through Armenia is being named the Trump route for
international peace and prosperity.
There is in an echo of Niyazov's Turk, Stan, a conflation of celebrating Trump
and the celebrating of the nation.
In fact, a New York Republican in Congress has suggested doing exactly
what Turk Stan did a year ago.
She introduced a Trump birthday and flag day holiday establishment act into
Congress to combine the two, which fall on the same day into one federal holiday.
It didn't make it to a vote.
The Commemorative National Park passes for our country's 250th anniversary
feature an image of Donald Trump alongside one of George Washington.
Although a contr conservation group is suing to have that removed, the National
Park System has said it will void passes if they are defaced or altered
Trump's defense, by the way, for all of these examples, is that they were
suggested or undertaken by other people.
The State Department said it changed the name of the Institute of Peace.
Neither renaming the Kennedy Center, nor the naming of Trump's
Rx were the President's ideas.
At least according to him.
He says it's all a great honor, but this actually puts us
back into Turk Stan territory.
NAB's birthday was made a holiday by the Parliament.
Schools across the country were named after him simply by custom.
Because this type of behavior begets itself, especially when a leader
markets himself as openly transactional.
If people know the only way to make their point is to curry favor,
they'll just start to curry favor.
President Washington who appears behind beside Trump on the
National Park Pass, objected to having his own likeness on a coin.
Only after his death did the country defy him.
But just as he demonstrated when he walked away from the presidency after
two terms, Washington understood that the country was bigger than the man and
that no man came before the country.
Alongside Donald Trump's hunger for territorial expansion with Greenland and
his sore loser attitude over the Nobel Peace Prize, his self naming spree is
part of his quest for permanent legacy, an effort to etch his paragraph in history.
But let's go back to Turkmenistan and Niyazov to figure out how the story ends.
In 2006, Niyazov passed away.
While in office, a new autocrat replaced him.
The country quickly changed back all of those names of the days and the months.
Banners with Niyazov's face and name were removed from the capital city.
In 2008, they abolished the holiday honoring his birthday.
By 2016, the central airport would no longer bear his name, so Trump
would do well to learn Niyazov's story or he could go back even further to
Percy Shelley's 1818 poem, Azi Uhand, warning against the hubris of Leaders
if there ever was on the pedestal.
These words appear.
My name is Azi Mania, king of Kings.
Look on my works.
Yeee mighty in despair.
Nothing beside remains.
It's no secret that Donald Trump likes to see big buildings named after himself.
Over the past year, he has plastered his name on the Kennedy Center
and the US Institute for Peace.
And in December, the Navy announced plans for a quote, Trump class of battleships.
Just last night, Trump unveiled a new government website for prescription
drugs called Trump Rx, but this goes further than any of that.
Two sources familiar with a conversation that President Trump had with Senate
leader Chuck Schumer last month.
Tell me that Trump told Schumer that he would be unwilling to un, he'd be willing
to unfreeze $16 billion in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York.
If Schumer would agree to rename New York's Penn Station and Washington's
Dulles airport after Donald Trump, the New York project, a rail tunnel
that would connect New York City and New Jersey had already started.
Now, officials say if the money is not freed up, the project
will stop leaving about one.
Thousand construction jobs in jeopardy.
My sources tell me that Schumer rejected the offer.
There is no comment yet from either the White House or Senator Schumer's
office on the story which was first reported by Punch Bull News,
I want to turn to the domestic situation, 'cause this is really why I wanted to have
you back, and I'm trying to place what we are witnessing in our cities in context.
What has changed since you were last here is we had, you know, the National Guard.
Um, in cities like Chicago, la, Portland, and they were, uh, unwelcomed,
they were causing disturbance.
But the National Guardsmen themselves seemed at times, or not
at times, seemed mostly reluctant.
I mean, they were not entirely clear why they were there, and they certainly
were not shooting people, right.
They were a sign of.
Donald Trump's strength, but they weren't necessarily themselves
engaged in, you know, acts that that.
Uh, dominate the news, like what we see in Minnesota where it's not
the National Guard, it's actually part of the executive branch.
It's ICE and, uh, and, uh, border patrol, I guess.
And they seem to, in these videos, not just being engaged in.
Violations of civil rights and, and in the killing of, you know, in a tragic
event and the killing of a woman that's just heartbreak and shooting her in
the face and calling her names and, you know, I mean, all of it's terrible, but
there seems to be almost a relish in.
I'm not saying they relish that killing, but you just see some of the videos in
the way they are interacting with people.
One of the things that struck me, Ruth, is they don't say.
You know, ma'am, will you please step out of the car or serve?
Right.
There's a, there's sort of a contemptuous that they show towards
the population, and I guess I'm asking you what you make of that.
Like why, why do, why would a, an authoritarian want to be seen as treating
the public disrespectfully when they are establishing this kind of, you
know, control as opposed to, you know.
Have a different, like they're definitely not trying to be
beloved in the communities.
Yeah.
It's really important to just, to talk about this.
Um, and the net each, um, military or as they call them a broad state
security forces, each of them have their own kind of culture.
Uh, operational culture, social culture, and the National Guard.
One of its main things, it did and was known, uh, to the
public is helping in disasters.
Katrina and many places they have policing, um, capabilities, but
they also are, uh, uh, you could say a humanitarian assistance.
That's what people, and, and so that's reflected in their, uh, in their.
When they're put into this new situation that that comes with them, that culture,
ice is, uh, it pre, of course, predated Trump, but it, it has been under Trump.
It has been, uh, re socialized to be a kind of authoritarian, paramilitary.
Reminds me very much of the fascist, militia and all kinds
of authoritarian para militaries.
And not only 'cause of the masks, but the co the comportment, the behavior.
And so the scorn and the contempt is part of this, that they are taught, that
they, uh, have, they've been, um, they've been given a kind of immunity, uh, which
indeed this, the agent who shot, uh.
Uh, Renée Good was given a study, had they told, they said he had immunity,
but, um, they've been given a kind of, uh, carte blanche to behave any way they want.
And so this arrogance and this, and the, the will to humiliate people like
marching immigrants, uh, you know, out, uh, in a, in the cold in their underpants
or in a bathrobe and for no reason, and then taking them back home sometimes.
And the public sphere.
This is very important that the public sphere.
Under, in, under Authoritarianism, it's our space.
These are our public spaces, our neighborhoods, and they become like
a, a scene, a like a movie set, but all too real of authoritarian, uh,
rituals of humiliation and domination.
And so your streets, your public squares become.
Um, like, uh, you know, spectacles of humiliation and,
and that's, that's part of it.
But Isis, ice culture, ice socialization is to be the lawless,
arrogant, brutal, um, kind of corpse of that, of this regime.
I don't want to get too theoretical about this, but you know.
I understand.
You know, people read Machiavelli and they say it's better to be feared than loved,
but, but mostly what Machiavelli is saying is actually you want to be both loved and
feared, and you want to be viewed by the population as essentially restraining.
The, the, the army from engaging in abuses, right?
There are several chapters of, in which Machiavelli talks about, you know, how,
how a dictator, um, does that, if we were in Hungary with Victor Orbin, or
we were in, you know, transported back to Mussolini, or we were in Russia.
Putin, is this what you see or do the leaders want to be seen by the
public as benevolent, like actually condemning this kind of behavior?
Or is there a util like, does Donald Trump see a utility in people
projecting this humiliating force?
Or is it counter like, to me it seems like it would be counterproductive
and it is counterproductive.
In fact, we see in, uh, Minneapolis and twin cities that the more
brutal they are, the more people.
And this is very moving, very inspirational, are signing up for
trainings for whistle, be grades.
Um, and they're, they're very conscious that, that despite all
the brutality, they're not gonna show that they've been dominated and
they're taking back the public space.
So there's two spectacles going on.
So what you're asking is in, at the level of an ice or a paramilitary secret,
police who are in the public, they don't wanna be loved, they couldn't care less.
The whole point is to be feared.
Of, of the average person, and they're chosen for that reason, and they
know they're gonna be given immunity.
That's why autocrats from Mussolini pinoche up to Trump.
They, they use pardons.
They're always pardoning people, but the leader has a different psychology that
these leaders are behind their bluster, they're very insecure, and they, they want
to be, maybe not, they wanna be feared for sure, but they also want to be liked.
And, and it really bothers them if they're still public opinion polls
and elections that, uh, if, if they go down too much in estimation.
That's when they become more reckless and they become more
vindictive and, and look at what's playing out, uh, with Donald Trump.
And I was thinking, uh, that all of this behavior had something to do with
this, uh, you know, ego injury for not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
You can never underestimate the, uh, obsession with, um, getting
something you think you deserve.
And so it leads you to behave in ways that will far from having you
be loved, will have you be ridiculed.
And that's also why autocrats are so, um, they're so insecure and
particularly they don't wanna be mocked.
Um, because they do things that are, uh, counterproductive all the time.
Out of peak, out of grievance.
You know what's strange though, as people talk about it, we had a no King's
rally here in Columbia several months ago, and King is such an archaic term.
I mean, honestly the best word is tyrant.
Yeah.
And, and, and we have a man that has so lack of knowledge of history
or understanding or context.
He's elevated by people.
A lot of people in this nation, as many of your listeners there know, you know
the ugly American tourist that shows up that doesn't really understand the history
of, of Europe or anything in England and just wants everything to appeal to them.
Like creating some sort of fake Disneyland.
Well, that's what is supporting this man now is a total lack of
understanding of context of history.
So he makes one trip and sees the arc, the triumph there in Paris, and all
of a sudden he wants an arc to Trump.
He actually said Arc, the Trump, and nobody in his base pushed back on it.
So we have an illness of perception in this nation that's supporting this mess.
The administration though, has been described as a kind of
internet style content production machine headed by a Trojan, right?
The, the purpose is to grab and fill headlines, just
dominate the information space.
Meanwhile, the actual policies of.
Violent detention, uh, you know, concentration camps, subversion
of the real law that's happening elsewhere, because what you are
concerned about is he's renamed the Kennedy Center after himself, or
he's made a video dumping sewage on protestors or whatever the latest.
Dumb thing is, and that does seem new because there, there
were not those avenues of mass media available in the past.
I mean, is it a new form of politics that a America's gotta deal with and B, you've
gotta watch out for your 250th birthday celebrations being conscripted into
Well, it, it's definitely going to try to do that.
And, and the other element of this is the technology of the
algorithms of social media.
I mean, I have very good friends that are very intelligent.
But because of the mistrust that's put into the opposition, the demonization
of the opposition, they only look at information in their comfort silos,
and they honestly do not even know the facts and the knowledge that I
have when I come to a conversation and they just think I'm a radical liar.
It's, and, and it's made it very difficult to have any sort of healing conversation.
Well, let's talk about your book, reviving Our Republic.
It contains ideas of how to reenergize America, reconnect it with its purpose.
It talks about things like term limits in Congress, removing corporate
money, breaking up monopolies in media and healthcare and fund.
Talk us through what you are saying here and.
Why it's urgent, because for those of us in the UK, we just
see a continual degeneration.
Yeah.
So I let, let's give a big 36,000 viewpoint for say, I want to communicate
to all your listeners there that the America that you know that came in in
World War II and that helped form NATO and the world order that existed since the
fifties is an anomaly in American history.
America's system was meant to divide and to stay small and to maintain
liberty on communities and states.
And so the systems that were put into place in order to ensure that world
hegemonic system was in place is counter.
To what the original DNA of us were.
And so what we're seeing now is now that it's become so big and powerful,
that's where the forces are fighting.
And what I come in with the book is to believe, since I'm
in the Navy, I understand the concept of ballast in a ship.
And the ballast and the ship that's most steady is the one
with the ballast in the bottom.
So I see our ballast stone of 50 stones of 50 weights in the
bottom of a ship stabilizing.
Has now been put up on top of the deck and morphed into one big stone
at the top of a mast and is doing nothing but going back and forth.
That's what the book was about on how to bring those ballas stones back down,
how to decentralize power, how to.
Not be the only responsible party for world peace, necessarily for world
policing and to help heal ourselves a little bit so we could be a peer among
world nations and not the dominating force where we could be the shining city
on the hill that others will look to for inspiration and not out of fear of
the spotlight, hitting them in the face.
That's what I tried to put together in the book.
So what does that mean when you break it down into kind of individual,
you know, policy moves, uh, individual changes in your society?
Because we have seen America being reshaped by media and by money
in ways that let alone aren't predicted in the constitution.
None of the framers could have even conceived of these things.
No, they couldn't have.
And the base of the books is on two things.
One, Martin Luther's nailing his 95 theses that started the Protestant Reformation.
So I took that.
Framework of 95 theses put it into the book, but the information I base it
on is Washington's farewell address.
'cause after eight years of him being the first president, he saw
the limitations of what they didn't deal with in the Constitution.
He saw the rise of party conflict, so he warned the nation as he left.
Here's how you keep this republic.
You have to pat down party.
Do not base your philosophies on party politics, on fake patriotism.
Beware of foreign entangled alliances to where you're beholden to other nations
for your own safety versus yourselves, and also fiscal responsibility of.
Taking care of your debt limit.
I added a fourth section in there, which is the Corporatization of America
and the collusion between corporations and government, which has happened
really bad since the seventies.
So one of the first things that I think is really important, a lot
of people know about our Supreme Court case called Citizens United.
Yes.
Where it allowed.
Mega corporations to just pump in money blindly into political campaigns.
For listeners who don't, who don't know this, essentially Citizens
United implies that corporations have the same rights as human beings.
Yes,
that's right.
That's right.
And so actually being a textualist and originalist, the court got
it technically correct because corporations have had personhood
attached to them over the past century.
So when you look at the text, personhood is personhood.
However, while you fix that, instead of politicizing the Supreme Court, just
say, okay, if that's the rules, then in the Constitution we must separate
natural persons from artificial personas and we must put that in.
That will fix, I believe, 70% of the issues because then we can then regulate.
The next step, which would be if anybody runs for office only those people who
can vote for them can contribute to the financial stability of their campaign.
Period.
No corporations, no.
Outside your district, nothing.
Only those people.
It's an interesting thought.
I mean, it almost sounds like what you're talking about is uns scrambling
an omelet though, because, you know, this has been the Americans as long
as I've been alive, so I wasn't gonna been able to pay attention.
Pax and Super pacs and corporate involvement have been the defining factor.
I, I guess the, the, maybe the kind of obvious and slightly dumb question
is how do you get there from here?
Well, you get a lot of people getting so fed up.
They're willing to change their positioning and realize we have
to do a radical thing and trying to get people to come out of
communities and run for office.
Now we kind of have a mentality that, well, our representation
is done by the politicians in our community and not by us.
I just need to go and work at the drugstore.
I need to do what I do and I hope I can vote for the right
guys when I have limited choices.
We need to have an uprising of our own.
Citizenship, self-respect and allow people to start rising up.
Taking the lead in representing their communities.
That's what we have to do.
And that's what's going to end up happening out of this because
I suspect it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
And there's gonna be a point where we're gonna have to have a choice.
Are we gonna be the America that was?
Put in place 250 years ago, are we gonna be something totally different?
Because there's nothing anywhere in the history of the world where a great
nation lasts much longer than 250 years.
Well, actually the, the, the record is republics tend to get a couple of
hundred years and then they dissolve into dictatorships, empires, and decadence,
which is the really worrying thing.
Well, that's it.
And that's what they do.
And the thing that makes our constitution really fascinating and important, and
also the vast diversity of our nation, of so many different people with so many
different cultures, I think can mitigate that and we could remake ourselves.
But it's going to be a trial, and my book is a testimony to that.
I see this as a way out and trying to show people that here's a way
we move through this labyrinth of mess that we're in, but it's not a
foregone conclusion that we will.
Um, so one thing that's been happening, well, it's been happening for decades
now, but with alarming frequency since January 20th, and since Donald
has been essentially unbound by the corrupt, diligent and super majority
of the Supreme Court and an entirely complacent Republican Congress that
seems perfectly willing to advocate its own congressional, sorry,
constitutional responsibilities, Donald's.
Essentially trying with tax American taxpayer money, uh, to
remake this country in his image, both literally and metaphorically.
So in the last couple of weeks alone, uh, he has, or in the last month say
he's renamed the Institute of Peace.
It's the Donald Trump Institute of Peace, which is a particular kick
in the teeth considering, uh, it was taken over by armed guards.
So that's always fun.
Uh, he's renamed the Kennedy Center and uh, he continues to build a.
Now $400 million ballroom, which he just admitted is a monument to him.
Plus we have the arc to Trump to look forward to.
So, um, on the one hand that I, I think that is, that is a reason, just more
reason to mock him and how pathetic and needy and thirsty he is, but that also
does have very real world consequences.
So I wanted to talk, I wanted to hear what you had to say mm-hmm.
About that aspect of it.
So we are living through all of these things you mentioned.
They are, um, part of construction, the construction of a personality cult.
And, uh, you know, his huge picture on the outside of the Department of
Labor, all the things, uh, the other pictures of him, his name everywhere.
This is what dictators do.
So that.
People can never forget about them.
That people think that they're always the dictator's, always watching them.
He's, um, omnipresent.
He's everywhere and he's all powerful.
And the other part I found interesting with the Kennedy Center
renaming is that in my, uh, work in this, I have stuff on this.
Uh, in, in my book, strong Men, it's like it's coming to life yet again.
Um, that, uh, because they're so insecure, uh, the strong men have to kind of
vanquish those who have come before them.
And so any leader who.
In their country's history, who might have been more popular or
more charismatic, or more handsome, have to be erased or demeaned.
And so, uh, Kennedy, um, cannot stand.
It has to be Trump who is replacing Kennedy.
And we all know how he keeps up his campaign against Obama, and this is
typical of what this kind of leader does.
Everything has to be about them, and they're the only heroes
who can exist in the universe.
Yes, indeed.
Uh, and I think for Donald, that's obviously because he's
not a hero and he's incapable.
Mm-hmm.
He's character logically incapable of being one.
And he's had opportunities.
He had an opportunity during COVID, as a matter of fact, to do that,
and he did exactly the opposite, um, and got a lot of us killed.
Um, but mm-hmm.
Another thing, and, and I, I've been curious about this and wanted.
Asked you about this for a while.
'cause it's not, it's not simply that Donald is, uh, flooding
all of our spaces with his image or remaking them in his image.
We know that he, uh, as you mentioned, he's, he is, uh,
on the Department of Labor.
He's also on the tickets to get into national parks right
next to George Washington and.
Apparently there's going to be a 250th anniversary coin with
his face on both sides of it.
Both sides, you know, just in case, you know, uh, just in case one isn't enough.
Uh, but then there's also this, um.
Flooding of the zone with a particular kind of culture.
So for, for many years now, republicans have, have reviled
the left for are allegedly forcing our elitism down their throats.
But it seems like what, what Donald and the Trump regime were doing.
Is making it basically remaking everything in the image of WWE or, uh, ultimate
fighting or monster trucks, what have you.
So, uh, this, I just wanna read you a quote from John F. Kennedy,
which is etched on the facade of the Kennedy Center, I believe.
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, an
America, which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in
business or a statecraft unquote, that seems kind of like the, exactly the
opposite of the Trump regime's agenda.
One of the twists that Trump has brought to the strongman formula is.
I mean, he, he, he's a master of propaganda and every strongman uses
the state-of-the-art tools that he has.
It could be newsreels from Mussolini or radio for Hitler
and social media for Trump.
But he's also brought this marriage of celebrity, um, reality tv, but
not high culture, not art films.
Uh, but real, um, popular culture, uh, and that's been part of his persona
since the start, as you mentioned, with wrestling with reality tv.
And so he's, in a way, you know, people could say he's cheapened the brand of the
presidency also by, um, becoming a vendor.
Uh, there are corruption issues, of course, with that.
Um, you know, and he always had his own Trump wine, Trump stakes
when he first ran for office.
He, he posed with his Trump stakes, um, and that has cheapened the brand and
changed the presidency and made make it more of a commercial enterprise,
which is really what authoritarians do.
The, the presidency and the chief executive office are for sale.
Um, and when you get.
If you've been there long enough like a Putin, it becomes a kleptocracy where
the whole state machinery is about, um, enriching you personally and your cronies.
It seems like that's where we're headed.
Yes, I at a cki ocracy.
Yeah.
Be because already I've lost count.
Uh, you know, the count has to be revised upwards every week of how much money,
uh, not just he, him personally, but also uh, Trump businesses and thus his family.
Um, and then of course, this is classic the family of the commerce secretary.
And so what, what you get is this kind of, it's called the inner sanctum.
Uh, and these are people, some are cabinet.
Like, uh, minister of com, the Secretary of Commerce, and some
are hangers on or family members.
The wits, the, the Kushners and all of them have to make deals and make money
from, uh, the leader being in office.
And so the dynamics that are unfolding in the United States are exactly what
has happened in Hungary, in Turkey, of course, in Russia and other places.
Yeah, I, I wanna shift gears, uh, in a second, but just, are you surprised at
all by the, almost total capitulation of any institutions or individuals,
uh, institutions a or individuals, uh, in the Republican party to a person?
There seems to be literally no pushback whatsoever.
Uh, I'm not surprised, uh, about the party because he, uh, he being Trump and
Company used their power, uh, out when they were out of, uh, when they were out
of office brilliantly to, to complete the domestication of the Republican party.
And the main thing they did was January 6th, which left,
uh, Republican, uh, members of Congress running for their lives.
And one of the saddest things, um, is that this was traumatic for everyone there.
Uh, and some people, certainly Mike Pence, but others, uh, missed their
appointment with, uh, violence by only 30 or 60 seconds, and you
don't forget something like that.
And yet, Trump required them to forget their trauma, to bury it and to actually
proclaim that day as a patriotic day.
And so psychologically.
That was such a shock that nobody's allowed to talk about
that, uh, that and other things.
Like his criminal trial, when everybody, Matt Gates, everybody came
dressed as Trump to cheer him on.
There'd been all these, there were all these occasions.
By the time he got back to office, the party was completely domesticated.
Um, and so that doesn't surprise me.
What, what I've been more surprised is, um, people like Tim Cook, um,
people who have the means and the power just on their own, but certainly
along with others, uh, at their level.
To oppose, to oppose Trump and to actually make a difference in saving our democracy.
And instead all of them decided to fold and become collaborators and
give him trophies and presence.
And that's, that's very dispiriting.
'cause they don't have to do this.
They actually have the power and the means not to do it.
Yeah.
And I, I think it's also fair to say that by capitulating the, we have,
instead of joining together and creating United Force against, uh, the.
Um, this corrupt, uh, autocratic government we know
or faced with it increase it.
It increases the size on the target of the backs of people who don't have power
and means that's, uh, to fight back.
So it is that, that's the tragedy.
And, and, but that's the, the kind of making an example that autocrats do,
that's an autocrat gain making example.
And if one folds or they get one to become corrupted, it's an
example that you better do it too.
Um, or you or look what can happen to you.
And finally, section C authoritarian nostalgia
So how did you move from studying museum pieces and art
crime into, uh, into monuments?
Well, so my PhD is in ancient Greek and Roman arts, and when monuments
began being protested in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George
Floyd, people were commenting online like, isn't this a civilized
people don't take down monuments?
Um, this is horrible.
And, and I was thinking, well, studying the ancient world, everything
that I study has been at one point.
Torn down and thrown into a pit and then buried for thousands of years.
Uh, we actually, as humans, this is what we do.
We make monuments and then we tear them down as soon as we decide
we wanna honor somebody else.
So I thought I could maybe add some.
Perspective, uh, and then having my skills in researching fraud, I started
to realize that so many of the most controversial monuments in the US were
essentially fundraising scams, uh, where a bunch of money was embezzled
from, from people who wanted to support racism, essentially by putting up
giant monuments to white supremacy.
So I thought, you know, maybe that's some interesting information
for our current debates.
They got got As they should.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
As somebody who grew up in the South, I would just say like, as a, a young black
man growing up in the shadow of these monuments, watching them go down, um,
felt like finally, finally, this country was recognizing me in some small way.
And I was completely unsurprised at the uproar from a lot of people who
wanted to keep these monuments up.
But the, when you dig into like why these monuments were placed
down, a lot of 'em were done.
Just, especially when we're talking about civil war monuments in, in,
in the South and in other places.
They were primarily.
Put there to silence or, or to intimidate, um, the black population in the set area.
Yeah.
I call them victory monuments.
They're not about the defeat of the confederates, they're about the
victory of Jim Crow and other means of reclaiming political and economic power
for the white population of the south.
Yeah.
And so.
Talk to me a little bit about the monuments themselves and how
a lot of those were, were scams.
Like I, I had never heard of that before.
So, um, for example, just outside of Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia
is the world's largest Confederate monument, a gigantic carving into
the side of a cliff of, um, Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis.
That was launched in 1914 by a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, working with the
United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Klan enthusiastically embraced the project.
They stacked the board.
They took a bunch of the donations.
Essentially no progress was made for years and years and years until the 1950s
when as a sign of resistance to Brown V Board, the state of Georgia took over
the monument and finally finished it so it wasn't finished until the 1970s.
And to me it's, the makers said it should be a shrine to the south.
It's more like a shrine to a scam.
The Klan leaders who, who led the project even fired Borglum at a
certain point 'cause they thought he was taking too much money.
Uh, but he landed on his feet because he persuaded some, uh, Dakota
businessman to sponsor him to carve what turned into Mount Rushmore.
So he defected from.
Glorifying the Confederacy to carve, uh, a monument to the union.
So he didn't really care about the, the glory of the Confederacy.
He just wanted to make some money.
So in the United States, how have monuments, you know,
historically been funded?
Well, the American government, both state and federal, has always
been a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to putting up public art.
So most monuments that we see were actually privately fundraised,
planned, and then donated to local governments, so they're not.
Really public art.
They were put up by small groups, uh, for reasons.
If you look for example, at the Confederate Monument that used
to be in Birmingham, Alabama.
This is a little weird that Birmingham had a Confederate monument in the first
place because they were founded as a city, well after the close of the Civil War.
Um, and the monument went up in two parts, both of which were.
In response to interracial unionization efforts.
Uh, so the leaders of the, the owners and managers of the mines,
uh, when the miners were threatening to strike, said, no, no, no, no, no.
We need to remind our white workers that they have to keep maintaining
the segregation that their fathers or grandfathers fought for.
So let's put up this Civil War monument.
Um, so monuments don't tell you very.
Detailed versions of history, but also even thinking about history is kind
of leading you on the wrong track.
When you look at, well, who is actually paying for these Monument
mibi put up and who, what did they actually want from them?
So tell me, like, just pulling back a little bit, what's the relationship
between monuments and society?
Monuments are our visions of the future.
We put up a monument when we want people to aspire to that condition.
Uh, we put up monuments to honor people, to inspire people
to follow their examples.
So that sounds good and cheerful, right?
It's nothing wrong with having models and aspirations, but you
kind of have to think about.
Monuments are expensive, so who has the money to pay for them?
Who has the political power to.
Put them in place permanently, and you'll often see that monuments are
used to try and shape a community into a different form that it currently has.
I live in New York City, for example, and almost all of the monuments put up into
the last few decades are of, of white men.
And what kind of message does that send to this incredibly diverse
community of who deserves honor?
And, and you said earlier that like throughout time we have erected
monuments and taken them down.
Can you kind of talk that cycle through with me?
Yeah, well take the Romans for example.
Uh, Roman emperors would win a victory at war and put up a big
victory monument, um, a triumphal arch or portraits of themselves.
Uh, and then after the emperor died, the Senate would vote and decide
was this a good owner or a bad one?
Do we want to decide officially that.
They have become a deity and are to be honored forever, or do
we want to forget their memory.
And it was about, um, a third, a third, a third, a third was no vote.
A third were deities.
A third were their memories.
Um, were subjected to what we call dumb NIO memorial.
And if that happened to you, they would chisel the face off your
statues and carve on your successor.
Uh, the Romans were, were thrifty that way they reused.
Wow.
So they recycled.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow.
Or they would break things up, um, or melt it down and make it into induced statue.
So this was a pretty common, um, strategy of, uh, just like we do it
in a, a much more peaceable form.
When a new president is, uh, elected, you take down the photo
of the current president from the, the post office and put up.
The successor or, uh, et cetera, et cetera.
So, uh, if in the, in the ancient world, they had a, a more intense version of
this, but you can think about the tearing down of statues of Saddam after, uh, his
fall or the, the removal of statues of, of Lenin across the Soviet satellite states.
This is something that we do, and there are changes in power, and usually we don't
notice it because it's more peaceful.
Uh, there's an official removal of, uh, the signs of the previous regime
and a substitution with the others.
So what was special and different about the summer of 2020 was,
um, the change came from below.
It was unofficial.
Uh, we mostly saw people not tearing down monuments with their bare hands.
Uh, that's obviously hard to do, but modifying monuments by adding paints,
signage, projections, et cetera.
we want the museums to talk about the history of our country
in a fair manner, not in a woke manner or in a racist manner.
Brian Stevenson is in Chicago.
Brian, good morning.
Good morning.
Good to be with you.
Good to have you here.
When you hear your president talk about the museums in your country as being woke
and racist, what goes through your mind?
Well, I think it's very misinformed.
I doubt, uh, the president has actually been to any of the museums that he's
accusing of this distortion of history.
I actually think we've made a little progress in the last decade in helping
our nation more honestly reckon with our history, the African American History
Museum in Washington, the Smithsonian.
Mm. Didn't open until 2015, which meant that for most of America's history we
didn't have a cultural institution.
The federal government supported that.
Talked honestly about the legacy of slavery or, or segregation or lynching.
We still have a really remarkable absence of cultural institutions that
deal honestly with, uh, this history.
That's the reason why we created our legacy sites.
But the other thing that crosses my mind when I hear the president say that is
I think he is going to burden general.
Rations of Americans with the same weight, the same contamination, the same
pollution that Mayan generation inherited.
We have a history of, of slavery, of racial injustice, and I think
it's corrupted the atmosphere.
It's like toxins in the atmosphere.
And if we just had the courage to talk honestly about this past, I think
we could get to something better.
Why do you think some Americans don't wanna talk about the
parts of your history that.
Are really uncomfortable, whether it's slavery or lynching, or segregation,
why do they avoid talking about that?
Well, I think we've never had to.
I look at what happened in South Africa after the collapse of apartheid, you
know, a black majority took over.
They were able to shape the future and they insisted on a process
of truth and reconciliation.
And I think that helped that country move forward by giving space to the black
victims of apartheid to, to talk about their harm, their trauma, their suffering.
It did something important.
And a handful of perpetrators also gave voice to their regret
and that did something important.
In Germany, you see a nation that has reckoned with the history of the
Holocaust in a pretty radical way.
The Holocaust Memorial is in the center of Berlin.
Students in Germany are required, uh, to study the history of the Holocaust, and
I think that has helped that country.
Move into the 21st century.
They were the villain of the 20th century, but now they're considered
an ally, a strong partner, a believer in democracy, and they're not
perfect, but they've made progress.
In the United States, we haven't made that same commitment.
And you have to understand, a black majority took over, uh, after
the apartheid collapse in South Africa, the Nazis lost the war,
and so there was a shift in power.
There's never really been a shift in power in the United States, even the
Civil War, uh, which was fought over the.
The institution of slavery.
Um, I've always believed that the great evil of slavery wasn't an
involuntary servitude and forced labor, bondage, humiliation, violence,
all of those things were horrific.
The great evil though of slavery, for me, the enduring evil was the enduring
narrative of racial difference that we created to justify enslavement.
People who enslaved, other people didn't wanna think of themselves as
immoral or indecent or unchristian.
And so how do you feel decent when you're pulling away mothers from their
screaming children, knowing those mothers will never see those children
again because you're selling them?
Well, you need a narrative.
And we created a false narrative in America where we said that black
people aren't as good as white people.
And that narrative gave rise to an ideology of white
supremacy, of racial hierarchy.
And the North won the Civil War.
But the south one, the narrative war, those ideas persisted past the Civil War.
That, that's the narrative struggle that you've talked about.
Um, that's, that's playing out right now in the United States, you believe.
Absolutely.
I mean, I do think we are in the midst of a narrative struggle, and I believe it is
our generation, my generation and younger people who now must take up this struggle.
And I put this in historical context.
When you're enslaved, you have to focus on freedom.
The enslaved in this country couldn't get to the narrative 'cause they had to focus
on their freedom during the first half of the 20th century we're dealing with.
With racial terrorism throughout the American South, and when
you're being terrorized like that, you have to focus on security.
In the 1950s and sixties, we had a courageous generation who had gotten
to a slightly more secure place and they began focusing on civil rights.
And that generation of civil rights activism made it possible for me and
people of my generation to get college degrees, to get professional degrees.
And now we're finally positioned to engage in the narrative struggle to
confront this false idea of racial hierarchy and white supremacy and
racial difference to push this nation.
To something better.
And museums and literature and content, creative content are the
beginnings of this struggle, and you're seeing a reaction against it.
And the only thing I would stress on that is whenever there has been
a forward step when abolitionists began talking about ending slavery,
uh, the South reacted violent.
They made it a capital crime for an enslaved person to be in
possession of abolitionist material.
During the time of terror violence, they burned down the home of
Ida B. Wells for her activism against terrorism and lynching.
During the Civil Rights movement, black people were, were threatened and meed
and and fired, and people were killed.
Segregation was calcified in some areas, but we prevailed.
And so you're now seeing, I think that.
Moment of resistance to progress in the comments of President Trump and
many others who are characterizing a future unburdened by racial inequality,
a future unburdened by this legacy of slavery and lynching as woke.
When I see it as just a Better America.
A Greater America America that has the opportunity to be all that we
talk about in our language, in our constitution and in our literature.
Practically, what should those institutions that receive federal
funding like the Smithsonian do when the president says he wants their
funding to be reviewed, but also their exhibits to be reviewed so that they,
they show the brightness of America, what should they do, do you think?
I, I really think they have to resist, and I know that's not comfortable.
I know that's not, is that, is that prac, is that practical for them given that the,
the federal funding that they receive.
I, I, I think it is.
I mean, I, I, I say this, I should qualify my comments because our sites,
uh, we didn't take a penny of federal funding when we built our sites.
And, and so it's easier for me to take this position.
I wanna acknowledge that.
I say we didn't take a penny.
We were actually never offered a penny for our sites.
But I don't think we can let funding sources shape control and.
Strict the content in cultural institutions because cultural
institutions lose their integrity.
They lose their credibility, they lose their purpose when they are
censored and sanctioned, and so it may mean that they're going to have
to shift to a model that relies.
Entirely on private support, but I really believe that's a better way forward.
Uh, even though our cultural institutions don't get federal funding,
we are a nonprofit organization.
You know, the government may come after us and say, we're gonna take
away your 5 0 1 C3 status, which is a status that allows people to donate
to us and then get tax credits.
If you take away that status, it'll be much harder for us.
But as I've said before, I would rather be.
Taxed and a truth teller than to be silent and untaxed.
What, what?
I just think that What about, what about beyond cultural institutions?
I mean, it's, you also have.
You have law firms, you have universities, you have newspapers
that fear, retribution and fear.
Yeah.
That they need to bend the knee and they say that they have to do this.
The leaders of those institutions, and we saw this particularly in the,
the law firms say that they have to do it because they don't have a choice.
That if they don't, to your point, the, the administration could
come after them and destroy them.
Yeah, I think they do have a choice.
Uh, many law firms accommodated the president's, uh, demands and gave
into this, but many law firms didn't.
They resisted.
They sued, and I think they have come out of that.
Chapter as victors as the institutions to respect.
Many educational institutions are pushing back, uh, they're saying no.
And yes, there will be cost to that.
And I think there's never a way to move toward justice.
There's never a way to achieve the kind of freedom that many of us believe in
Without cost, it's never been true.
And during the time of enslavement, there were huge costs.
During the time of lynching, huge costs.
The civil rights movement was never comfortable.
It was never convenient.
People would be on their knees praying for the right to vote.
They'd get beaten and battered and bloodied.
They'd go home, change their clothes, wipe the blood off, and
they'd go back and do it again.
And for me, that is the lesson that I'm taking into this moment.
Yes, there will be consequences to standing up when people say, sit down
to speaking when people say, be quiet.
But those consequences.
Part far less than the consequences of tolerating bigotry, giving into
authoritarianism, and I think that's the best moments in world history
are the moments when people said no at great cost that said no.
Even though it might mean that they lose something, we're not
doing it just to be oppositional.
We're doing it because we believe there's something better.
I talk about.
Slavery and lynching and segregation, not because I wanna punish America.
I talk about these institutions because I wanna liberate us.
I wanna create a nation where the children of our children are no longer
burdened by this history, where black kids are not presumed dangerous and
guilty because of their color, where white and black and brown communities
have an opportunity to relate with one another without the scourge, the, the
bigotry, the violence of our history.
Constraining those relationships.
So given everything you both have said, which is we're in this unusual position
where the federal government is a major actor in, what do we wanna call it?
Storing whitewashing history,
both
prey history, all of the history, any of those.
Um, it's Black History Month, which is this month in this year, in this moment.
Is there an argument for thinking of or practicing Black
History Month differently?
You know, I, I, I've been thinking a lot about this.
Um, I was recently in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and I bring my kids.
I'm from New Orleans.
That's my hometown.
Uh, my parents still live there.
Happy Fat Tuesday.
There you go.
Um.
And I, I want my kids to have, I bring my kids often to New Orleans 'cause
it's a place that means a lot to me.
Uh, and I want them to have a connection to that city.
And one of the things that we did kind of between the, the celebrations and the
festivals and the parades is we got in the car with my mom and went to her elementary
school, which is no longer there.
It's a school that was called T.J. Semmes.
And we went there because my mom was among the first black students to desegregate.
That school or to integrate that school.
She was there after, you know, there were the four little girls,
including Ruby Bridges, who integrated New Orleans schools in 1960, and I
brought my kids there with my mom in this moment because I've been
thinking a lot about what it means for people to understand black history.
Not only is something is like about Rosa Parks and Frederick
Douglass and Martin Luther King, but also is this thing that's.
The people who are right next to us, right?
Like their grandmother, not Martin Luther King, not Rosa Parks, not these people
in the books, like their grandmother was among the first wave of students
to integrate a school in New Orleans.
And I want them both to understand them, that because of their
proximity to it, but also in this specific moment, I think it's.
A reminder that like they can, the Trump administration can try to change a museum.
They can try to change how things are taught in school.
They can try to take away DEI in higher ed.
They can try to do all of these things.
But we still, within the sort of micro units of families and communities still
have the power to share this history in ways that I think can be really meaningful
for all of us and for young people.
And, and it wasn't just for my kids.
Like I got to hear my mom talk about her experience going into this school.
I think all of these things, for me, when I think of Black History
Month, it's about both understanding and appreciating the sort of Jackie
Robinsons and, and the like, but it's also about remembering that.
Those larger figures are only possible because of the sort of what's
happening on the most granular level.
And actually to that point, right, it it is to say that.
It's the actions of each individual, right?
It is you think historically, it's like, oh, well, Frederick
Douglass actually didn't have to write those things that he wrote.
Um, and they, they praised him because it was like, oh, that was a, that was a, you
know, really brave thing of you to do.
Our grandparents didn't have to send a. Our moms and dads to the
schools that they send them to.
A lot of people didn't.
Right,
right.
Where it's like, actually it's a little bit too dangerous to do that.
Um, and similarly, right?
My, my mom was born in 1963 in Alabama where, you know,
four little girls were killed.
And a church, you know, this, this sanctuary, the place where you're
supposed to feel safest, right?
This is, this is living history that, that, that individuals experience
and continue to experience.
Um, and it's the individual actions that people take
and, and why.
Is it important to remember history and its difficulty?
Like, you know, even within families, people keep secrets for decades and
decades, and they don't like to talk about the bad things that happen.
It's a common human impulse.
So why is it important to remember something like what
your mother went through?
I, I tell people all the time, America is a place that has provided
unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across
generations in ways that their own ancestors could have never imagined.
It is also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions
of other people, and both of those things are the story of America.
It's not one over here and one over there.
You get to pick this one and not pick that one.
Both of those things are the story of this country, and you have to hold.
Both of those realities alongside one another.
Why?
Well, I think when we think of ourselves, when I think of who I am as a person, I'm
someone who's done things in my life that I'm proud of, and I'm someone who's done
things in my life that I'm not proud of because I'm human and I make mistakes.
And what I try to do and what I try to teach my children is you.
Acknowledge those mistakes.
You try to learn from those mistakes to become a better
version of yourself in the future.
And so if that's the standard that I hold myself to the standard, I hold
my children to the standard I hold my friends and loved ones to, why would I
not hold my country to that same standard?
And I think the implications for it are that if you don't, like I,
I remember being a kid growing up.
In the nineties in New Orleans and being inundated with these messages about all
the things that were wrong with black people, that the reason there was no,
there was so much violence and poverty and, and inequality in the black community
was because of something that black people had done or it failed to do.
And it was coming from the media, it was coming from politicians, it
was coming from celebrities, it was coming from, you know, everywhere.
And I remember this feeling of hearing these messages and not having the
historical context or intellectual toolkit with which to push back against it.
And what I felt and experienced as a child was a sort of, uh, paralysis, it
was like an emotional paralysis where I knew what I was hearing was wrong.
But I didn't know how to say it was wrong.
I didn't have that language.
And it wasn't until years later when I encountered the scholarship and I
encountered the art and I encountered the film and I encountered the, the
history that explained that like, oh, the reason one part of New Orleans
looks one way and another part of New Orleans looks another way.
It's not 'cause of the people in those communities.
It's 'cause what has been done to those communities or what's been extracted
from those communities, generation after generation, after generation.
And when you learn that history, it is so profoundly freeing and so
profoundly liberating because this country can't lie to you anymore.
Adam this week, there was a pushback against this trend we're describing from
a federal judge who ruled about the panels at what's known as the President's house
in Philadelphia that were taken down.
It was quite a strong ruling.
She quoted Orwell.
She said, an agency cannot arbitrarily decide what is true.
How significant is that ruling?
Like, have you seen other kinds of pushback like that?
We have seen, um, federal judges push back, um, pretty forcefully
against the Trump administration dictates, um, their executive orders
and maneuvers that they made, right?
Whether that is removing the placards without consulting the city, um,
in an effort to sort of say that the history that they want, um, to
say is, is a true history, right?
The order functionally says, right, this is.
It can't just hinge on whether there's a transfer of power, um, what we actually
believe about what we're saying.
Right.
It is a very Orwellian view of the way we do history.
Right.
And it is, I think.
Americans, um, people generally think of history in a different way than
scholars think of history, right?
Where yes, there are places and dates and names, um, but how those things
are remembered is sort of subject to your interpretation oftentimes, but.
There are realities.
The fact that George Washington transported people back and forth and
wrote to other people to say that, Hey, how can I get around this law
that says that I can't keep people here for longer than this period of time?
Those are just realities.
You cannot change the facts of the situation.
You can only change how you remember those facts, and if you
decide to publicly display those facts, and in a sense, right.
What we have seen over the last year and change in a really aggressive
fashion is that effort to remove those public memories of the
facts that happen in this country.
Although that.
That conversation about facts does often confuse me a little bit.
Like what we do do is decide which facts we're gonna present.
Mm-hmm.
Which is what the Trump administration is saying.
Like, why do we have to put those on display?
You know,
I mean, I think it goes back to what we were saying before.
It it part of what you, I was a high school teacher.
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, I'm, I feel very strongly about the idea that.
You know, so the, the Trump administration would suggest that the part of why, you
know, you shouldn't teach so much about Washington owning slaves or Jefferson
owning slave people, or, um, you know, why the presidential house should remove
these things is because they, they don't want, they would say, because
they don't want so much emphasis on it.
And they would say that teachers, um, and, and museums are attempting
to indoctrinate students.
They're using the language of indoctrination.
And what I find to be true is that there is this attempt to conflate or
to make it so that the teaching of empiricism, like of primary source
realities to suggest that that is somehow an ideological project rather than.
Uh, an empirical one, right?
What the, the idea that what you have to do, what I tried to do when I was
a teacher and what I tried to do as a someone who writes about history is not
necessarily to convince the reader to.
Believe X or believe Y, but it is to lay out all of it.
I'm actually not interested in if you think Thomas Jefferson was evil or good.
What I do want you to do is sit with the fact that he both wrote Declaration
of Independence, and he also wrote notes to the state of Virginia that
black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind.
What I want you to do is to sit with the fact that he wrote, you
know that all men are created equal.
And that he enslaved 600 people, including four of his own children.
My role is not to tell you what to think, but what I do have
to do is present the evidence.
What a teacher does have to do is present the evidence.
What a museum does have to do is present the evidence to say, this is the totality.
This is the full picture.
Obviously the thing that I focus my time and attention on, which is not
global is, is domestic elections.
And I just want to like, give you a rundown of how I see where we stand.
Um, Donald Trump has.
In the last few weeks said, uh, he laments the fact that he did not
send the National Guard to seize ballot boxes after the 2020 election.
That was a statement he gave in an interview to the New York Times.
Anyone can go read it.
Um, on their website.
He, uh, said that, uh, uh, no incumbent president wants to have
midterm elections and he doesn't think we should have midterm elections.
Now.
His press secretary said he was joking.
You can.
Check for yourself.
It doesn't in context what he told Reuters, who he told this
to, doesn't look like a joke.
They didn't report as a joke.
So that's the cancellation of elections.
He, uh, announced, uh, at the World Economic Forum, the Davos, uh, speech,
uh, what he called breaking news, uh, which I thought was interesting.
Uh, that, uh, that, uh, there will be, uh.
Prosecutions of people who were involved in the 2020 election.
Um, I don't know exactly what he has in mind, but presumably it's either p
Biden or states or people around the Biden campaign or election officials
who, who knows what it is, but that he, he, uh, uh, he said that, and
this, these are just the recent things.
Obviously he continues to say the elections are rigged, uh, and he has.
Continued to disparage, um, the voting voters Voting laws wants to control the
method of voting ban mail-in ballots.
He's, his Department of Justice is suing 24 states and the District of
Columbia to access sensitive voting data.
I mean, it's kind of like from the legal to the rhetorical, to
the authoritarian to whatever.
It's kind of a constant drumbeat from him where.
Do authoritarian stand relative to elections because one of the things that
I keep hearing experts in, um, Orban.
Say that is hopeful is that, you know, he was able to consolidate
electoral power because there was a central election commission or some,
some central body that allowed him to essentially, eventually rig the rules.
But that number one, that took him time.
Um, and number two, that, you know, the United States doesn't have that
and therefore, um, uh, we don't really need to worry about this with Trump.
I buy that and I don't, right?
Like, so I buy it in that we don't have a centralized system.
Elections, we have local elections, uh, and we have state elections.
We're gonna have elections.
So Donald Trump can't cancel them because they are state run.
But that, that decentralized nature is both a, um.
An opportunity for him and a, and a drawback.
And the drawback is exactly as people say.
Like he doesn't control every, uh, you know, he can't issue one decree
to a federal election official.
The flip side is though that, you know, when we talk about election threats.
The visibility of those of us in the pro-democracy
movement is, is also limited.
Like, you know, he, Donald Trump has inspired a lot of really
bad people to, to be in election offices or to intimidate voters.
And that highly decentralized system also makes it really hard to tackle those
problems because, you know, I sometimes, uh, would say leading into 2024.
They'd say, are you worried about certification?
I'd say, I'm very worried about certification.
They'd say, but don't you have lawyers and aren't the ags ready?
And I'd say, look, here's the thing.
Um, you know, let's just take Minnesota.
'cause I, I was not an example, I used them, but it's on top of mind right now.
Minnesota's got 87 counties.
So like, sure could, could we.
Prevent there from being a certification crisis in Hennepin County or Minneapolis
is, and Ramsey County where St. Paul is and you know, in Duluth and, but
like are there enough private lawyers?
Does the ags office have enough lawyers to go into.
87 counties.
And by the way, Minnesota's not the large, doesn't have the
largest number of jurisdictions.
You have states like, uh, Wisconsin, where they certify at the town level.
Uh, you're talking about thousand more than a thousand jurisdictions.
So that, that it's, it's both an opportunity and a drawback if Donald
Trump is able to inspire and if he is able to use these paramilitary, you
know, I don't know what, I don't know if paramilitary is the right term, but the,
these sort of state, you know, these, uh.
Federal government, ice type people.
As you say, it's a big country.
It's a geographical and a logistical problem.
I'm curious, um, though from the non-legal standpoint, why do you think
he views this rhetoric as helpful to him?
Uh, is maybe my first question, and then how seriously should
we take it as the second?
Well, he keeps using it because it worked beautifully for him.
Um, he's, he's one of the most skilled propagandist in history and he, from the
second he started on the campaign trail in 2015, he started talking about elections.
So.
So we had year, people had years and years of him, um, sowing distrust
with the election system and all the aspects of it that you mentioned.
And then this is, it's unbelievable.
He got tens of millions of people to think that he didn't, that
he didn't, that he won the 2020 election and he wasn't working in
a one party state like, uh, Duche.
He was working in, in a democracy, uh, that had an open media and he
still got these people to believe.
And so he became like the wronged leader.
You know, during the Biden years and then he had January 6th.
Wasn't Orban able to do that also though?
Yes.
Orban, Orban did a lot of things like that, but Orban didn't
convince tens of millions of people that he won an election.
Um, and nor did Orban stage a an insurrection to, to try and, you
know, that he convinced people that was wrong, writing a wrong.
Uh, right.
You know, like avenging a stolen election.
That was the whole rationale.
And that's officially the rationale now on the White House, uh, webpage.
Right?
He's used this and it's worked for him before, so he's gonna keep using it.
And the thing about autocrats is that it, it does take a long time
for them to escalate, usually with elections and one thing they do.
Um, they do a lot of things you already mentioned, but a key thing
is that you've gotta get rid of anybody who is a major rival.
And so, uh, one of those people in Russia was Alexia Navalny who
started, and, and this is why we never ever give up on elections.
Uh, one of my mantras is you use every tool that and space you have available
to you and you, and as long as you have elections, you never give up on them.
Never give up on voting.
And so it was when Putin cracked down after 2012 that Navalny
started to run for office.
He ran for the mayor of Moscow.
Then he wanted to be on the president on the presidential ballot.
Putin escalated his work against him, work poisoning, jailing because he
needed to get rid of him as a candidate.
And then the same thing happened to, uh, Ekrem İmamoğlu the mayor
of Istanbul in Turkey, who.
Clearly would've.
He won the, he won against all expectations, uh, on an affordability
platform, similar to the New York mayoral race and radical
love empathy, hugging people.
So he is unbeatable, great charisma.
Erdogan tried for years to, didn't know what to do with this guy,
and, uh, tried to invalidate his, you know, high school diploma or
college diploma, so he couldn't run.
Finally, he jailed him.
And so they game the system by, um, sowing distrust by, um, getting, you know,
hollowing out institutions and getting the right meaning wrong for democracy.
Election officials, judges, very important.
If you have election tribunals, you gotta clear the decks
of all pro-democracy people.
The last resort, you start jailing or killing any rivals.
And so that's, but you keep the elections going and so Erdogan says.
I'm not a dictator because Turkey has elections.
So, so that's the menu there.
I had a back and forth, uh, with Tim Miller, whose podcast I love.
He and I were on M-S-N-B-C together and we, we, I think I was thinking too much
like a lawyer and maybe, uh, he was right, but we were talking about popular opinion.
He said Donald Trump is really weak because his popularity is low.
And I was like, I don't think Donald Trump cares about his popularity.
He seems pretty strong to me because like he is, you know, doing all these things.
Um.
How much do they care?
Like how much does public opinion outside of the, obviously
the electoral context, right?
But like how much does just, does like raw popularity versus non
popularity matter to an authoritarians ability to get stuff done?
They do care.
I'm kind of in the middle between you and Tim.
The reason that, um, that Trump, uh, did that horrible AI video of him basically
throwing his own excrement on, um.
Uh, voters, and that's, that tells you they, they despise their people.
They meaning, they despise the people who don't love them, who are not
cheering for them because really.
Who would they be if people didn't show up for their rallies
and cheer them and love them?
And they have like a bottomless need for adulation.
And, and because of that, because they're actually very fragile, insecure PE-people,
um, that's why they have the grievances.
And if you don't love them, if you protest or, or, uh, you know, mobilize.
Uh, in the legal realm, legal resistance, whatever form of resistance,
then they hate you and then they don't care what happens to you.
And we're back to, uh, humiliating you, scor you and showing domination over you.
So it's, it's goes back to fascism.
There's this like a, just like a. Bipolar.
Either you're in or you're out.
Either you love me or I hate you kind of mentality.
But that's because they do care.
They do care what people think.
The Supreme Court last week heard a case that challenged part of the Voting
Rights Act and the, the fear that people have, and it's not universally
shared, but there, it's pretty acute in some corners, is that the important
parts of that act could be gutted.
That the, there's a belief that perhaps within the conservative
majority on the court, that those protections that the Voting Rights
Act offered are no longer necessary.
Do you worry about that and what would the impact of that be?
Oh, I'm deeply worried about it.
I think that we have a court, which is for the first time in my life,
uh, seemingly, uh, hostile to many of those civil rights victories that have
made life so much better in America.
You know, without the civil rights movement, we wouldn't be having,
you know, these college football games where schools and states
rally behind the team in Alabama.
Nothing is a greater source of pride than our college football teams.
None of that success, none of those championships would've been
possible without integration.
Those teams are.
Predominantly kids of color.
We love sports in America and we're forgetting that for decades the best
athletes couldn't play professional basketball or baseball or football.
It took a civil rights movement.
It took a change in the mindset, and we've reaped the benefits of that.
The problem is, is that we have a court that hasn't understood.
The challenges of this history in the context of things like voting, and I think
the Supreme Court is just misinformed.
The state of Alabama where I live never wanted to give
black people the right to vote.
They were forced to give black people the right to vote.
Every southern legislator in 1965 voted against the Voting Rights Act, and
after the Voting Rights Act was passed, they began scheming on how to limit
the political power of black people.
And that has gone on consistently from 1965 to today, and I think that's
what this court is not appreciated.
Not understanding, and one of the consequences of not having honest history
is you have a lot of people in power.
You have a lot of policy makers that are operating and making decisions
with a skewed view of this history.
We never did anything remedial in 1965 to help black people recover
from a century of disenfranchisement.
I, I joke sometimes I wanna go back to 1965 with my Harvard law degree.
And I want to advocate, I want to ask for some different things
than we asked for in 1965.
I think in 1965 it would not have been wrong, uh, for black people
to say, you need to repair the damage done by disenfranchisement.
We do remedies in all kinds of contexts in business and corporation and tax.
We, we create remedies and if I could get back to 1965.
I'd be asking and requiring these states to make it easier for black people to
vote because we made voting so difficult.
I think black people should have been automatically registered in 1965, just to
reckon with the history of intimidation and violence that we subjected black
people to when they went to the poll.
I don't think it would've been wrong to put the burden on states
like Mississippi and Georgia and Texas to go into black communities.
And get their votes.
And that would've shown a real commitment to eliminating the harm, the burden,
the bigotry that a hundred years of disenfranchisement had created.
Instead, we resisted all of that.
We didn't do any of that.
Had we done those things, we might not need a voting rights Act in 2025.
We might be in a different place, but we did the opposite.
We looked for new schemes to disenfranchise, we looked
for new ways to limit.
We created gerrymandered.
Political districts to, to limit the political power.
That's been our history for the last 60 years.
And so, yes, I am worried about what the court will do, but what
encourages me is that it's too late.
We've had the right to vote.
We've elected too many people into positions of power.
Black people in this country, poor people in this country,
marginalized people in this country.
We'll never go back to the kind of conditions and the
powerlessness and the depoliticized disenfranchised state that we had.
It's gonna be tricky, but I am persuaded that whatever the court
does, there is going to be a response and there's going to be a fight
and a commitment on behalf of.
Those who are being marginalized to make their voices heard.
That's a really optimistic and surprisingly optimistic, I think to
some people take on this because there are a lot of people who see this as,
you know, a knife on the neck of, of democracy in the United States.
When you look at actively disenfranchising people, um, removing black majority
districts and perhaps tilting the table in favor of, of a different
party that that threatens democracy at.
Its at its core.
But there's a hint of, of optimism in what you're saying.
Yeah, I wanna be very sober about the threat.
I mean, it, it would be a catastrophe for the court to undermine the Voting
Rights Act, but you, you don't believe the people will, will allow that to continue.
Well, I, I think there will be a moment of retreat, but I am persuaded that we have
many of us inherited this hope that makes it impossible for us to give into that.
I mean, I, I started out as a lawyer representing people on death row in
a state that had one of the highest execution rates in the country.
We had no money, we had no resources.
We had to believe things.
We have not seen, and I'm proud that we've gotten 150 people off of death row.
Many people who were wrongly convicted, many people who are free.
We challenged conditions of confinement.
We challenged death and prison sentences for children.
And people were saying, there's no way, uh, that that will change.
And, and, and now here we are.
I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.
We are in a critical moment, a crisis moment.
America, but the last thing we can afford to become is hopeless about
our capacity to overcome this moment.
Our hope is our superpower.
I've just learned that my great grandparents were enslaved, and
yet they had a hope of freedom and it empowered them to do things
that I think probably didn't make sense to the hopeless around them.
My great-grandfather learned to read while he was enslaved.
It was against the law.
He could have been sold.
He could have been killed for learning to read, but his hope for freedom
caused him to take that risk because he knew one day he was going to be free.
And he didn't know in the 1850s that the Civil War would come in the 1860s.
But there it came.
And after emancipation, my grandmother said he would read
the newspaper to formerly enslaved people who didn't know how to read.
And my grandmother worked as a domestic her whole life, but she was a reader.
She would insist.
That we would read books before she would sometimes let us in the house.
And I grew up in a poor, racially segregated community, but my mom
bought us the World Book Encyclopedias.
When we were young kids, you didn't see a lot of hope outside the door.
People were poor.
People didn't have running water.
People worked in the poultry plants.
But in those books, I read all about the lawyers.
I read about the great things that people did, and it is that
legacy of hope that empowers.
Me that empowers the work that I do, but I think it empowers many of us.
We've come too far to be turned around now.
We don't yet know whether what we're living through in America
in 2025 is going to be a moment.
Or it's going to be an era.
I'm still pushing for it to be a moment.
A moment that can be corrected.
It'll be hard.
It'll be complicated with these political decisions, but we have to believe
that we can get to someplace better.
The thing that I was given by the generation that came before me is this.
Understanding that hope is an orientation of the spirit.
It's not rational and logical all the time.
It's just a place you occupy in the midst of conflict and struggle.
And they used to sing, we shall overcome even in the face
of violence and brutalizing.
State troopers and police officers, even when they were being chased
and menaced and threatened in bond, they still said, we shall overcome,
not we hope to overcome we shall.
And that is rooted in that hope orientation.
And I think the great things that America has done, they've done because there's.
Commitment and a spirit of hopefulness.
And that's what I think we have to have to hold onto in this moment.
We can't just give into the politics of fear and anger
I want to start with something that has been on my mind and trying
to understand, which is why has Donald Trump all of a sudden become
fixated on foreign intervention?
What do we learn from, uh, authoritarians in the past and in the, in the present?
You know, I always think of authoritarians as wanting to control the populace and
being actually sort of isolationist.
What am I missing here?
It's a dual dynamic.
On the one hand, they.
You're right, they want to control the population and they have
these national purity campaigns.
At the same time, they, uh, want to, uh, spread, they want to plunder the earth,
they want to plunder foreign countries.
Uh, we forget that, uh, you know, even the Holocaust was, uh, one of the biggest
criminal op operations in history.
Not only because of genocide, but because of plundering.
Everywhere they went, they plundered.
And we also see a dynamic where.
If leaders feel some pressure at home, uh, whether if they still have elections,
they feel they're getting unpopular or there's discontent, uh, brewing, they
can become, uh, more, they can use wars, imperialist wars, or other kinds of
military escapades to justify crackdown.
Emergency powers or just like bringing people into line.
And we see this in China with, uh, Xi Jinping when the economy
started to have a downturn.
He has purged between one third and one fifth of all military officials.
In recent years,
I wanna go back to the historical analogies, not because
they are perfect analogies.
Obviously the Holocaust was a unique historical event.
World War II was different than where we are now.
Every generation has its own challenges, but because I think that that, um, there
is a hole in my understanding of this, and therefore I suspect in a lot of the.
Publix, when I think of what fascist regimes were trying to do
in Italy and Spain and Germany, um, uh, I don't, you know, I, I think
of them as mostly inward focused.
Like they were trying to, as you say, engage in racial purity.
They were trying to control the economy.
They were, they were taking away civil liberties to say the least.
To what extent is the.
The interventionist abroad.
In other words, the expansionist impulse.
To what extent is that?
Part of that internal thing, or is it sort of runs intention with it?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, is it a, like the public can't object to it because they are being
subject to authoritarian at home?
Or is it actually part of the attraction and the popularity of the strongman?
It's both.
Um, so these are the, the classic fascists were empire builders.
And Franco's a little different, but he was very, they also are very, they
have these fixations, which we see with, uh, Trump in Greenland at the moment.
Um, but Franco was fixated, uh, to restore the grandeur of the Spanish
empire, but he, so he limited this to, to obsession with the last bit
of Spanish Morocco that existed.
And in fact.
He was so fixated on this that he didn't go into World War II on
the side of, uh, the axis Hitler was trying to get him to join.
And he didn't, uh, he didn't end up going in because Hitler thought he wanted
too much territory in North Africa, and he and, and Hitler said, I'd rather go
to the dentist and get my teeth pulled than deal with Franco ever again.
During the axis, they had this idea of a new world order.
They wanted to completely, uh, supplant democratic, uh,
internationalism the League of Nations and have a whole new civilization.
And so when we hear people like Stephen Miller talk about reviving, you know,
and protecting, uh, white Christian civilization, there is a history
of expansionism along those lines.
So I have to ask, 'cause I know you are a particular expert in,
um, the, uh, in Mussolini and the, uh, Italian fascist, uh, movement.
Was there an expansionist part to them as well?
We obviously know Hitler went into Poland and, and into, you know, uh,
uh, several other, uh, uh, countries, uh, uh, after, you know, the border of
Germany went into France, obviously.
Uh, but was, was there an expansionist part to Mussolini's form of fascism?
In fact, uh, Hitler, uh, adored and worshiped Mussolini and learned from
him and it, and it was Mussolini who started off the destabilization.
He invaded, uh, Ethiopia.
Which was an independent, uh, but it was a member of the League of Nations and the
first appeasement was not Munich, but, um, but nobody wanting to do anything to
stop, uh, Mussolini and Hitler learned from this and right after, so, you
know, Mussolini invades 1935 and Hitler starts doing his stuff, and the Italians
went into Yugoslavia, uh, Albania.
Um, they were partners with the Axis in, in many places in
France, they invaded seven Dimo in France, which we never remember.
So they did an enormous amount of damage.
I've looked at the war crimes records and sometimes.
The UN War Crimes Commission records and sometimes the Italians were
behaving worse than the Germans.
That's going to be it for today.
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