The Bulwark Podcast - Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse: History Is Under Assault

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

History became more politicized in the Trump era and the conservative media ecosystem has helped amplify untruths. Princeton's Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer join Charlie Sykes to explain the value of learning both our good and bad history. We can handle the truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is January 31st, 2023. We've almost gotten through the month of January. A lot of things in the news today. Mitch Daniels has decided that he is not going to be running for Senate in Indiana, which is just another commentary on the way the Republican Party has changed. George Santos apparently has said that he's going to recuse himself from any House committees. Hmm. Wonder how that happened. And the headline in The Washington Post today, I'm just looking at it. Hide your books to avoid felony charges. Florida schools tell teachers unsure what titles violate new state rules to school districts, tell educators to conceal

every book for now. So this is going well in the free speech state of Florida. So to join us to talk about everything that's going on today, as well as their new book, Julian Zelizer and Kevin Cruz are back on the podcast. Both of them are professors of history at Princeton University, and they are co-editors of Myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. Julian, Kevin, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Always a pleasure. It seems highly relevant to be talking about myths and lies these days. I want to get to

that in just a moment. Before we do that, I just wanted to highlight this new bulwark poll that we have out this morning that I think underlines exactly where we are in our politics. Apparently, a large majority of Republican voters are ready to move on from Donald Trump, but a devoted minority might not let them. These are the always Trumpers, and they are why the GOP could be sleepwalking into another Donald Trump catastrophe. So this is kind of a choose your adventure poll. The poll shows Ron DeSantis leading Donald Trump by large margins. But in a crowded field, if Donald Trump continues to get around 30, 32 percent of the vote, he could win in these early state winner

take all primaries. So once again, we have this question of collective action. Some of us might remember back in 2016, where Donald Trump did not have the support of a majority of Republican voters and yet was able to finish second in Iowa with 24% of the vote. He won New Hampshire with 35% of the vote, won South Carolina with 32% of the vote, and then, of course, went on to run the table. So a devoted, hardcore minority could still win Donald Trump the nomination, even though the vast majority of Republicans sound like they are ready to move on. So I just wanted to just toss this out to the two of you, because it raises the questions of collective action, whether or not Republicans will repeat what they did in 2016, because that's really all Donald Trump needs to

win this nomination. And then, of course, there's always the threat of a third party. According to this poll, 28% of the hardcore Trump supporters would be willing to follow Donald Trump into a third party or vote for him as an independent. Now, that's what they say now. Whether they would, we don't know. But your thoughts about all of this. Julian, you want to go first? Sure. I mean, look, in 2016, the former president, then Republican candidate Donald Trump, understood the power of dividing up the party. Everyone saw this wide open field with many candidates. And he understood that if he could get a committed, passionate base, the others could fight among themselves. And that might be enough

to ultimately win enough of the primaries and caucuses to secure the nomination. And my guess is he's seeing that right now. The other bet is that eventually the other Republicans will come home, that right now they might say they are against them. They might prefer another candidate like DeSantis. But if he can show that he's strong, if he can actually prove he can win, I think he anticipates that some of those Republicans who now are saying we're not with him would actually come on board in pursuit of victory. The power of partisanship is awesome. So those are the two factors going on. So I would not discount his ability to move forward on that path. Kevin Cruz. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think

especially that last point Julian made, a present company excluded Charlie, some of the never Trump support we saw in the past became, well, maybe Trump finally, grudgingly Trump. So I think he's right that once he if he can get a lead here, the rest of the party might well enough or at least enough of it would fall in line behind him. And it is remarkable that Republicans seem incapable of learning the lessons of the 2016 campaign. They're all still waiting for someone else to take Trump out. Right. It's magical thinking. I thought we saw how this worked or didn't work last time,

but apparently they're hoping the third time is the charm. So let's talk about what's going on down in Florida, because this seems very relevant to your book about historical myths. The Washington Post this morning reports, students arrived in some Florida public school classrooms this month to find their teacher's bookshelves wrapped in paper or entirely barren of books after district officials launched a review of the text's appropriateness under a new state law. This, of course, is part of Ron DeSantis' campaign against wokeness. Some of this, of course, has to do with the alleged sexual content of the books. But we're also, it feels like we're engaged in not just a culture war, but a war over history and the way our history should be told.

And that seems to underline a lot of the complaints that are going on. Your book tackles misinformation and lies about U.S. history, these myths. Part of the struggle we're having now is clinging to some of those myths, the clinging to some of those narratives and excluding, I think, aspects of the past that might be deeply uncomfortable or troubling to some folks. Do you see it that way? Yes. And there's a partisan element. I do think we have to remember this is intentionally being used right now by Republicans like DeSantis as an effective issue, you know, moving away from other kinds of policies, economic policies that might not play as well. But what we're seeing is legislating classroom material in ways that are really destructive for students. And this notion that in the realm of history, we should just ignore almost all of

the scholarship we have on questions such as race relations, immigration, and more in favor of basically a PR version of history for students to embrace is ultimately undercutting our ability to ensure that the next generation has real civics education and real historical knowledge so that when they graduate, when they're adults, they could actually wrestle with what's going on in the country. I think it's very blatant what's going on. Our book certainly is an effort to explain to people what we know about all these major areas of American history. But what's going on in Florida, I suspect, will be replicated, is being replicated in other states as well. Yeah, it's remarkable the way in which DeSantis has set this up. You know, when he said he was

going to block that pilot program for the African American Studies course, he said, you know, we should just teach history, but cut and dried facts. Well, it's not cut and dried. He said, you know, we should just talk about these people who stood up when it wasn't easy and made their voices heard. Okay. Well, we need to be able to explain why it wasn't easy. Why do they feel the need to stand up? Right. You know, history isn't solely a story that's designed to make you feel good about yourself and about your country. History is messy. History is complicated. And we've got to teach the bad parts along with the good parts, both of them. We've got to teach them both because that's what happened. And if we're teaching a rosy view of the past, we can never learn lessons from it because our present isn't

as rosy and as cut and dry as DeSantis believes the past is. You know, that's an interesting point, whether or not history should make us feel good about ourselves and good about our country, because, you know, part of the conservative critique of snowflakes in academia was that they were too concerned with people's sensitivities and their feelings. But very, very explicitly, some of these laws and these policies are designed to say, don't teach anything that will make people feel bad or that will make people feel guilty or that will make people feel responsible. So it is interesting once you begin layering in, you know, how people should feel and react, because a lot of this history is in fact deeply troubling. And

there are people who believe that the purpose of teaching American history is to make people more patriotic, right? To make people love their country. So what is the answer to people who say that we should teach children about how wonderful America is, how we've overcome all of our challenges, because we want people to feel pride in America? What's wrong with that? Well, look, I'd say two things. One, I keep hearing these people who are arguing that when we teach students about some of the uglier parts of the past, we're trying to make them feel bad. That's not our goal.

We're simply trying to give an accurate presentation of the past. But also, if your children are reading about, you know, Klansmen and segregationists and identifying with them, you may have to have a conversation with them at home, because that's not something I think most parents would find. My kids have learned about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and they empathize with them. They didn't identify with the kind of the white racist taunting them. But on the bigger point of, should history make you feel proud? Well, there's a way to do that that acknowledges the past, right? American history is the story of constantly wrestling with our problems, right? We're not a country that was perfect from the beginning. We're a country in which the founders set up a system and immediately

started amending the Constitution. We're a country that Lincoln called for us to become a more perfect union, right? And so to think about our constant improvement and the way in which we have reckoned with problems in the past and have sometimes risen to the challenge and beautifully so, but other times not. But either way, wrestling with those issues and those problems in the past shows that we're constantly trying to get better. And that is something I think, whatever your political perspective is, you can take pride in as an American, that we have confronted our issues, often been forced to, often of our own volition, but we've confronted the problems of the past and tried to become a better nation, right? I would add to that that, well, two things. One,

our job isn't to make you feel good or bad. The job of the teacher is to teach you history. The notion that somehow we're going to just say, well, let's push this slavery thing outside our narrative because it might not be so comfortable to think about it, that's not really teaching history. And so I think good teachers all over the country in the classroom have to keep their eye focused on going through the material and teaching students not to say rah-rah or boo and hiss, but to actually work through these issues and to figure out what the country is about on their own. Those are the skills we want. Secondly, patriotism doesn't mean just thinking that everything is great. As every person matures as an adult, we realize with ourselves,

we understand our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities. And to truly be a strong person and to truly have a sense of self, you have to understand the whole package. And the same is true with the country. For me, it's not patriotic to say, I'm just going to ignore much of what has happened in this country just so I could focus on a few stories that make everything feel great. That's not respecting the history of the country. It's the opposite. It's total disrespect and not having confidence in our students to handle this and to work through the big questions of American history. So tell me why you were motivated to organize this book of essays. You know, what was the trigger for it? This is a book of essays you've called on a wide range of

American historians and writers to write about different aspects, whether, you know, it's about whether socialism is a foreign import, whether there's an unending flow of unwanted immigrants, that voter fraud is common, that feminism is aimed to destroy the American family. So what was the trigger for you, you two, to sit down and say, let's do a book about the biggest legends and lies about the American past? Well, it's kind of an ongoing process over the last five, six years, right, in which history has become more and more politicized. And largely in our own era, the energy for this has come from the right. It came from the Trump administration, certainly, not just in his constant claims that he was the biggest or the best or the whatever, you know, every superlative

you can imagine in American history, but he was, you know, as great as Lincoln or Washington, but also in terms of what we've seen more and more even after his administration. And again, his administration ended, remember, with the 1776 report, his effort to push forth a patriotic education. But what we've seen at the state level, right? And so Florida is just one of many states in which history is under assault. But it's also taken place outside of the political realm on social media. And we've seen more and more figures, again, largely different from the right, who have sought to challenge some fundamental facts that we know about American history and push forth an account that simply doesn't square with what academic historians have

long taken as conventional wisdom for decades. So many of the people we got involved in this are people who were engaged in that discussion already, who were writing op-eds or appearing on radio and podcasts, who are on social media trying to educate the general public about the real truth of American history. And we thought, well, social media is great, but what do historians do best? Well, we write. So let's get these historians together and put it all in a single place, a volume, where we can address a wide variety of these myths and lies and try to set the record straight. Julian, do you want to answer that? Yeah. I mean, I think everything Kevin said

obviously captures it. There was a feeling that, look, there's always myths and you hear things that are not resonating with what we're researching and writing about, but it really just got out of control in the last few years. And it wasn't a disconnect. It was just a huge gaping hole in what was being said, often by pundits who were kind of writing history or going on air and talking about history rather than actual debates among historians. And so we just knew the work that's out there, and we wanted to bring some of our hope is just to show and showcase some really smart people who are grappling with so many issues that are front and center in the news, but providing great historical perspective. It feels like we're going backwards, though,

that there was an attempt to broaden the scope of our understanding of American history, to look into some of the more neglected parts of American history. Some of it was revisionist. Maybe some of the revisions needed to be done. But now there seems to be this very concerted effort to roll it back. Have we gone through periods like this before, by the way? I'm thinking of the early 1950s, but I would like to sort of bounce it off of you. Well, the last time we've had this concerted a political attack on the way that we talk about and teach history. Yeah, I mean, we've had episodes like this before. And it's because you mentioned the phrase revisionist history.

And this is something that in the general public is often thrown out as, you know, almost like Holocaust denialism. That's not true. But honestly, if you ask any historian, all good history is revisionist in some way, right? As we get into the archives and we discover new documents, as we think to ask new questions, as we think to shine the spotlight somewhere different, we're constantly improving, perfecting, and yeah, revising our understanding of the past. And that's healthy, right? That's how this profession works. So the revising part isn't

bad. But what happens when you revise it is people have maybe taken in a view that they learned, you know, in grade school and taken it as kind of an unchanging gospel. And if you're tweaking that view, if you're challenging that view, they suddenly feel that their knowledge, their identity maybe is coming under attack. So we've had these moments in the past. The 50s were certainly one. We saw it in the 70s when there was an effort to kind of expand education beyond just talking about kind of great white men to a more multicultural fight. You know, we had the textbook wars in West Virginia where there were, you know, dynamiting buildings and shooting at each other. There was a real fight there. We started in the 90s with fights over national history standards that Lynn Cheney led. The effort to have the exhibit for the Enola Gay for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That became a big fight. And again, a lot of it is that historians have one view of the general public, maybe it's a slightly different view. And when they come into clash in the general sphere, there's a resentment on the part of the public that we're not hewing to the myths that they've believed. Healthy debates are debates that we have, which happen very often where you take one topic, whether it's reconstruction or whether it is World War II and the decision to drop the bomb, or you can kind of pick any topic. And there are ongoing debates among historians. And when they work well, you have your students have these debates where you look at the evidence and you have substantive and healthy kind of open dialogue about what it all means. How do we interpret it? What does it

add up to? But then there's this other tradition of debate, which is much just, it's more damaging. And so the Cold War era is a good reminder that there you're not talking about genuine debates about history. You have efforts to purge certain kinds of books or certain kinds of faculty from the classroom. In the South, this was not uncommon, where in most of the public schools, there was no teaching of Black history, for example, and slavery in the way that has become much more commonplace, at least until recently, although now there are these efforts to roll that back. And those are the kinds of myth-making efforts and purges that I think are extraordinarily damaging and are not genuine efforts to really understand the American past.

I don't want this question to come off as hard-edged as it might, but I was thinking about the film. Was it Frank Capra who made the film Why We Fight near the beginning of World War II? The government learned or realized that a lot of Americans, a lot of the people who are signing up to go and fight World War II didn't really understand much about American history, did not understand what the stakes of the fight for freedom were. So they developed a massive, well-intentioned propaganda

campaign, Why We Fight. And it really was the creation of a myth and or a version of history that was necessary to get us through World War II. So I guess, you know, part of the question is how much of our history is really sort of dressed up propaganda, but how much of it is also a necessary myth that every country, every society needs to have a story that it tells itself so that it has the confidence to go on and fight for itself? I'm throwing out a lot there, I know. I'm sorry. That's a great question. I love the why we fight films. I mean, Cap is a master filmmaker and they're kind of, they're beautiful historic artifacts. If people haven't seen them, they're available and out there.

They're great. Got some good Disney animation in them too. But I think that points to maybe a fundamental difference here is that that is propaganda, right? And that is an effort to mobilize people for a crisis moment. But it's not history. And it shows the stark difference there. And sure, there are certain myths that I think any nation has, America is not unusual in this regard,

that are meant to inspire people, that historians would quibble with, but not find fault with. I mean, nobody's furious about the myth about George, maybe somebody is, it's 2023, maybe somebody is, furious about the myth about George Washington and the cherry tree. It inspires honesty and things like that, right? It doesn't distort our vision of who we are and what we can do. But myths about the past that get the history completely wrong lead us astray, right? So if we've got myths about, you know, people argue, well, the New Deal didn't work, the New Deal set us backwards. Well, that's not what historians think, right? And if that's trotted out today to foreclose another style of government activism, that's a mistake, right?

That's a distortion of the past. Or to say, you know, we constantly see Vietnam or Munich trotted it out, right, as examples. And often by people who maybe not even know what Munich or Vietnam were about, and they're trundling out in a way to dissuade action along similar lines in the present. Again, that's distorting, and that's misleading. And that's, I think, a real problem. It shows the danger of myths. Julian Zelizer? Yeah, and sometimes that actually inhibits and limits what the potential of a country is.

So you could think of the cycle that we went through in World War II. There was a need and a value to a very strong belief and confidence in this country in the fundamental democratic culture of the nation. And it was used as a way to rally against the very serious and horrific threats of fascism. It was a way to mobilize and to build support for that mobilization. But very quickly after the war, many veterans, black veterans, came back and said, hey, you know, that myth doesn't really match the reality of where I grew up and what life is like in a state like Mississippi or Alabama. And they demanded that kind of the nation fulfill the myths and match up the reality of life, of racial life in this country with the kinds of arguments

government officials were taking. And ultimately, that helped to drive a civil rights movement that I would argue made the country stronger, made us have more to be patriotic about rather than less. So I think that's how those two, you know, shouldn't be seen as at odds. But we need that real historical grounding to ultimately improve as a country. But that also suggests that the myth played a positive role, that the myth became aspirational. Yes, but then you're acknowledging it isn't the reality. You are acknowledging it's aspirational. And then you make the next step to say, we have a lot of work to really make that what the country is about. And if you don't get to that last step, then you're limiting what the country is, because then you're just trapped in myth-making rather than using it

as a way to move forward. And we have to distinguish between the myths, the public relations, whatever you want to call it, when they have a positive value, and understanding the real history of this country so that we are grounded when we start to make arguments and decisions about the future. Martin Luther King was brilliant at this, right? You know, the March on Washington speech, it's more of that one line about the content of the character. It's a framing about he has a dream rooted in the American dream, right? And he knows it's a dream. It's not quite reality yet. He talks about the aspirations of America. He says, we've come here with a promissory note, cashing in on the founder's promises that all men are created equal, but we're not there yet, right? And so he invokes that dream, that myth as a goal to achieve and to recognize the chasm that stands between present reality, in which he called out a lot of things that were wrong in society at the time, while still holding that faith that we could get there, right? And so it's a desire, again, as Lincoln said, to become a more perfect union. You know, it also occurs to me that the whole

strategy of sanitized history to make people feel good about themselves is a self-defeating strategy because what I've noticed has happened, I'm sure you've noticed this as well, is young people who get a sanitized version of history at some point are exposed to uncomfortable realities and they realize, wait, you know, all of that I've been told has been extremely misleading. I've been lied to about this. These things are myths and it's very disillusioning. Or they find themselves unarmed in a debate over American history with people who know some of this. So this was one of the things that happened during the Cold War, right, where the Russians were able to cherry pick certain aspects of American history and say, well, what about this? And if you were an American who had

simply gotten the very, very whitewashed version of American history, you weren't prepared for that sort of a debate. So I think in a lot of ways, not giving people the factual basis will come back to bite you. And we've seen this over and over again. So it is the fundamental flaw that feel-good history is the most effective way of making strong patriots. heard and been taught about U.S. foreign policy during the era. And some of the realities of what was going on. And then Vietnam, obviously, is right in front of their face. And it doesn't make them unpatriotic, but it certainly disillusions many Americans in a way that would last for decades. And think of a different way. As you were saying, if you have students and Americans who really know in a much more grounded way what's happened and what the

issues are, they're less likely to reach that point. And I think they'll remain more confident engaging with the country. It's good and bad. And so I think it's not a good strategy if your goal is to create patriotic Americans. I think the better goal should be to create informed Americans and let them do what they want with it. But that first goal is not necessarily reached by just giving them things that they'll learn eventually are not true. I'm going to give you a chance to talk about some of the reactions to the book. Carlos Lozada in the New York Times notes that while you refer to some bipartisan myths, that overwhelmingly this book focuses on myths that originated or live on the right. And he writes that they're singling out conservatives.

He says, and he asked this question, do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let's hear about it. If not, it might require its own debunking. So, Kevin, you've been asked about this in the past. Are conservatives the only ones that create convenient myths? Not at all. And the reason we focused on those, again, we were kind of responding to the moment we're in, right? And so much of the myths that are about their front and center, just because of who's had the microphones. And the Trump administration was when we crafted this in 2019 and 2020 was when the book came together. We're in the waning days of the Trump administration. We didn't know they were going

to be done, but they were. But also in the States. So Texas and Florida have kind of led the way on this. And so we really were responding to what was out there. It's not to say that these are the only myths by any means. We had to pick and choose what we had, and we were kind of responding to what was out there in the public. If Joe Biden, who's president now, has his own 1776 commission, which pushes a bunch of liberal or left-wing stuff out there, we will respond to it too, or someone will for sure. It's not to say that there's nothing out there. And again, we've got certain ones here that are bipartisan myths about America not being an empire, about American exceptionalism, about, say, the vanishing Indians. And that essay is largely driven by myths on the left by Dee Brown's book.

So there's certainly ones out there that kind of cover the ideological range. But most of our attention was, yeah, focused on the right because that's where most of the conversation has been right now. So let me ask you very, very specifically, because this didn't create the history wars that we're having now, but it was certainly a flashpoint. Conservatives would say, well, we're talking about, you know, myths about American history. A lot of what has been happening in the last, you know, several years was in reaction to the 1619 Project. And there are other historians who have pointed out historical flaws to the argument that the true founding of America was in 1619. So how do you see that? The 1776 Project, which was, of course, the Trumpian response, was a direct response to 1619. And it seems, as I'm reading some of the anti-woke

legislation and the restrictions on what can be taught in schools, much of it seems to be a reaction to the push to make that part of the curriculum. Is the 1619 Project legitimate revisionist history, or does it have its own element of myth-making and distortion? I mean, Kevin has an essay in it, so he can talk in a different way about it. Look, A, I don't think it's a reaction. There's a great essay in our book about the myth of the backlash by a guy named Larry Glickman of Cornell who argues we use this term backlash left and right. It doesn't really capture what happens. You have movements that are pushing for certain issues. They're resisting certain policies like civil rights.

And it's not because legislation passes that all of a sudden they get worked up. That becomes a focusing event. It's a way for them to move forward with their agenda. The culture wars have been going on for decades. History has been a contentious subject for decades. A lot of people on the right have been going after these questions for a while. I think it's just accelerated. So I don't think the 1619 Project is the reason that all of this is happening. It became a way for some on the right to tackle these kinds of issues. People have different positions. There are certain specific elements of the 1619 Project that have become contentious. They've been disputed. It's not always left-right.

There's very good historians who disagree with some of the essays. And that's the kind of debate I think Kevin and I both agree is good. It's healthy. And the fact the 1619 Project kind of launched a very high-profile debate about slavery and about how it fits into the U.S., even with many disagreeing, there's value to having that and to having that conversation in the country. But we certainly aren't saying, you know, it's only in one area where you see kind of mistakes being made. Again, I want to give Kevin a chance to talk about this too. But when I'm specifically talking about this, I'm looking at an essay by Leslie Harris who said, I helped fact check the 1619 Project. The Times ignored me.

And she specifically, since we're talking about myths and misinformation, she looked at the assertion in that project. One critical reason that the colonists declared their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies, which had produced tremendous wealth. At the time, there were growing calls to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, which would have badly damaged the economies of the colonies in both North and South. And she writes, I vigorously disputed this claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution. The protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 colonies went to war. That seems like a pretty big issue here. So is that a falsehood? Is that a distortion of history? Is that a myth that we're getting from, shall we say, the progressive left? Leslie Harris is an excellent historian, and she and others who have taken fault with that claim, including some big names in the field like Gordon Wood or our own colleague Sean Lent, I think are on perfectly fine ground.

But that's not the only perspective, right? There is a debate in the field so that you can look at other historians like Woody Holton who have argued the other side, right? And so that, again, historians don't always agree on everything, and there's our matters of interpretation there. So that's certainly fair criticism. But I think the problem with the overall picture here is that is one claim, a big one, but one claim in one essay in the collection. And the 1619 Project is a collection of many more essays, a lot of them written by very accomplished historians. And I think we've taken that one fight over one part of one essay, and it's been extrapolated into the entire 1619 Project as somehow at fault. And it's not. I think the 1619 Project actually represents a lot of what the current literature on slavery suggests.

I mean, there's a reason it had a generally strong reception among historians because it does reflect the kind of things that we talk about in the field. So not perfect, certainly not immune to criticism. It might have inspired some sort of response here, but I think it's not wholly the source of the pushback here. As Julian noted, conservatism and its own myth-making on history has long predated that moment. So let's talk about some of the chapters in the book, since we're on the subject of slavery and the South. There's a great chapter in your book about the Confederate monuments written by Karen Cox of University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This, I think, was also kind of a revelation to a lot of Americans to realize that these Confederate monuments did not actually date from the Civil War or the period of the Civil War. So let's talk about that because, of course, we often hear that there's an attempt to erase American history by taking down these Confederate monuments. What's the myth there? Well, the myth there is, first of all,

these Confederate monuments, as you noted, aren't from the Confederate era. A lot of them are from the 19-teens and 1920s during the depths of Jim Crow, somewhere in the 50s and 60s during the segregationist pushback against the civil rights struggle. And they are themselves. These monuments are themselves an effort to erase the real history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. They're part of the lost cause narrative, which is thought to recast the Civil War not as a war of treason and defensive white supremacy, but rather as a noble cause inspired by states' rights or whatever economic tariffs they want to talk about or some other issue, right? I mean, it was fought by gentlemen.

And again, as Karen notes, that wasn't the motivation for these statues. They were intricately tied to the project of white supremacy in this era. And you can only have to look at the dedication ceremonies for these monuments. I went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and we had a monument there called Silent Sam, dedicated in, I think, 1911 or so. And in the speech that Julian Carr gives when he dedicates this, he makes it quite clear why this statue is there. He says it's there to remind, and he points to remind that Negro wench over there about the powers that be, right? We're not reading some hidden text here. It's right there out in the open, right? And so Karen reading some hidden text here. It's right there out in the

open, right? And so Karen's essay reminds us of the motives here. Also reminds us that we're often told, oh, no one used to complain about these things. No, people complained about them at the time. The African-American press was livid at these things were being written. Frederick Douglass was outraged at the tributes to Lee after he died. And so people in this era, if we count African-Americans as people in this era, if we count African-Americans as people in this era, were very upset about this. So it shows that A, the monuments are rewriting history, and B, they've always been controversial. So this is nothing new. So Julian, it does strike me, and again, I'm making a confession that I've made before on

this podcast, that it was actually shocking to find out all of the things, major events in American history that I had not known anything about. And somebody that I'm, of course, not in your league, but I do think of myself as somebody who reads a lot of history. So when I read about the Tulsa massacre, for example, and some of these other racial massacres, my reaction was, how did I not know about this? How do things get erased from history completely? And I think part of it is, isn't it, it's because they didn't fit into the narrative that we had accepted that America had some really, really tough times, but you know what? We won the Civil War and we fixed everything. I can't give one answer to why some of these issues aren't remembered,

because I think it's more complicated than that. I think there are some issues that often they are either ones we don't want to focus on for the kinds of reasons we've been talking about, or they just don't get the same high profile treatment as what happens with the president or what happens in a national election or a national issue. And I think that's part of the joy and importance of constant investigation and historical discovery. There are other issues where I think the nation is not comfortable, or a lot of scholars and classrooms have not been comfortable wrestling with the underside of what the country is about, because those are cases where the reality runs up against the myth, as you were saying, and we are not willing or interested in trying to understand how those two fit together.

And so I think different things are going on, but that's part of what we're trying to show in the book. Historians have worked hard to expand the range of topics, issues, persons, events that we understand in our complex past. And that's why it's so important to move away from what we're seeing in states like Florida. Well, let's talk about what's happening right now. Let's fast forward to this moment we're in right now. And I think two things are true at the same time. One is that the vast majority of American students can handle the truth. If they were told all of these details about American history, they can handle that. They would be very, very interesting debates. It would be a positive thing. At the same

time, there are tens of millions of people who it feels like not only can they not handle the truth, they don't want to know it or they are indifferent to it. And I guess that's the thing is we are not living in the first era in which there are lies, in which there is propaganda. But it feels right now as if there are a lot of Americans who frankly don't care whether something is true or whether something is false, that they have decided that they want to live in their own safe space. And whatever is convenient for them, whatever reinforces their bonds to their political tribe is okay. Because as you watch our politics right now, and you watch this constant stream of lies and complete bullshit from, like, for example, the former president or from Fox News, you have to wonder, do people actually believe this? Or do they know at some level that it's a lie and are okay with that? Do you follow what I'm going in? It's one thing

to have people who are lied to and misled. Okay, we understand that. But what about the phenomenon of tens of millions of people who are lied to, suspect they're being lied to, and don't care that they're being lied to? I mean, do we really want the truth? I suppose is what I'm getting at. That's a, it's an unsettling question. That's why I wanted to ask the two smartest guys I know, because it's very unsettling. I think you're right. And one of the questions we've been asked is why put out a book like this if a lot of people aren't going to listen anyway?

The people who don't agree are just not interested in hearing this. And I think it is a problem, not just with history. It's a problem more broadly in our culture that that sentiment grows. And maybe I'm an optimist, but I still think there's enough people out there who want to not have that mentality, and they are open to hearing. But it is a problem, and it weakens our public culture if we think that way. And that's how you get unchangeable minds. That's how you get minds that are less and less grounded in fact, and much more comfortable circulating in a world of fiction. And then when people complain, you know, how did our politics get this way? And you have a lot of

the population that don't really want to be told the truth. I think you can put the two together and get your answer. So it's a problem. We try to combat that by just putting out good work and things that are accessible for people. But it's a long, long struggle that isn't just about academics in the classroom. It's a bigger issue that we face as a country. And again, if you want to be patriotic, understand that problem and acknowledge the problem and then try to work to fix it. Kevin Cruz? I think that's exactly right. I mean, you know, we're not going to reach everyone with this project. We're under no illusion. This book is going to magically solve all the problems we have in the world. But at the same time, this is what we do. We're historians, his enthusiasm for political violence, for, you know, the summary execution of people, you know, and giving the bullets to their families.

The fact that he has, you know, celebrated, you know, shooting protesters and migrants or, you know, surrounding the wall with moats. And I guess the uncomfortable question is, this is not the first time that we have seen the glorification of violence and brutality in politics. And yet, I'm trying not to go to the easy, this is the 1930s, because you know where I'm going here. There are clear echoes here. And yet, I think it's dangerous to immediately say that what's happening in American politics is like Italy or it is like Germany because we're not dealing with Nazis. We are kind of dealing with neo-fascists. But in order to understand our time, you have to understand these historical echoes without necessarily going full, it's Adolf Hitler again, right? How do we navigate that? How do you navigate that? I mean, I look, everyone has a different position. I'm not one who's kind of made that comparison in

general, and I don't feel the need to. I mean, I'm happy to understand some of the problems we're facing on their own terms. And sometimes it's useful to make those comparisons. It's certainly useful to understand right now, how does this compare with what we're seeing in other countries around the world where there are anti-democratic forces taking hold in politics and the media? And that's useful. But look, we just had an attempted coup after an election where a president and many high-profile politicians were trying to overturn the election. It's not a myth. It's been well

documented. We saw it happen in front of our eyes. And I don't know what that's like. Is it like the 1930s or not? Just let's understand it on its own terms and understand where it came from here within the country. How did we reach the point where that was even a possibility and where there was really very little accountability after it happened? And that's the way I frame these questions. Others have different ways to do it, but that's where I'm comfortable. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there's your caution, Charlie, about Trump is not Hitler, I think is borne out. But at the same time, as we don't immediately leap to that conclusion, we also have to be wary of not immediately shutting that conclusion off, right?

This dangerous belief that, oh, it can't happen here, I think is frightening. So we've constantly got to be on guard about the potentials. Everything is possible. Everything could happen here. No, I agree. Understand to me that what I find myself doing is going back and reading, you know, Hannah Arendt's, you know, Origins of Totalitarianism and saying, shit, this describes what's going on right now. And it's uncomfortable because I know that there are analogies in American history, but the question is, how did we get here is very important, but also where can it possibly lead? You know, can it not

happen here? I mean, I think there has been this complacency that somehow America was immune to history, that our democracy was so solid that none of these things could ever happen. Americans look at other countries and they go, what must be wrong with them that, you know, these things happen? Well, we're not that much different than them if we go down this road. So I find that very disturbing. You saw this on January 6th, right, when the reaction was, oh, how could this happen here? Well, we haven't had an armed assault on Congress before, but we've had elements of this in the past. We've had the kind of armed mobs. We've had incidents of reconstruction.

We've had things like this that have happened at a smaller scale. So, yeah, it's not totally unprecedented, right? And so it's not totally out of the realm of possibility. Yeah. And I would say that this gets back to the underlying premise of the book. In fact, we have an essay at the beginning by a historian, David Bell, a colleague of ours on American exceptionalism and why that idea has such a hold and why it's not the best way to really think about the country as you engage in these questions. He explodes that myth pretty well. But what Kevin's saying is true. Look at the Jim Crow South, where organized violence sponsored by the state was normal. So this is where you end up if you kind of whitewash history, so to speak. And then these things happen.

How did that happen here in the United States? There are roots where we can see it. And then those comparisons are useful in the way that you're saying that we should imagine where things can go. So we are not so limited in our understanding of the instabilities and the weaknesses of our political system. The book is Myth America. Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past. Julian Zelizer and Kevin Cruz, both are professors of history at Princeton University. Appreciate very much coming back on the podcast. It is an amazing and provocative read, both Julian and Kevin. thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.