The Ricochet Podcast - Land of Hope and Dreams

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

This week on America’s Most Trusted Podcast®, we kick off with some home grown commentary about the ongoing Pelosi-Trump drama. Then, the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s White House correspondent extraordinaire Deb Saunders joins for an extended and more detailed chat on the same topic. Later, Dr. Bill McClay stops by to discuss his new book, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think you missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilex.

Today we talk to Deb Saunders about, well, the White House, and Bill McClay about the antidote to Howard Zinn. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 449, one away from the absolutely meaningless but somehow significant number of 450. I'm James Latlix here with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. And gentlemen, as I walk past MSNBC and CNN this week, I detect several things. One, the walls are closing in. I think I actually still saw that on the TV yesterday as they believe that the Trump administration presidency is a beleaguered,

frightened, chaotic, erratic, crazy thing that is sitting there in sweat panic because it's all coming out now and it's all going to end. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political bubble, there are people who believe that Barr is getting close to declassifying a bunch of information that is actually going to prove a narrative contrary to the one we've been hearing for the last two years uh somebody's going to be rudely surprised in the next x number of months don't know who that's going to be the second thing that i get from uh paying attention to the lefty twitter sphere and blogosphere and linkosphere and whatever is that never mind ir whatever, is that never mind Iran, never mind China, never mind Gaza, never mind Venezuela. The real issue perhaps that we should think about is the ethics of milkshaking and when exactly political violence isn't because

you hate the Nazis. Let's go to the first. Rob, Peter, what do you think actually, which is the proper narrative do you think? Impeachment is nigh. The president is about to be going down walls, closing in, bombshell, boom. Or actually this is the start of a contra-narrative that will upend a few things in Washington. Do you want to go first, Rob? Yeah, I'll go first. Go. I think we've reached – I don't know if we've reached, but I hope we've reached peak stupidity. Oh, no. I know we haven't.

I don't know why I even said that. Look, to me, it's like I'm working on – they tend to make the easy stuff hard. So the easy stuff they pretend is hard so that they feel heroic doing it. And the hard stuff they pretend is easy. Oh, we'll just get to that later. That's the easy stuff, right? The idea – what they're trying to do – it seems to me – look, I'm assuming that they have a strategy, which I'm not – maybe that's a big assumption. They're trying to get inside his head.

They like rattling his cage. The president is very, very easy to troll for all of his bullying and tweeting. He is a very simple person to upset. to keep him talking about impeachment because that if you look at the numbers for trump that is the only thing that's really hurting him you look at like if you're a democrat you know the economy's pretty good and unemployment's pretty low and things to be seem to be doing pretty well and despite the fact that we're having a trade war which i'm sure will have bad effects later it's not having present day effects except for the stock market but people generally think that economic growth is going to correct the stock market's jitters on trade anyway. So what else – what's the reason for Trump's kind of languishing with very high disapproval numbers? And that's because his personality. Nobody likes him. So the idea is amplify his personality so that I guess you keep his negatives high. I think that's the theory.

The problem is they forget the actual hard thing they're going to have to do anyway, that they keep thinking is way down the line. The hard thing is to come up with policies that appeal to the broad center of America. And that means things like, or that does not mean things like the Green New Deal, a lot of liberal nonsense. And they seem to think that that's just going to happen magically. But it's not. And I suspect that they are, as people in politics tend to do, they're overthinking this. They're outwitting themselves. The simple thing is come up with a bunch of moderate policies with a little touch of liberalism. Hold them out as bait. Have Trump sign them and then make – then once again have people scream and yell on the right that he's betrayed the conservative cause. That's to me the strategy. Instead, they're doing this weird thing where they just um it's a psyops which is so dumb yeah i agree with yeah i agree with every word of

that every word of that here's what keeps coming to my mind years ago not years and years not decades but some of the years ago the great Richard, the great late Richard Pipes, the historian par excellence of the Russian revolution. He wrote in the days, he wrote about this in the days before the revolution. It was a phrase that I found very puzzling and that stayed in my mind. And he said that the ruling class began to suffer from a revolutionary psychosis. Psychosis, meaning a mental disorder where you lose touch with reality. And I thought to myself, oh, yet another story of the strangeness of Russia, that everyone in the Duma, everyone advising the czar, all the aristocrats, all the great business leaders in Petersburg and Moscow, all were suffering from a revolutionary psychosis. And Pipes, as Pipes portrays it,

and of course, there are diaries that he's quoting and letters writing. Everybody felt the end was near. Something huge was going to happen. And they became incapable, in particular, the liberals, that is to say, in those days, the centrists in the Duma became incapable of action. And in a certain sense, it became self-fulfilling. But I thought to myself, a story of the strangeness of Russia. And here we have all of Washington, all of the press, members of the administration, certainly all the Democrats, displaying this psychosis, this total says their political reality is. We may be able to damage Trump, but we can't beat him with nothing. And our best shot right now is 77-year-old Joe Biden, whom we're not supporting with any kind of policies at all. That's just, that is taking leave from first order political reality. What do we offer our voters? And they're not answering that question. Nancy

Pelosi, shrewd person that she is, maybe she's not taking leave of reality. Maybe she's just miscalculating. But she seems to believe to this point that she can have it both ways, that she can say to the left where the energy and the youth and the money is in her party, this man is clearly guilty of impeachable offenses. At the same time that she says to her committee chairman, look, we need to reelect centrists in 2020. We've got about 30 who were elected in districts that Trump either carried or came close to carrying. Don't start impeachment proceedings. And you just can't have it both ways. As Bill Buckley used to say, who says A must say B. There is a weird rule in politics

that is irrational as it seems, as psychotic as it now seems. There's a certain reality, logic tends to work itself out in arguments over time. And on the Trump side, please, you have grownups in place now in the important positions. You've got Mike Pompeo, a secretary of state, who just gave this wonderful, I was just, I didn't have a chance to read the whole thing, but he just, he said the essence of Donald Trump's foreign policy is reality. We do not take the world as we wish it were. We take the world as it is. That's a smart, tough guy. You've got a chief of staff who's a grown-up. You've got, above all, an attorney general who's tough, who's willing to take punches to the stomach, and who is determined to run a clean operation to find out what happened. Someone please put that man in a straitjacket or drag – it's the president himself who seems half crazy.

Anyway, okay, so the whole thing seems we're we're we're russia in 1916 and 17 it's bizarre perhaps the problem they have the democrats have is twofold one having predicted that the country would be under the authoritarian heel by now it didn't happen uh even though even though there are all these people who believe that we're very well along to nazism and that it's right around the corner, as it usually is, people look around in the diminution of freedom. They don't see it. What they do see, perhaps, is that the other side is willing completely to craft a bill of attainder, as the New York legislature seems to do, in order to get Donald Trump's tax returns, that there is no law they would burn down to get to the devil. And I'm sorry, but my freedom of speech is not being curtailed from the right. My actions, my desire to live where I like, drive the kind of car that I like,

participate in the electoral college, et cetera, the fundamental changes are not being dictated by some authoritarian government that is bringing out the brown shirts in the streets to seek out the new order. It's not happening. The second thing is, is you're right. If the Democrats came up with moderate candidates, pro-American, pro-American culture, pro-Western exceptionalism, et cetera, with a moderated tone that brought those Clinton-esque ideas into the 21st century, it'd be great.

But I think a lot of people, a lot of people think, OK, fine. I give you guys the majority based on your centrist. I've just empowered essentially a party that has been drifting so far to the left that the centrist are going to get on board with health care for all and a Green New Deal and electrification of all the railways. And the next thing you know, the centrist are being pushed out of the margins because the revolutionaries are always much more cool and fascinating than the boring old poke along in the middle people so right i mean the number of people who voted held their nose and voted for donald trump yes they some of them may have peeled away but the number of people who are going to do the same and didn't do it before i think is increased i i i agree and you go on let's just say one giant one giant mystery is now revealed we now know exactly what it's like to have president trump we didn't know that november

1st 2016 that was a giant mystery what's in the what's in the mystery box turns out it's a crazy man like he's a complete totally irritating and in many ways an embarrassment but on the other hand i don't know you know what growth low unemployment if you're what do you as they say out here in the venture capital world he's been de-risked he's been de-risked not because he is a crazy person but we know what we know this guy i wish he would just go on some sort of huge climate modification program, because right now we're looking at cold weather for the rest of the summer here, cold and rainy and below normal temperature, which I'm sure comports with whatever model they want to use to insist that the climate

is changing. But one thing we do know, this is the weekend where spring turns into summer, which means that you've got about, I don't know how many ever days, whenever you listen to this, how to get your spring cleaning done, right? Because summer cleaning is nothing that anybody wants to talk about. Spring cleaning, a great way to start, with your brushing habits. Sure. With Quip. With Quip.

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What a feat. Follow her on Twitter, if you will, at Deborah J. Saunders. Ms. Saunders, this was supposed to be infrastructure week, but apparently the president balked at being slashed and hacked and paved over and attacked and said, nah. So where do we go with this? Is the nation about to crumble? Our bridges fall? Our airports shutter? Because infrastructure week version, however many of this may be, isn't going to happen.

Infrastructure week never happens. It's a running joke in this White House that whenever they want to have a big infrastructure week event, something else happens. It's a running joke in this White House that whenever they went to have a big infrastructure a week event, something else happens and something always happens in this White House. Hey, Deb, Peter here. First of all, what is this new martial arts thing that you're doing? Well, I did take karate, Kenpo karate for a while. And I sort of liked it. I sort of like punching things. You are already on my list of people never to cross, but you just moved up a couple of places. Okay, so here we are. We're a couple of days away from Memorial Day, the beginning of summer.

Those of us who are old enough to remember, you wouldn't be, of course, but I am. Rob Long just barely, he may have overheard his grandparents talking about the olden days, will recall the summer of 1973, the impeachment hearings, the long, I was, of course, I was a kid at the time, but I can remember my parents just, their long faces whenever they turned on the evening news or whenever the evening newspaper – in those days, there were still two newspapers a day delivered morning and evening. Is there a – what is the feeling in Washington? Are we sliding into another impeachment summer? Oh, I don't think there's any question about it. I mean, as you know, Nancy Pelosi says that Trump is trying to goad the Democrats into impeaching him.

And Nancy Pelosi is trying to goad Trump into goading the Democrats to impeach him. So, I mean, you have this thing that goes on. I mean, the real crazy part was last month when Trump has this meeting. Pelosi asked for a meeting with Trump to discuss infrastructure. And Chuck and Nancy, as we call them now, came out of the West Wing and told reporters that they'd cut a deal and they were going to do a $2 trillion infrastructure package, which, I'm sorry, is like totally crazy. The Democrats had proposed $1 trillion before.

I mean, $1 trillion, $2 trillion, big diff. Trump had proposed $1.5 trillion, never went anywhere. And the Democrats had all sorts of things that they wanted to include with it, broadband, you name it, Trump agreed. And not only that, Peter, but Chuck Schumer said that Trump had agreed that they would meet in three weeks and he would explain how to pay for it. Now, there are some things that Donald Trump is known for. Coming up with how he's going to pay for something isn't one of them, right? And that's a lot of money. There was – some people thought maybe he'd raise the gasoline tax.

That doesn't come close to paying for this package. So the question was why did Trump agree to let them say that, not say, no, that's not true. Maybe it was. And what was going to happen next? So everybody's waiting for this meeting Wednesday. And Tuesday night, Trump sends Chuck and Nancy a letter. And he said, you know what? I don't think we should talk about infrastructure yet. Because first, you guys have to pass my USMCA, his new NAFTA, the Mexico-Canada trade deal, and then we can talk about infrastructure. So he basically takes it all back.

And the next morning – And he sent that out in the evening? How did the press handle that? That seems a very strange time to make a move like that. It's so like this White House, Peter. Really? Like it went out – I think it went out about 9 o'clock. And I let my people at the wires handle it.

That's what I did. But, I mean, that's just how they do things. So the White House sends a note to the Democrats. They don't distribute the letter to everybody. They don't send it out. The Democrats send out a response, and they sort of seem to be like, no, we want to talk about infrastructure. So what's going to happen the next morning? And the next morning, Nancy Pelosi meets with her caucus,

some people clamoring for impeachment, and she walks out. And on the one hand, she's saying, hey, I'm not one of those impeachment people. On the other hand, she says that Trump is engaging in a cover-up, which brings us back to what you were talking about, Peter, 1973. Three. Yeah. I mean, to the whole impeachment,

the impeachment summer. Right. And all of the, which I remember so well too, with all of the, just accept that it's going to be impeachment two years. In a way, we've just finished two years of impeachment.

Right. Yep. So, so, of course, that gave Trump a pretext to say, oh, no, no, we're not doing this. And so a bunch of us are all there waiting for Chuck and Nancy to come out and tell us what happened at the meeting. And instead, the White House announces, all press, go to the palm doors. And that means one of two things, Rose Garden rant or East Room rant, probably Rose Garden rant. And we go out there, and he talked. And he was – one of the things I find sort of interesting is, of late, we haven't had these 90- minute pool sprays where he just goes on and on

and on. He's been much shorter. Yesterday was the exception to the rule when he was doing the farm, the farm package talk, but he kept it under 15 minutes. And he basically said, I'm not talking to these people. They had signs ready. The White House said that the signs had already been made where they talked about no collusion, no obstruction, and numbers about how much money the Mueller probe had spent. And that was it. And now we have – so obviously both sides are going to go to the other side toward impeachment. And there was never going to be an infrastructure deal anyway. So both sides – I know Rob and James want to get back in here, and I'm willing to cede time to my colleagues, but I have one last question.

So both sides are making the calculation that impeachment is in their own interest? You know, the scariest thing in the world, Peter, is when both sides think they won. You can see it. Both sides think that they have won this thing. Trump thinks that if they impeach him, he's solid and that he will win in 2020. And the Democrats think that if this stuff, if they have all these hearings and all this ugly stuff coming out about Trump, that he's done. So both sides think that they're going to win with this, and only one side can be right. Well, as the saying goes, if you strike at the king, you'd best put his poll numbers down five points. I love that saying. What's strange about impeachment summer is that it seems to me you have a lot of people who maybe saw all the president's men fast forwarded through

some parts and think that they're going to get this exciting montage with the John Williams score and very serious looking people with loosely knotted ties will be typing very furiously and it'll be all glorious for the profession. It's not a good thing for the nation, but let's go back to infrastructure week. Let's say the Democrats really do want this. Why do they want it? Because they assume that they're going to get a lot of jobs out of it. Jobs from people who probably aren't going to vote Democrat at this point.

It seems to me that the whole idea of building bridges and highways and airports contradicts with the very notion of the Green New Deal, which de-emphasizes these carbon-intensive things. What sort of infrastructure, what are they talking about precisely? That's a great question. And what they're talking about is green energy. What they're talking about is broadband for everyone. It's a Christmas tree. They have a lot. If you're thinking that this is sort of the old school infrastructure package, no, it's really spending on everything. And there's also they have a wage package in it, and you have to make sure that women and minorities have set asides for them. So it's not really what you're thinking.

If you think it's a bunch of guys with jackhammers, you're wrong. So they want us to think that we're not building the bridge. Well, there might be a bridge or two in there. But when they, when they defer one bridge because they're actually spending the money on minority contracting to get fiber to North Dakota, small towns, the population of 17, when they put money there and they don't spend money on the bridge, well, if the bridge collapses

down the road, that's just more proof that you need more spending on bridges. I mean, there's really no downside for this for any of them. And if they raise the gas taxes, their legal provision, then that that money would be specifically devoted to roads and bridges? That's what it is here in Minnesota. Probably not, right? Probably goes to just – No, no. There is.

So they would have to change the law to spend the money on other issues. I mean you don't have to just spend it on roads and bridges. It can also go to transportation, but it can't go to things like another big area is water. And that is infrastructure. Water is something we expect the government to be involved in. But it can't go to things like that. And it can't go to – even if you double the gas tax, you're not close to getting there. And of course, what do the Democrats say that they want? And this is why I don't think they're really serious about this at all. They want to pay for this by having Trump take back the 2017 tax cuts and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And what do you think the likelihood of that is? Zero. Zero.

Hey, Deb, I got a question. Can we go back to impeachment for a minute? Sure. You say both sides think they won, but in a way, hasn't Trump won? I mean, isn't he right His certain popularity isn't really growing. What he's still – he's got to do is he's got to keep digging around to find enough votes to squeak by again in 2020. He's got a pretty strong economic record to do that. People who don't like him are not going to like him. He's not – there aren't going to be any Trump Democrats. An impeachment would just in bold relief say these people, the other side never gave me a chance. It feels to me like if that's – if I'm looking at Trump's hand right now,

that's not – he's not wrong. You don't know that. That's the thing. I see two dangers here. One of them is I don't know. I just wonder if people are going to start tuning them out. I mean, you notice that used to be that every minute of... Trump fatigue? Yes, Trump fatigue. It used to be that every minute of every Fox speech was broadcast on Fox News. They're not doing that now. They're doing cutaways. They're having talking heads talk while he's talking. I think that people... I had a woman call me up, a reader, and she told me that she likes Trump because she doesn't pay attention to his tweets,

like I'm not supposed to, right? I'm sorry, it's my job. But it's like, you know, so you don't, and if people are turned off and they're not engaged by this, then they may not turn out. And the other thing is, you just don't know what people are going to learn during things like this. So I think the likelihood is that they over-investigate and people are completely turned off and don't care, except for the people who already cared and were already going to vote against him. But it's a gamble. It's a huge gamble. Well, yeah, but he is a gambler. We do know that he's a gambler, and his real-life numbers are – I mean his real-life economic numbers are pretty good, but his personal number is pretty low.

I mean I guess what I'd say is this. It's like one of the elements of 1973 and frankly one of the elements of the Clinton impeachment in 98 I think or 97 was shock. There was actual shock in the country. Maybe naïveté, maybe it was fame, maybe it was disingenuous on the part of some people in the Senate at the time, but there's genuine shock that the President of the United States had engaged in a cover-up. A genuine shock that the President of the United States talked the way he talked in the Oval Office.

Exactly right. And I do remember people leaving the room, the evidence room, during the Clinton impeachment and actually saying things like And I do remember people leaving the room, the evidence room, during the Clinton impeachment and actually saying things like, I'm shocked by what I read. What I read is truly, truly shocking. So my question is, is it conceivable in the known universe that there is something about Trump that we don't know that will shock us? Well, I mean, we know Democrats are shocked he gets away with this stuff, right? They are shocked about that. So we know some people are shocked. But we know,

you know, I think over time, I think the thing that we learned from Clinton is that we've seen the issue of sexual harassment. It's just something that you use against the other side and never against your own. And I think the public has become pretty jaded on that, so that when a story comes up, people will be outraged only if it's the other side. And even that sort of something that's being dialed back, look what happened here in Virginia with our governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general with the problems that they've had, and somehow weathered because people sort of realize

now it's just sort of astonishing. But, you know, there are things that Trump could still do that could turn off his base also. You don't, it's not, so if people are turned off – and again, he only needs to irritate 3% of his following, and he's in trouble. So I don't – I just – I guess that's why I think he's winning because it seems to me that if I were Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, I would be trying to seduce him with moderate-sounding, feel- good initiatives that he can get behind that will that he that will stroke his ego enough, but will also enrage that three percent. It seems to me that's more likely. Yes. If Donald Trump raises the gas tax by 15 percent, the people who support Donald Trump will not

turn on him because they know the other side will raise it by 30. If he gives money, if he gives soybean farmers 16 billion dollars, they will not they won't like it, but they will hate it more if they believe the Democrats are going to make a 20 percent ethanol mandate. I mean, they're always going to see Trump as a backstop. Now, it could be that something will come out that we can't possibly believe, like actually Stormy Daniels turned him down and laughed at him. And he said, you know, or he told Karen McDougal, I'm a married man. I wouldn't touch you or something like that but even factor that in i don't think anybody's going to care at all so i mean but but debbie you said something before that's fascinating the nor the the virginia scandal that isn't you said somehow that all went away could that

somehow wouldness have to do with the press that was utterly uninterested in pursuing what seemed to be a very juicy story. You had blackface and rape accusations, and they rode them out somehow as if nobody was stabbing them with knitting needles on CNN and MSNBC every hour at the top. So could the press have had something to do with their survival rate? Absolutely. Absolutely. The press that was so appalled at what Brett Kavanaugh, I don't believe, did when he was in high school, right? All, of course, are a complete and total double standard. And the one thing that Donald Trump has had going for him is that his base and a lot of members of the public hate the press because of that double standard more than they hate other stuff. So, yes, absolutely. That's true.

Deb to Peter here with a couple of closing questions, if I may really quickly. My own supposition is that Donald Trump is hard to pull because there are a lot of people, lots of people, millions of people who can't stand him, but are going to vote for him anyway in their own mind. This is, and that that's the job approval rating is always going to be low because people are going to say, I don't want to be associated with that guy. Polling him is hard. Is that right? Correct. That's absolutely, absolutely correct. But you don't know that that's going to last. Right. Right. And then I just, I want to go, this is something we said earlier, but I want to go back to it to make sure that I understand.

As I've been listening to you, my mind has been adjusting to this bizarre fact, if it is a fact. The Mueller report is in. Two years of that is over. And yet we're not going to get down to substance.

Politics are not going to return to normal. Both sides have concluded that it's in their interest for this to get ramped up rather than ramped down. And it's August 1914. Is that right? It is. You know, I had somebody say to me, I personally believe that Trump is too provocative with people and that he can try to work with people a little bit better and not push every button. But somebody said to me, we're never going to be a country where we sit down and sing Kumbaya again. And the analogy I use is Rome. I mean, this is the fall of Rome.

What happened? The fall of the Roman Republic, not the, not the, I mean, this is the fall of the Roman Republic where each side spent every minute trying to make sure the other side could not succeed. And they don't, and they're not trying to work to get stuff done. Now they are doing some things. I don't want to make it sound like they don't do anything, but this whole exercise where infrastructure was used for both sides to parade themselves out there and make a point that was meaningless, and they tried to do nothing. If the Democrats really had wanted an infrastructure package, they would not have said that we

have to get rid of the Trump tax cuts, right? They would have. And they wouldn't have said, hey, yeah, let's make it $2 trillion. That's a great idea. No, they would have actually tried to work for something. But they just want to tell their base that they want to give them a new Green Deal infrastructure package, and that they want to ramp their base out. And Trump is trying to ramp his base out, and the people in the middle are just going to have to choose a side. And that's really what this is all about. Well, there was a side of the pro-Trump faction before the war, the Flight 91 people who were saying that it was time for a Caesar. That's what we need.

If we're going to have us, if Caesarism is inevitable, well, then let him be one of our side. I'm not as happy as you are. And I don't think that the Republic has fallen entirely, but heck, the year's long. We'll talk to you in a couple of months and see how we're going down this path. Thanks for joining us today, Deb Sounders. Everybody, read her and follow her on Twitter. Deb, thank you.

Thank you for having me. Thank you. I always love doing this. Hey, before we get to our next guest, I've got to remind you that you've got a credit card, right? And the interest is high, right? You don't like that. Who does? Credit cards have been telling you for decades to buy it now and pay for it later or something like that.

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Lending Club is the number one peer-to-peer lending platform with over $35 billion in loans issued. That's $35 billion. You can be part of that yourself if you go to LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. Check your rating minutes and borrow up to $40,000. That's LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. All loans made by WebBank, member FDIC, equal housing lender. And our thanks to LendingClub for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast, Dr. Bill McClay. He's taught history since 1986, including at Tulane, Johns Hopkins, University of Tennessee,

and now at the University of Oklahoma. His new book is Land of Hope, an Invitation to the Great American Story. And Dr. McClay, anybody who was brought up on a good dose of Howard Zinn thinks the title is wrong. It should be Stolen Land of Despair, an Invitation to the Horrible American Tragedy of Nightmarish Capitalistic Confiscation of Freedom or something like that. You know, when I was in high school, grade school, 60s and 70s, we were taught a version of America that was fairly well balanced. But then along comes Howard in 1980, and the whole thing goes off the rails, doesn't it?

Tell us what the influence of Zinn was and how your book hopes to counter it. Well, gosh, beginning with that wonderful 18th century title, you just concocted. I hardly know where to begin. But I think the real problem is that Zinn in some ways moved into a vacuum, that textbook becoming more and more and more unreadable without any kind of narrative drive to them, any sort of imaginative flourish, anything to capture the imagination of young readers. And then along comes in, and of course, there's other things that prepared the ground for it.

But with a kind of comic book version of American history that nevertheless had a narrative line, he actually writes rather well, at least by comparison. So it gives a kind of structure to American history, makes it interesting in a way that is, at least in the short run, interesting. It's not in the long run very sustaining, and it's not very truthful. Interesting thing is the best critiques of Zinn have come from left-wing historians. Eugene Genovese wrote one of the first and best,

but more recently, Michael Kazin, historian at Georgetown, one of the founding members of SDS at Berkeley back in the day, and still a man of the left, somewhat chastened from his earlier days, and a very fine historian, really very good historian. Somebody I always read. He's the editor of Dissent.

He wrote a really devastating evaluation of Zinn and Zinn's influence. So it's not only people on the right uh like me who uh who object to zin uh i think anybody who cares about history uh feels that our young people have been and not so young people have been done a disservice by it so dr mcclay peter robin hi how are you peter robinson i just want to make sure our audience understands. When we talk about Zinn, we're talking about Howard Zinn, who just died a couple of years ago, and his book, A People's History of the United States, which is as if it had been written, which was published in 1980, and it's as if Howard Zinn spent the 70s processing Vietnam and then wrote the book from exactly that point of view.

And the maddening thing about that book is that it still sells tens of thousands of copies a year, every single year. I just want people who may not be familiar with Zinn to be aware of what we're talking about here. Yes, although I thought James' title really said it all. I want to get that down for future use. Yeah, and for your California listeners, this is not referring to Zinfandel. This is Howard Zinn. Zinfandel is much more edifying.

But, yeah, he dominates. He dominates the market in high school textbooks. And, of course, the alternative choice is the standard textbooks from the big three publishing, uh, which are boring. They're boring. They're written by committee and by committee of the vocal of the organized. So, um, you know, and, and textbook committees have to be placated. And so they're not really written. They're sort of constructed. Can I, I know Rob Long, Rob Long is champing to get in here. Our colleague, I have one question for you first, if I may.

Zinn's title, A People's History of the United States. It's as clear as can be that that's going to be a history of the country from the left, which it is from the beginning of the book to the end of the book. And for all that gets wrong, and as you just explained, he gets episode after episode wrong. Nevertheless, there's a narrative thread. There's a point of view. Your book, which I haven't picked up yet, I confess, but the title is Land of Hope.

So there's a narrative line. What amazes me is it's hard work taking the whole story and finding a through line. How long have you been working on this project and then over to Ron? Well, in a sense, for a long time. I mean, I taught the American History Survey really up until I came to Oklahoma six years ago. I taught it every year. And I'm always, you know, if you want to give good lectures, if you want to keep people's attention,

you really do need to have that narrative thread and something that can thread from episode to episode, from lecture to lecture, class to class, something to have people feeling that they're listening to and absorbing an unfolding story, which, by the way, is really necessary if you're going to recall details. The narrative has to be there like the Christmas tree to hang the ornaments on. Otherwise, people won't remember the details either. So I have been, you know, but in a concentrated way, what really, I don't know how far to

go into this, but what really made me feel this was an imperative thing to do was after in 2014 and really did some amazingly audacious things. Like the name of James Madison doesn't appear in the framework study that outlines some of the things that will be required. I'm not kidding you. Well, I mean, there's somebody here. I mean, there's somebody here. I don't know about you fellows, but there's at least one person on this podcast who took the AP U.S. History exam. Got a five.

Thank you. That's the highest number. But I'm just going to ask you just two questions. One is, I mean, isn't that the benefit? I mean, isn't that the chief pro of Marxism is that it's a coherent, completely enclosed worldview that you can apply and look at a lens through almost anything and everything, not just literature but Roman history, Greek history, American history. So what is the lens that the right can use to explain away – we've got a lot of things to explain away, right? We've got to explain away slavery. We've got to explain away civil rights. We've got to explain away all sorts of things that the Marxists have an easy answer for, which is just this power dynamics. What do we say? Well, of course, the Marxists can't explain abolitionism, and they've struggled with that, with trying to find ways to explain that away. It's economic, they say. Yeah, well, you know, even David Bryan Davis, the great historian of slavery, in the end,

come around to the point of view that's been expressed a number of times, that this was one of the great acts of altruism and high-mindedness, of moral courage in human history. That's not supposed to happen under Marx, yeah. Yeah, and he spent a whole career kind of shying away from that conclusion, well, not enough to make it. Look, I don't think Land of Hope says everything

that needs to be said about american history and part of what i'm trying to restore is a sense that history is a morally complex tale and it's not it's not a simple cops and robbers white has that you know that black hat kind of thing it has moments and you know uh but even the civil war I present in a complicated way. I'm actually – I'd be interested to see if readers find me to be too sympathetic to the South. I'm not really sympathetic to the South, but I do try to give a sense of the moral complexity of it. So I think moral complexity is part of my goal. So just the generation that rioted in the streets in the 60s, the SDS generation as you referred to before, they grew up reading – they're pretty anodyne probably textbooks, but basically textbooks that didn't even come close to touching the kind of Marxist analysis that Howard Zinn indulges in and they ended up riding the streets so could you i mean isn't there an argument to say like yeah well give all the kids all the marxism they want in high school eventually

they'll turn uh and and vote for reagan yeah well you know some did but um i i think actually there's a there's a maybe a mistaken premise in what you're saying that is that those textbooks of the 50s were anodyne and were, you know, flag-waving products of the DAR and the American Legion. I had not found that to be the case. I think, you know, and certainly beginning with Charles Beard's The Rise of American Civilization, which was published in the 20s, you have textbooks that are extremely critical, that employ quasi-Marxist terms of political analysis. I think that that's one of the many things that the 60s generation distorted about the immediate preceding passage,

that there was this kind of whitewash, a term I use advisedly these days, of American history as the way it was taught. I don't really find that when I look back at these earlier textbooks. Certainly, you don't have the kind of relentless concern with what I call the overriding moralism that's a product of Zinn and his ilk, and that you see in American textbooks. Nothing good can be said without something bad to balance it. One of my

big experiences in my life was patriotism. That's true. One of the biggest experiences, a mind-blowing experience in my life was I was out of college and someone handed me as I was driving across the country a copy of Paul Johnson's Modern Times. Yes.

And I read it, and I thought, well, wait a minute. This is a different kind of history. I haven't heard this kind of history. And it really was very effective to me, and it actually helped me sort of move smartly to the right. Who do we give your book to to do the same thing about American history? Oh, okay. Who did I write it for, or who could be a suitable reader?

Who did I write it for? Both those things. What are we talking about? It's an anime. It's graduation. Who should read your book? Well, I think graduating seniors should read it. I was starting to tell you about the AP thing,

that I was moved partly to write this because people kept telling me, look, there's no textbook anymore that doesn't adhere more or less to the standards that the AP exam said, even though they reversed themselves on that. That's another part of the story, but the college board did. But the textbooks remain. And so I kind of began looking in the mirror, and the face I was seeing was looking back at me saying, why aren't you doing anything about this? So I felt moved. And actually, the person who really convinced me, the come to Jesus moment was Roger Kimball. When he called me on a Sunday afternoon,

I was in a weakened condition. And having rejected the idea in the past, he said, come on, you know, you got to do this for all glory. And he hit me at the right moment. So I launched into it. And it turned out to be just tremendously fun. I, you know, I'd like to tell you it was an ordeal, but it really wasn't. It came fairly easily because these are things I'd been thinking about for years and years. So who should I... Initially, my initial target audience was that smart high school junior like you were about to take the AP U.S. History exam their senior year of high school. And then that was sort of the first target. But the more I got into it, the more I realized that this could be a trade book. This could be a book that could have a general readership.

And certainly, I've tried it out on the way on lots and lots of people, including high school teachers who assured me that the people in publishing who were telling me, oh, your reading level is much too high. They said, no, no, no. Our kid can handle this. There's all kinds of bad advice

that guides the making of textbooks. And it's an interlocking circle of advice. It's sort of like the vietnam war you know where he's getting the bad information that's recycled through people who are designated as experts and and you you end up having very bad results dr mcclay maybe maybe before people read your book um maybe we teach them something else because right now you have a bunch of young kids who believe that history essentially was this primordial mass of stuff. And then along came America, which is uniquely evil, and did everything bad to the country and to the planet for 200 years.

And then out of that odious muck rose Obama, born aloft on an alabaster beam, and things were okay for a while. And we glimpsed what paradise could be, and now we're back into our old back ways. In other words, they don't have context for American exceptionalism. What if we taught them for three or four years not about America but about the rest of humanity and the rest of history, which is oppression, colonialism, cultural appropriation, slavery, violence, everything that they uniquely ascribe to america is endemic and magnified in every single other culture because they're made up of humans and once they understand that they see why a nation founded on the ideals that we have in our history is actually the

exception to human brutality not a particularly unusual or you know egregious manifestation of it. Teach them everything else first and then get to your book. Well, you're right about I think the underlying point is that what happens now is that kids, they don't know anything. They don't even know what the Soviet Union was and let alone what it did in China and so on. They don't know anything. What they learn is that, as you say, America is uniquely evil, that slavery has never existed anywhere else. There's a sort of unique burden that the United States bears for that. It would be great if they could have the kind of larger background of what a truly dismal prospect most of human history presents, and then see what a shining light and a land of hope. I mean, hope partly means the hope that one can escape the circumstances

of one's birth. That's a theme that runs through the book from start to finish. I start with the first Asians coming out across the Bering Straits, and you know, what were they coming for? And that in some way, from the very beginning, we have been an asylum for the world. And even if it's maybe a little fanciful to think of those very straight immigrants as seeking asylum, but they were seeking something. And Leif Erikson was seeking something. And, of course, Columbus was along the way. He was seeking something else and found America instead. But I think this notion that's hardwired, even in the European antecedents of America,

that there is somewhere a land of hope, a land of transformation, is a part of who and what we are. And have we realized it perfectly? Well, of course not. Have we realized it in substantial measure? Yes. Have we set standards that are very, very high for what we aspire to be? Yes. Have we met those standards invariably?

No. Sometimes we fail miserably. But we've failed miserably, but we've set the standards, and the standards are still there. And the standard is not the standard you're very proud of. It is. The standard is no longer the book of Howard Zinn. The book is Land of Hope, an Invitation to the Great American Story. By it is the Zinn antidote, the Zinn emetic, if you will. Dr. Bill McClay. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. I want you as my publicist.

Exactly. The emetic Dr. McClay. I'm not sure you really do want that, Bill. Well, I do at the moment. You know, because of the passing phase. Thanks so much. And congratulations. What an achievement.

I wish you could do this for another three hours. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. What? You know, as the book we were just talking about reminds you, there's a lot of America that's new. I mean, there's ideas that have never been tried before. It's an American thing to find a good idea and give it a try. You know, we all got that friend who, in the typical American spirit, they're the first one to try things, right?

Whether or not they're super trendy or more of a guinea pig. When you're making a choice, it's always nice to hear it from someone who's been there, isn't it? Get the lay of the land from somebody who knows what they're talking about, that they've been there, that done that. It's like that with software too. Choosing the right software for your business is no different than that. You want to know who's been there and done that and what they think. So you can read thousands of real software reviews. They'll help you choose the right software for your business. And where? Captera.com slash ricochet.

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So join the millions of people who use Capterra each month to find the right tools for their business. So you can, I'm thinking here, you know, I would like to kind of sort of start a self-publishing outfit where I sell books on Amazon, on Kindle or whatever. And it'd be nice to have some sort of software to figure out how to do that and chart my sales. It's there.

Go find it at Capterra. Capterra.com slash Ricochet for free today to find the tools to make an informed software decision for your business. That's Capterra.com slash Ricochet. C how do you spell that you wonder i'll tell you c-a-p-t-e-r-r-a dot com slash ricochet captera software selection simplified and a thanks to captera for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast that well even though some people may be listening to this after memorial day i'm sure they're absolutely fascinated and hanging on the edge of their seat and uh as peter noted champing at the bit to find out what everyone's doing for the weekend i'm gonna grill some meat rob you happen

to be in miami right the sea levels are rising they're up to they're up to the second or third floor those others everyone here is walking around they're very nervous about it, it seems like. Actually, no. Everybody here is very nervous. I'm going to be spending Memorial Day with the family. We're going to be up in the – not Miami, but in Palm Beach and hang out and swim. And the weather is going to be perfect and the water is perfect. I know everybody loves Texas, but –

There's a lot to be said about Florida, isn't there? I do love Florida. I really do love Florida. I do, too. And I don't care if it's humid and overgrown with large insects and parts of it are strange. It's fascinating to me the place. Yeah, I agree. It's like Texas without the certain

Texas elements that we like. It's sort of Texas in shorts and cargo shorts and flip-flops, maybe, in some respects. Texas with real waves. It's got everything Texas has, a Gulf Coast, and it's got an ocean coast, and it's just cool. I just think it's a very cool – Miami is a very cool, fascinating, wonderful city, and I'm never, ever bored of what's going on here. It's just a really great city.

Well, I like Fort Lauderdale, for heaven's sakes. I mean, I'm kind of keen on that town as well. Except Texas has those great long expanses, those stretches of nothing but phone poles and the occasional town with the shuttered movie theater, which lends something to the character that the humidity of Florida doesn't have. Peter, in California, what are your traditional American plans? Traditional American plans, we are all caught up at the moment with plans, packing, arrangements, logistics, because we have a traditional American thing to do not this weekend but a weekend, what, two weekends from now,

which is everybody's going to Hanover, New Hampshire to watch Robinson Child No. 4 graduate from Dartmouth College. And this is child number four to graduate, but you go through it all over again. There's the sweetness of it, the sadness, the father's hope that the child will at last step off the family payroll. There are all kinds of emotions going on here. A reminder of your personal, you know, what's the word I'm looking for? Immateriality. Something like that. The evanescence of life.

Is that what you're running toward there, James? What I love is the perpetual wishful thinking that the child will actually go off the payroll. That's what I love, is that after being taught a lesson so many times, you still think that this time it's going to be different. I find that both heartening and tragic. But you're closer to being shunted off to irrelevance and closer to the tomb, so there's always that.

There's that to look forward to. There always is. But you'll be remembered, which is part of what Memorial Day is all about. So everybody get out there, do your memorializing, and also figure out how you're going to be remembered and perhaps print off your photos instead of leaving them in the cloud

because they'll all be gone. Leave something for somebody to page through 50, 60, 70 years hence. And by then, of course, we'll be up to Ricochet Podcast number 5,942. And Lord knows who will take it on. It'll be some smart kid who probably read the book we just talked about, some kid with fine teeth because they grew up listening to this podcast using Equip, some kid who probably doesn't have high-interest credit card payments because their parents went to a lending club, and, of course, Capterra as well for all of your needs in that way.

Support them, why don't you? Because they support us. And also, do I have to say it? I do. Go to iTunes, leave a review. The more five-star reviews we get, the more the show surfaces, the more people listen, the more people contribute to Ricochet. You did join Ricochet this week,

didn't you? Thank you very much. And if you didn't, we'll talk to you next week and done you some more about that. In the meantime, it's been a great week, good show, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye, Peter. Bye, Rob. Next week, boys, happy Memorial Day. Next week, fellas, happy Memorial Day.

Go check out. I gotta run. Okay, bye-bye. Bye, Peter. Bye, Rob. Next week, boys. Happy Memorial Day. Next week, fellas. Happy Memorial Day. Go check out. I gotta run. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye. I'm going to go. Grab your ticket and your suitcase Thunder's rolling down this track Well, you don't know where you're going now But you know you won't be back Well, darling, if you're weary We'll be right back. Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams Meet me in a land of open dreams I will provide for you

And I'll stand by your side You need a good companion now For this part of the ride Can't leave behind your sorrows Let this day be last Well, tomorrow will be sunshine And always darkness past Well, big wheels roll through

fields where sun lights stream up meet me

in a land of open dreams Ricochet. Join the conversation. This train carries hearts and gambers This train carries lost souls

I said this train dreams will not be thwarted This train faith will be rewarded This train hear the steel wheels singing This train bells of freedom ringing. I'm out.