Offline with Jon Favreau - Heather Cox Richardson on Donald Trump, Democracy, and Taylor Swift

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson, historian and author of the Substack’s most-read newsletter “Letters from an American,” joins Offline to explain why she’s still hopeful about the future of American democracy. Heather’s new book, "Democracy Awakening," pushes past the clamoring 24-hour news cycles and delves deep into US history: how does Trump’s rise compare to those of other authoritarian leaders? Can Americans use fascists’ theory of change against them? Is widespread disinformation anything new? But first, Max and Jon discuss why referral traffic from social media sites has plummeted and what that means for journalism. Then, they marvel at Congressman Matt Gaetz’s Trumpian political strategy, and why it’s stymied the Old Guard of the GOP. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

In the early 19th century, before we had social media and ways to get information quickly, one of the best ways to win an election was to spread the rumor that your opponent was dead. And that's really hard to push back on. You know, no, I'm alive. Well, yeah, prove you're alive, right? So it's not like this is anything new. But one of the things that fascinates me in this moment is we know that political theorists very deliberately came up with a theory for how you get people to abandon democracy. And you do it by the creation of virtual politics or political technology, which is literally a blueprint for creating a false reality that make people think they're voting for things they are not. False candidates, disinformation, throw shit at the wall, the way Steve Bannon talked about. There's these steps to make

this happen. But there was never a theoretical framework for what happens when people recognize what has been done to them. And that I think we have seen before, and I think we're seeing it now. And that is that once you've used those tools of technology against a population, they reclaim them for themselves. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. That was Heather Cox Richardson, historian and writer of Letters from an American, the most read and subscribed newsletter on Substack, reaching over a million readers every day. She stopped by for a fantastic conversation about her new book, Democracy Awakening. We also talked about why authoritarianism is appealing and why she's still hopeful about the future of American democracy.

Spoiler. One reason is, of course, Taylor Swift. You'll hear that conversation a little bit later. But first, Max and I are going to talk about our favorite topics, social media and Matt Gaetz. Our boy. This is what we talk about when the mics are off, you know, just social media and Matt Gaetz. We're just sending each other Gaetz tweets all day and saying, did you see this one? He's got a good one off. He got a good misinformation off today. I was really hoping you were going to say Heather Cox Richardson's reason that she was

optimistic about democracy was the incredible quality of podcasting these days is the thing that is going to carry us through. That's what I feel. I mean, yeah, that's look, that's our story. We're sticking to it. This week, Axios reports that over the last year, referral traffic from social media giants Facebook and Twitter to digital media publishers has plummeted. Digiday also reported that between August of 2022 and August of 2023, the New York Times saw their referral traffic from Facebook drop 66 percent. BuzzFeed saw theirs drop 72 percent. Ryan Broderick reported in his newsletter that the top news article, quote unquote, news article on Facebook last month was from the website

christianfundamentalism.com with the headline, do Catholics find life by being pleasing to God? Not this Catholic, that's for sure. That's a great newsletter. Max, what happened to all the social media traffic? What's going on? So this is a trend that has been really building for like several years now, like five, six, seven years, people in news organizations have been noticing that not just Facebook, but all social platforms have been directing consistently less and less traffic to news sites across the board. And this year seemed to be the year that it like,

it truly ended. Like the era when social media was a primary or the primary driver of traffic to news sites and so drove a lot of news consumption in the world has at least for now come to an end. And the change kind of... I think the big moment was about five years ago. For a long time, of course, social platforms deliberately built themselves up as promoting a lot of news links because they wanted to be the central clearinghouse for all everything, including a lot of news discussion, and that included putting a lot of news links in front of people. But starting in 2018, Facebook was one of the first big ones to come to the conclusion that they could generate a lot more

traffic and a lot more time on site by instead of putting news links in front of people, but directing them to internal discussions on the platform that they could recycle them through over and over again. So it used to be that like, if Facebook thought you were interested in democratic politics, they would show you posts from your friends or pages you followed showing like CNN links about democratic politics. But instead, they made this very deliberate change that they talked about openly at the time to their algorithm where they would show people links to Facebook groups or Facebook pages where they would talk about, you know, whatever the topic was that they were interested in. And, you know, Adam Masseri was running News Feed at the time, is now running Instagram, was like, we think that this is just like a better way to keep people on site. But what that meant

is downgrading the likelihood that you are going to see links to news sites, which has an effect for the news business, but it also has a big effect for people on the social platforms because people have an innate desire to learn and talk and think about the news regardless of whether they are seeing the links. So the thing that happened on Facebook and every other platform an innate desire to learn and talk and think about the news regardless of whether they are seeing the link. So the thing that happened on Facebook and every other platform is once they took the news links away, people were still talking about politics, but it was like instead of hearing from CNN, you would hear from whatever was the loudest shit poster in the Facebook

group you were being referred to. So misinformation shot way up. The discussions became much more polarized and polarizing. And that's something we know due to Facebook's own internal research that was leaked by Francis Haugen. They know this is happening. They did it anyway. And I think the other big change in the last year or two that has really cemented this for good is the wave of new regulations that Facebook and other platforms are seeing internationally that is telling them that they have to start paying news companies for outbound links. So they're saying, well, if we have to pay regulatory taxes for linking to CNN, fuck it, we just won't link to CNN.

So these social media sites now, particularly Facebook, basically just want to be the comment section. Without the article at the top. Yeah, without the article. So I used to be the comment section. Without the article at the top. Yeah, without the article. So I used to read the article, then people would talk in the comment section. Now they're just like, who needs the news? Who needs well-researched journalism and reporting? Let's just rely on everyone's fucking takes.

The thing that blows my mind about this change is they initially test launched it in three or four small developing countries as a way to like see what happened. And one of them was Sri Lanka. And immediately what happened was for a lot of complicated reasons, but partly because of this is there were huge race riots across the country because when the news went away, what people were doing instead was posting like racist misinformation and hate speech. So we decided to talk about this a couple of days ago. And then like after we decided to talk about it, Elon Musk made another change that is

most certainly going to reduce traffic from digital publishers. So Elon just removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites so what that means is when you scroll through twitter you can only see the image associated with the story and not the headline that would tell you what the fuck the story is about is that going to help publishers with their traffic issues musk musk tweeted musk tweeted about this this week our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on x so links don't get as much attention because there is less time spent if people click away. So exactly what you were saying about Facebook,

now he's trying to do the same thing with X. He doesn't want people to click away from Twitter. He wants people to stay on Twitter and have all their fights on Twitter without clicking and going to the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CNN, or any kind of news site to read the story. Yeah. And it's also like, it's probably not irrelevant that he has been very open about hating the news media. So the idea that something

that will like punish those liberal media cucks by like making it harder for them to get links, even though Twitter has not meaningfully driven traffic to new sites for years, I'm sure was appealing to them. And I think there's also just a healthy degree of like, anytime something happens to Twitter, I feel like you have to factor in like, there's probably just some chaos factor that are driving this or just like dumb design decisions that are not thought through because Elon had a whim, which is something we've heard about so many changes there. What do you think this means for digital publishers, right? Because you got the New York Times of the world who they have their subscribers and they probably don't depend as much on traffic from Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter, but smaller, medium-sized news

outlets, special digital news outlets probably do. How do you get your stories in front of people if social media makes it harder and harder to do so? Yeah. I have been thinking a lot about, and I don't know if maybe you found this when you guys started Crooked, but I've been thinking a lot about when we started Vox. God, I can't believe it was 10 years ago. Jesus Christ. I'm so old. Like, yeah, we reached the I'm so old portion of the podcast. It feels like it's been a hundred. So, you know. That's true. That's true. Like 10 years ago when we started Vox, like for all the ways that like platforms like

Facebook and Reddit have had a negative impact, it was very easy for us to very quickly reach a large audience because we could figure out how to, not of course not how to steer the reporting, but how to like frame the headline or like how to like promote things on Facebook and Reddit that would get us a big audience. So we could start a new site out of nowhere and reach a lot of people initially. And then hopefully those people would like what they saw and then they would start coming back on their own. And that is going to get much tougher. I do think that there is a lot of experimentation right now in the media on other ways to reach readers, partly because everyone has seen the writing on the wall for

years. And the big thing for the last few years has been chasing Google traffic. You probably already noticed that. If you go to the New York Times homepage now, you will see where you used to see three stories about the latest news events, you'll see nine because Google selects for that as opposed to Facebook selects more for writing a hooky profile or writing a really talky story. So, you know, these changes in the social media ecosystem, the internet ecosystem, they do change the kind of work that news outlets do. I don't think that it's ever led to them like cynically chasing clicks. I don't think it's that, but whatever is the thing people will find to replace that traffic or that revenue. I mean, in the cases of a lot of outlets like us,

like Crooked, you're trying to build a core audience who will want to subscribe to something that does change what you invest in. And it does change the kind of stories that you produce. So unfortunately, journalists are going to have to record themselves doing the latest viral TikTok thing and then say, check out the link to my reporting. Just get in on the algorithm that way.

I don't know. I've always been doing viral dance trends to explain the war in Ukraine. So I came to this naturally. That's just my style really fits to this. You are made for this new era. This is the Max Fisher opportunity. The 38-year-olds, yeah, really are really, are really, as always, have always been thriving.

Well, we shouldn't worry too much because one person is still finding clicks, at least. Congressman Matt Gaetz this week shit-posted Kevin McCarthy out of the House speakership following the passage of a bipartisan continuing resolution to keep the government open. Gaetz attacked Kevin on Twitter and all over MAGA media, ultimately orchestrating a historic vote that cost McCarthy his job. Max, what do you think the Matt Gaetz speaker saga says about the political power of right-wing shit posters? So I am actually so excited to talk about this

because I think that this... Because you love Matt Ga mean so much i might be sorry i've got so many mac gates tweets lined up to quote to you um i think that this is actually like a little glimpse into something that i find super fascinating and that like once i came to understand a few years ago reporting on like the changes democracy like unlocked so much for me so okay it is not a coincidence that people like Matt Gaetz, like the insurgents in the Republican Party, or people like Donald Trump, the big insurgents who are the tear-it-all-down people, are super online. And you'd even say something kind of similar to

the Democratic Party. Obviously, the AOC is not the same, but the insurgents in the party tend to be pretty online. And I don't think that's because being radicalized by the Twitter algorithm made Matt Gaetz who he is or made him want to tear down the party from within. Rather, I think that the fact that the insurgents, especially in the Republican Party, but in both parties, tend to be very online, I think reflects this much deeper, really seismic transformative change in how our democracy works and this change has been going on over the like the last 10 years so okay the way democracy worked for like the first two i promise i know this is going to be quick i promise uh it'll be interesting which is how i preface all my stories i was gonna say that's how you know

no i'm just it's how you know. It's like, you know, it's a good joke when you have to explain it. That's listen, you had me on here. So this is on you. So, okay. So like, I, I really think this is a democracy for the first like 200 years, like its entire history, the way that it functioned was that the bounds of acceptable democracy and acceptable politics were set and enforced by these institutional gatekeepers, right? Like chiefly political parties, like the political parties would decide who got to run for

office, who got nominated. They control fundraising, they control messaging. And so they determine what kind of politician you can be, who can hold office. And then to a lesser extent, the mainstream media also does this by determining like who gets written about as a legitimate candidate or who gets to reach people at all because they control politicians' ability to reach people. And also like organized groups like organized labor, big business that control the funding or donations for candidates. So that was how it always worked. But, and I'm sure you know something about this in 2008, like 10, 15 years

ago, that started to completely collapse and has been collapsing, even though it's hard to clock because it's such a big change, has been collapsing completely before our eyes where those institutional gatekeepers no longer have that control. And that's for two reasons. One is that the United States, which is pretty much alone in this, started allowing primary voters instead of the parties to select who runs for office. We're almost completely alone in the democratic world and who does that. It's just pretty much just the UK, the only ones who have open primaries. Everybody else, the party picks to run for office. But the other big one is the internet, because the internet means that if you are an insurgent, someone who is running against the party instead of running with its support, you don't need the party to reach voters. You don't

need the party to fundraise. You can just fundraise on your road through the internet and you don't need the mainstream media's approval to reach those primary voters who are the ones who are going to elect you. And what you need in this new world is to get attention. And because everything is about attention, that's what social media values, that's what the internet values. And the way to get attention is, whether it's positive or negative, doesn't matter. You've got to be louder. You've got to be more extreme.

It incentivizes insurgencies it incentivizes all kinds of clownish behavior that we've seen from the republican party uh it incentivizes more extreme politics look i mean you brought up 2008 there are the cases where you know barack obama's rise was he was very inspirational and i i think hope and humor and that and inspiration like that you know that gets you some attention as well but the easier route to attention is just saying a bunch of shit um like so to prepare for this um austin emma sent us a gq profile of matt gates from 2018 and uh in that profile, he said, the organizing principle of today's politics

is stay interesting. Which, honestly, Matt Gates, genius. I know, he's not wrong. That is the organizing principle of today's politics and it is the organizing principle of the internet and social media. And I thought there was a funny piece of color

in this profile they said just inside the door to gates's congressional office this was at least in 2018 a flat screen monitor mounted on the wall displays the congressman's mentions on twitter streaming in real time that's amazing i mean it is it's like I think that he is right about that. And the people that he has to stay interesting for are Republican primary voters in his district. That's what he's, instead of having to work for the party and what's good for them, he has to work for what those primary voters want to see what to be way more online. So it's this thing now where you have people who are online talking to other and working for some small pool of voters in their districts who are also super online. And you see how that is a really transformational change in incentives where it's like, it's not a Matt Gaetz interest for the Republican Party, much less Congress or the United States government to be successful. What's in his interests, and this is true to so many insurgents of the party now, is just to hold on to the

eyeballs of super online primary voters. Yeah. And that is why Donald Trump is the leading Republican nominee. And you know what? His latest thing about windmills driving the whales crazy, it got my my attention i paid attention to it great content i don't think i'm gonna vote for him though no i think i'm i'm i'm off the fence at this point i've decided against it but look at you know trump for speaker trump going to the hill next week to maybe float himself for speaker maybe he will maybe he won't trump goes and sits in the the trial right uh his own trial he didn't have to be there but he's there he's talking to the cameras he's is it negative attention absolutely but what do people hear they hear trump trump trump uh and gates took that lesson right and

now he's deposed one speaker and now it's jim jordan versus steve scalise at this taping at the very least and steve scalise more of like an institutionalist still very right-wing conservative but like you know kind of a party guy and jim jordan like more appearances on fox news than like any other member of congress over the last several years so is it no wonder that the guy who john boehner once called a political terrorist is now like a possibility for speaker of the house because what does he have? He has the base because he's very online. Great stuff. And that divide is not going away. I mean, that divide in the Republican party where you have some of them are loyal to and have to work for the party institutions and some who have to go,

which, you know, the Republicans have also, I know this is the oldest story of the Republican Party, have dug their own graves by gerrymandering these districts to hell. So now the people who someone like Matt Gaetz has to win is the primary electorate and he doesn't have to worry about the general. So it's the most extreme people in the party are the ones who he is completely in hock to. And it's, I mean, it really is two parties at this point. And that's also kind of true of the Democratic Party. But of course, they have the, I think so far we've seen the like professionalism and the

interest to like basically caucus together, the insurgents plus the institutionalists. Well, if this has bummed you all out, don't worry, because next up, I had a great and surprisingly hopeful conversation with Heather Cox Richardson about the future of American democracy. She's a professor of American history at Boston College, writer of Letters from an American, Substack's most popular newsletter, and author of Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America, which is a new book out last week. It was a fantastic conversation, Max. You'll like it. I'm really glad that she is speaking to so many people, that she has such a big and dedicated audience to really talk people through what's happening, why it's happening, how to think critically about it. I feel like it's the kind of knowledge that really gives you a sense of agency and having a handle on what's going on in this kind of scary moment. I have, over the last however long we've been in this sort of Trump era hell,

been thinking about like, how much of this have we seen before in history? How much is new? You know, and she does a great job in her newsletter and in the book talking about the appeal of authoritarianism over time and the appeal of the argument over time and then why democracy works. And I think what one of the things we land on is that what's new today is, or at least one thing that's new today, is technology and the internet and social media. And that has changed politics and the allure of authoritarianism and the challenges of democracy in many of the ways that you and I have talked about on this show. I can't wait to hear your thoughts. Before we go to break, two quick housekeeping notes.

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But not until you get a pair of shoes at cricket.com slash store. Enjoy new and old Pod Save America episodes completely ad-free when you subscribe to Cricket's friend of the pod community. That's right. No distractions. No fast-forwarding. Just sweet, sweet takes and insights into the power

structures that shape our world. Perfect for binge listening. Do people do that? I don't want to know. Head to cricket.com slash friends to learn more. Up next, Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson, welcome to Offline. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

So for people who don't know, you are a professor of history at Boston College who has become the most successful author on Substack. You now have over a million subscribers to your newsletter called Letters from an American, which grew out of essays you posted on Facebook, which I first heard about from my mom, which is how I know you were popular because my mom is not as much of a political junkie as her son. So how did all this start? And what were you trying to do in those early essays? So it really did start as a way to answer questions people were asking me on Facebook about politics, because I'm a political historian and I study Congress and I study the president. But because I do American history, it's short enough that you have a lot of control over a

lot of material. So I'm pretty good on most things, a little weak on opera, but otherwise I'm okay. And people were asking me questions about what was happening in 2019 and I just started answering them. And I had been writing about once a week on Facebook, a general essay, either about politics or about life or about some aspect of American history I liked. And on September 15th, 2019, I wrote about what I thought the world looked like to me at that moment. Questions poured in and I thought, well, you know, I hate to clog the airwaves, but I'll just go ahead one more day and answer what people have to say. And I've been writing every single night since. Wow. So there has been no shortage of historians,

democracy experts, scholars writing about democracy in the Trump era. What do you think it is about your writing that gained you such a large audience so quickly? Well, of course, you never know when you're the person doing the writing. And I guess if I had to guess, I would say it's that I am interested in establishing a reality-based community. So what I'm really trying to do is actually explain to people, not tell them how to vote, nothing else, but just simply say, this is what happened. Here's how the rules work. This is what people are doing. And this is how it fits in the larger scheme of American history. Can you talk about the difference between how people generally get their news each day and how you try to explain the day's events to your

audiences? Because it feels to me like such an antidote to much of what is uh i think wrong with a lot of media coverage today well it's so funny you ask that or put it that way because i did try for a while to watch television news which i hadn't done since i'd had my own children and i was actually at the time dating the man who is now my husband and i did notice that after a few times at his house with me screaming at the television he stopped watching the news because the stories would have changed. By the time that they were actually being aired, the story was something entirely different. So all I try and do is to explain what's happening and put it in a larger context. And also not to speculate about what's going to happen next the word might or may just

drives me bonkers because i don't know what's going to happen tomorrow but i can put you on pretty solid ground for what happened today and remind you of how it fit in a larger story so that you don't end up feeling like everything's just coming at you like you know from every direction you instead sort of feel like you're part of a longer story that tells, that gives you a picture of the way the world really is. In a way, it's kind of like a, I hate to say this, but in a way, it's kind of like those old fashioned soap operas, where, you know, they're long running, but there's the recurring characters, and there's the recurring themes. And at the end of the day, it gives you a picture of a town. It's just that my town is the United States of America.

I mean, it does seem like one of the biggest problems with media coverage today, particularly political media coverage, is sort of the lack of context. That this is sort of at the core of what's missing from our understanding of politics and the world around us. And I think the cable news started it. And now I think the internet and especially social media just strips everything of context. And I don't know how we continue to have a functioning democracy if we're constantly getting a stream of information and news about the day that is just stripped of all historical context or any context, really. Well, you know, it's almost as if it's always a horse race or always a ball game. And there is an assumption that people understand the ins and outs of the ball game. Like you can't really watch baseball and feel like you have a handle on it if all you

know is somebody's hitting the ball and somebody's not hitting the ball. You sort of need to know the players and you need to know the rules and you need to know who's injured and you need to know who the manager is. And, you know, I'm trying to make sure people know all of those things about American society. And that makes it a much more interesting story as well as a much more meaningful one, I think. I wanted to start with these questions about your style of writing as a way into a larger discussion about democracy, because I know that you see a lot of power in language and storytelling, as I do. And one of the challenges I've been wrestling with for most of my career, and especially since 2016, has been how those of us who believe deeply in democracy and the American democratic experiment can tell a better, more persuasive

story than authoritarians like Trump, who've always seemed, at least to me, to have an easier sales job and a simpler story to tell. So I guess I'll start there. What does history tell us about why people find the authoritarian appeal so persuasive? Well, that is a very simple story. And this is not new to me. The scholars of authoritarianism will tell you that the way an authoritarian rises is he, because it's almost always a he, finds a population that feels itself to have been dispossessed, either economically or religiously or culturally or socially, and says, listen, I know that you feel like you've been left out. And the reason for that is, and while a responsible politician would say because of this series of policies and so on, the strong man simply says the reason this has happened is because of them.

And who them is doesn't matter so much as you use that foil to weld your group into a group that feels grievance and that is willing to back you to make things be great again, to make America great again, as it were. And the trick to that is once people believe that you, the strong man, are going to return the nation to a series of rules that are divine or laid down by nature, rules that your opponents are refusing to enact, once they've done that, they have started to commit to you. And once you start to treat those other people badly, they internalize their identity as being associated with you.

So that once you have committed violence against somebody, either rhetorical or actual against those others, they have bought into it. And it becomes harder and harder and harder for them to give that up. So the worse a strong man behaves, the more tightly they cling to him. Historically, how much has authoritarianism been driven by larger cultural and economic conditions? And how much has been driven by the emergence of a particularly talented demagogue? So there's a great book that's written in 1951 by a longshoreman in San Francisco, a guy named Eric Hoffer.

And everybody after World War II is madly trying to figure out where Hitler and Mussolini came from. He says, who cares? You know, every generation has Hitlers and Mussolinis, but they never get anywhere. The question is, why does a population embrace those people? When I read that, I thought that was absolutely earth shattering. Because of course, what you really need to look at is not those leaders, is their followers. Why did they buy in? And the answer, at least as far as scholars of authoritarianism have unpacked, is precisely that. A population follows a strong man when he promises to return them to a prominence that they felt they used to have. And he's going to do that by putting in place these laws that

will make them great again and hurt their enemies. Obviously, there have been times when Americans have gone to war against fascist authoritarian governments or movements, World War II, civil war in our own country. Aside from the 2020 election, what are some examples of Americans beating back the threat of fascism without taking up arms? The late 19th century is, although I'm always a little bit dicey when we say without taking up arms, because those were very violent times as well. But you mean in terms of armies and fighting against armies. So if you really strip down what we're talking about here, we're talking about two ways of organizing the world. We're talking about, on the one hand, a society that believes everybody should be treated equally before the law and the people within it should have a say in their government. Standing against them, we have those people who

say some people are really better than others, and they have a right and maybe even a duty to rule over the rest of everybody else. And while you can call that latter thing different things, and sometimes in some eras, we call it fascism, in some eras, we call it, you know, the rise of the slave power. And in the late 19th century, we call it the robber barons. Those are always people who are arguing that, you know, some people really are always people who are arguing that, you know, some people really are better than the rest of us, you know, and they really should be in charge of things. So what happens in the United States in each of those eras that I just mentioned, the 1850s, the late 19th century, the 1920s, again, rising now, is you get a very few wealthy

people taking over the political system. And in the late 19th century, as that happened, we got all the normal hallmarks of how that works. We got society saying that Andrew Carnegie was the best thing since sliced bread. We get the laws making it possible for monopolies to form. We get the idea that anybody who is objecting to working in a factory for pennies is somehow undermining American society. We get all the trappings, and yet we get a period in which Americans come together to push back against that and to instate very quickly what we know as the progressive era, simply by saying this is not what the United States is supposed to stand for, and by taking over the political system. You write a lot about history rhyming, and I'm always trying to

figure out what aspects of this moment don't rhyme with anything else we've heard in American history. What do you think? What feels new and different about this era? Two things, although both of them are simply exaggerations of things we've seen in the past, and then one thing in a big way. The two things, first of all, are the degree of social media control over our language. That is, we've always had disinformation in American society, but now we have it on steroids. The other major thing that we've had in the past that has grown much larger in the present is the global concentration of wealth. So we've always in the past that has grown much larger in the present is the global concentration of wealth. So we've always had concentration of wealth, but now it's not simply in the United

States, it's global. Now, the one thing that is truly unique in this period is that this is the first time in our history in which one of the two major political parties is rejecting democracy. That's a biggie. That's the moment that is unique here. And it's one that I hope will help us to articulate that this is not, in fact, what we believe the United States should stand for. Why do you think this is the first time in our history that one of the two major political parties has rejected democracy? That's a very long answer here that I'm not going to give you all of, and it would be fun to unpack. But one of the things that you started with here was talking about stories.

And one of the things that FDR did so well was to articulate why democracy mattered and why it stood effectively against fascism. And he gives this phenomenal speech after the fall of Rome, in which he really takes on that question and says, you know, the fascists promised that they were going to give you, you know, great jobs and great food and great families and great churches and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, who's feeding the people in Italy? It's these messy democracies that got our acts together to stand against the fascists and to make sure that people actually are living, you know, staying alive. And that defense of democracy was so widespread that coming out of World War II, I think members of both political parties believed that they could stop defending it. And in 1960, of course,

we get Philip Converse, a name I'm sure you know, a political scientist who says, would you all stop talking about democracy? We all are agreed. We don't have to talk about this stuff any longer. Instead, what we need to do to win elections is to nail together coalitions who will be able to pick people to put in office depending on what they promise to deliver to those constituencies. And when they did that, I actually think there was something important that happened in society where people stopped feeling like their vote really mattered for something bigger. And with that, we had the rise of those movement conservatives saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. We can make your vote matter again.

We can help you take back this nation for the little guy against this creeping socialism. And, you know, I think one of the reasons we're here in the moment we're in is because of that loss of language. And then with it, what followed was the taking over the mechanics of our government through Foundation did a little while ago. 71% of respondents over the age of 56 said that democracy is preferable to any other form of government. That drops to 57% of respondents between the ages of 18 to 35. 42% of young people also said that army rule is a good way of running a country. And 35% of young people said that having a leader who doesn't hold elections is a good way of running a country. What do you think is going on there with younger population? So isn't this interesting? And it's actually one of the things that makes me very sad and worries me. One of the things that I have seen happening in my extraordinarily long life, sorry, is any time that the government started to do something that was popular with the majority of Americans, the Republicans called it socialism. And you see that again and again and again. I was reading just the other day a piece

that Bill O'Reilly, who was at the time a person on the Fox News channel, was saying about the Affordable Care Act, that this is socialism come to America, and what are we going to do because people like socialism and socialism is a bad thing. So one of the questions that you just cited here, a lot of people might say, well, you know, I don't actually like this system of democracy. I quite like these ideas of socialism. Of course, that has nothing to do with what socialism really is. So there's that, but there is also, I think, the continual underpinning of our civic rights, if you will. But one of the other things you mentioned here was the idea that army rule would be a good thing.

There, too, we've seen the celebration of the military as part of a right wing project, as opposed to what it has traditionally been in the United States, a way to keep us secure, which is the primary function of a government. So a lot of it, I think, is language that has taken people to a place where they believe that the very guardrails of our government, of our democracy, are somehow unimportant and can be replaced by these things that are embraced by a radical right wing. much more difficult to maintain a functioning democracy, which requires us to pay attention, have patience, be open to other points of view, exist in a shared reality. And maybe most important to your line of work, remember, remember what came before the day's news cycle. And cable news makes that hard. I think social media and the internet make that hard. I think the balkanization

of media in general make that hard. So it's one thing to come up with a persuasive story about American democracy. How do we make sure enough people hear it at this point? Because when you talk to young people, I think part of it is there's also the speed of information. And so there's this desire for everything to be solved immediately. Everyone's instant gratification is something that technology has brought us. And there's so much noise and so much information getting thrown at people that you can see why some young people would say, okay. And it's interesting because that same survey I cited, high, high percentages of young people, even the ones who said like military rule might be a good idea, high percentages still believe in upholding individual rights. And yet the system of, they're not connecting it to a system of government because I wonder if they see democratic governments and the infighting and the arguing that goes on in democracies is

making the government sclerotic and also not attentive to their needs. Well, in terms of things moving quickly, I will say, I see what you're saying, but I will say it seems to me to be reasonable to want things to move more quickly on things like gun safety and on climate change. I mean, they do have a point. Let's call it that. So one of the other things you mentioned, though, was the rash of social media and how difficult it makes it to combat disinformation, which is what you're saying. And I remain hopeful on that front for two reasons. Disinformation is not new. And my favorite

is that in the early 19th century, before we had social media and ways to get information quickly, one of the best ways to win an election was to spread the rumor that your opponent was dead. And that's really hard to push back on. No, I'm alive. Well, yeah, prove you're alive, right? So it's not like this is anything new. But one of the things that fascinates me in this moment is we know that political theorists very deliberately came up with a theory for how you get people to abandon democracy. And you do it by the creation of virtual politics or political technology, which is literally a blueprint for creating a false reality that make people think they're voting for things they are not. False candidates, disinformation, throw shit at the

wall, the way Steve Bannon talked about. There's these steps to make this happen. But there was never a theoretical framework for what happens when people recognize what has been done to them. And that I think we have seen before, and I think we're seeing it now. And that is that once you've used those tools of technology against a population, they reclaim them for themselves, and they do something very different with them. So you and I are having this podcast right now, but one of the things that has really jumped out to me recently, and I really hate to do this to you, but is Taylor Swift. Yeah. I'm a fan.

Okay. So I'm actually going to be writing about her recently because of this very thing. This is somebody who is using the technologies that have been used against democracy for democracy. And they're using them in new and incredibly innovative ways. And I think to the point that most people who study this are not aware of how much is going on in areas that they're not even looking at. In what ways do you think she's using those tools? By getting people to register to vote. And she's not telling people how to vote, crucially. She is saying this is very important for our democracy. And of course, she's not the only one.

But she's a very visible person in this era to be doing that. And I think considering her previous attempts to stay out of politics, a really important sign. Of course, she's not by any means the only one. I find that so interesting because I have heard criticisms from liberals and Democrats that, oh, she should be doing more. She should be saying more. And she's, you know, she's not putting out statements on every political development that happens. And she's not being strong enough on this issue or this issue. And I've always wondered, like, knowing the difficulty she's had in the past, being told not to get involved in politics, you know, I kind of thought it was a pretty big step that she's registering voters. But I also do wonder if it's a strategy,

which sort of brings me to other questions. I mean, it is, we have a country now where, you know, 46%, 47% of the population has voted for Donald Trump, not once, but twice. And I always think about something the author Marilynne Robinson said to President Obama, which is that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people. And it makes sense to me. But I also struggle with what to do with the millions and millions of hardcore Trump fans who are either living in a different reality, as you spoke about, or are actively hostile toward not just liberalism, but democracy itself. And even if Trump loses again in 2024, like, how do we coexist peacefully with a radicalized faction? I'm laughing because this is so unfair. We've gone from Taylor Swift. I know, we really did it well. And I keep thinking of answers the whole way. Let me go back to Taylor Swift, though, and the poor woman who does not deserve me analyzing her. But not simply that she encouraged people to register

to vote, which is certainly a piece of this. But her tour that took place this summer was, I believe, the highest grossing tour of all time. Is that correct? And that tour was a very unusual tour in that it was cross-generational. So how many times have you seen a cross-generational tour of women and their daughters, or rather daughters and their mothers? And that, I think, was a really important statement about voices in this country. And I always love when people aren't saying she's doing enough. Isn't it fascinating how many people have a lot of opinions about what other people should be doing? Taylor Swift is a musician and a songwriter, and she is doing what she does best. But in that, she is, I think, advancing a view of society by virtue of who she is attracting that is important to this moment. The idea that women of all generations can operate together to do something like elevate their favorite person to the highest

grossing tour of all time. Well, she also created over the summer and now with the crossover with NFL fans, a real monocultural moment, which I was talking about this on another episode of Offline, is that we sort of don't have a lot of these monocultural moments as much anymore because of the balkanization of the media, because everyone's getting their information from so many different sources. And I wonder if American democracy needs more monocultural moments, because I wonder if, like, what is stitching us together right now? That sort of worries me well but it's it is a monocultural moment that it's not around walter cronkite it's around women women changing the world women saying this is what we want we don't care what your advisors told you we are making this the most profitable tour of all time so i think that that matters aside from yes you should register to vote but what that says about society matters oh well then the other thing is just talking about how to what to do about the now radicalized faction. Right. And I'm not you know, there's there's Trump voters and I sort of split them up between the Trump voters and there's Trump fans.

Right. There's some people, you know, I've I've talked to Obama, Trump voters. There's Trump voters who switched to Biden. right? So those people seem persuadable. But, you know, there's whether it's the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, whether it's the people who show up at his rally, the people who are more inclined to commit political violence these days. I don't quite know what to do about a country where that is a growing and vocal faction. And I don't know if history tells us anything about what we can do. I'm not buying growing. Okay, that's good. Maybe just louder.

Well, they're very loud, which is, I think, actually a sign that they're weakening, not growing. Because if you are in control, you don't have to shout. And that's a really important distinction. Because if you know you've got the voters, you don't have to be out there threatening people. I mean, we don't have to discuss this because it's sort of obvious on its face, right? And Trump has never won a national election, even despite all the things that the Republican Party has done since 1986 to suppress the vote of people that they expect will vote against them. And that really matters. If I hear one more pundit saying, black people aren't turning up to vote, it's like, have y'all looked at the laws? And my friend Carol Anderson is really great on that. But worth remembering always that 20% of the people, you just have to, I'm going to put this and get all of us into trouble,

will never be recoverable. Let's put it that way. Trump has become a part of their identity. It will not go away. Even if they stop vocalizing it, it is what it is. And that's what all theorists will tell you. But then there's the other piece of the rise of an authoritarian like Trump that is so interesting is that somebody like that can turn people who have previously been apathetic into political actors. And the question is what happens to them when they recognize that he is no longer a viable candidate. And by that, I mean, if you watch him, one of the things that seems to me not on the table right now and ought to be is that people really haven't seen

him for a long time. I was just saying this on Pod Save America yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. And when you see him now and listen to him, one of the reasons I think he's not doing the debates, yes, he's way out in front his businesses have been found guilty of fraud. Aside from all those things, he's incoherent. And at some point, those apathetic voters, the previously apathetic voters are going to have to make a choice. Am I still willing to throw in my lot with this man or am I going to do something else? And the question is, what will they do in that moment? And my guess is that some people are going to become fervent anti-Trumpers. They've been cheated and they're pissed off, right? Probably a fairly small percentage of them. A lot of the apathetic people will just

be apathetic again. They're all corrupt. I hate this. I wanted Trump. He was the best president ever, but you've ruined him. And then there's a group of them, I think, that will become nihilists and want to burn it all down. And that feels to me like where we are right now. Now, of course, I don't know, because I'm a prophet of the past and not the future. But I am very concerned about the future, but I am not despairing of it. We've talked a lot about Trump, but I'm trying to think about like the antidote to Trump and leaders who have tried to oppose Trump. Joe Biden comes into office and he, you know, sort of does everything that you would want someone to do to sort of lower the temperature in the country. And he's talking about democracy and he's reaching out to all Americans.

And many of his policies have he has specifically targeted policies, economic policies to help people in red states. They have talked about that, says that he's everyone's president. And he's sitting in an approval rating that's not great. And then you have someone like, and I've heard you talk about this too, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, right? And very competitive state and has passed policies that done the same as Biden and has a very high approval rating in that state. And I wonder what's the difference between Michigan and the rest of the United States? Because you see the same thing with Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, right? Another sort of moderate, middle of the road Democrat,

super, super popular. And I wonder if there's something that when you go national, something is broken in the country that Joe Biden can't get sort of the credit that I think a lot of people would give him for lowering the temperature and just governing responsibly in this period. Well, in a sense, states are easier because you're not going to make your career in Florida by attacking people in Michigan. So it's much easier, I think, to go after the president because most people pay more attention to the president as well. But one of the things that I think is interesting about this moment, and I think about what Biden is doing that I don't think people are paying enough attention to, and that is that he and his administration have worked extraordinarily

hard to roll back the policies of the past 40 years that have concentrated wealth at the very top. Now, there's big stuff they haven't been able to do, and they won't be able to do simply because of the split in the Congress. But as we know, rolling back the George W. Bush tax cuts and the Trump tax cuts would take care of the deficit. I mean, that's not news to anybody who follows the numbers. That would be huge. But the piece that is interesting to me in that, and of course, they're taking on anti-monopoly, they're taking on all sorts of ways in which they're trying to restore power to ordinary Americans. And what's interesting to me about that is historically, if you look at this country, the times in which we have pulled together, the times in which our racial, our ethnic splits, our gender splits, all of those things have gotten much smaller,

are times when the economy is much fairer. So while people recognize the importance of his economic legislation and his economic moves, I think, they seem somehow to see that as separate from what people like Vice President Kamala Harris has been focusing on, which is the idea of equality before the law. And it strikes me that they're both flip sides of the same coin, that if you can stop all the money going to the very top and make sure people don't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or where their next car payment is coming from,

they're much more likely to say, sure, I don't mind sharing my job site with somebody from another country. I know. It's so interesting because, you know, I worked for President Obama and I remember in the 2012 reelect, Mitt Romney was our opponent. And Obama would always say that this is, you know, this is a debate about the size and role of government. And I think that

Romney probably would have said that as well. And they were arguing over taxes and tax cuts and healthcare and all this. And now, it feels like the axis of American politics is around these issues of identity, partly because of Trump. Trump did this, right? And as he has radicalized the Republican Party, it seems more difficult to even get coverage when you are debating issues about economic growth and inequality. And look, it's Biden's message. He's out there all the time talking about the economy and in Bidenomics and all the things he's done. And look, I think part of it is, you know, we're still dealing with inflation, even though it's come down and so that people are feeling that. But I wonder how to beat back the MAGA Trump strategy of making everything about these cultural,

social issues of identity. Well, it is worth remembering that the reason that they're focusing on those cultural and social issues and on identity is because the vast majority of Americans are agreed on the role of the government in our society. So, you know, the percentages are truly crazy when you look at how many people want gun safety, how many people want reproductive rights, how many people want fair taxes, how many people want health care. I mean, these are not marginal issues. These are we're in the 70 percent, in some cases, in the 80 percent of people who want them. So, of course, that's not a fight that the Republicans want to have. Instead, they would much rather have a fight over whether or not literally it came down to one trans kid in Kansas, which I thought was interesting legislatively for different reasons. They'd much rather have that fight than have people say, argument and say, listen, we are really talking about this here. But second, how do you take that back, first of all, by doing what you and I are doing?

But second of all, by recognizing, I think, that there is a huge problem right now on the Republican side, and that is that central to their cultural fight has been the fight over reproductive rights. Once again, we're in the 70s of people who believe, 70% of people who believe that abortion should be safe and legal in some or all cases. That's a huge percentage. And the number of people who think it should never be is under 10%. I don't remember if it's six or nine because I always mix those two up, but it's quite low, right? So they don't want to talk about that. Instead, as I say, we're really focusing on things like that stupid penguin and the fact it had two parents. And I don't even know if it was two male penguins. I mean, really? Like, really? This is the world's superpower, and we're worried about a couple of penguins in a children's book? And they would much rather have those fights than the real ones

that matter to people's lives. One of the things that we started with here was narrative. And one of the things that worries me is when people try and take on those narratives, they fight on their terms. You know, in fact, instead of saying, I don't want to talk to you about the latest thing that Trump has done, I want to tell you what America should be. That's the narrative structure that will enable people to envision our way out of the box that we've lived in for the past six years and the past 40 before that. You wrote that you're much more hopeful now than you were six or seven years ago, when there was a clear trend toward authoritarianism and no one was paying attention. Now people have woken up. What makes you so hopeful that people have woken up

and will continue to stay away? I will answer that. But I want to ask you first. Did you see this coming, this moment coming or not? I did not. I knew that the Republican Party was radicalizing in sort of a dangerous way. But again, I remember, it's now a famous quote, but I remember being with Obama when he said, you know, I think if we win this in 2012, the fever has to break. And they will only be, not because they'll like suddenly see the light, but Republicans will realize that it's not sustainable for them to continue running elections like this, especially in a diversifying country where there's going to be a majority for, you know, progressive values or more progressive values that at least than Republicans. And I think, you know, to be fair, the Republican Party itself, after they lost that election, they had the whole, the RNC did an autopsy where the conclusion was we have to be more pro-immigration and, you know, we have to be more welcoming. So I, you know, I did not see it. I did not see it. And I thought that I did think during the primary in 2016 that it was going to be, I thought earlier in the primary before he was leading in the polls that it was going to be Trump just because that's how the Republican Party. Right. That's where it was headed. But I did not think that he would win. It is worth remembering that Trump in 2016 was the most moderate Republican economically on that stage. Yes.

You know, he called for fixing tax loopholes that were enabling the rich to take everything and wanted to bring back manufacturing and wanted cheaper and better health care. You know, he really was saying all the right stuff. We just didn't realize that it was all. Well, that's that's what worries me about him now is because you were just mentioning the you know, it's more of like the Ron DeSantis wing think he was at a rally a couple months ago and he was like, you know, I talk about tax cuts. No one applauds. I talk about this trans stuff and everyone's clapping their hands. People didn't even know what it was. It's like he's almost confused by it because I think he is now he's he's back on the message. I think that was effective for him in 2016, which is more economic populism, more immigration, we got to stop immigration, we got to do another trade war, right? And I do think that's a more, he sort of

intuitively gets where both the Republican bases and maybe some of the swing voters more than I think anyone else in the Republican Party right now. Although the leaders of the Republican Party are really pushing it toward that illiberal democracy that you're identifying that comes really from places like Hungary. Yes. And the idea of a much larger government that is going to turn us all into a Christian nation, as opposed to the old kind of Republican argument that we wanted a smaller government and economic freedom. Yes. So I guess that goes back to what keeps you hopeful? And most effectively, of course, in 1853, it was pretty clear if you were looking around that the country was about to become entirely dominated by elite enslavers. They had taken over the White House and the Supreme Court. They had taken over the Senate. They had made inroads in the House of Representatives. And it was only a question of time until they spread human enslavement to the American South. And from there, it would become a national institution. They were quite articulate about this. They intended to have their system of human enslavement spread around the globe, and this was going to be the future of human government. That was 1853.

1854, they forced through Congress a law that does, in fact, enable them to spread enslavement across the West. By 1856, there's a new political party made up of people who disagree with each other about everything from immigration and finances and internal improvements to you name it, but they could agree that they were not going to let the country be taken over by an oligarchy. That was 1856. By 1859, you've got Abraham Lincoln articulating a new vision of American society that says the government should not work for those rich guys. It should work for ordinary people like us. By 1863, January of 1863, he has signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending human enslavement in the United States. And by 1863, he's giving the Gettysburg Address saying that this government is going to be based on the Declaration of Independence and the right of everybody to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government.

That's extraordinary. That's nine years. You go from we've lost it all to we're reinventing it. But I could do the same thing for the 1890s, and I could absolutely do the same thing for the 1920s to the 1930s. So that's the real question. A lot of pain and suffering in all of those periods. Well, that's why I keep talking. It would be really nice to just kind of skip over this part, right? Because we know how it's going to come out. Strong

men never survive. It's just a question of how much damage they do until they end up, you know, being gotten rid of. So I have faith in the history. I also have faith in American society because I think our marginalized peoples have kept those ideals of the Declaration of Independence in front of us since the beginning in a way that in other countries they may not have. But finally, I think I am sanguine because I believe that humans want the principle of self-determination, that at the end of the day, that this is really a human experiment in whether or not we should have control over our own lives. And if that's the case, and that democracy is a form of government most designed to guarantee that the majority of people can have the right of self-determination, I have a really hard time

believing that Americans are going to give it up. Yeah. I mean, you were describing authoritarianism in your book as this belief that some people are better than others. It's pretty simple, isn't it? Well, and it also reminded me of, and I think Biden has said this a lot. He said it during the inaugural as well, because it really stuck with me. And it's one of his parents sayings, which he often gives people a lot. And it was what his mom used to say to him, which was, Joey, no one is better than you.

Everyone is your equal and everyone is equal to you. And it struck me that that is a pretty good foundation for a defense of democracy and specifically American democracy. And I wonder how you think about the story that we tell now going forward and what the most effective story to counter authoritarianism is. And is it more like value laden like that? Is it, you know, I remember when Trump won, there was some folks from Italy who were saying, you know what, the way that we beat Berlusconi was just treating them like a regular politician and just talking about issues. And I think Biden has sort of

elevated the conversation about Trump to talk a lot about democracy and values and principles and ideals. And, you know, and there's some concern, is that too far removed from people's everyday lives? And so I do wonder what your thoughts are on like sort of the core story about democracy that could prevail at this moment. Trump, although Biden is articulating it, it is about American people reclaiming their control of their democracy. So one of the things that's really taken off since the 1980s, and you see it in the curriculum in Florida and Texas and Oklahoma, for example, is not just the erasure of minority history. It's the erasure of agency, the idea that ordinary people make a difference. And that's why I am pointing to things like people showing up at a Taylor Swift concert. The idea that ordinary people make a difference. And that's why I am pointing to things like people showing up at a Taylor Swift concert. The idea that people going about their daily lives can make good choices on a daily basis, can stand up on a daily basis for caring for community, for caring for each other, for making sure people are treated equally before the law, for doing the things that make a democracy work, I think has really gotten

traction in the last few years. And I find that very exciting. I mean, that doesn't mean at the end of the day, we're going to end up at the place that it looks exactly like what I envision it. But that's the whole point of democracy. We get to have a say in the way it comes out. And I'm seeing that all around. So yes, talking about democracy is very important. But more important, I think, is seeing how it plays out on the ground and ceasing to focus only on Trump as if he's somehow some shaman who's going to either make us or break us. Because at the end of the day, he's not. It's never been about him. It's been about those people who hope that he can make something magical happen to return their lives to importance, when in fact, the vast majority of us are pretty convinced our lives already are important and our government should

represent us. Yeah. And reminding people that they, like you said, they have agency and they have power to do something about this, which I think is the antidote to the cynicism that pervades politics right now that I think helps people like Trump and the Republican Party. Absolutely. And if you don't think you have power, take a look at how the Republicans are no longer talking about getting rid of abortion. Ever since the Dobbs decision and when Democrats have been overperforming in every special election since then by eight points, all of a sudden now

they're coming up with all kinds of other language to talk about restricting abortion rights, because people are upset by it. And similarly, within the week before you and I were talking, we have Clarence Thomas recusing himself from a Supreme Court case involving the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, which he's always refused to do in the past. Well, you know, he's feeling the pressure because people are speaking up and saying, hey, wait a minute here, what about ethics on the Supreme Court? So American voices really matter in terms of making people do what you want them to do, but also, I think, in upholding democratic values. And it's high time.

Yeah. Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for joining Offline. This was a fantastic conversation. The book is Democracy Awakenings, and everyone should go get it. It is a fantastic book. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau.

It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, Thank you. share our episodes as videos every week. Daily headlines remind us of how the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is moving fast and breaking precedents. But elsewhere, in the lower courts, where the media spotlight doesn't shine as bright, unseen forces are fomenting a quiet revolution. We Don't Talk About Leonard, a new series from ProPublica and On The Media, explores the web of money, influence, and power behind the conservative takeover of America's courts and considers the man at the center of it all. Listen to On The Media from WNYC.