Dan Snow's History Hit - How Deep History Swung the US Election

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Lewis Dartnell joined me on the podcast to talk about a theory that links the outcome of the US election to geology.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Down Snow's History. We're talking to Professor Lewis Dartnell again in this episode. He's been on the podcast a few times. He's a real favourite of ours. He's a friend of the podcast. During the presidential election, one particular tweet went viral about the strange line of Democrat voting counties that runs through a swathe of otherwise Republican areas in the American South. That is something that Lewis has talked about before, but he wanted to use that as a springboard to come on and talk about the American election, in fact, all of modern politics, by looking at some of the deeper history.

Lewis Dartnell is a legend. You can listen to his previous podcasts if you go to History Hit TV, which, by the way, this week, everyone, is three years old. We're three years old this week. When do I have to stop saying new digital history channel?

I don't know. We've got thousands and thousands of subscribers. We are doing more and more ambitious stuff every time. We've got our first big drama shoot coming up, which is so cool. And so I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been on this journey. For the subscribers who believed in us from the start, thank you. To everyone who's joined on the journey in the meantime, thank you as well. And for those of you who have no interest in subscribing, but like listening to these podcasts, well, thank you. I mean, I'll take anything I can get, frankly. So please go to historyhit.tv, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1,

and you'll get a month for free, and your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. And while you're there, buy a little subscription for a friend, and wing it over to them, a lockdown seasonal Christmas present. I mean, perfect. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Lewis Darnall. Lewis, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Dan, no problem at all. I've been looking forward to this. I always challenge you to come up with the most long-term epochal reasons for

changes in contemporary politics. Let's talk about the US election. What have you identified? What can you tell us? Surely the US election was all about Black Lives Matter, propaganda, voter suppression, and the reaction to COVID and the economy. You cannot be telling me there's some geological stuff going on here. Yeah, so of course, all of these human factors are very, very important in politics, the way people vote and the type of government they think will serve them as best they can. But underneath all of these social and economic and cultural factors, often we find features of the planet, so geological factors. And the reason I reached out to you a week or so ago was just at the moment that Americans were going to the polls to vote in possibly the most

contentious, one of the most important US elections in recent history, a journalist called Lateef Nasser at Radiohead put out a tweet that went massively viral about this link between Democrat voting counties in the southern states of the US and some weird geological formation, which is a story I told in the book, in Origins. And you and I have briefly chatted about on this podcast, maybe two years ago when Origins was first coming out on hardback. But what I thought would be interesting to remind your listeners who maybe haven't heard that previous podcast, is to kind of run through briefly the steps in that argument about how you go through hundreds of years of American history and millions of years of the planet's history to explain that particular feature and then I thought

it'd be interesting for us to zoom out a bit on that story and look at US politics as a whole and in particular how it was that geology helped Trump win in the last election in 2016. And therefore, why it's been important that Joe Biden has been able to flip some of those critical states to win this election in 2020. This is about the broad mass of red in the Deep South, Republican voting Deep South, and yet there's this strong linear vein of blue counties crossing it, Democrat voting areas across it. Exactly. It stands out in the network. It's a sea of red with this crescent of blue arcing through the southern state, through Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina. And this doesn't seem to correspond to anything you can see on the ground. It's not corresponding to a mountain

range. There's a line of Democrat voting counties along the banks of the Mississippi River. But this crescent doesn't correspond to anything you can see above the ground and any landscape features. And it's only when you peel the surface off to look underground, to look at what rocks are lying there, does that pattern start emerging. And that Democrat crescent corresponds with a band of rocks that happen to be about 80 million years old. You go further to north, further to south, the rocks are a different age and people vote Republicans. This doesn't make a great deal of sense, right? There's this link between the rocks and who people want to run the country.

But that particular band of rocks, those 80 million year old rocks, those Cretaceous age rocks, were laid down in a period of Earth's history when the sea levels were much higher and the ocean lapped up right through the middle of North America, the great American inland seaway. And so the rocks that were laid down then were basically just seafloor mud, pretty thick, fertile mud that got turned into stone and rock and is now being eroded out again to give you very fertile black soil. And it was realised in the second half of the 19th century, in the 1800s, that that particular soil was particularly productive at growing cotton. And unfortunately in that period of history, growing cotton, which is a very finicky crop to harvest, meant people were abducted from their homes in Africa, taken across the North Atlantic and forced to work on these plantations

along that Cretaceous band. These people were taken on the Middle Passage, which is effectively the trade winds, the band of trade winds blowing from the east towards the west across the Atlantic. And this is something that, again, you and I chatted about on the previous podcast, about how it was the churning of Earth's atmosphere that created these bands of winds, that the trade winds, the westerlies, that people learned how to navigate by and connect together to build these huge, sprawling trade networks around the world. And for a particular dark period of history, those trade winds were used to bring human slave labour from the home in Africa and took them to North America as well as Brazil and forced to work on those cotton plantations. And even today, after hundreds of years of

subsequent history, after the Civil War, after emancipation from slavery, after the Civil Rights Movement, there's still the largest concentration of black African-American people today living along that cretaceous band of 80 million year old rocks. People that are still unfortunately economically deprived, poor education, poor health care, poor opportunities, and therefore are more likely to vote for Democrats' promises and electoral ideals rather than Republicans. What about the so-called Rust Belt states? Is there anything about that old heavy industrial steel coal automobiles? Were they placed there because of the Great Lakes, because of the Ohio, because of the accessibility from the East Coast,

the trade? Or is there something in the ground beneath them that made all those going concerns viable? Over the last 30 years or so, states have tended to vote Republican or Democrat. There's been some swing states, but the states that tended to vote Democrat for the last 30 years fall into three main areas. There's this blue wall, it's called, of Democrat voting states. And you have the western seaboard. So you have places like states like California, Oregon, and Washington, and therefore cities like San Francisco, LA, Seattle. And these are places which, because they're port cities, you know, historically, they've had a lot of influx of people coming and going, a lot of migrants coming in. These sort of cities tend to be much

more ethnically diverse and metropolitan and illiberal, and therefore, again, tend to vote for Democrat ideals. And you see the same effect up in the northeast with states like New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut. So basically New England. These are also big port areas. So as you say, places close to water and the coast tend to be a little more metropolitan and therefore Democrat voting. But there's a third chunk of Democrat states, and these are states on the Great Lakes like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan. And the reason that those become important, again, linking this to the geology, goes back to two very different periods in Earth's history. And the first of these two periods was about 2.4 billion years ago, a long, long time ago. And back then, the Earth was basically an alien planet. If you

were to hop in a time machine, Dan, and go back to the Earth 2.4 million years ago, you'd not only need a time machine, you'd also need to wear a spacesuit, that the air itself would be poisonous. There's no oxygen for humans to survive. And what was happening in that period in Earth's history was tiny single-celled microbes had invented photosynthesis. They were growing by the energy of sunlight and releasing oxygen, basically as a pollution, as a waste gas from that process. And oxygen was building up in the atmosphere and building up in the oceans. And a lot of the iron that was being eroded off the continents back then and flooding into the sea became oxidized by that oxygen in the atmosphere and that dissolved oxygen in the seas. And oxidized iron can't dissolve. And 2.4 billion years ago, there would have been this constant iron snow filtering down through the oceans and settling on the seabed,

developing these great deposits and layers of iron. And we see those today all around the world as very distinctive kinds of rocks called banded iron formations or biffs. They look like red and brown stripy rocks, incredibly distinctive. And this is basically iron ore. This is the iron that we've been mining around the world since the beginning of the Ice Age to make our tools and our weapons. And it's been this huge driving force through history. And a lot of this iron ore is found around the Great Lakes and specifically around Lake Superior towards the west. Lake Superior towards the west. But to do anything useful with that iron, to smelt it, to forge it, to turn it into steel, you need something else as well. You need coal. And the coal in North America was discovered from the 1760s is over towards the east, much more towards the east coast,

along the Appalachian mountain ranges. And so what triggered the industrial revolution in the early 1800s in North America was the linking together of those two critical regions, the iron ore in the west around the Great Lakes and the coal coming from Appalachian mountains east. And first off, that was with canals linking the lakes, and then laying down these great railways by people like Andrew Carnegie, people that became phenomenally wealthy, great industrialists. And so that region between the Great Lakes became the heartland of the industrial heartland of America, for the same reason that the north of England became the industrial heartland,

because you've got iron and coal in the same place. Same reason that the Ruhr Valley in Germany became the industrial heartland. This persisted through the Second World War. America, it was largely industrial might of America, saved Europe and pushed back the Axis forces with industrial output from America coming across the Atlantic. And this lasted all the way up to the 1950s with the rise of Chinese industrial production. They uncovered their own vast wealth of coal that had been laid down at exactly the same moment in Earth's history,

300 million years ago as the American deposits. They could extract and export that coal and iron and steel very, very cheaply to basically undercut American industry in that manufacturing belt, that iron belt up in the Northeast. And so that whole region basically economically collapsed. It became known as the Rust Belt because it became very economically deprived. The cities which had been some of the largest cities in America before the war, effect was emptied. People left in droves. And what was left behind was economically deprived, empty cities, disgruntled, blue-collar workers. And then 2016 happened and Donald Trump came along.

And what Trump was promising, at least what he was saying, whether he could deliver this or not was in the question, but what Trump was saying is that he would listen to these people. They were no longer forgotten. They were no longer voiceless. He was going to make America great again. He was going to bring back American production, American manufacture. He was going to open up all of the coal mines again, which, for economical reasons, is quite troublesome. But this is what Trump promised. And that Rust Belt felt heard. And they connected with Trump in a way that Hillary Clinton couldn't connect with these traditionally Democrat states. And they swung red, they swung and voted for Trump, which is a large reason why he won that last 2016 election, because he was able to win the Rust Belt states. And they were there in the

first place, largely because of these geological factors of the overlapping, the co-occurrence of iron ore and coal. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about solar, about settlement in Arizona, Nevada, parts of the southwest, and of course, I suppose, arguably parts of Florida, and how that might change US politics and change US society. You know, whenever in history new technologies came along or new economic forces come into effect, you see a shift in response sociologically, politically,

and coal and then oil have clearly been the dominant energy resources since the Industrial Revolution and for various reasons. So oil is starting to get more expensive. There's plenty of oil, so there's plenty of coal left on the ground. But for environmental reasons, we probably need to leave it there, leave it underground. And so we are needing to move towards more sustainable, more renewable energy sources, wind power, solar power. And I was driving a couple of years ago, I had an astrobiology conference up in Lake Rena, up in the mountains, and then picked up a hire car and drove myself all the way down to California for a series of lectures.

And you really got the sense of moving through the landscape, coming down off these rugged mountains, down into the great Californian plains, covered in wheat. But also lots of windmills or wind turbines are starting to pop up in that region. So we are seeing a shift in the energy, even in the States, which has traditionally been a bit more coal, coal, coal, coal, coal, and perhaps it's been Europe that's been forging ahead with their renewable sources. But I'm also very struck by the fact that the International Energy Agency has now said that solar is the cheapest form of energy creation in the history of the human race. Now, if you look at, I think it was in New Mexico, like the astonishing price for kilowatt hours now in solar. Is this going to make Lewis Dartnell less important?

If we're able to go to the middle of the desert, create unlimited amounts of energy, which will now then to distill water from the atmosphere, spray it all over the desert, turn it into a nice orchard, does that mean that we are going to be less tied to our geological anchors? To pick solar as this particular example, it changes the value of land. Previously, deserts you couldn't do much with. You can't grow crops there unless you pump up fossil water deep underground or pipe it over long distances. But with the fact that solar is now the cheapest energy source on the planet, as you say, and that's not even including subsidies that governments often give to solar. It is dollar for dollar the cheapest energy on the planet now. So we might see huge solar farms popping up in places that previously couldn't do much with,

the desert in Nevada, Arizona. You would only need to put solar panels in a tiny fraction of the Sahara Desert to power the whole of Europe using free, clean energy. There's still some geopolitics, there's still the spectre of geology hiding under the surface here. Because in making all these high-tech electronic components, solar panels, electric motors, the things you would have to use in batteries for electric-powered cars, although the electricity might be very cheap and free from the sun, from solar panels, the rare earth elements you need to build things like very powerful electric motors from, those are still localised in particular places around the planet that you can mine them economically from.

And again, this brings us back to China. China currently supplies 80% of the world's demand for these rare earth elements. It is absolutely sat with its hand around the throat of world supply. And that gives it a commanding political position as well, because it's got access to these next generation technological metals. Whereas something like iron, as we talked about earlier, these banded iron formations are all over the planet. Iron is about the most democratic metal on earth. These rare earth elements are much harder to mine economically. Thanks for raining on my solar parade there, buddy. Thank you very much. What have you been up to last six months? Yes, I've been working on

a new book. What we've been talking about just now in terms of these links between geology and politics has largely come up come out of my research from the last book from origins of the ancient human history and i've been working on the new book where i want to look much more at how different features of biology have been affecting world history before you go i must ask about old football clubs tell me about the ask about old football clubs. Tell me about the geology of old football clubs. If you plot on a map the starting date of football teams, football clubs across Britain, you also see that very strong association between early football clubs and those carboniferous rocks,

those coal-bearing sedimentary deposits underground. And again, when you think about it, that's obviously quite an obvious connection, that when Britain was urbanising with industrial revolution, you have lots of people all crammed closely together in these cities, getting bored on the weekends and evenings and not in the factories. And this new game, football, was invented and became wildly popular amongst these industrial working classes. And so the earliest football teams to emerge did so around the old industrial cities, places like Manchester, Sheffield, which were near those cold seams.

There's that link from 300 million-year-old rocks to football clubs. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me again, Dan. Cheers. for having me again, Dan. Cheers. Hi, everybody.

Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring

weather that, frankly, is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.