Ideas - The extreme in America’s mainstream

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Leonard Moore has long taught popular courses on American history at McGill University. His retirement lecture is full of insight — and worries — about the deep polarization in the United States. He argues history has its lessons, but it’s still an open question whether they’ll be learned.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

All this time it feels like, well, this is the hardest lecture I've ever given. Leonard Moore taught American history at McGill University in Montreal for more than 30 years. And while professors have been known to put their scholarship above all else, Len, as he prefers to be called, sees himself first and foremost as a teacher. His interest in teaching began when he had a summer job as a swimming instructor in the Bay Area of San Francisco. One thing I figured out early on is that, yeah, I'm teaching swimming, but mostly I'm teaching six-year-olds. And I think that is the key to being a good teacher. It's not just the material. It's not just an exercise in an information dump. It is about connecting with the people. Len Moore arrived at McGill in 1991, an expert on the rise of modern conservatism

and the author of a groundbreaking study on the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan. But at McGill, Len was just one of a few professors teaching American history. And initially, that paucity unnerved him. It felt like a lot in my first thoughts. I've got to get out of here. There's not very many Americanists around. There's not going to be a big group. But it wasn't long before he ignited the interest of his students. I don't think I've ever walked into a class at McGill without feeling like there's a buzz in the room, like people are interested. That's just an extraordinary thing to experience

as a teacher. In April 2024, Leonard Moore delivered his last lecture before retiring. And we're going to be concluding the class, in case you don't know History 392, is the U.S. 1965 to present. And so the lecture today is going to be on the really difficult present. To cap off a stellar career, the lecture was open to the public and was attended by friends, family, and generations of former students. Thank you. Can you hear me okay back there? Yes?

All right. In 1958 and 1959, the integrated circuit was invented in the United States. It was a product of post-World War II investment in defense and in electronics in particular. It was a part of a kind of just one key example of the kind of economic golden age of the 1950s and early 1960s, an age of incredible scientific and technological advancement for good reasons and for some not so good reasons. One of the inventors was a guy who worked for Texas Instruments.

His name was James Kilby. He was a guy from Kansas, got his master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, and went to work for Texas Instruments in Texas. And he just solved this problem that had been underway in the field of uses of electricity, electrical engineering. Shortly after that, a somewhat better integrated circuit semiconductor was invented out in California by another guy, Robert Noyce. And he founded a company called Fairchild Semiconductors in what would become the Silicon Valley juggernaut in the years to come.

He later went on to help found another company called Intel. And the first microprocessor was invented and marketed by Intel in 1971. And by the end of the decade of the 1970s, a revolution was underway in computing. This was a part of the post-World War II period of an American sort of economic and technological juggernaut. And those events changed the world in powerful ways for good and for bad. They led to the digital revolution that we all are a part of today. Jump ahead a few decades. In 1990, 37% of all the semiconductors in the world were manufactured in the United States. And then the magic of the marketplace does what it does, or did what it did. marketplace does what it does or did what it did. And by 2021, the United States produced only 12% of the semiconductors in the United States. They were produced in other countries.

And in 2021, President Biden saw this as a significant problem. The United States was coming through the pandemic. There were huge problems with supply lines that were made really evident by the pandemic. And there was also the rise of China and the fact that semiconductors, a huge number of them, are manufactured in Taiwan. And then the geopolitical threat involving Taiwan, a very complicated issue. And just as the semiconductors were invented in large part for national security reasons, so they could have more reliable airplanes, it seemed rather important for the semiconductors to start being manufactured in the United States again in large numbers for national security reasons and also just because it had become such a vital part of almost every aspect of our lives and everything that we do. So one of the things that the Biden

administration did in 2022 was pass something known as the CHIPS and Science Act. passed something known as the CHIPS and Science Act. And CHIPS is an acronym for something having to do with chips. And this act passed by Congress devoted $280 billion to support the expansion of semiconductor processing in the United States. And it was to manufacture chips, manufacture equipments that made chips. It was for research. It was for workforce training to serve the interest of NASA,

of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce. NASA, of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce. The whole idea is there was going to be an explosion of this industry returning to the United States and playing a huge role in the American economy. Under the CHIPS Act, huge investments were made, along with private corporations, in manufacturing facilities. Two of them in upstate New York, a region of the United States that was sort of at the heart of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but by the end

of the 20th century had become a kind of semi-abandoned industrial space. Schenectady, Albany, Utica. But two huge plants are underway now to sort of re-industrialize this region. Two huge plants were planned by different companies in Texas, two more in Phoenix and Arizona, one in North Carolina, another one in Utah, another one in Wichita, Kansas, another one in Indiana in conjunction with Purdue University, which also has scooped up a lot of money for training and research in the area. It's been an extraordinary revival of almost kind of a throwback

to the America of the 1950s and 1960s when there's government investment in an economic expansion that is going to bring good jobs, high-paying jobs, and bring more economic and actual security to the people of the United States. But that's not all the Biden administration was doing in the first couple years of the administration. There was the Infrastructure and Jobs Act passed in August of 2021. And that bill devoted $1.2 trillion to infrastructure projects all across the United States, in every state, almost in every town. Road construction, bridge construction, highway safety construction, rail repair and construction, expansion of ports in various places around the United States,

the repair and modernization of airport concourses and other airport facilities. Work on the electric grid, which has been a huge neglected problem for the past 40, 50 years, resulting in possible blackouts and that kind of thing. And trying finally to deliver high-speed Internet to lots of isolated rural places around the United States. This is a throwback to the politics of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower in terms of the scope, the commitment of the federal government to the well-being of the people of the United States and the economy of the United States. And then there was also the Inflation Reduction Act

that was passed right around the same time, which leveled new taxes and closed loopholes for the wealthy in lots of areas. I won't go through all the provisions, but one of the provisions was to devote billions of dollars much needed toward green energy research and production to address climate change. There's all of this extraordinary achievement that has taken place in the last

couple years in American politics, the last couple years in American politics, the last few years in American politics. It's an extraordinary record. So why isn't Joe Biden cruising to re-election in the 2024 election, given what he has accomplished, these historic things that seem to be reversing decades of neglect of infrastructure, decades of government not working to advance science and technology as much as it could have. and technology as much as it could have. The reason is because a fascist movement has emerged in the United States in recent years, and it has gathered extraordinary political power

to the point where it significantly threatens the very existence of democracy in the United States. significantly threatens the very existence of democracy in the United States. Now, I want to say something about using this term fascist. Not all historians or scholars agree that that is the right term to apply to the right-wing extremism that has emerged in American politics in such a strong way in the years of Donald Trump on the national scene. I think that the debate over what to call it is fine. I've never had a problem using the term because I think what we have seen sort of goes to the heart of what fascism is, and that is it's an extreme form of ethno-nationalism built around the idea of mass grievance and the emergence of a charismatic figure who doesn't have any real

solutions to the problems that the citizens of the nation are concerned about, but just seems to benefit from stoking the fear and the anger and the anxiety. There are other things that some scholars have pointed out about fascism that they see as kind of universal. The idea that fascism is tied to a kind of unreality, an idea of a mythic past, an anti-intellectualism, in other words, a rejection of knowledge, a rejection of the whole idea of truth in favor of this ethno-nationalist passion and vision. A lot of scholars have associated fascism with a kind of hyper-masculinity and sexual anxieties and various other kinds of things. And I think we've seen all those things on display in the Trump years in powerful ways,

and in ways that I don't have time to go into now. So I'm comfortable with the term fascism. There are some scholars who initially didn't like using fascism to describe Trump's movement because they didn't see the kind of violence that was associated with, say, Nazi Germany. The argument against that is, well, just wait. A lot of violence did erupt, especially at the end of his presidency, and there is a lot of violence, potential violence out there in American society. People all over the United States are afraid. People who work at polling places, people who serve on school boards, people who are involved

in public service in any way are often finding themselves with death threats and all that kind of stuff. But the thing is, I think it's a legitimate debate. And the most important thing about it is it's not really whether you call it fascism, whether you call it right wing extremism. The reason that normal political achievements like the kind Biden has had in an economy that shows many positive indicators and has gotten through the trauma of the pandemic. Well, he's also old. That's another factor we all know. But the reason he's not cruising, the reason is because the nation has become divided profoundly and powerfully by this ethnic nationalism, by this sense of grievance,

by this kind of irrational, passionate belief that somehow the nation has been sold down the river by, I don't know, people like me or woke people or, you know, think of whatever term you want, people who teach about the history of racism or African-American history in the United States and on and on. And the key thing about it is the threat that it represents to democratic institutions in the United States. If you haven't heard about Trump's 2025 plan that has been hammered out by the Heritage Foundation, it's frightening. It essentially is a plan to disassemble American civil government and reassemble it with loyalists to Trump's extreme right-wing ideology.

It could affect almost every function of American government. It could deeply affect the criminal justice system. My biggest fear is that Trump will do what he evidently wanted to do very often during his first presidency, and that is invoke the Insurrection Act, which will allow martial law in the United States. So this is truly a unique and frightening moment, whether you want to call it fascism or whatever you want to call it. It's a grave danger to American society. And given the state of the world, it's a great threat to the entire world, in my view. Now, one of the things about understanding where the United States is these days, is I think moving past what I see as the somewhat easy or maybe

too simple idea that somehow Trump is an aberration. Trump does not represent something from the sort of the center, the heart of American society. That, you know, he is so clearly such an odd person, such a strange guy. He's a pathological character in so many ways that it might be easy to see him as a kind of one-off, like just somebody who came along and knew how to punch all the right buttons and rise to this level. He seems to get more off the charts and crazier every day. And that could lead people to believe that Trump represents an outlier, not something that truly reflects American society. But I really disagree with that conclusion. not something that truly reflects American society.

But I really disagree with that conclusion. I've always operated on the assumption, and some of it has to do with the research that I did early in my career, on the idea that crazy leaders come and go, and some of them get big followings, and some of them just are a flash in the pan, and they self-destruct in some way. And maybe that will happen with Trump down the road.

Eventually we'll see. But I think that the leaders of these movements only play a certain role Because the most important and powerful role is what comes from beneath the surface, what comes up from society. The big question is, why are people open to what Trump is saying? What has taken place that has made that a possibility, made the destruction of democracy a possibility in American life.

I would start with the Civil Rights Movement and what happened to the United States after 1965. How the Civil Rights Movement led to an explosion of awareness of citizenship issues, not just for African Americans, but for all Americans, for many Americans, for women, for other ethnic groups in the United States, for indigenous people, people who had a different sexuality other than the norm. On and on across the board, this is a period of upheaval where people are asking basic questions the extremism that we are seeing today in American politics. Extremism has always been a mainstream element of American life. Look at the issues that are at stake today that seem to define the extremism of the political right in the United States. Let's start with the abortion decision by the United States Supreme Court.

That is something that I would say is extremism. It is something that sort of defines the Trump era. I mean, he ran on a promise to do away with Roe versus Wade. So many of his supporters flocked to him, especially from the Christian right or by conservative evangelicals in the United States because of that promise. And we're seeing all these extraordinary, dire, life-threatening consequences to that decision by the United States Supreme Court. Opposition to abortion was not something that came out of the blue. It's been a 50-year

struggle ever since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. And it has included violence, ugly forms of protest, bombings of Planned Parenthood buildings, assassinations of doctors who performed abortions. Now, it doesn't mean that everybody who considers themselves pro-life or defines himself as pro-life is a radical. But there's tons of radicalism inside that underneath that political umbrella it's been there all along it's just been put into realization let's look at the issue of race

and other issues of social justice and ethnicity but particularly the teaching of African AmericanAmerican history and what an assault it is under in the United States today in various places, especially when you have conservative governors and state legislatures interfering with state universities, as, say, is the case in Florida and is mushrooming up in other places, telling professors like me, you know, what they're supposed to be able to teach about professors like me what they're supposed to be able to teach

about American history and what they're supposed to be able to say about African-American history and the fact that it is at the very center of American history, essential to understanding anything about the United States as a country and about American history. That perspective goes throughout American history. I'm going to talk about the deeper past here in a couple minutes. But certainly since 1965, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were fought at every turn. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were fought at every turn.

When they were put into law, they were fought in the courts. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It was immediately challenged in court, and the liberal Warren Court at the time upheld the legitimacy of the Voting Rights Act. And the Voting Rights Act brought profound and important changes to American politics and American life, empowering African American and other minority politicians all around the United States in new ways for the first time and voters in new ways for the first time. But the challenges never went away.

Even when the courts were turning aside the challenges to the laws, local states responded, states like Mississippi and Alabama and other deep southern states. They responded by changing elective offices to appointed offices just to try to undermine the power of the vote of the newly registered African-American voters. So instead of judges being elected in a county election, they were now appointed by the state legislature, undermining and diluting the power of African-Americans. And then there were other examples of what were known as vote dilution

that carried along through the 1970s and 1980s and led to litigation. I worked on a little of that litigation. Voting rights litigation always involves historians because one question the court has to answer or wants an answer to is, is there a history of racial discrimination that bears on this question of voting rights discrimination? And there actually are a core of incredible historians who have been at the forefront of this for years. I'm like on, you know, the taxi squad of that group because I know a lot about Indiana. A case for Indiana comes up and they say, well, try Len Moore. He knows about Indiana. So I've worked on a few cases. I'm not at the forefront of that effort. But what's happened during all of this is that people had to fight so that the rules of elections aren't written in a way and the political system isn't structured in a way

so that even if you have the right to vote, you're never going to be able to win. You're never going to be able to get representation. That's what vote dilution is about. But beginning in 2000 with the Bush-Gore election and the Supreme Court decision in Bush-Gore in 2000, it became clear to conservatives that the path to political power

was to put their thumb on the scale of elections and win elections, well, win office without actually winning elections and getting the most votes. Since 2000, there's been an explosion, not simply a vote dilution, although there's still plenty of that out there, but actual voter suppression. And it has done nothing but ramp up to even greater lengths over the last 20 years. In 2008, the court decided that voter ID laws were perfectly legitimate to thwart voter fraud at the polls, even though there wasn't any voter fraud. There were no examples of it. Study after study

showed that two million votes cast in the state, three people tried to vote illegally, and they were probably just confused. It was a non-issue, but it became, the Supreme Court approved it in 2008, and 30 states rushed to pass voter ID laws with the idea of trying to keep away from the polls, people who were poor, people who were aged, and other people who might not have the proper ID and who might find it difficult to get the proper ID. And then even more recently, the Supreme Court decided in 2013 that the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act were unconstitutional. They were no longer valid. And that enforcement provision, which was so critical to the success of this law, perhaps the most important single law passed by Congress in the history of American democracy, the enforcement clause was out of date, no longer necessary. Clause was out of date, no longer necessary. In the words of Chief Justice Roberts,

it's not 1965 anymore. You know, America has transcended these racial problems of the past. On the same day that that vote was issued, the state of Texas passed a voter ID law that had been banned by the preclearance clause because it was racially discriminatory. And 680,000 Texans immediately lost the right to vote. So we have seen an explosion of opposition to the right to vote throughout American history, but just in our era since the Voting Rights Act was passed. The worst example in American history of attempt to suppress the right of people to vote occurred on January 6th when the sitting president tried to nullify all the votes cast in a national election by subverting the process of counting the votes and authorizing the vote count in Congress

through back-channel manipulations and also through a direct attempt to overthrow the government of the United States with the assault on the Capitol building and the assault on the vote counting process. So January 6th was more radical than some of the other stuff that's happened. But the extreme is embedded in the mainstream of American life. And it always has been. You're listening to Ideas. You can find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also hear us on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus,

and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short-sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now.

Short-sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. Experts will tell you that the upcoming 2024 presidential election will be one of the most important in U.S. history. We've been hearing that for a while now. But how do you make sense of history when you're living through it? But how do you make sense of history when you're living through it? That was the challenge of Leonard Moore's last lecture at McGill University, where an exceptional career spanning over 30 years recently came to an end with his retirement. In his last lecture, Leonard Moore highlighted how studying history can help chart a path towards justice. And to do that, he looked unblinkingly at the United States,

and especially to its history of what he calls the extreme elements of America's mainstream. This idea of the United States having a powerful mainstream current of anti-democratic belief based on race, based on gender, based on all kinds of levels of bigotry and ethno-nationalism, it's something that cannot be extricated from all of American history before 1965. That's one reason those forces in the period we've been looking at, those forces of conservatism that have led to the current radical attack on democracy, that's one reason they're so strong. They stand on a powerful foundation. A lot of historians look to the 1930s as a kind of starting point for the modern political right.

They look to this period as a time when the welfare state was created. American liberalism kind of opened the door to the achievements that would come down the road. There are economists who believe that the United States achieved what it did in the Second World War, fighting two wars on the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time, simply because of the road building and electric extension that took place starting in the 1920s, but accelerating with all the New Deal programs of the 1930s. So lots of scholars have looked to the reaction against the New Deal by business leaders, by conservatives who saw the New Deal opening the door

to civil rights reform and other kinds of social and cultural reforms. The thing I don't like about that perspective is that it paints the political right and modern conservatism as a reaction to modern liberalism. And I don't think that's the right way to look at it, because I believe that there has always been this anti-pluralist, powerful set of forces inside American life from the beginning, not just a kind of reaction against the New Deal. action against the New Deal. I think, actually, the modern political right emerged a decade before, in the decade before the New Deal, before the Great Depression, in the 1920s.

The 1920s were a pivotal moment in American history for all kinds of reasons. You had, for the first time, you had a communications revolution with radio, with movies, and even with the expansion of print and the availability of print. You had airplanes, you had automobiles, you had all kinds of technological developments taking place that made it seem that the United States was no longer in the world of the late 19th century. It had entered into a more modern, fast-paced, changing era. And modern conservatism was right at the heart of that transformation. It wasn't something that grew out of just a reaction to liberal policies. It was something that appeared in response to this wide range of historical forces at work.

Look at it this way. How do you understand the modern political right or modern conservatism without anti-communism? Modern anti-communism emerged with the first Red Scare after the First World War in response to circumstances that were taking place at the time. How do you understand the modern political right or modern conservatism without understanding the role of people we think of now as a religious right or fundamentalists or, I think more accurately, conservative evangelicals. That movement had been underway a little bit before the First World War,

but after the First World War in the United States, it became a powerful, powerful thing for the first time. the First World War in the United States, it became a powerful, powerful thing for the first time. The famous Scopes trial of the 1920s was about the teaching of evolution in public schools, and it was banned in some states. How do you understand the modern political right and modern conservatism without trickle-down economics, without the idea that the best way to ensure prosperity is to cut taxes for the wealthy, allow them to invest their money in the economy, without trickle-down economics, without the idea that the best way to ensure prosperity is to cut taxes for the wealthy, allow them to invest their money in the economy, and let the economy flower and bloom as a result.

Ronald Reagan's great hero was Calvin Coolidge. And the 1920s was an era of hands-off, no rules, economic, free market philosophy. And that resulted in the Great Depression and the great stock market crash when lack of government regulation and just kind of racetrack gambling mentality ruled the day. How do you understand the modern political right without understanding right-wing populism? It's not really possible. That feeling, that enormous current through a giant part of American society, that we, our group, should be dominant in American life.

Our values should be dominant. How do you understand that without understanding what happens with prohibition when essentially white Protestant America tries to force everyone else in America to stop drinking? Didn't work. And how do you understand the modern political right and this right-wing populism?

Understanding the Ku Klux Klan movement of the 1920s, which was a massive nationwide political movement dedicated to the idea that America was a white Protestant nation. When I was a fledgling graduate student working on this, I had to come up with a name for this. And I looked around and no one else had the name that I thought was accurate for it. So I called it white Protestant nationalism.

That was the title of my dissertation. And it bears a striking resemblance to white Christian nationalism, the term used today. And the currents that were existent and powerful in American society in the 1920s

would remain current and powerful and have their own history, their own history, their own roots that didn't flow directly from opposing the New Deal or opposing modernity in some broad cultural sense, but through a deep, deep belief in how they saw the history of the United States, how they saw the people of the United States, how they saw the people of the United States. How do you understand modern conservatism without understanding the role of nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States today, the radicalism of it?

In the 1920s, the United States slammed the door on immigration to the United States on the grounds that only white people from northern and western Europe could be made into good citizens of the United States. And everybody else, southern and eastern Europe, from Asia, from Africa, all over the world, those people were racially unfit to be Americans. That was the mainstream in the 1920s. The Klan was the mainstream in the 1920s. Fundamentalism was the mainstream in the 1920s. A lot of urbane Americans looked at the results of the scope trial and thought, oh, those fundamentalists will climb back under their rocks where they came from.

We're done with them. They're defeated. They would just keep growing, and they wouldn't stop. All of these things flowed out of America as it had existed up to that point, America as it was being transformed by modernity. The political right in modern America is truly a part of modern America, not simply a throwback to some kind of imagined past. It's not irrational. It's based on a serious, deadly serious desire for one group of Americans to dominate the rest of American society. And it's based on a long-held belief tied to

all of American history that some Americans deserve to be citizens of the United States and they deserve to have their values made dominant in the United States and lots of other people in the United States shouldn't enjoy that same right. That's as old as the history of the United States before it was a nation and after it became a nation. the United States, before it was a nation and after it became a nation. And it is an outgrowth of the vast legacy of events in American history that include not just inventing new computer equipment,

but include the enslavement of African Americans, computer equipment, but include the enslavement of African Americans, the conquest of the continent, and colonization of the people who lived here before Europeans and Americans showed up. It involves a very, very deep existing reality about American history, and it's not just something that can be seen as a kind of one-off. That's one reason I'm so worried about where the United States is right now. Worried that somehow Trump could pull this off. If he does, one of the things that has always inspired me about being a historian is knowing quite a bit about this history that I've been talking about and knowing how many Americans have fought this kind of perspective, this kind of

anti-democratic perspective throughout American history. How many people have fought and laid down their lives for democracy and for freedom. So if they can do it, so can other Americans in another era if it comes to that. I'm hoping it doesn't involve violence if it ever happens. But here's the other thing I want to leave you with, and that is that as someone who has spent a lot of time looking at sort of this dark side of American history, studying that also helps me see and believe in the other side and how things can change even when the mood of the nation seems dark and difficult.

In the late 1840s and early 1850s, it looked like the slave power in the United States was in total control of American government. And they passed a fugitive slave law that talked about powerful central governments that forced the central government to, that forced every county sheriff in every state across the United States to pay attention to the possibility of runaway enslaved people in their town. Otherwise their lives could be ruined by prosecution from

failure to enforce. In so many other ways in the 1850s it looked like the slave power in the United States could not be defeated. Then, by the end of the 1860s, not only had slavery been defeated, a second founding of the Constitution had been written that was intended for the express purpose of doing something that nobody could imagine in the 1850s. Not even most of the people who were anti-slavery

and angry at the slave power of the South. African Americans had become citizens of the United States in a way that benefited all of Americans. And the 13th and especially the 14th and the 15th Amendments opened the door to a whole new idea of citizenship in total contrast to this anti-democratic right-wing vision of America that I've been laying out. No one saw it coming, but it came on its own

because events unfolded. As Hitler's troops were marching across Europe, and as, in 1941, as England was being bombed relentlessly by the Germans, kind of standing on its own against the horrors of Nazi expansion, the United States didn't want anything to do with the war. The United States had its own extreme right-wing movement at the time that was trying very hard to keep the United States out of the war. The United States had its own extreme right-wing movement at the time that was trying

very hard to keep the United States out of the war. But then Pearl Harbor happened. And all of a sudden, the United States is fighting for the four freedoms, for Roosevelt's four freedoms. And that led to another new day in American democracy that would be complicated and imperfect, but which would persevere and bring about unseen changes in the years ahead. I knew this was going to happen. Sorry. And so I started with talking about Biden and where he is and what's going to happen in this election. I think it's very possible that Biden can pull it out. And I think it's because there are other current challenges to democracy that

are so horrible that America may well rise up against them. I'm thinking right now, first and foremost, about the abortion situation. The fact that that issue alone might bring about a kind of revolution in American politics that will help lead to a better future. It's, in my mind, very possible that if Biden and the Democrats can ride a resurgent wave of democratic beliefs in the United States, and Biden can be re-elected, assuming he makes it through four more years. There may be a new law that makes abortion legal all across the United States and bars the kinds of restrictions that exist. There may be a new law, a new Voting Rights Act, that replaces the old one and makes it even more powerful.

Such legislation is just sitting around right now, waiting to be passed. On the eve of what might be a terrible turn to the right and something that would usher in a need of perseverance and not giving up against very difficult circumstances, it could go the other way. It could be possible that there could be a huge progressive set of steps that would move forward if the Democrats are able to push back this horrible threat to American democracy that's going on at present.

Okay. Some of you who have been with me have seen me close classes with a quote in the past, and I'm going to bring it forward again right now. Almost everybody has heard one version or another of a quote attributed to Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. King was paraphrasing the words of a 19th century abolitionist. And he was using those words to try to inspire people caught up in the danger and the trauma and the challenges of the civil rights movement in the late 50s and early 1960s. of the civil rights movement in the late 50s and early 1960s.

And he wanted people to feel like there was a kind of inevitability to African Americans achieving equality in American life, or at least tearing down some of the barriers that had been erected. And I think that's why he paraphrased it in the way he did. But what I would like to do is let you hear the original version by Theodore Parker, the abolitionist, in

something he wrote in 1853. And the great insight about myself turns out to be absolutely true. I was worried I wouldn't be able to read it without getting choked up. So I asked one of our graduates, who is now a civil rights historian of her own,

Alexandra, to come up and read the quote for me. Thank you. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight. I can divine it by conscious. But from what I see, I am sure it bends towards justice. Thanks.

I always have a hard time if I try to read that in front of a group. I always have a hard time if I try to read that in front of a group. First and foremost, the thing I like about it is that it puts qualifications. It doesn't make it seem like, well, you just have to wait around and justice will happen when the arc of the moral universe gets done bending. Parker and countless other Americans, white and black, tried to bend that arc in the era before the Civil War. And the cost of all of that was enormous. And I think his life showed that

you have to act to bend the moral arc. You can't just wait for it to happen. It's not inevitable. It's something you have to fight for. So I think that quote brings that out even more than King's paraphrase. The other thing about it that I really like is that it emphasizes how difficult it is to know what the arc of the moral universe is. It's hard to calculate. It's hard to figure out.

It's complicated. And I think studying history is the best tool we have to try to come to grips with the wisdom of a better path forward, the best way to move forward, and to know the complexity and the difficulty and the challenges that lay ahead. I've loved studying and teaching about history my whole life. I feel so grateful that I've had the chance to do that here. Thanks very much.

Historian Leonard Moore, in April of 2024, delivering his final lecture at McGill University in Montreal. After more than 30 years of teaching, the lecture concluded his class, The United States, since 1965. He's the author of Citizen Klansman, The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-28. This episode was produced by contributor Melissa Gismondi, with help from Ideas producer Tom Howell. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Laura Antonelli. The acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.