- [Announcer] This program was funded by the following.

Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb & Family, BP America, and also by, and by.

A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(dynamic music) - The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12.

- We are reinforcing democracy.

We are the ones who get to choose our future.

- Democracy is a fragile thing, it has to be defended, and it always has to be defended.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day, about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we'll explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people and the formidable challenges we face today.

We begin with the author of the bestselling book, "Democracy Awakening," Boston College professor, Heather Cox Richardson.

Her daily newsletter, "Letters from an American," reaching well over a million subscribers, puts our history in context and shows us that we've overcome major challenges to our democracy before, emerging stronger as a nation, while reminding us that our future is in our own hands.

Heather Cox Richardson, welcome.

- It's lovely to be here.

- So, so many people know you because of your daily newsletter, "Letters from an American."

How did that start?

What was the impetus of "Letters from an American"?

- Well, I didn't set out to write them, I was writing at the time an essay a week on Facebook, and hadn't done it for a while, and people were starting to worry about me.

And I happened to sit down on September 15th, 2019, to write an essay about what the US looked like to me that day.

And there were so many questions and so many comments that poured in because that was right at the moment when we knew there was a whistleblower that had suggested there was something untoward happening in the Trump administration about some phone call that people were curious about it and wanted to know how that system worked.

And so, not on the 16th, but on the 17th, I started answering some of those questions from my expertise as a political historian, and somebody whose studied both the presidency and Congress.

And then people asked more and more and more questions, and I've been writing ever since.

- What have you learned about Americans by doing "Letters from an American"?

- I have learned that Americans are really decent people and they're really smart people and they're really creative people.

And there is a large majority of people who have not been able to make their voices heard for a long time, and they are starting to do so.

And it's a really heartening and exciting time to be in this country and to watch that sleeping giant waking up.

- What has awakened the sleeping giant?

- I think the realization that our government is no longer representative, that it has tended, especially since 2015, to respond to a very small group of extremists who are trying to force on us a system of government and rules that we actually don't want as a majority.

And that realization was made clear, of course, so dramatically during the Trump years, but even since then, has made a lot of people say, "Listen, I might not agree with you about many issues.

I may not agree with you about taxes, or finances, or immigration, or cities, or rural broadband, but I can agree that these are decisions that we as a people need to make as a majority, not kowtowing to a very small minority that is trying to impose their will on the rest of us."

And that echoes our past, and is the United States at its strongest, I think.

- So, let me talk about the past in a moment, but I wanna quote you, to your earlier point, from your latest book, "Democracy Awakening," which you begin provocatively with these words, "America is at a crossroads, a country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.

How did it come to this?"

- In a nutshell, I think coming out of World War II, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, the majority of Americans believed that the government had a role to play regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure and protecting civil rights.

And there was such a consensus around that.

It even got its own name, the liberal consensus.

And that was not just people in the Democratic Party, it was people in the Republican Party as well.

There was this consensus that even though you disagreed about the pieces of that, that that's what the government should do.

And because we believed that was the case, we stopped protecting it, we stopped talking about democracy, we stopped talking about majority rule, we stopped talking about the common good, and instead assumed that it would always be there.

And that left opening for people who wanted to get rid of that, who wanted to take us back to the period before we had that consensus, back to the 1920s when the government didn't do any of those things, to come in like a wrecking ball and try and tear that consensus apart and put themselves into power.

So I think there's been this slow movement in which people were playing on the surface and didn't recognize that what was really going on was an attempt to tear apart a much larger idea of what America was supposed to be about.

So I think people weren't paying attention, in a way, to make it short.

And now they are, they've woken up, and are saying, "Wait a minute, we may disagree, but we do agree on the idea that the government has a role to play in these areas where it has been for the last, at this point, almost 100 years."

- But we learn from your work, Heather, when we look back at our history, that we've had a very fickle relationship with democracy almost from the beginning.

And you see these cycles through American history when a minority, a radical minority, tries to more or less take control of the government, only to awaken the citizenship, who ultimately overcomes this effort.

What is the best example of that when you look at our history?

- Well, I would say, overcomes it and expands it.

I mean, one of the hallmarks that you're talking about is very true.

There's always been this group of a political minority, I would emphasize, and it's a political minority that tends to be extraordinarily wealthy compared to the rest of us.

- Right.

- But when that has happened in the past, people have in fact woken up and seen the rise of an oligarchy that looks like it's going to destroy our democracy.

And they have managed to push back and expand our democracy to include more and more different groups that have been excluded before, marginalized groups that have been excluded before.

So we do have that longstanding pattern.

And I could point to any number of things.

I mean, somewhat often I point to the 1850s and how, in that period, it looked very much as if the elite enslavers in the American South had taken over our government.

They had the presidency, they had the Supreme Court, they had the Senate, and they were making inroads in the House of Representatives.

But when in fact they managed to spread the concept that human enslavement should be able to take over the American West, where the eventual states there would work with the American South to take over the entire country, making the entire country dominated by enslavers.

At that point, Americans, who again, disagreed about a lot of things, said, "Well, wait a minute," and began to organize, first, a new political party, that's gonna be the Republican Party that is organized by 1856.

It's gonna have a new ideology by 1859, articulated by Abraham Lincoln, saying, "Wait a minute, the government's not supposed to work just for the rich, it's supposed to work for everybody."

And he came up with an ideology behind that.

And by 1863, he has signed the Emancipation Proclamation, undermining human enslavement in the United States from that point on.

And by late 1863, he's given the Gettysburg Address, saying that this country needs a new birth of freedom and a country that is based on the idea of a government that works for everybody, a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

So, historically, that is the closest parallel, I think, but it's really important to think, for example, about the 20th-century civil rights movement, which came out of a period in which we really did have one party rule and the idea of people being better than others on the basis of their race in the American South from about 1874 to 1965.

And from that period, which certainly if you were living in the American South in the 1920s, or the 1930s, or the 1940s, you would not look at the conditions under which Black Americans were living and say, "Oh, this is going to change."

And it's certainly not going to change when the people who were holding all the cards were white men, and yet it did.

And that idea that even under those circumstances, Americans who were awakened to the conditions under which their Black neighbors and their brown neighbors lived, those Americans who could vote, at the time, white Americans, that they woke up to the destruction of American democracy on a bipartisan basis and said, "This is not what this country stands for," seems to me to be a really important moment to remember in this period when in fact, women and minorities can vote and still have a say, because we have in the past overturned a one-party rule based in white supremacy, even at a time when the only people who could vote were white men.

So we certainly can do it again in the present when we have so many different voices who can still vote.

- So not only do we stave off these existential challenges to our democracy, we become stronger out of them.

Is there a tipping point when you look at the rhythms of history, as these challenges take place and citizens awaken to the reality that their democracy is being threatened?

Is there one common denominator when citizens realize they have to come together in order to overcome this problem?

- So I'm gonna say something that's gonna surprise you and probably surprise a lot of people.

I think the tipping point is actually economic.

That is that when those voters I just talked about, especially white American, especially white American men, recognize that those people who have taken over the government are destroying their own ability to work hard and rise, which you see in the 1850s, people forget, of course, that when the idea of the elite Southern enslavers taking over the governmental system meant that it would really destroy the opportunity for white men to rise, for white men to move out to the West and compete with extraordinarily wealthy men, they recognize that this system of losing their democracy hurt them on an economic basis.

You see it again in the 1890s.

You see it again, obviously, in spades in the 1930s when the Depression has ripped out the bottom of the economy for ordinary white men.

And I think you're seeing it again now in the present with the reality that the system that we've had for the last 40 years has hollowed out the middle class.

So while the initial push against racial and ethnic and gender minorities is one that often, especially white voters, don't pay a lot of attention to, when it becomes more and more obvious that those people who are increasingly running society are also hollowing out the economic system for the white middle class, that tends to be the breaking point.

And not necessarily that there's one event that does that, because often those events are actually rooted in race rather than being rooted in the economy.

But I actually think that's the tipping point.

And one of the things that you see again and again in history that we don't talk a lot about is that our expansion of democracy almost always comes at a time when our economy is such that there are not extremes of wealth, that we don't have a very small rich class and a lot of people who feel that they can't make ends meet, because it's when people feel like they got enough food on their table that they're much more willing to say, "Hey, it's okay if those people have food on their table, too."

Whereas if they are feeling like they are not gonna get a job, they're not making decent wages, they can't support their families, they're much easier to turn against racial minority by the people who are in power.

So it's kind of a funny answer when we're sitting here talking about race, to say, "What I think really matters is our economic system."

But I would say the two are profoundly entwined in American history.

- Mm, what were your thoughts on January 6th?

- January 6th was, for me, one of the hardest days of my life.

And for this reason, because I'm a historian and I study the Civil War, and because the Civil War is very real to me, and the people in the Civil War are very real to me.

And it was bad enough the attack on the US Capitol, but when that man brought the Confederate flag into the Capitol Building, all I could think of was Julia Ward Howe.

Julia Ward Howe was a poet during the Civil War, and she and her husband, who was a reformer, had come to the city of Washington DC after the first Battle of Bull Run, in which it looked very much as if the Confederacy was going to be able to invade the Capitol and take over the Capitol Building and the White House, and have captured the country's capital.

And that would've been an effective end of the Civil War and an effective end to the United States of America.

And she is out in a carriage with her husband and a friend, and they pass a number of soldiers who are singing a very popular song at the time about hanging Jefferson Davis from a sour apple tree.

And Julia Ward Howe had felt really badly that she couldn't participate in the war either by working in the sanitary commission, raising money and wrapping bandages and all that, 'cause she had a number of small children, and she couldn't send her husband off to war because he was elderly.

And she wanted to do something for the war.

And the friend of hers in the carriage said, "You should write a poem, you should write better words for that song."

And nothing came to mind.

And she went home to a hotel that night, and she was looking out her windows, and then she went to bed with her small children in the room and woke up in the middle of the night, or right before dawn, in the dark, and didn't turn on a light because she knew it would wake up the children.

And she wrote down on a piece of paper, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

And then she looked out that window and she saw all the circling fires of the sons and the fathers and the husbands who had left home to go sit there in the cold with guns to protect that capital.

And the second verse of that poem goes, "I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps."

And for the next four years, those men had protected that capital to the tune of 600,000 lives and almost $6 billion of treasure to keep that Confederate flag out of that Capitol Building.

And when I saw that flag go into that Capitol and saw an American president backing those people and members of our Congress cheering them on and taking their side, I was offended not only for our moment, but for all those people who since 1861 had kept the concept of American democracy alive and the idea that we all have a right to have a say in our government, and that we all have a right to be treated equally before the law, be overturned in that moment by putting that flag in that Capitol, it offended me so profoundly that, as I say, it was one of the worst days of my life.

But I vowed that I would work for the rest of it to make sure it never happened again.

- So why wasn't it a turning point?

Why wasn't that the turning point that you write about happening in the 1850s and in the 1890s and the 1930s and the 1960s?

Why wasn't that the turning point?

- Because that concept that was embodied in the American Confederacy and that was embodied by the people who took over the Capitol Building for those hours on January 6th, 2021, never died in the United States.

The idea that was embodied by the Confederacy and in periods since then and is a strand through our history that says that some people are better than others and have a right and maybe a duty to rule over those others never died.

And it never died after the Confederacy failed because those concepts fit very nicely in the American West.

And the ideas behind the Confederacy moved quite naturally into the American West where people in that region made common cause with people in the American South and managed to push that idea across the nation periodically from then on.

So one of the things I think that we're dealing with in the present is recognizing that the idea that some people are better than others is still very much a going concern in our democracy.

And at this moment, there are a number of people who believe that in fact they do have the right to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.

And that I think is really important to remember because we often don't talk about that, that strand that runs through our history.

And it certainly has been part of our history since the very beginning.

- Do you believe in American exceptionalism?

- I believe that every country has its own unique story, but American exceptionalism, the concept of American exceptionalism comes outta the late-19th century and argues that because of American democracy, America is better than other countries.

I think it is possible to understand that countries have their own stories without saying that some people (laughing) are better than others, which applies not only within the United States, but also internationally.

So do I believe that America has its own story that we should study, that we need to understand, that says a lot about where we have been and where we are going?

Yes.

Do I believe that that makes us better than other countries?

1,000% no.

And often those things get conflated.

People think that if you wanna study the United States, it means you believe that America is better than other countries, and I don't think those two things have to be conflated, although often they are.

I am somebody who says you can believe both of those things.

- You had an opportunity early in the Biden presidency to interview the president, who has said that the central issue of his legacy is going to be the preservation of our democracy.

In your view, how is he doing?

- I think President Joe Biden is a transformative president.

He is the person who is taking that attempt to pull apart the liberal consensus and putting a stop to it, trying to reinstate that liberal consensus, trying to get us to work together again, trying to create an economy that is not working just for a very few wealthy people, but it rather is working for the vast majority of Americans.

He is trying to resurrect the post-World War II international agreements that managed to make it possible for countries to settle their differences without going into major conflicts.

We certainly have had conflicts since World War II, but we have not had World War III.

And one of the ways that we have managed to avoid that is by having these international agreements, the rules-based international order that had eroded so dramatically, especially during the Trump administration when the former president tried to get rid of NATO, for example, and really was bolstering people like Viktor Orban in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia.

And the idea of shoring up these alliances, the idea that people can work together even across international lines and resurrecting those philosophical concepts, I think, has been an enormous change.

And a president who has had great experience in foreign affairs, has great experience in getting laws through Congress, has meant that his presidency has been absolutely transformative, domestically with the slew of domestic legislation that the Congress passed, sometimes on a bipartisan basis, has really transformed the American economy.

And the ways in which he has shored up NATO and our allies and partnerships across the world, especially in the Indo-Pacific, has been nothing short of astonishing.

And we are seeing things that would define any presidency, and they simply disappear in the media without a ripple.

And that itself, in a way, (laughing) almost seems to be the story of this presidency, is what if you have a transformational president and no one knows?

(Mark laughing) And it's just this really weird divorce between image and reality, where the image is, at least the way it's being portrayed on many forms of media, of a president who doesn't (laughing) do anything.

And the reality is, as a historian looking at it, you're like, "Love this administration or hate it, you can't say it's not doing anything."

So I think that regardless of where this country goes in the future and where the world goes in the future, this moment will be seen as transformational.

Whether it is seen as the moment in which the United States remembered its history and rose to the occasion to defend democracy, as this president has said he wanted to do, or whether it'll be remembered as a paean to what could have been, I think we don't know yet.

And that's one of the things that makes this moment so dynamic, because at the end of the day, we are reinforcing democracy, we are the ones who get to choose our future.

- You may have just answered my question, Heather, but I can't end this interview without asking you, given your prodigious knowledge of history, given your realistic view of where we are right now, what gives you the most hope?

- The American people is what gives me hope.

I believe in the project of American democracy.

I believe in the ideas that are articulated in that declaration, that we have a right to be treated equally before the law, and we have a right to have a say in our government.

But I believe in those things because I believe that, ultimately, they serve the human project.

The idea that humans have a right to self-determination.

And that really, for me, that concept is the goal to which humanity strives, the idea of letting people determine their own futures.

And American democracy, I think, at its best, serves that human project and serves that human goal.

And at the end of the day, I don't believe Americans will walk away from that and give up their own right to determine their own futures in favor of turning it over to a small group of people who dictate how the rest of us can live.

At the end of the day, I just think we're all in it together and we believe we're all in it together and we will vote to make that happen.

- A wonderful note on which to end.

Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me, it's been a pleasure.

(dynamic music) (dynamic music continues) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following.

Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb & Family, BP America, and also by, and by.

A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(whimsical music) (upbeat music)