← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:02]
A
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B
Guys, I'm JBL from the Bulwark, and I am here with the great Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, Maynard. Do you remember? You're old enough. You and I are. We're close in age. The Saturday Night Live sketch. What's the best way with the New England? It's like the Jeopardy with the three New England people giving directions.
- [01:22]
C
Anyways, I don't, but it's kind of a trope and, you know, there's something to it.
- [01:26]
B
I think Glenn Close played the main lady and she was like, well, you're gonna go down the road past the blueberry stand. And anyway.
- [01:33]
C
Oh. Oh, no, no. The worst ever was there is a very back way to get from here to Portland that is completely unmarked. And it helps you get away from the coastline when there's a lot of traffic here in the summer. And the person who gave me instructions, literally one of the turns was right after so and so's tractor. And I'm like, he's gonna move the stupid tractor, dude. And he's like, well, I don't know how else to tell it to you. He lives in a white cape, if that helps. I'm like, in May. No, that doesn't help either. And yes, the answer was I got incredibly lost. And now that we have gps, I don't have to worry about where he lost his tractor.
- [02:15]
B
All right, so I had wanted to sit down and talk with you about the history of conservatism and about what where modern conservatism as we're experiencing it right now, which is different from how we experienced it 20 years ago when I first came into the adult world, how it got here and whether. Whether this was inevitable or contingent before I do that, because God knows the world is always with us and we can't just look back at history. So the Charlie Kirk thing has happened. The terrible murder of him. It's awful. People are sort of trying to pick on you today, and I just wanted to give you a chance to respond because you had one sentence in what, like a 3,000 word essay about what is going on here and people are taking shots at you, and I don't like it. And I was wondering if you want to clean that up and talk about it a little.
- [03:08]
C
Well, yes, it's funny, I haven't seen anything today. Yesterday was a complete nightmare in my life. But maybe those two things are not unrelated in that the backstory is that, as you know, I try and keep a record every day of what the country looks like on that day. And I try to be really, really careful to make sure that everything I say is sourced. And, you know, I put in the comments. And so I tried on, I think it was September 12th, to say, here's what we know about the alleged shooter. And you have to use the word alleged because he has not been convicted yet, although I am. Well, I'll leave it with that. And said these things about him which were all established, right. And then the next day I wrote a long piece about the use of today's radical right. I won't call them conservatives. I think that's an important distinction we can talk about of creating a false reality in that I had one sentence in which I referred back to what I had said the day before and said, although there's this big machine out there saying, he's on the left, it appears he's on the right. But I used the word appears. And my sources for that were the commentary on the gun casings, which were associated with a game that, you know, some of the online gaming stuff which had been associated with the right. Although again, I used the word appears because we simply didn't know. That's it. I got nothing else. Because we don't know. I mean, even yesterday, after the state of Utah came out and issued an indicting document and had a number of text messages in it, they didn't speak. The state didn't speak to motive, they just put those text messages in it. So we just, just don't know. And it strikes me that the volume of anger and hatred that I have gotten from that one sentence has very little to do with that one sentence and has a lot to do with real bad Faith, the idea that I should. I mean, I'm not gonna go into the details of what they have said, but there is not any attempt there at all to engage with the actual ideas in the pieces I wrote or with what I wrote so much as to sort of paint me as this far left conspiracy theorist who is trying to attack the memory of Charlie Kirk. And it's just a really weird, almost feels perverted kind of attack on participation in the public sphere. I mean, that's a sentence. And, you know, if you look at, on the other hand, the stuff that Kirk said about me in the public sphere, that seems to just be going by the board, it. It just. It just kind of reeks, to be honest.
- [06:17]
B
Yeah, well, so we know a little bit more than we did. We still don't know everything. Text messages do make it appear like he was motivated because he didn't like the things that Charlie Kirk had said about trans people know more eventually.
- [06:33]
C
Yeah, but you even can't say that because until it gets to a court of law and we actually have evidence that is introduced and that, you know, and witnesses and stuff. It's what I said right after the shooting itself, and everybody was making assumptions about who had done it before they caught Robinson again, who's still alleged. You just don't know. I mean, anybody who studies history will tell you that sometimes the things that seem like they fit pretty clear patterns simply don't. And on my webcast that day, I said, you know, you just don't know. It certainly looks one way, but it could be somebody he cut off in traffic for all, you know, until it's actually been tested. And, you know, that's one of the reasons I think we're in such a bad place right now, is that people make assumptions that are not actually, as they say, admitted. You know, in. In evidence assumes a fact, not in evidence. And even that charging document did attribute motive. It simply said, here are some text messages. It did not attribute those as motives. So who knows?
- [07:45]
B
All right, now we get to talk. The conversation I really wanted to have a talk about. So you, you make a powerful case that modern conservatism. And while we talk, I'm just like, everybody's listening. Try in your mind to disentangle partisan identifications of Republican and Democrat from the ideological conversation, because the partisan things move around a little bit here. So you, you argue that modern conservatism really comes around after the New Deal. And you have business interests who would like to roll back the New Deal. They link up with segregationists who want to try to insulate the south from integrating African Americans, and then eventually religious forces who are uneasy about the changing role of women.
- [08:32]
C
Well, they actually, 1937 is when we get the conservative manifesto. And I do want to just start by distinguishing, as you did, but a little bit more firmly between the concept of political conservatism, which is a really interesting and a really important concept, and the rise of this radical group that calls itself conservative. And those are not at all the same thing. From the very beginning, they are not conservative. They're using the name conservative. And that actually really matters. And the other piece to that that I do think is important is that while religious traditionalism doesn't really start to dominate, and now we're talking partisanship, the Republican party until the 1960s, the. It's part of the coalition from the beginning. And it's worth remembering that in 1937, the Scopes trial was only, what, 12 years old? No, I can't do the math. 15 years old. I can't. Here we go. 1925 to 1937 is 12 years. There you go. 12 years. 12 years apart. So that matters. I mean, we tend to focus on the race in those early years, but the gender piece, which is gonn to come to the four through the religious right, is going to be what we're dealing with now. And by the time.
- [10:03]
B
By the time we get to Goldwater, that's when it is sort of that becomes known as movement conservatism.
- [10:11]
C
It's actually not named. It's not named movement conservatism until, I think it's 1974. And I think it was journalist Sidney Blumenthal who gave it that name. However, I could be wrong on that, but. However, they certainly grabbed hold of that name with the idea that it was a political movement that was named conservatism. So they were movement conservatives. That's a political faction, as opposed to, as you say, the political ideology of conservatism, which is fascinating.
- [10:43]
B
So talk to me a little bit about the difference between conservatism as it exists as a political philosophy, which is like Edmund Burke. Right. And then how it exists as a, like, I guess, you know, in vivo versus in situ. Right. In. In America, and how that. How that those things have diverged. Let's just start post New Deal.
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C
You want me to start post New Deal or start New Deal?
- [11:15]
B
Sure, let's start. Let's start post New Deal.
- [11:17]
C
Okay.
- [11:18]
B
Unless you want to start with spurcing.
- [11:20]
C
Well, I think the concept of what conservatism Means is really important in this era when so many people see it as being what is currently the radical right. Because today's radical right is trying to destroy the government. That is not a conservative position. That's not an ideologically conservative position. Edmund Burke is a really interesting character because if you think about the time he's writing, which is during the French Revolution, the general sense, in the sort of united. It's not, well, the United States early republic still, but in the UK and in that political tradition is that government is a negative force, that government can only hurt things. And so you really wanna make sure you hold it back and that it can't really do very much. Well, Burke takes a look at what's happening in France during the French Revolution, where people are asserting an ideology. And in order to make that ideology become real, they're actually killing people and, you know, setting buildings on fire and doing things that are destroying the stability of the country and killing people. So he begins to argue that, in fact, the government should not rest on ideological principles because pretty soon you're trying to make the people fit the ideology rather than the ideology fit the people. And that what a government really should do is it should promote stability. And the way in his era that one promoted stability was to promote the protection of property and the church and aristocracy and all those. And the family, all those pieces of a society that promote stability and give people a stake in the country. That's really the first major philosophy that talks about the use of the government in a positive way rather than in a negative way. And that idea of conserving the pieces that are important and then moving forward based not on an ideology, but on what works and what doesn't, which is what he talks about, is a really important concept for understanding how a government should or should not work in the United States. It doesn't get much traction because they ain't got much to conserve at that point. They're brand new. And the United States doesn't start to use the term conservatism until after the Compromise of 1850. And part of the Compromise of 1850 says that Northern states have to, regardless of their own state laws, have to return fugitive enslaved people to the American South. And the law is written in such a way that free black people have, like, no rights at all. And a lot of people in the north who disagree either with the idea of enslavement or with the idea that the federal government should override their own laws start to say, no, we're not gonna pay any attention to that of The Compromise of 1850 to the Fugitive Slave Act. When that happens, Southern enslavers start to refer to those people saying they're not gonna pay attention to that law as radicals, as they're, you know, they're not gonna pay attention to law. They are radicals. The abolitionists begin to say, now wait a minute, we're not radicals, we're conservatives because we are standing on the Declaration of Independence. And that's the term that Abraham Lincoln picks up when he starts to call a conservative, as he does very dramatically at Cooper Union in New York, when he says, you're the radicals, we're the conservatives. What he is saying is we are standing, excuse me, standing on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. And it's on those terms that the concept of conservatism comes to the United States. And you often hear me saying that I am a Lincoln conservative. And that's what I'm talking about. I believe in the Declaration of Independence.
- [15:15]
B
So how does it then morph into what happens after the New Deal?
- [15:22]
C
So again, I think it's important to remember that the people who become movement conservatives are out of step with mainstream Democrats, of course, but mainstream Republicans as well, who would define themselves as conservatives. Somebody like Dwight Eisenhower, who is looking at the fact that a number of the aspects of the New Deal worked really well. You know, there'd been this terrible depression and now they figured out how to regulate business and provide a basic social safety net and significant enough wages for workers that that probably wasn't going to happen again. And they figured out how to promote education and how to create a rising standard of living and how to protect civil rights, although they're just getting their toes wet in that. And they're trying to figure out how to have a rules based international order so that will protect society and so on. That's Eisenhower as well as somebody like FDR or Harry Truman. The movement conservatives want to get rid of that. They want to go back to the period before that into the 1920s. And they're very clear about that in that they first articulate that stand in the Conservative manifesto of 1937 in which they say the government has no right to regulate business. It has no right to have a basic social safety net that belongs to the churches. It better stay out of civil rights, and it shouldn't promote infrastructure. So they've got this idea. And when in fact, somebody like William F. Buckley Jr. Publishes God and man at Yale in 1951, the reviews of it are just brutal. And they say this, they Literally. One guy literally calls him an infin. Terrible, you know, this upstart who's trying to change this stable society. And in that review, he says, this is not conservatism. This is anything but conservatism. So that little faction that now is referred to as conservative by anybody but me, I mean, I won't call them that is actually a radical attempt to get rid of the conservative government that Americans as a whole built after the New Deal.
- [17:33]
B
So you said that the conservatism as it exists now exists to sort of. What did you say? Did you say destroy the government, Wage war against the government?
- [17:43]
C
Well, I wish you'd stop using the word conservatism because there are plenty of conservatives left in the United States. There's plenty of them, but they're not members of today's MAGA party.
- [17:55]
B
Yeah, well, the MAGA Party then, which rules, you know, we'll just use that. I would have agreed that 10 years ago. The. The pre Maga conservative, or whatever you want to call it. I mean, we can call it the Republican Party then, even though it's a little imprecise. What it existed was to sort of, in theory, it said it wanted a smaller government, but it didn't really. What it wanted was protect business interests and pursue, as you said, the other things. Right. It was very uncomfortable with racial progress. It was very uncomfortable with the changing role of women in society. It had projects that it wanted. It seems to me that it's different in that it is now almost openly fascist and authoritarian. Is that fair? Like, it doesn't want smaller government. It doesn't want the government to change. It doesn't have policy goals. It wants domination, and it wants government to dominate all aspects of everybody's lives. And it wants to control government for forever.
- [19:00]
C
That's right. That's right. Is that unfair? No, I think that is fair and I think. But I think, again, it's important to pull apart the partisan nature of what's going on and the concept of conservatism, which are just very different as well. And as I say, there's plenty of conservatives in the United States today who would like to promote the institutions of stability, recognizing that that's how you make sure you have a society that is not violent and where people can work and get ahead and have educations and stable marriages and healthy children and all those pieces of soc society that are good for a nation, any nation. But the people in charge of it now may have the. Let's call them magus, like you say, people might refer to them as conservatives, but in fact, what they are looking to do is to destroy American democracy. And we can talk about why. There's theories about why. I mean, they have articulated theories for why they don't like American democracy. But to replace that with an extraordinarily powerful government, which is very different than what the movement conservatives talked about. And that very powerful government they would like to have impose on the rest of us Christian nationalism, which is about as far from conservatism as you can get.
- [20:15]
B
So I guess the big question is, and I've written about this a bunch, was it always going to end like this? Right? Was the what arose out of the New Deal and became the movement, conservatism in the 1970s with Goldwater and then sort of grew with Gingrich. Was it always going to wind up here at fascism or is that accident? I guess. Were there other pathways? Are there other ways this story could have developed?
- [20:48]
C
So listen, I should start by saying I don't believe in inevitability. I believe that the sun comes up the next day and you can always change things. And if you remember, I wrote the history of the Republican Party in 2014. And in that it really sort of a warning to the Republican Party saying, hey, take the off ramp. Take the off ramp, guys. Cause it's time, well past time. And there's still time for you to get back the popular party that supported the nation and all that. And I got lambasted for that, that I was way too hard on the Republican Party. And so I said to someone the other day, I sit here now awaiting my lavish apology from all those people who wrote that thing. So the cosmic answer is no, nothing is inevitable. But I got thinking about that after you wrote and asked me about that. And I do think that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a really important moment for that movement in the United States. And by the way, I've had this argument with somebody who 100% disagrees with me. And that's a legitimate position as well. We could argue about that. By the way, I love to argue fact based argument, which is different than sort of potshots, which is where we seem to be right now. Because it always, you learn new stuff all the time and often refine where you thought you were. But I was thinking about that and I was thinking, you know, if you think about Watergate and the fact that Republican senators during Watergate went to Nixon, led by, of all people, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and said, and I paraphrase, dude, the gig is up, you need to resign, cuz we're gonna find you guilty. That's 74. And now look at us. Where the Republican Party kept in power somebody that in 2019, 2020, the senator, Republican senators, according to Ted Cruz, anyway, all believed he was guilty, but kept Trump in office because they were looking forward to the 2020 presidential election. What happened in there? And I am starting to think that the collapse of the Soviet Union made a really big difference because it seemed to a number of Americans to have proved that democracy was going to triumph forever. And, you know, remember we got the end of history books and all that because everybody was gonna become a liberal democracy. And they divorced the idea of democracy, I think, from the idea of capitalism and felt that so long as you were exporting capitalism, you were exporting democracy. And we know on the heels of that that those radical Republicans I talked about quite openly said they were going to turn their firepower on those they called liberals at home. But that wasn't Democrats. That was people who believed in that kind of government that Democrats, Independents and Republicans had all put into place in the United States after World War II. And they went to war against Americans and I think perhaps created a new kind of intellectual allegiance to their concept of capitalism rather than a concept of an allegiance to democracy. And I could be wrong about that for sure. But if you think about Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and his purge of the party, you know, RINOs, Republicans in name only, that was not something you were going to do when you were still fighting against communism in the Soviet Union. And that continuing purge and the continuing emphasis on the idea that a good American was the man who could amass as much money and as much power as possible, that was not something that could have stood, I think, in a contest against Communism. And I don't know, I think maybe that really is what began the slide toward creating a party in which people were loyal to their party above their country. That maybe that was the place where faith in American democracy ceased to be the defining feature of our lawmakers, and loyalty to party instead became the central piece. And then, of course, that loyalty to, to party and to money making also brought a ton of money into the party and sort of forced it to continue down that road. I don't know. What do you think?
- [25:19]
B
I hadn't really thought of the role of the Cold War. I mean, just for easing it right now, I might say prior to 1989, you had 50, 40 years in which, whatever their other differences, Republicans and Democrats were basically in the same place on the Cold War. And, you know, the Republicans would try to paint Democrats as being weak against the Soviets and whatnot, but they really weren't. I mean, they. They were. You know, Kennedy was right where Eisenhower was. Carter for the first two years was more dovish than, you know, Republicans in general. But the last two years are indistinguishable from Reagan in his approach to the Soviet Union. And so you have, like, in general consensus on what is the most important issue. And once that issue's gone, like, what consensus is there between the parties? And this is when things start polarizing. So I tend to put a lot of stock in polarization and the ideological sorting out of the parties. And so as you wound up losing conservative Democrats and they begin flipped, and you lost liberal Republicans, and they flipped, you wound up in this place where negative polarity started driving everything, and it became hard to get consensus on anything. Is this, any of this making sense or no?
- [26:52]
C
It is, it is. And now I'm gonna undercut my own argument, which is why we have these discussions. Polarization is articulated first, of course. I mean, it's an old political theory, actually, pretty well articulated Before World War II by Eric Schmidt, who is now. Who became a Nazi political theorist and who is now much beloved among MAGA Republicans. But that polarization and the articulation of that polarization really begins in that 51 book by William F. Buckley, Jr. God and man at Yale. And the person who really brings it into the mainstream of American politics is Richard Nixon, first in 68 and then in 70, and then in 72, when his vice president, Spiro Agnew, was quite proudly engaging in what he called positive polarization.
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B
Right.
- [27:44]
C
You know, and so that's, you know, again, we've already examined my extraordinary ability with math, but that was significantly before the end of the Soviet Union. And the polarization is there then. And it works. It works. It works. In 72, obviously, Nixon wins going away.
- [28:03]
B
Those are issue polarizations, though, right? Is what. What Nixon was trying to do. Nixon was trying to polarize voters around issues. What I'm. What I'm talking about is more of like the. The partisan sorting out where the. The parties became ideological monoliths instead of polyglots. You know, I think, but maybe not. I don't know.
- [28:24]
C
Now, now I'm going to undercut my. My last comment, because, of course, I've always thought the Voting Rights act of 65 was the real biggie, because then the parties had to decide if they were gonna try and pick up black and brown votes or pick up the reactionaries. And Nixon makes the clear decision to follow Goldwater and pick up the reactionary Dixiecrats. I mean, he goes and courts Strom Thurmond the same way that Goldwater did. So I don't know, when is the die cast in that 65, 72, 92, 1865.
- [28:57]
B
I mean, this is right. You just keep going back right with these things. So this is good. So, you know, I have done a lot of like, reconsidering of the world over the last 10 years. I try to reconsider the world sort of on a constant basis. But I would say my, I've said this before. Anybody who's listening to this, who's heard me before, my biggest analytical failure, like before age 35, was totally misunderstanding the centrality of race in American politics. And so I, I am totally, totally open to the argument that like the Voting Rights act is the beginning of all this for exactly the reasons you say, because the parties had to decide which, which co. Which constituency were they going to try to absorb. And once you decide you want to absorb the reactionary Dixiecrats, maybe the die is cast. I don't know.
- [29:49]
C
Well, so of course, what they are picking up, that radical right after World War II, really, after the Brown vs Board of Education decision in May of 54, is that evil marriage from 1871 of the idea that permitting for a nation, for the United States, not any nation, for the United States, to permit black men to vote is a form of, of socialism because it will mean that they will be able to vote for lawmakers who will give them roads and schools and hospitals which can only be paid for with white tax dollars. And so that comes back in the second civil rights movement there in the 50s, 60s and 70s. But as long as we're on things that I think we're not paying enough attention to, we have focused a lot in our lifetimes on the role of race in polarization, in political polarization. I am blinds, just gobsmacked at how little discussion we have in our political spheres about the role of sexism in promoting MAGA Republicans, because it seems to me, and we could break this down in greater detail as well, but that idea that men should dominate their wives is a way to bring that political polarization into every single household in the country. And that, you know, I'm just shocked at the degree to which that is not front and center when you can see it every freaking day when you look at the political news and you.
- [31:24]
B
Can see it in how the parties have shifted just on gender.
- [31:28]
C
Right.
- [31:28]
B
I mean, as Republicans have become the party of men to a large degree, Democrats, party of women. Did you see that coming? Because I'm going to say I did not. Maybe you did.
- [31:40]
C
Well, we've known for a while that the gender gap begins in 1980. That, I think, was a big sign right there. But did I see this moment coming where we would have a president who openly bragged of sexual assault? No. No. I really did think. I always think that norms are gonna hold, and that's my big blind side. When I tend to believe things people tell me. And I also tend to think they're gonna operate in good faith. And that's. That's clearly not the case. As I've gotten older, I've finally had to admit that that's not the case. But did we know that gender and the role of women in American society was gonna be a thing? Yeah, absolutely. And that, I think was clear from the. Was in 1970 when there were all the stories about women burning their bras at the Miss America pageant, which never happened. You know, so that was one of the things. Those of us who study women's history in the United States already there was myth making about women's rejection of roles in American society and radicalization that simply didn't reflect reality. I think what I didn't expect to see coming was the degree to which white men would walk away from obtaining the kind of skills they needed to survive in the 21st century, thereby ceding them to white women for the most part, or to women in general. And then to decide that they were going to make up the difference by excluding women from American society altogether. That's a biggie.
- [33:15]
B
Yeah. So how do we fix it is what I get. I would say the biggest criticism I get is I get 20 of these every day. It's like all you do is tell us how terrible the world is and why it's terrible, and you never tell us how to fix it. I'm always just like, boy, if I had the answers, I'd tell you.
- [33:35]
C
You.
- [33:36]
B
I'm not holding out on you because I get off on it. Do you have any answers? My layman's view is that there aren't really any buttons to press. The systems that make up society and politics are so complex that you never really know what happened. You push on this thing over there, and something else pops out over there. And so if things resolve, it winds up. Familiar with Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite movies, at one point. Geoffrey Rush, the Conductor of the show has explained to his producer. I think he says the natural condition of theater is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. And his producer was like, so what do we do? And Geoffrey Rush's character says, nothing. Strangely enough, it all works out in the end. And the producer says, how? And he says, it's a mystery. Maybe that's how it works here. I don't know my real question, because we have gone through. We've gone through the age of acrimony. You, on a recent podcast, talked about how we avoided a Civil War in 1876, a second Civil war. What are the lessons of history on fixing these things? Can you do it consciously or does society just sort of. In America, we just. We never solve our problems. We just bulldoze on top of them and create new ones.
- [35:05]
C
Well, again, the future is unwritten, and I think that really matters. There is not, obviously, a magical button to push, but there are things that people have done in the past, at times similar to these, that have led us in a healthy direction. And the script is actually pretty easy, it seems to me. And that's that, yes, the world is incredibly complicated. The world has always been incredibly complicated. You know, that's human's got a human right. We have different tools and so on, but we are who we are. But there are, I think, some very basic principles that are very simple. And one of the ways that people have reclaimed a democracy and rebuilt a healthier nation in our past has been when we looked like we were going lose that democracy because it had to encounter something new. Like in the 1850s, they had to deal with westward expansion. And in the 1890s, they had to deal with industrialization. And in the middle of the 20th century, they had to deal with international markets and they had to deal with the nuclear world. And now we have to deal with the Internet. I mean, there's always something new that's really big that everybody says, that's it, democracy's over because it can't absorb X. One of the things that has enabled people to make the adjustments that democracy needs in those conditions is to go back to those fundamental human principles on which nations have been founded. But certainly the United States was founded. And that's the idea that we have a right to consent to our government. We have a right to be treated equally before the law. And we have a right to have equal access to resources to enable us to rise from the products that we create, access to resources like healthcare and education, as well as to land and the things that they used to talk about. And when we return to those fundamental principles, the kind of principles that certainly the founders talked about, for all of their faults, but that Abraham Lincoln talked about or Theodore Roosevelt talked about or FDR talked about, and all those people like them, like Constance Baker Motley or like Fannie Lou Hamer, you know, you go back to those touchstones and people who may not be paying attention to what is happening on the Capitol Hill with the continuing resolution and the fight between Thune and Schumer, they can say, I want to have a fair shot at my kid being able to get an education. And when you go back to those fundamental principles and you articulate those as a society, and more and more people stop saying, I hate you, because you backed Thune and you backed Schumer instead saying, I really want to make it possible for people to have health care, they that you create communities that require a new set of lawmakers who make that world happen. And that's what happened in the 1850s. That's what happened in the 1890s. And the 1890s is the comparison that looks most like today. For me, that's what happened in the 1930s. And that, I think, is what people are doing now is getting together in new ways, new forms of communication, and coming up with new ideas for what we want the world to look like. So maybe that's partly muddling through and maybe that's partly human nature, but I think it's also not a bad blueprint to think about going forward.
- [38:34]
B
I mean, not to bring the room down, but the news that we are going to have a TikTok deal in which TikTok is going to be owned by a bunch of crony oligarchs who are friends of the president. Twitter is owned by a crony oligarch friend of the president. At least, friend of me, of the president. Facebook is owned by an oligarch who is a friend with the president. It just seems like people are definitely communicating on new platforms and finding new things. And all of those things are owned by a very small group of oligarchs who are at least okay with fascism, if not actively in support of it. Is that a problem?
- [39:18]
C
Yes, it's a problem. It's a huge problem. But, you know, I've got two things running through my head. One is the poem Ozymandias, which, you know, about the very famous one. And it's also, I guess I was going to talk about the history of the steel drum and where that comes from, but I think at the end of the day, it comes down to how you think about the world. You know, there's a lot to overcome anytime in the world. And this is a time that looks really bad for Americans in a way that it hasn't looked this bad in our past, although certainly in the United States, in the American south, from about 1874 to about 1965, it was a one party state in which it wasn't fascism because that has significant economic components that weren't present in the American south. But certainly it was not a world of freedom by any stretch of the imagination. It's authoritarian people living there. So authoritarianism. Right. And that ended, you know, and I think it comes down to the fact that I keep looking at the American people and their resistance to what is around them and again, looking at the fact the future is unwritten and a lot depends on contingency and saying, you know, it could come. And in many ways it has. But. But as long as you and I are still here talking, there's still hope.
- [40:49]
B
Well, I'm going to let that be the last word. As you know, as my boy John Paul II represent always said, hope must have the last word. And it was absolutely a delight getting to meet you in the virtual flesh. Huge admirer of your stuff. I love letters from an American every day. Heather, thank you so much.
- [41:10]
C
Well, thanks for having me. And back at you. We'll have to do it again soon.
- [41:14]
B
Bye.
- [41:14]
C
Friends.