Bulwark Takes - LIVE: JVL & Heather Cox Richardson SHRED the GOP’s Fake “Conservatism”

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

NOTE: This livestream was recorded on Wednesday, September 17th at 3pm ET. Is Trump and MAGA the inevitable endpoint to conservatism in America? JVL was joined by Heather Cox Richardson to discuss the state of conservatism in American politics.

Grab a coffee and discover non-stop action with BudMGM Casino. Check out our hottest exclusive. Friends of one with Multi-Drop. Want to even more options? Play our wide variety of table games. Or head over to the arcade for nostalgic casino thrills only available at BetMGM. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Guys, I'm JVL from The Bullwork, and I am here with the great Heather Cox, Richardson, Professor of History at Boston College, Maynard. Do you remember you're old enough? You and I were close in age.

The Senate Night Live sketch, What's the Best Way with the New England? It's like the Jeopardy with the Three New England people giving directions. I don't, but it's kind of a trope, and you know, there's something to it. I think Glenn Close played the main lady, and she was like, Well, you're going to go down the road past the blueberry stand. And anyway. Oh, no. No, the worst ever was there is a very back way to get from here to Portland that is completely unmarked.

And it helps you get away from the coastline when there's a lot of traffic here in the summer. And the person who gave me instructions literally, one of the turns was right after so-and-so's tractor. I'm like, he's going to move the stupid tractor, dude. And he's like, well, I don't know how else to tell it to you. You know, he lives in a white cape, if that helps. I'm like, in Maine, no, that doesn't help either. And, yes, the answer was I got incredibly lost. And now that we have GPS, I don't have to worry about where he classed tractor.

All right, so I wanted to sit down and talk with you about the history of conservatism and about where modern conservatism, as we're experiencing it right now, which is different from how we experienced it 20 years ago when I first came into the adult world. How it got here and whether this was inevitable or contingent. Before you that, because God knows, the world is always with us and we can't just look back at history. So the Charlie Kirk thing has happened, the terrible murder of him, it's awful. People are sort of trying to pick on you today, and I didn't want to give you a chance to respond because you had one sentence in what, like a 3,000-word essay about what is going on here and people are

taking shots at you. And I don't like it. And I was wondering if you want to clean that up and talk about it a little. Well, yes, it's funny. I haven't seen anything today. Yesterday was a complete nightmare in my life. But maybe those two things are not unrelated in that the backstory is that, is, you know, I try and keep a record every day of what the country looks like on that day. And I try to be really, really careful to make sure that everything I say is sourced. And, you know, I put in the comments.

And so I tried on, I think it was September 12th, to say, here's what we know about the alleged shooter. And you have to use the word alleged because he's not been convicted yet, although I am, well, I'll leave it with that. and said these things about him, which were all established, right? And then the next day, I wrote a long piece about the use of today's radical right. I won't call them conservatives.

I think that's an important distinction we can talk about, of creating a false reality. In that, I had one sentence in which I referred back to what I had said the day before and said, it appears, you know, although there's this big machine out there saying he's on the left, it appears he's on the right. And that, but I used the word appears, and my sources for that

were the commentary on the gun casings, which were associated with a game that, you know, some of the online gaming stuff, and which had been associated with the right, although, again, I used the word, appears because we simply didn't know. That's it. I got nothing else because we don't know. I mean, even yesterday, after the state of Utah came out and issued an indicting document and had a number of text messages in it, they didn't speak, the state didn't speak to motive. They just put

those text messages in it, so we just don't know. And it strikes me that the volume of, anger and hatred that I have gotten from that one sentence has very little to do with that one sentence and has a lot to do with real bad faith, the idea that I should, I mean, I'm not going to go into the details of what they have said, but there is not any attempt there at all to engage with the actual ideas and the pieces I wrote or with what I wrote so much as to sort of paint me as this, you know, far-left conspiracy theorist who is trying to attack the memory of Charlie Kirk. And it's just a really weird, you know, almost feels perverted kind of attack on participation in the public sphere. I mean, that's a sentence. And, you know, if you look at,

on the other hand, the stuff that Kirk said about me in the public sphere that seems to just be going by the board, it just kind of real. It just kind of real. to be honest. Yeah. Well, so we know a little bit more than we did. We still don't know everything. Text messages do make it appear like he was motivated because he didn't like the things that Charlie Kirk had said about trans people will know more eventually.

Yeah, but you even can't say that because the, until it gets to a court of law, and we actually have evidence that is introduced and that, you know, and witnesses and stuff, it's what you It's what I said right after the shooting itself, and everybody was making assumptions about who had done it before they caught Robinson, again, who's still alleged, you just don't know. I mean, anybody who studies history will tell you that sometimes the things that seem like they fit pretty clear patterns simply don't. And on my webcast that day, I said, you know, you just don't know. It certainly looks one way, but it could be somebody he'd cut off in traffic for all you know. until it's actually been tested. And, you know, that's one of the reasons

I think we're in such a bad place right now is that people make assumptions that are not actually, as they say, admitted, you know, in evidence, assumes a fact not in evidence. And even that charging document did not attribute motive. It simply said, here are some text messages. It did not attribute those as motives. So who knows?

All right, now we get to talk to the conversation I really want to have to talk about. So you make a powerful case that modern conservatism, and while we talk, I'm just like, everybody's listening, trying your minds to disentangle partisan identifications of Republican and Democrat from the ideological conversation, because the partisan things move around a little bit here. So you argue that modern conservatism really comes around after the New Deal, and you have business interests who would like to roll back the New Deal. They link up with segregationists who want to try to insulate the South from integrating African Americans, and then eventually religious forces who are uneasy about the changing role of women.

Well, they actually, 1937 is when we get the conservative manifesto. And I do want to just start by distinguishing, as you did, but a little bit more firmly, between the concept of political conservatism, which is a really interesting and a really important concept, and the rise of this radical group that calls itself conservative. And those are not at all the same thing. From the very beginning, they are not conservative. They're using the name conservative.

And that actually really matters. And the other piece to that that I do think is important is that while religious traditionalists, doesn't really start to dominate, and now we're talking partisanship, the Republican Party until the 1960s. It's part of the coalition from the beginning, and it's worth remembering that in 1937,

the Scopes trial was only, what, 12 years old? No, I can't do the math, 15 years old. I can't. Here we go. 1925 to 1937 is, 12 years. There you go, 12 years, 12 years apart. So that matters. I mean, we tend to focus on the race in those early years,

but the gender piece, which is going to come to the fore through the religious right, is going to be what we're dealing with now. By the time we get to Goldwater, that's when it is sort of, that becomes known as movement conservatism. It's actually not named movement conservatism. until I think it's 1974, and I think it was journalist Sidney Blumenthal who gave it that name. However, I could be wrong on that, but however, they certainly grabbed hold of that name with the idea that it was a political movement that was named conservatism. So they were movement

conservatives. That's a political faction as opposed to, as you say, the political ideology of conservatism, which is fascinating. So talk to me a little bit about the difference between conservatism as it exists as a political philosophy, which is like Edmund Burke, right, and then how it exists as a, like, I guess, you know, in vivo versus in situ, right, in America, and how that, how that, those things have diverged, let's just start post-new deal. You want to start post-New Deal or start- Let's start post-New Deal. Okay. Unless you won't start with Burke. Well, I think the concept of what conservatism means

is really important in this era when so many people see it as being what is currently the radical right. Because today's radical right is trying to destroy the government. That is not a conservative position. That's not an ideologically conservative position. Edmund Burke is a really interesting character

Because if you think about the time he's writing, which is during the French Revolution, the general sense in the sort of United States, it's not, well, the United States, early republic still, but in the UK and in that political tradition, is that government is a negative force, that government can only hurt things. And so you really want to make sure you hold it back and that it can't really do very much. Well, Burke takes a look at what's happening. happening in France during the French Revolution, where people are asserting an ideology, and in order to make that ideology become real, they're actually killing people and setting buildings on fire and doing things that are destroying the stability of the country and killing people. So he begins to argue that, in fact,

the government should not rest on ideological principles, because pretty soon you're trying to make the people fit the ideology, rather than the ideology fit the people, and that what a government really should do is it should promote stability. And the way in his era that one promoted stability was to promote the protection of property

and the church and aristocracy and all those, and the family, all those pieces of a society that promote stability and give people a stake in the country. That's really the first major philosophy that talks about the use of the government in a positive way rather than in a negative way.

And that idea of conserving the pieces that are important and then moving forward based not on an ideology but on what works and what doesn't, which is what he talks about, is a really important concept for understanding how a government should or should not work. In the United States, it doesn't get much traction because they ain't got much to conserve at that point.

They're brand new. Right. And the United States doesn't start to use the term conservatism until after the compromise of 1850. And part of the compromise of 1850 says that northern states have to, regardless of their own state laws, have to return fugitive, enslaved people to the American South. And the law is written in such a way that free black people have like no rights at all. And a lot of people in the North who disagree either with the idea of enslavement or with the idea that the federal government should override their own laws start to say, no, we're not going to pay any attention to that part of the compromise of 1850

to the Fugitive Slave Act. When that happens, Southern enslavers start to refer to those people saying they're not going to pay attention to that law as radicals. They're not going to pay attention to law. They are radicals. the abolitionists begin to say, now, wait a minute, we're not radicals, we're conservatives,

because we are standing on the Declaration of Independence. And that's the term that Abraham Lincoln picks up, when he starts to call himself a conservative, as he does very dramatically at Cooper Union in New York, when he says, you know, I'm a, you're the radicals, we're the conservatives, what he is saying is we are standing, excuse me, standing on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

And it's on those terms that the concept of conservatism comes to the United States. And you often hear me saying that I am a Lincoln conservative, and that's what I'm talking about. I believe in the Declaration of Independence. So how does it then morph into what happens after the New Deal? So, again, I think it's important to remember that the people who become movement conservatives are out of step with mainstream Democrats, of course. mainstream Republicans as well, who would define themselves as conservative, somebody like Dwight Eisenhower, who is looking at the fact that a number of the aspects of the New Deal worked really

well. You know, there'd been this terrible depression, and now they figured out how to regulate business and provide a basic social safety net and significant enough wages for workers that that probably wasn't going to happen again. And they figured out how to, you know, promote education and how to create a rising standard of living and, you know, and how to protect civil rights, so they're just getting their toes wet in that, and they're trying to figure out how to have a rules-based international order so that will protect society and so on.

That's Eisenhower as well as somebody like FDR or Harry Truman. The movement conservatives want to get rid of that. They want to go back to the period before that into the 1920s, and they're very clear about that in that they first articulate that stand in the conservative manifesto of 1937, in which they say, the government has no right to regulate business. It has no right to have a basic social safety net that belongs to the churches.

It better stay out of civil rights, and it shouldn't promote infrastructure. So they've got this idea. And when, in fact, somebody like William M. Buckley Jr. publishes God and Man at Yale in 1951, the reviews of it are just brutal. And they say this is they literally, one guy literally calls him and fin terrible, you know, this upstart who's trying to change this stable society. And in that review, he says, this is not conservatism, this is anything but conservatism. So that little faction that now is referred to as conservative, by anybody but me, I mean, I won't call them that, is actually a radical attempt to get rid of the conservative government that Americans as,

a whole, built after the New Deal. So you said that conservatism as it exists now, exists a sort of, what did you say? Did you say destroy the government, wage warrants, the government? I wish you'd stop using the word conservatism because there are plenty of conservatives left in the United States. There's plenty of them. But they're not members of today's Maga Party. Yeah.

Well, the Maga Party, then, which will, you know, we'll. We'll just use that. I would have agreed that 10 years ago, the pre-Maga conservative, or whatever you want to call it, I mean, we can call the Republican Party then, even though it's a little imprecised. What it existed was to sort of, in theory, it said it wanted a smaller government,

but it didn't really. What it wanted was affect business interests and pursue, as you said, the other things, right? It was very uncomfortable with racial progress. It was very uncomfortable with the changing role of women in society. It had projects that it wanted. It seems to me that it's different in that it is now almost openly fascist and authoritarian.

Is that fair? Like, it doesn't want smaller government. It doesn't want the government to change. It doesn't have policy goals. It wants domination. And it wants government to dominate all. all aspects of everybody's lives and it wants to control government for forever. That's right.

Is that unfair? No, I think that is fair. And I think, but I think it's, again, it's important to pull apart the partisan nature of what's going on and the concept of conservatism, which are just very different as well. And as I say, there's plenty of conservatives in the United States today who would like to promote the institutions of stability, recognizing that that's how you make sure you have a society that is not violent and where people can work and get ahead and have educations and stable marriages and healthy children

and all those pieces of society that are good for a nation, any nation. But the people in charge of it now have, let's call them, Magus, like you say, people might refer to them as conservatives, but in fact, what they are looking to do is to destroy American democracy, and we can talk about why, there's theories about why, I mean, they have articulated theories for why they don't like, like American democracy, but to replace that with an extraordinarily powerful government, which is very different than what the movement conservatives talked about, and that very powerful

government they would like to have impose on the rest of us Christian nationalism, which is about as far from conservatism as you can get. So I guess the big question is, that I've written about this a bunch, was it always going to end like this, right? Was the, what arose out of the New Deal and became the movement conservatism in 1970s with Goldwater and then sort of grew with Gingrich? Was it always going to wind up here at fascism? Or is that, accident, I guess, were there other pathways? There are other ways this story could have developed?

So, listen, I should start by saying, I don't believe in inevitability. I believe that the sun comes up the next day and you can always change things. And if you remember, I wrote the history of the Republican Party in 2014. And in that, it was really sort of a warning to the Republican Party saying, hey, take the off-ramp, take the off-ramp guys, because it's time and, well, past time. And there's still time for you to get back the popular party that supported the nation and all that. and I got lambasted for that, that I was way too hard on the Republican Party.

And so I said to someone the other day, I sit here now awaiting my lavish apology from all those people who wrote that thing. But so the answer, the cosmic answer is, no, nothing is inevitable. But, you know, I got thinking about that after you wrote and asked me about that. And I do think that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a really important moment

for that movement in the United States. And by the way, I've had this argument with somebody who 100% disagrees with me, and that's a legitimate position as well. We could argue about that. By the way, I love to argue fact-based argument, which is different than sort of pot shots, which is where we seem to be right now. Because you learn new stuff all the time and often refine where you thought you were. But I was thinking about that. And I was thinking, you know, if you think about Watergate and the fact that Republicans during Watergate, went to Nixon, led by, of all people, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and said, and I paraphrase, dude, the gig is up, you need to resign because we're going to find you guilty. That's 74. And now look at us where the Republican Party kept in power somebody that in 2019-2020, the senator, Republican senators,

according to Ted Cruz anyway, all believed he was guilty, but kept Trump in office because they were looking forward to the 2020 presidential election. What happened in there? And I am starting to think that the collapse of the Soviet Union made a really big difference because it seemed to a number of Americans to have proved that democracy was going to triumph forever.

And, you know, remember, we got the end of history, books, and all that. Because everybody was going to become a liberal democracy. And they divorced the idea of democracy, I think, from the idea of capitalism and felt that so long as you were exporting capitalism, you were exporting democracy. And we know on the heels of that that those radical Republicans I talked about quite openly said they were going to turn their firepower on those they called liberals at home. But that wasn't Democrats. That was people who believed in that kind of government that Democrats, independents, and Republicans had all put into place in the United States. after World War II.

And they went to war against Americans. And I think perhaps created a new kind of intellectual allegiance to their concept of capitalism rather than a concept of an allegiance to democracy. And I could be wrong about that for sure. But if you think about Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and his purge of the party, you know rhinos republicans in name only that was not something you were going to do when you were still fighting against communism in the soviet union and that continuing purge and the continuing emphasis on the idea that a good american was the man who could amass as much money and as much power as possible that was not something that that could have stood i think in a contest against communism and i don't know i think maybe that really is what what begins

the slide toward creating a party in which people were loyal to their party above their country, that maybe that was the place where faith in American democracy ceased to be the defining feature of our lawmakers, and loyalty to party instead became the central peace. And then, of course, that loyalty to party and to moneymaking also brought a ton of money into the party and sort of forced it to continue down that road. I don't know. What do you think? think? No, I haven't really thought of the role to Cold War. I mean, just sort of easing it right now, I might say, prior to 1989, you had 50, 40 years

in which whatever there are other differences, Republicans and Democrats were basically in the same place on the Cold War. And, you know, Republicans would try to paint Democrats as being weak against the Soviets, and whatnot. But they really weren't. I mean, they were, you know, Kennedy was right where Eisenhower was. Carter, for the first two years, was more doveish than, you know, Republicans in general, but the last two years are indistinguishable from Reagan in his approach to the Soviet Union. And so you have, like, in general consensus on what is the most important issue. and once that issue's gone

like what consensus is there between the parties and this is when things start polarizing so I tend to put a lot of a lot of stock in polarization and the ideological sorting out of the parties and so as you wound up losing conservative Democrats and they begin flipped and you lost

liberal Republicans and they flipped you wound up in this place where negative polarities started driving everything. And it became hard to get consensus on anything. Is this making sense or no? It is. It is. And now I'm going to undercut my own argument, which is why we have these discussions.

Polarization is articulated first, of course. I mean, it's an old political theory. Actually, pretty well articulated before World War II by Eric Schmidt, who is now, you know, who became a Nazi political theorist and who is now much. beloved among MAGA Republicans. But that polarization and the articulation of that polarization really begins in that 51 book by William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale. And the person who really brings it into the mainstream of American politics is Richard Nixon, first in 68, and then in 70, and then in 72, when his vice president, Spiro Agnew, was quite proudly engaging in what he called

positive polarization. Right. You know, and so that's, you know, again, we've already examined my extraordinary ability with math, but that was significantly before the end of the Soviet Union. And the polarization is there then, and it

works. It works. It works in 72, obviously. Nixon wins going away. Those are issue polarization though, right? Is what Nixon was trying to do. Nixon was trying to polarize voters around issues. What I'm talking about is more of like

the partisan sorting out where the parties became ideological monoliths instead of polyglots. And I think, but maybe not. Now I'm going to undercut my last comment because, of course, I've always thought the Voting Rights Act of 65 was the real biggie because then the parties had to decide

if they were going to try and pick up black and brown votes or pick up the reactionaries. And Nixon makes the clear decision to follow Goldwater and pick up the reoccur. actionary Dixiecrats. I mean, he goes in courts, Strom Thurman, the same way that Goldwater did. So, I don't know, when is the die cast in that 65, 72, 92? 1865? I mean, this is right. You just keep going back, right, with these things. So this is good, so, you know, I have done a lot of, like, reconsidering of the world over the last 10 years.

I try to reconsider the world sort of on a constant basis. But I would say my, I've said this before, anybody who's listening to this was argument before, my biggest analytical failure, like, before age 35, was totally misunderstanding the centrality of race in American politics. And so I am totally, totally open to the argument. Like, the Voting Rights Act is the beginning of all this, for exactly the reasons you say,

because the parties had to decide which constituents, see where they're going to try to absorb. And once you decide you want to absorb the reactionary Dixie crafts, maybe the diet is cast. I don't know. Well, so, of course, what they are picking up

that radical right after World War II, really after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in May of 54, is that, you know, evil marriage from 1871 of the idea that, um, that, permitting, for a nation, for the United States, not any nation, for the United States to

permit black men to vote is a form of socialism, because it will mean that they will be able to vote for lawmakers who will give them roads and schools and hospitals, which can only be paid for with white tax dollars. And so that comes back in the second civil rights movement there in the 50s, 60s and 70s. But as long as we're on things that I think we're not paying enough attention to. We have focused a lot in our lifetimes on the role of race in polarization, in political polarization. I am just gobsmacked at how little discussion we have in our political spheres about the role of sexism in promoting MAGA Republicans. Because it seems to me, and we could break this down in greater detail as well, but that idea that men should dominate their wives,

is a way to bring that political polarization into every single household in the country. And that, you know, I'm just shocked at the degree to which that is not front and center when you can see it every freaking day when you look at the political news. And you can see it in how the parties have shifted just on gender, right?

I mean, as Republicans have become the party of men to a large degree, Democrats, the Party of Women. Did you see that coming? Because I'm going to say I did not. Maybe you did. Well, we've known for a while that the gender gap begins in 1980. That, I think, was a big sign right there. But did I see this moment coming where we would have a president who openly bragged of sexual assault?

No, no, I really did think. I always think that norms are going to hold, and that's my big blind side. when I tend to believe things people tell me, and I also tend to think they're going to operate in good faith, and that's clearly not the case. As I've gotten older, I've finally had to admit that that's not the case. But did we know that gender and the role of women in American society was going to be a thing?

Yeah, absolutely. And that, I think, was clear from the, was in 1970 when there were all the stories about women burning their bras at the Miss America pageant, which never happened. You know, so that was one of the things those of us who study women's history in the United States, already there was myth-making

about women's rejection of roles in American society and radicalization that simply didn't reflect reality. I think what I didn't expect to see coming was the degree to which white men would walk away from obtaining the kind of skills they needed to survive in the 21st century,

thereby seating them to white, women, for the most part, or to women in general, and then decide that they were going to make up the difference by excluding women from American society altogether. That's a biggie. Yeah. So, uh, how do we fix it? This is what I get. I would say the biggest, the biggest criticism I get is, uh, I get 20 of these every day. It's like, you know, all you do is tell us how terrible the world is and why it's terrible and you never tell us how to fix it. I'm not only just like, boy, uh, if I had the answers, I'd tell you. I'm not holding out of you because I get off on it.

Do you have any answers? My layman's view is that there aren't really any buttons to press. You know, the systems that make up society and politics are so complex that you never really know what happens. You know, you push on this thing over there and something else pops out over there. And so if things resolve, it winds up. You're familiar with Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite movies.

Yeah. You know, at one point, Jeffrey Rush, the conductor of the show, as explained to his producer, I think he says, the natural condition of theater is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. And his producer was like, so what do we do? And Jeffrey Rush's character says, nothing. Strangely enough, it all works out in the end.

And the producer says, how? And he says, it's a mystery. maybe that's how it works here. I don't know. This is my real question, because we have gone through, you know, we've gone through the age of acrimony. You on a recent podcast talked about how we avoided a civil war in 1876,

a second civil war. What are the lessons of history on fixing these things? Can you do it consciously or does society just sort of, in America, we just never solve our problems. We just bulldoze on. top of them and create new ones? Well, again, the future is unwritten, and I think that really matters. There is not obviously a magical button to push, but there are things that people have done

in the past at times similar to these that have led us in a healthy direction. And the script is actually pretty easy, it seems to me, and that's that, yes, the world is incredibly complicated. The world has always been incredibly complicated. You know, that's humans got a human, right? We have different tools and so on, but we are who we are. But there are, I think, some very basic principles that are very simple. And one of the ways that people have reclaimed a democracy and rebuild a healthier nation in our past has been when we looked like we were going to lose that democracy because it had to encounter something new. Like in the 1850s, they had to deal with westward expansion. And in the 1890s, they had to deal with industrial

And in the middle of the 20th century, they had to deal with international markets and they had to deal with the nuclear world. And now we have to deal with the Internet. I mean, there's always something new that's really big that everybody says, that's it. Democracy's over because it can't absorb X. One of the things that has enabled people to make the adjustments that democracy needs in those conditions is to go back to those fundamental human principles on which nations have been founded, but certainly the United States was founded. And that, That's the idea that we have a right to consent to our government. We have a right to be treated equally before the law, and we have a right to have equal access to resources to enable us to rise from the products that we create, you know, access to resources like health care and education, as well as to land and the things that they used to talk about. And when we return to those fundamental principles, the kind of principles that certainly the founders talked about for all of their faults, but that Abraham Lincoln talked about or Theodore Roosevelt talked about or FDR talked about, and all those people like them, like Constance Baker-Motley or

like Fannie Lou Hamer, you know, you go back to those touchstones and people who may not be paying attention to what is happening on the Capitol Hill with the continuing resolution and the fight between Thune and Schumer, you know, they can say, I want to have a fair shot at my kid being able to get an education. And when you go back to those fundamental principles and you articulate those as a society

and more and more people stop saying, I hate you because you backed Thune and you backed Schumer, instead saying, I really want to make it possible for people to have health care, that you create communities that require a new,

set of lawmakers who make that world happen. And that's what happened in the 1850s. That's what happened in the 1890s. And the 1890s is the comparison that looks most like today for me. That's what happened in the 1930s. And that, I think, is what people are doing now, is getting together in new ways, new forms of communication, and coming up with new ideas for what we want the world to look like. So maybe that's partly muddling through, and maybe that's partly human nature. But I think it's also not a bad blueprint to think about going forward. I mean, not to bring the room down,

but the news that we are going to have a TikTok deal in which TikTok is going to be owned by a bunch of crony oligarchs who are friends of the president. Twitter is owned by a crony oligarch friend of the president. or at least a friend of me of the president. Facebook is owned by an oligarch who is a friend with the president. It just seems people are definitely communicating on new platforms and finding new things, and all of those things are owned by a very small group of oligarchs who are at least okay with fascism,

if not actively in support of it. Is that a problem? Yes, it's a problem. It's a huge problem. But, you know, I've got two things running through my head. One is the poem Ozymandias, which, you know, about the very famous one. And it's also, I guess, I was going to talk about the history of the steel drum and where that comes from. But I think at the end of the day, it comes down to how you think about the world.

You know, there's a lot to overcome any time in the world. And this is a time that looks really bad. for Americans in a way that it hasn't looked this bad in our past, although certainly in the United States, in the American South, from about 1874 to about 1965, it was a one-party state in which, you know, it wasn't fascism because that has significant economic components that weren't present in the American South,

but certainly it was not a world of freedom by any stretch of the imagination. Authoritarianism. Right. So authoritarianism, right. And that's, that ended, you know. And I think it comes down to the fact that I keep looking at the American people and their resistance to what is around them.

And again, looking at the fact the future is unwritten and a lot depends on contingency and saying, you know, it could come. And in many ways it has. But as long as you and I are still here talking, there's still hope. Well, I'm going to let that be the last word as, you know, as my boy John Paul II represent, and I always said hope must have the last word. And it was absolutely a delight getting to meet you in the virtual flesh. Huge admirer of your stuff.

I love letters from an American every day. Heather, thank you so much. Well, thanks for having me and back at you. We'll have to do it again soon. Bye, friends. Thank you.