Ideas - How the American cowboy ignited the Republican movement

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

The U.S. crisis today is the result of a 40-year-old Republican ideology, historian Heather Cox Richardson calls "cowboy individualism." The true American man who is anti-government, works hard and protects his family. Thatmyth became central to the culture of Republican politics and Cox Richardson says the Trump administration has taken cowboy individualism to an extreme, gutting the U.S. government and centring power.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. So I wanted to talk today about what's happening in the United States and to address this question of what

it means to be an American in April of 2025. As a historian, Heather Cox Richardson looks to the past to understand the present. And I want to start with why we're where we are. I'm going to argue today that the crisis in today's United States is the logical outcome of 40 years of a Republican ideology that was based in the idea of cowboy individualism. That idea has directed American politics since 1980, at least, when President Ronald Reagan wrote it to the White House.

She's based at Boston College and came to Vancouver to deliver the Phil Lind lecture at the University of British Columbia. She starts off by examining the mythology of the quintessential American hero, the lone cowboy. Those people who embrace cowboy individualism believe that a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community, he needs nothing from the government, he works hard to support himself, he protects his wife

and his children, and he asserts his will by dominating others. That ideology, as you probably know, is rooted in the mythological image of the American cowboy who began to drive cattle from the border of Texas and Mexico north across the plains to army posts and railheads in 1866. That image sprang to prominence in the years immediately after the Civil War, and in that peculiar moment it took on a specific anti-government meaning, a political meaning. The Civil War government in the United States set out to protect black Americans from persecution by their white neighbors in the American South.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed equal protection of the laws to formerly enslaved people. And then two years later, in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to prosecute those people who attacked black Americans because of their race. So with the federal government suddenly willing to prosecute racial discrimination, former Confederates turned their racial animosity into an economic argument. Beginning in 1871, they claimed that the government's effort

to protect civil rights was tantamount to socialism, because the government officials it required to protect black Americans cost tax dollars. was tantamount to socialism, because the government officials it required to protect black Americans cost tax dollars. And those tax dollars could only come from hardworking white men in the years after the Civil War, and they were providing that money to provide benefits for undeserving, they said, black people.

Southern Democrats after the war contrasted that government socialism, as they called it, with the image of the American cowboy, who in their view was a young white man who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone. The cowboy in their view was hardworking, he was good with a gun, and he dominated the women and the racial minorities he encountered in the West. That myth countered the idea that the government

should protect all Americans equally. The cowboy image actually faded in the early 20th century progressive era, which is itself an interesting story, but it sprang back to prominence in the 1950s and the 1960s as a propaganda tool to oppose the wildly popular post-World War II government. That government reflected the idea that government had a role to play in regulating business, in providing a basic social safety net, in promoting infrastructure

and in protecting civil rights. And those people who were determined to get rid of government regulation and taxation resurrected the myth of the American cowboy, and they championed this idea of cowboy individualism. They embraced the idea that a government that worked for ordinary Americans was a form of socialism because it redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to black Americans, people of color, and women who demanded equal rights. In 1960, the Republicans nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who was famous for his cowboy persona and his white cowboy hat

and his opposition to the post-war government. They nominated him for president. And then, of course, in 1980, Ronald Reagan put aside his British riding clothes, put on a Western cowboy hat, and rode that ideology to the White House. That myth of cowboy individualism became central to the culture of Republican politics

as a way for Republican politicians to convince voters to support the destruction of federal government programs that actually benefited them. From 1981 to 2021, Republican policies moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, and the party stayed in power through media disinformation, voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the flood of money into politics.

Those systemic changes to the political system in the United States moved the Republican Party farther and farther and farther right. And the rhetoric of cowboy individualism as it did so became more and more extreme. They demonized non-white Americans and women in the public sphere, and they dismissed all government policies

that promoted social cooperation, whether at home or abroad. And in place of the post-World War II idea of cooperation among equals, they replaced that idea with the idea that individual men should dominate society, ordering it as they thought best. Over time, white men rejected the socialization

and the education that would enable them to rise to prosperity or to develop meaningful relationships. That domination to which they turned at the heart of cowboy individualism grew increasingly apparent in the United States after 1992, when the modern militia movement took off after a standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between Federal Marshals and a former factory worker named Randy Weaver,

who had failed to show up to court for a trial on a firearms charge, convinced a number of Western men that they had to arm themselves to fight off the government. By the early 2000s in the U.S., gun ownership first became a symbol of cultural identity, and then it became a way to groom younger people into Republican political ideology. This is why we see political leaders posing with their families holding AR-15s on Christmas cards. The Trump administration has taken cowboy individualism now to an extreme, I believe,

gutting the U.S. government and centering power in a dominant president, while also pulling the United States out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II. The administration began its run in 2025 by firing the women and the racial and gender minorities who held positions in the government, but it is not just exercising domination over others, it is reveling in that dominance and

advertising it, especially over the migrants it has sent to prison in El Salvador, showing films of them being transported in chains and displaying caged prisoners behind Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who in those photographs and in that film is wearing a $50,000 gold Rolex watch. In place of cooperation, the Trump administration's determination to exercise its dominance shows, I think, in its plan to invest $1 trillion in the military after gutting the US Agency for International Development,

also known as USAID. Now Trump is trying to demonstrate his power over the global economy. He's rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rests in cooperation. Trump has always seen power as a zero-sum game, in which for one party to win, others must lose, and he appears incapable of understanding that global trade does not mean the US is getting ripped off. Now he appears unconcerned that other countries could, in fact,

work together against the United States. He seems to assume they will have to do what he says. If, in fact, Trump succeeds in asserting his dominance States, he seems to assume they will have to do what he says. If, in fact, Trump succeeds in asserting his dominance over the United States of America and over the globe, the Republicans will have succeeded in replacing American democracy with a dictatorship, and they will have rebalanced global power. But, you know with me there's always a but, right?

Those who believe in that ideology of cowboy individualism have not yet established that autocracy that is their end game, in large part because that cowboy ideology is a myth. It has never reflected reality. And right now, MAGA Republicans are watching in real time as their President Donald Trump lumps them in with the minorities and people of color they believed were inferior to them. The government programs that Republicans are calling wasteful are not just the ones that supported racial minorities, they are the ones that supported mega Republicans.

Cowboy individualism was always a myth. It never represented the United States of America. It didn't even represent the cowboys, one third of whom were black or men of color, and whose employment actually replicated the low pay and dangerous conditions of Eastern factory workers. In fact, the American West was a multicultural world in which the key to surviving and even prospering was not dominating other people, it was kinship ties and communities. Famous Western trader Kit Carson, for example, often lionized as a real hero of cowboy individualism,

spoke English, Spanish, a number of indigenous languages, and was married three times, two times to an indigenous woman, and then to a Mexican woman. When Eastern settlers moved west, they depended on communities to enable them to survive disasters because, for example, every single farm would lose a barn to fire at some point and you needed to have people for barn raising. That focus on communities in the American West gave the United States of America

grass roots political movements, which were named after all for the prairie grasses, whose roots can go as deep as three and a half meters. Those movements included the late 19th century alliance movement and the populist movements in the late 19th century that reordered American politics. Central to those movements, those grassroots movements, were the Western women who organized to fund churches and

to fund schools and who drove Western politics. For example, when the Western State of Iowa added murals to its state house in 1908 to portray the modern government, the duties of defense, charities, education, and the executive, legislative, and the judiciary. It illustrated those aspects of modern American government, all except defense and legislature. It portrayed them as women. The contrast between the myth of cowboy individualism and the reality of life in the American West matters because they represent two very different versions of the American government. Iowa's depiction of the modern government as support for an inclusive society in which

women took full part was part of a larger movement in the early 20th century to change the nature of American government itself. Key to that change was social worker Frances Perkins. As a settlement house worker, she saw firsthand what economists will tell you today, that modern industrialization could not survive without the labor and the participation of the entire community, not just male factory workers who were actually paid lower than survival wages.

Later when she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, Perkins also saw what happened to communities without government regulation and social services. I can't begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere, Herkens recalled after the fire. It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn't have been. We were sorry. We didn't want it that way. We hadn't intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory.

It was a terrible thing for the people of the city of New York and the state of New York to face. With her help, the New York Democratic machine remade New York state politics to address the needs of the entire community. When Perkins became Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she took that new government philosophy to the federal level, where she ushered in a dramatic change to the nature of the federal government. With the 1935 Social Security Act,

Perkins did more than provide benefits for the elderly and orphans, she created a new kind of United States government. Before Perkins, the primary function of the Federal Government was to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. Property rights, after all, had been the basis on which North American colonists had found the legal justification to rebel against the British crown. And the focus on the relationships inherent in property ownership had continued to dominate

the government that American lawmakers built afterward. But Perkins recognized that the end of government was not to protect property. It was to protect the communities of people who lived in the nation. She recognized that children, the elderly, women, and disabled Americans were as valuable to that community as the young male workers and the wealthy men who employed them. And she molded the government to reflect the idea that the equal value of all Americans meant that they should all have equal protection of the laws and equal access to resources, including social services like

health care, education, and child care. Her vision of the U.S. government reflected reality. But Perkins' recognition of community as the heart of the nation directly challenged the power of men who could dominate a world that had been defined by economic relationships. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents worked to destroy it and the new idea of government that it represented. Reaching back to the past, they claimed that such a government would destroy men's willingness to work and ruin the individualism that made America great. In the 1930s, as soon as the New Deal reorganized

government around communities, established businessmen set out to resurrect that old form of government, that old economic ideology, and to bolster their support, they welcomed racists who opposed the idea of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities to their coalition, and that unholy alliance has been well studied. But they also turned to religious traditionalists who had stood against the teaching of evolution

in the Scopes Trial just a dozen years before the passage of the Social Security Act. Religious traditionalists, especially those in the Southern Baptist Convention, opposed the new system because it recognized equal rights for women. Women's equality, they believed, meant the end of the patriarchy that they thought mirrored God's relationship to his people and they saw it as an affront to God. Their position that the modern government was un-American then was strengthened in 1962 when the Supreme Court decided the Engel v. Vitale decision would struck down

state-mandated prayer in public schools, and then in 1963 when Abingdon School District v. Shemp prohibited teachers from leading students in prayer or Bible readings. The Supreme Court decisions against prayer in the schools reinforced the idea that the modern government opposed family values. That religious traditionalism took political shape in 1967

when Southern Baptist leaders Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson plotted to take the Southern Baptists back to an older view of the world. They focused on the inerrancy of the Bible, that is, the Bible can't be wrong, but it was really about women's rights, their ideology. They were denying women's equality and pushing them back into a position subordinate to men. Interestingly enough, both Pressler and Patterson both would eventually lose their positions in the church after allegations of sexual assault.

Which is not something I'm going to talk about here, but I will in the book. By 1972, the issue of abortion would bring this sexist religious backlash into American politics. Abortion had become a centerpiece of the post-World War II government after doctors identified abortion access as a major public health issue in the 1960s. They estimated that there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal US abortions a year,

endangering the lives of women, primarily poor women who could not afford a workaround. By 1972, 64% of Americans believed that abortion should be a question answered by a woman and her doctor. 68% of Republicans believed that. But in 1972, before Roe v. Wade, President Richard Nixon was up for reelection. He was in real trouble with his base after the May 1970 Kent State shooting, and he and

his people were terrified that he would lose the election. So his advisor, Pat Buchanan, urged Nixon to woo Catholic Democrats before the election by turning to the issue of abortion. Although Nixon had virtually the same platform on the issue as Democratic nominee George McGovern, Nixon and Buchanan defined McGovern as the candidate of acid, amnesty for draft dodgers, and abortion, a radical framing designed to attract traditionalists to the Republican Party. As Nixon split the U.S. in two to rally voters, his supporters used abortion to stand in for

women's rights in general. Railing against women's equal rights, in her first statement on abortion in 1972, again the year before Roe v. Wade, activist Phyllis Schlafly did not talk about fetuses, but she talked about women's equality. Women's Lib, short for women's liberation, is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society. Women's Libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are second-class citizens and abject slaves. Women's libers are promoting free sex instead of the slavery of marriage. They are promoting federal daycare centers for babies instead of homes.

They are promoting abortions instead of families. In 1979, the first deadline for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment enshrining women's rights in the U.S. Constitution passed with the amendment unratified, and candidate Ronald Reagan welcomed right-wing Southern Baptist leaders like Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell into his coalition. As the power of those evangelicals grew, Republican culture attacked the modern government by relegating women to the roles of wives and mothers or as sex objects. With talk radio hosts like Roche Limbaugh referring to women who wanted equal rights as feminazis who were destroying society, and after 1996 the Fox News Channel portrayed

women's ideal submissive role quite carefully as younger women deferred to older white male hosts like Bill O'Reilly and displayed their bodies under low-cut shirts and short skirts that could be seen under the new glass desks that they used on those sets. But this attempt to undermine the modern government was running up against women's changing political voice. American women tended to vote as their husbands did until 1980 when political observers first saw

a gender gap in voting. Women turn out in higher numbers to vote than men do, and they vote for Democratic candidates at higher rates than men do. If you break that statistic down by race, the numbers are even starker, with black women and women of color voting in significantly higher percentages for Democratic candidates than men do. So the attempt to get rid of the modern American state began to take shape as an evangelical emphasis on gender

domination in households. Wildly popular books and religious culture emphasized a woman's duty to produce a lot of children and to do as her husband or father told her. In 2014 and 2015, this impulse to remove the equality of women from American society showed in Gamergate. When men complained about their inability to find women who would date them and began to call themselves incels or involuntary celibates and began to refer to women as NPCs, non-player characters who are there to make the story move forward for the playing characters.

By the way, a term that you see Elon Musk using a lot these days, when you see NPCs, that's what he's talking about. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, on US Public Radio, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas, where you can always get our podcast. I'm Nala Ayed. Heather Cox Richardson is a renowned historian based at Boston College. She also writes a popular substack called Letters from an American with more than two million subscribers.

She was invited to deliver a lecture at the University of British Columbia on the question of what it means to be American. Here is the conclusion. In the 2016 campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump faced off against Hillary Clinton, who had so specifically defended the idea of a community-based government that she wrote a book titled It Takes a Village. He demonstrated his dominance over Clinton by physically looming over her at a debate. He called for her to be jailed and then he boasted of sexual assault. But that boast of sexual assault did not end his candidacy, it strengthened it. Once in power, Trump gave the evangelicals what they wanted by staying...

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Backing the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn abortion rights. In 2025, Trump returned to power by warning voters that the modern American state was literally turning boys into girls. While his vice president, J.D. Vance, urged women to embrace traditional gender roles, including staying in abusive marriages

for the sake of the children. In contrast, Democratic candidates Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz emphasized community and the role of government in protecting that community. Now Trump's MAGA Republicans control all the branches of the government, but it is not clear that they will be able to suppress the vast majority of Americans who continue to support the government that Frances Perkins ushered in 90 years ago. For one thing, Republican voters are learning that the government they thought was helping women and minorities actually helps them and kept

the nation safe. But there's also a key factor at play right now that is coming to a conclusion after the longstanding Republican attacks on women. As they did in Perkins's era, women are still central to the American community, but now there is a twist. Two generations of women striving for education meant that men backed away from professions once women reached parity in those professions, and now women are dominating educational achievement

in the United States, making them more prepared for a modern government than young men are. The past 40 years has also created a new demographic. Women now have educations and connections, they have skills, often they have money, and the people who are now in the boomer generation and slightly below it are the first generation of American women to have 20 to 30 years after their children leave home to invent a second career. Many of them are turning to issues they care about, including political organizing. Indeed, so nervous are MAGA Republican leaders about women's political roles that they're

trying to throw women out of political power altogether. The House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or the SAVE Act, which would require all American voters to prove they are citizens by presenting documentation in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. But the kicker is that your official identification has to match your current name. That means that it would disfranchise as many as 69 million American women who do not have

passports and whose birth certificates are not in their current married names. That save act, I think, dovetails with the extraordinary misogyny that has come to dominate the MAGA Republican Party. And I'm going to argue that it is not an accident that the current attempt in the United States to overthrow democracy presents as an attack on American women. American women created and then maintained

the American state the Trump administration is currently dismantling. Whether they will save it and realize the government Francis Perkins set out to establish 90 years ago a government based in the reality that the community is the centerpiece of American society, or whether they won't, is the story of America not just in this moment, but for our future. And I always like to point out that it's worth remembering that the mythological cowboy never stuck around.

He actually rode off into the sunset and left the people behind to govern the community. Thank you very much. Applause After the lecture, Heather Cox Richardson was joined on stage by Heidi Tworak, a UBC Professor of International History and Public Policy. Professor Twork is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. So the first question I want to ask you is just to start delving into your brain as a historian. One of the things we keep reading in the newspapers today is how unprecedented everything that the Trump administration has been doing over the last few months is.

And I wonder if you as the historian can take a bit of a step back for us and separate out a little bit the things that you really think are unprecedented about what we've been seeing in the last few months. It's dizzying, isn't it? So I am one of the people who called it a constitutional crisis from very early days. And the reason I was impatient with those who did not is because our Constitution is

really very clear, and the clarity of where the government power comes from is also quite clear and it comes from we, the people. In our Constitution, there's three main articles. Article one sets up the lawmaking bodies of the United States government and that is the House of Representatives and the Senate that are the legislative body. That is the only body in the federal government that can make a law. Article 2 powers are the powers of the President and the President's duty is to execute the laws, make sure that they are carried out of the president. And the president's duty is to execute the laws,

make sure that they are carried out in good faith. So the minute that the Trump administration got into power and withheld the appropriations that had been made by Congress for the US Agency for International Development, which is a congressionally established agency, he was taking the power of Congress, one of our three branches of government, and relegating it to himself. That is a constitutional crisis that is explicitly against the law.

This is what Trump was impeached for in 2019 when he withheld money that had been appropriated for the Ukraine's military. That right out of the box was the first thing that was unprecedented. But since then, of course, we have the problem of the fact that the Trump administration is operating outside the Constitution. They're not just breaking the laws, they're acting extra constitutionally, which makes things really difficult because we have systems set up for when people break the laws.

We don't have systems set up for when people say, I'm going to pull this billionaire off the street, give him access to all Americans' data, and good luck with that. The other thing is the quite deliberate destruction of the different pieces of our Bill of Rights that protect liberties. And those are ramping up on a daily basis with the idea, I think, of overawing people

so they don't fight back. But so far, it's had the opposite effect. A lot of people who otherwise wouldn't be paying very close attention notice when a graduate student gets kidnapped off the streets and sent to prison in Louisiana. Yeah, and I think your description of a constitutional crisis is one way of trying to express. There's something really unprecedented about this.

There's something urgent. It is some kind of emergency. One of the other ways that prominent historians have been trying to do that, like Ruth Ben-Giard or Tim Snyder, is through comparisons with fascism. And I wonder if you could just reflect a little bit about whether you think that's, is that useful or not, or do you wanna keep rooting it as you do really in American history?

There's two ways to answer that, and one of the ways in which we're in quite unusual territory for the United States is we have in power a group of people who are actively trying to destroy democracy. So I'm one of those annoying people who doesn't like the word fascism because fascism has

a number of economic policies that the Trump administration is really not embracing in favor of authoritarianism. To me it looks much more like somebody like Viktor Orban in Hungary. And while fascism is a very useful term for the destruction of rights and liberties, you know, I study the economy, so I'm kinda like, that's not quite what he's doing, because if you look at the terrorists, for example, the sheer caprice of them is something

that you'd have a much harder time getting through a fascist system than you would through an authoritarian system. So you can call it fascist if you want, but I'm much more into authoritarianism. So the way that I've been thinking about it to move to my next question is to draw on what Daniel Ziblatt, political scientist,

has been talking about when he's been describing what Trump is aiming at as something more akin to competitive authoritarianism. There'll still be elections, but it's going to be harder and harder for the Democrats to win. So I'd love to hear a little bit more of your reflections on that,

whether it's comparisons with Hungary or Turkey. Do you see competitive authoritarianism as a better description of where the US might be heading? I do, and I love his work. And yes, the concept of competitive authoritarianism is that, yes, there will always be elections, but you already know who's going to win one of them. And that's the same kind of things you saw in Russia or in Hungary are exactly the same things you're seeing here

in an attempt really to crack down on the media, to delegitimize opponents, political opponents. But to maybe add a little bit to something that he said, I have been fascinated for years now by the concept of virtual technology or virtual politics. And that's the idea of creating a false reality around which voters come to cast their votes. So they believe they're voting for something they're not,

which if you're following American politics right now, you don't have to go real far to look at people going, he's doing what with the tariffs? You know, what is he, I didn't, that's not what I voted for. But that idea of using a fake reality to convince people to vote away their own democracy strikes me as having a lot of commonalities

between the United States and countries like Russia or countries like Belarus or Ukraine who have faced a similar situation of political operatives convincing people of a fake reality, of a virtual politics. If you read these books, it's really interesting as they talk about how you destabilize a democratic population and how you can get them to vote away their democracy and how they become yours and how you start to scoop everything up. But they never talk about what happens when a people realizes that's happened to them. That when people who have sold their political and perhaps personal identities to that fake

image, discover that they were sold a bill of goods, they're going to be angry. And that I think is what we're going to see in the United States. Yeah, so I studied democracy, but I really study its communications and democracies. I want to dig into this question of virtual reality. I would love to hear from you your perspective of how Republicans have built this. What are the channels that they've used? So expanding a little bit more, and there's the Fox News, but the talk radio,

tell us a little bit more about your 40-year potted history of how Republicans have created this virtual reality. Well, it's really smart, actually, and again, this is kind of what I do. I'm a historian, and what historians do is we study how and why societies change. I'm an idealist. I believe that ideas change society.

And I was later to this game than a lot of right-wing operatives. So it's worth remembering that Alex Jones, who runs Infowars in the United States and has been a conspiracy theorist since the early 90s, the tagline of Infowars is literally, there's a war on for your mind. I'll take you back here to,

let's go with 1971 in the Powell Memo. The Powell Memo says that if the business leaders are ever going to stop this juggernaut of this government that I was just talking about that protects the community through regulation and social welfare and infrastructure and protecting civil rights, they've got to capture major pieces of the US government and that's gonna involve the legal system.

This is pretty soon, by the early 80s, you're gonna get the rise of the Federalist Society that's designed to capture the courts. You need to capture the universities, which is where you start to get the idea that universities are liberal, but you also need to capture the media. And so you're gonna see this by the end of the 1970s,

quite dramatically, Ronald Reagan, who is himself a media guy, of course, begins to use the media in a way that's reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was the big anti-communist guy, who would just make crap up, and then by the time anybody fact-checked him, he was the big anti-communist guy, who would just make crap up, and then by the time anybody fact-checked him, he was on to another story.

By the way, his right-hand man was Roy Cohn, who was Donald Trump's mentor. Not an accident that Trump is always staying one step ahead of the story. Reagan begins to tell stories in 78, 79, right before he's running for office, that are not true, and they're demonstrably not true. So if you read some of the biographies of Reagan,

they will say that journalists were laughing at him. And the great example of this is when he would talk about how many people he saved as a lifeguard. Like he saved hundreds and hundreds of people as a lifeguard, and everybody else who worked on the beach is like, dude, no one drowned on our watch. What was going on with you? But what he found was that people loved the stories. You know, he was

this great hero. And you see the rise, really with Reagan, although the roots of it are in Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign of creating this image. And the Nixon campaign does it very deliberately, and the guy who runs it in the Nixon campaign is Roger Ailes. And so they began to really push the idea that their point of view had to be represented in the American media. But the problem was that we had something called the Fairness Doctrine that said that if you were making

an argument in the media, it had to be supported by facts, and you had to represent the other side as well. So in order to make sure that their point of view, which was based in Christianity and based in getting rid of regulations and a social safety net and taxes, in order to make sure that that was available, they really pressured Reagan to put on our Federal Communications Commission a group of people who believed in what we called movement conservatism. They called themselves conservatives, but they were not conservative.

They were radical, but they were a political movement. So that's what movement conservatism is. So in 1987, we lose the fairness doctrine. And we lose the fairness doctrine just as FM radio is coming on really effectively, so that AM radio stations need ear balls, need ears, need somebody listening. And they start to run shock jocks.

And the shock jocks figure out that politics sells. So Rush Limbaugh does not start as a political shock jock, he becomes a political shock jock. So by 1988, you have Rush Limbaugh with a national show, and then of course you get the Fox News Channel in 1996, which brings that image to television, and of course that's run by Roger Ailes. You know, this is a theme.

That concept of creating this right-wing media and the ecosystem around it has grown since then and you know the rest. You know the fall of local media because of the concentration of newspapers, for example, and the overcapitalization of media and so on. But let me just jump forward to this moment, because I think this moment is so interesting. We know now that one of the reasons that President Donald Trump was able to essentially

not do any media, not do any interviews or so on in the 2024 election was because they had created an entirely alternative media. And that media was not just the things that people like me were watching, like Newsmax or OAN or the Fox News Channel, or the things that you have heard of. They were paying influencers on politics adjacent things

like nutrition podcasts, yoga podcasts, the TradWive, Instagram things, all that stuff. So they were permeating a group of people that the rest of us weren't even paying attention to. And we know now that those people who claimed that they did not watch politics voted as much as 54 points for Trump over Harris, while people who watched any news at all,

so long as it was not the Fox News Channel or for the right, that is you could even do nothing but read the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Now they're trolling Trump, but they weren't before the election. You still voted overwhelmingly for Harris. So that use of social media and alternative media, I think we're in a whole new world.

Let me make sure I bring in some questions from the audience because there are many. So the first is, what lessons from history offer us hope about reversing the immense influence of ultra wealth on controlling a democracy? I'm glad you specified wealth because there are a number of studies of how one reclaims a democracy from an autocracy. The thing about the extraordinary wealth in the United States right now is that we have a very clear pattern for overcoming that because this is exactly what the United States looked like during what we knew as the Gilded Age, or the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

And what was key to that was not only the obvious things like the rise of a new media, which of course we're seeing now. We had the exact same thing happen in the late 19th century with the rise of magazines like McClure's Magazine, which you may have heard of and which is available online by the way, that said to people who were not otherwise paying attention

and were simply reading the legacy media, you know, hey, do you know what J.D. Rockefeller's doing with oil and how he's destroying small businesses? Or hey, do you know how the cities of Minneapolis, Ray Stanner Baker wrote about Minneapolis and how Minneapolis was corrupt and so on? And that engaged a lot of people in the political process that weren't otherwise engaged.

And you saw the rise of things like the Alliance Movement and the Populist Movement from this new media, much of which was ephemeral, and we don't have it anymore, which breaks my heart. So there is the rise of new media, and there is the rise of increasing language against those politicians, because everybody writes to me and says, well, why should I complain to my Republican politicians? They're not going to change anything. I'm like, no, why should I complain to my Republican politicians? They're not gonna change anything. I'm like, no, of course they're not.

Ron Johnson is not suddenly gonna start voting for the Democrats. But lots of people would like to get elected to replace Ron Johnson, and they will listen to what you are saying. And you're already seeing this around the United States right now. All kinds of people throwing their hats into the ring

for the midterm elections and then eventually for the next presidential election. But that's not the only place that you see the rise of a pushback against wealth. The humanities are really important. Music and art are really important because they give voices to people who are otherwise excluded from that political system. And if you think about the late 19th century and the parallels to the present, we had new kinds of clothing, we had new voices, we had new foods, we had new languages, we had new art, the new music, jazz and ragtime and cowboy poetry and all the new forms of artistic expression

created new ways to talk about communities and about pushing back against those very wealthy people who were using the government for themselves. At the same time in that area you got huge numbers of fraternal and sororal organizations and they began to provide the kinds of support for individuals that the government was not doing. So you start to see all these new organizations and these new ideas, new languages, as I say, and music and so on. And you see the reality that the current government is not answering the needs of any except a

very few. I would argue the exact same thing is happening in the United States today. All of the things I just said you've seen parallels to, including the rise of new organizations, but you're not seeing them in the streets so much as you're seeing them on social media. And I always tell people that when I look at history, and you'll appreciate this, I think of it like the cement coming out of a cement truck. It's kind of gray and there's rocks in it, and it's very mesmerizing. You watch it flow by.

But if a child's red and yellow dump truck, plastic dump truck came down that chute, you'd sit up and take notice. Or if a fish started leaping out, you'd sit up and take notice. That's what I look for. And for me, one of the most dramatic children's toys coming out of that chute in the United States in the last at least five years was the popular reaction to the shooting of the United Health Care CEO in Manhattan in was it December or January?

TikTok was a light for weeks. There are images that circulate around the United States of the shooter as a saint. People are paying his legal bills. That lionization of a man who took on the health care system, but really, I think, the wealth that is dominating American society indicated to me a powder keg. Most popular question, because questions get upvoted, what does history tell us about overcoming issues with the Supreme Court?

Our Supreme Court is a problem. And it's a problem in a number of different ways. The third section of our Constitution doesn't say a lot about the judiciary, and one of the things it doesn't say is how many people should be on the Supreme Court That's adjusted by Congress. Do you know the last time Congress adjusted the number of people on the Supreme Court? 1869 and you know, I know you don't know this but the country's grown a lot since 1869 and so one of the things that's grown is federal districts have grown. We have 13 federal districts, and there's an argument to be made that we should have at least 13 people on the Supreme Court. Now, this particular Supreme Court

is deeply problematic right now. It's deciding a lot of things that, I'm dancing around it. Man, when they decided Donald J. Trump versus the United States in July of 2024, they undermined our entire system of government by saying that one man was above the law. So let's just say it. But now, they remain in power.

For now, they remain in power. And there is a dynamic going on here where at least John Roberts, who's the Chief Justice, and Amy Coney Barrett, who is the most recent appointee to the court, are concerned about destroying the legacy of the court and destroying their own power. Because if they give Trump all the power he wants, he does not need them. They're trying to dance between he's going to do it anyway and we can't let him do it because once we let him do it, he doesn't need us anymore.

You have to start by remembering that there's three factions of MAGA that are currently operating out of the White House. And Donald Trump is a figurehead for those. He is not in control of this administration. I believe that. Not that they're tying him up in the basement. basement, but he is, but he is, you know, he has admitted in many ways that he is not the one calling the shots. Those three factions are struggling over controlling the administration and that would be the brologuarks who are, you can

think of them as Elon Musk, although that's not, I'm giving you the shorthand. There's the Project 2025 people who is Russell Vogt, the director of the Office of Management and Budget that is really putting that stuff in place very quietly. He's really running under the radar, but he's the one who's really getting stuff accomplished. And then there is the Hungarian faction, which is being run out of the Deputy White House Chief

of Staff position, and that's Stephen Miller, and he's working with Christine Noem, who is the Secretary of Homeland Security. They're the ones who want to get rid of everybody with brown or black skin, and they're the ones who are behind the migrant stuff. So you got those three people going on. But it's really important to remember that of those three groups, Stephen Miller wants a very powerful government right away. The Project 2025 people and the brologarcks

want to take American government down to the dirt. They want to get rid of the government, they want to get rid of healthcare, they want to get rid of science, they want to get rid of social security, they want to get rid of Medicare, they want to get rid of the government. They want to get rid of healthcare. They want to get rid of science. They want to get rid of social security. They want to get rid of Medicare. They want to get rid of Medicaid. They want to get rid of everything. And they want to get rid of education. Because they believe that all of those things have been tainted by the government I was

talking about, what they call a liberal government or a secular government. And it's not just a question of replacing people and putting somebody else in power that votes Republican, they want to get rid of those things altogether and that's what you're watching happen right now. Project 2025, those particular people want to have a theocracy and the brologarcs want to have a technocracy. They don't agree with each other at all, but they do agree that they want to get rid of the American government. Stephen Miller wants to control a strong government, and both of those groups also want to control a strong government.

Elon Musk wants to have government contracts so he can get to Mars. And then the Project 2025 people want a strong government so they can impose religious rule. Stephen Miller wants a strong government so he can have a white supremacist, you know, white people get everything government. Heather, you wanted a small final question, so I'll give it to you. This series is called What It Means to Be an American. Tell us in three words. What do you think it means to be an American?

Oh, that's so easy. We have hope. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and the author of the newsletter Letter from an American. In early April, she delivered the final lecture in the 2025 Phil Lind Initiative series at the University of British Columbia. what it means to be American. The program was produced by Anne Penman. If you'd like to comment on anything you heard in this program or any other, just go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duvin. just go to our website cbc.ca.c.ca.ca.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c.c I'm gonna be a good boy. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.