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- [00:00]
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- [00:36]
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- [00:58]
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- [01:05]
Martin DeCaro
See Terms History as it happens July 21, 2026 liberal patriotism when the architects
- [01:14]
Martin Luther King Jr. (Speech Excerpts)
of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declar, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- [01:48]
Frederick Douglass (Speech Excerpts)
For 100 years the Negro people have searched for first class citizenship. I believe that they cannot and should not wait until some distant tomorrow. They should demand freedom now.
- [02:02]
Martin DeCaro
The left needs to rediscover patriotism, a healthy, skeptical patriotism that strives for a more perfect union if it wants to win the country to its side, says historian Michael Kazin. He wants us to remember a long patriotic tradition down through American history that fought for civil and economic rights while opposing war and militarism. That's next in this summer of the semi quincentennial as we report History as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:30]
Michael Kazin
Loving the country, wanting it to be better, identifying with the country, with its people and its culture, not feeling like, oh, you're just a citizen of the world. It's important to think about the good of the whole world. But you grow up in a country you Grow up in the culture, you're more familiar with it. And for many people, I think most Americans, that means that they have affection for it. But it's not about who's in power.
- [02:52]
Martin Luther King Jr. (Speech Excerpts)
We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds and the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.
- [03:02]
Martin DeCaro
Martin Luther King's speech in August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for jobs and freedom is best known for the I have a dream section. But the beginning of the speech is just as powerful as Frederick Douglass did during a Fourth of July oration in 1852. King began by invoking U.S. history. He mentioned Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and then decried how the nation had failed to live up to its ideals.
- [03:29]
Martin Luther King Jr. (Speech Excerpts)
So we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
- [04:48]
Martin DeCaro
The great labor leader Walter Reuther also invoked history during his speech that day in 1963. You heard his voice in the montage at the top of this episode.
- [04:57]
Frederick Douglass (Speech Excerpts)
American democracy has been too long on pious platitudes and too short on practical performance in this important area. Now, one of the problems is in what I call that there is too much high octane hypocrisy in America. There is a lot of noble talk about brotherhood, and then some Americans drop the brother and keep the hood.
- [05:27]
Martin DeCaro
Most every social movement in American history has drawn its inspiration from the ideals of the Revolutionary era, from the opening words of the Declaration of Independence. But historian Michael Kazin says too many leftists and liberals today forget about this tradition. In an essay for the Atlantic, Kazin writes, throughout our history, both the Declaration and the Constitution have inspired reformers and radicals to pursue egalitarian change. In 1852, Frederick Douglass hailed the Constitution as a glorious liberty document. During the Gilded Age, Terrence Powderly and Samuel Gompers built labor movements dedicated to the idea that only when workers had a voice on the job as they did at the polls, could the nation be considered a true democracy? W.E.B. du Bois and Ida B. Wells exposed the violence of Jim Crow that stood in the way of achieving the equality promised by the Reconstruction Amendments, Kazin goes on to say. In 1895, the socialist Eugene Debs addressed a crowd of supporters gathered to cheer his release from jail for leading a national national railroad strike that federal judges had enjoined. It is not law, nor the administration of law, of which I complain, debs announced. It is the flagrant violation of the Constitution, the total abrogation of law and the usurpation of judicial and despotic power, by virtue of which my colleagues and myself were committed to jail, against which I enter my solemn protest. And there are many other examples in the American story of liberals, progressives, socialists claiming patriotism for themselves and their movements to make the country better rather than dismissing the whole American project as a nightmare of white supremacy and capitalist exploitation. I mean, those are also part of the story, but they're not the entire story. Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including what It Took to Win A History of the Democratic Party, and he's working on a new book about the aforementioned labor leader Samuel Gompers. MICHAEL Kazin, welcome back, my friend.
- [07:29]
Michael Kazin
Always good to be here, Martin thank you.
- [07:30]
Martin DeCaro
You know, Samuel Johnson once said, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I came up in radio in the 1990s, before the Internet became a big thing. I worked at a lot of small radio stations that carried a syndicated program by somebody you may have heard of this guy. His name was Rush Limbaugh. Patriotism belonged to the right, to conservatives and liberals were unpatriotic or even anti American when they criticized the government or criticize the country. Sometimes those things are conflated, whereas people on the left would say dissent is patriotic. How do you define patriotism? MICHAEL kazen?
- [08:11]
Michael Kazin
Well, really, the most common sense definition is the one most people use, I think at least those who are not trying to score political points, which is love of country, love of the country's culture, and affection for your fellow Americans, or if you're French, your fellow French people, Brits, Indians, no matter what country you're part of. It's different from nationalism. Nationalism is wanting the country to be strong, wanting its self interest to be served in the world. Now sometimes the two are conflated. And you know, these terms, like a lot of terms in politics, are what philosophers call essentially contested concepts. I wrote a whole book about populism with a small p. And how, you know, we use that term wobbly these days. And the right wing populists. Left wing populists, and they're left wing patriots and right wing patriots. Basically, patriotism means loving the country, wanting it to be better, identifying with the country, with its people and its culture, not feeling like, oh, you're just a citizen of the world, you don't want to have any particular effects of any particular part of that world. Patriotism says no. It's important to think about the good of the whole world.
- [09:19]
Martin Luther King Jr. (Speech Excerpts)
But.
- [09:20]
Michael Kazin
But you grow up in a country, you grow up in the culture, you're more familiar with it. And for many people, I think most Americans, that means that they have affection for it, whether they love it or like it, it's a different question. But it's not about who's in power, it's about the country itself.
- [09:34]
Martin DeCaro
I don't use the term patriotism to describe myself anymore, which does not mean I dislike the United States, whatever that means. I think patriotism, for some of the reasons you just explained, has become such a loaded term. I don't want people to think that I'm a blockhead. You know, one of these love it or leave people, which often is how patriotism is expressed. Your essay in the Atlantic, which I will share in the show notes to this episode. You say, you know, some liberals and leftists have gone a little too far in their criticism of the United States, however warranted it is at certain points in our history. I mean, you know this. You're an anti war activist, an anti war leftist during Vietnam. You're saying today, though, too many people on, say, your side of the political spectrum have given up on patriotism, on U.S. history, on our ideals.
- [10:23]
Michael Kazin
A lot of this began to happen, I think, when I was in college in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when some people on the left began to spell America with three K's, for example.
- [10:34]
Martin DeCaro
Did you ever do that?
- [10:35]
Michael Kazin
Began to see American history as nothing but a history of conquest of Native Americans, of slavery, racial discrimination, gender discrimination. And very popular book by Howard Zinn, who was a 60s activist, though he was also World War II veteran. People's history of the United States really became very popular, very popular. Now 4 million copies have been sold, last I checked. And Zinn really puts forth this view that everyone in power in American history, throughout American history, has been evil one way or another. The only redeemable thing about the country is that some Americans have fought back against that evil.
- [11:12]
Martin DeCaro
You once wrote a scathing Review of that history book.
- [11:16]
Michael Kazin
Yeah. For Descent magazine, which is a left wing magazine that he used to be the editor of. Yeah. I think that's bad history and also bad politics for the left. It's bad history because the founding documents, Special Declaration of Independence, which of course we've been talking a lot about, thinking a lot about in the last couple months, is an ambiguous document. Obviously, it's a document where the majority of people who wrote it were slaveholders, actually northerners as well as Southerners. But it's also a document which talks about the need for governments to have the consent of the governed. It's a statement of democracy. It's also one that argues that all men are created equal, as, you know, a great Enlightenment belief at the time. So the Declaration and American ideals generally are a resource I think, that one can use in order to present and fight for different points of view, including points of view which are left wing, social democratic, even socialist. And also seeing American history as nothing but a terrible saga of oppression and inequality and dominance by the rich undervalues the fact that a lot of Americans who are patriotic have claimed those ideals for themselves and have been able to make incredible advances because of it. We once had a very strong labor movement. Martin Luther King Jr. Was very clearly a patriot and said he was trying to change America in the spirit of Declaration of Independence. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, gave a famous speech, what to the slave is the Fourth of July, where he said, the Fourth of July basically leaves him out. But he said, we can use the Declaration, the ideals in Declaration. We can use the Constitution to abolish slavery and the end. Of course, slavery was abolished through the 13th amendment.
- [12:58]
Ryan Reynolds (Mint Mobile Ad)
Yeah.
- [12:58]
Martin DeCaro
He says at the end of that speech, I will not despair from my country, despite everything. That's a great speech. I did an entire episode about that speech a couple of years ago with Jim.
- [13:09]
Michael Kazin
Look at the end. In the end, if you don't care about the country, if you don't think it's possible to change the country, then you're not going to change it. Then you're not going to be involved in changing. You stand outside criticizing at all times. There's a great quote by a black activist on the left named Julius Lester, which I've used a lot in things I've written and speeches I've given. In 1970, he wrote with tongue in cheek, of course, said American radicals are perhaps the first radicals in the history of the world who want to make a revolution in a country which they hate. It doesn't work. You can't change the country as an outsider to the history of that country, to the ideals of that country.
- [13:46]
Martin DeCaro
And I did try to pop in a question earlier. I'm not sure if you caught it. When you were discussing radicals in the 1960s who spelled America with three Ks, I wanted to know if you ever did that.
- [13:56]
Michael Kazin
No, no, I was always ambivalent, even when I was a crazy. A crazy revolutionary for a few months. Luckily not much longer. I mean, I ended up being an American historian. So I always loved American history. And. And most people do American history find it ambiguous. If you're a historian, you're not skeptical about the past, questioning about the past.
- [14:13]
Martin DeCaro
You're not a good historian from a historical perspective. Zen and ideas like it. It's just bad history. Right. It's a simple dichotomy. I would say faux complexity. People who may wave that book around and say, see how complex our history is, but it's a simple dichotomy. And I'll try to dig up that review you wrote for Dissent magazine, and maybe I'll. I'll share a link in the show notes to this podcast. People want to read your critique of.
- [14:38]
Michael Kazin
You know, it's simplistic and. But it's. It's well written and keeps the same theme going throughout the book, of course, 600 pages or so, but it's very much black cats and white hats, you know.
- [14:47]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. I mean, there's an unbroken line essentially, all through American history of. What do you want to call it? White supremacy? Oppression? Capitalist oppression, Exploitation. You know, we need to be able to understand these black marks in our past without being paralyzed by them. I think what you're saying politically from a historical perspective, you know, I do think the American Revolution, for the most part, was a good thing for humankind. And our ideals, of course, is something that we're still aspiring to, a nation founded on the principle of fundamental human equality. Even if that's not what Jefferson may have meant at the time. That's what the words say. You know, there is a big exception to this. I mean, no Native American tribe can view the American Revolution as having been a positive development in their history.
- [15:33]
Michael Kazin
Look, a lot of people on the left today talk about settled colonialism, and they apply it to Israel, of course, retrospectively, to European colonialists in. In Asia and Africa, Latin America. And they apply to the United States, too. The problem with that, of course, is, first of all, it's a kind of American exceptionalism sometimes, because every country, including countries like France before, was also a set of colonialist country. They took over from the Celts. So every country, pretty much every major country, has a history of fighting conquering indigenous peoples. In that country, all land is conquering. Indigenous peoples have a history of conquering earlier indigenous peoples. So that's not to excuse what happened. It's not to say, oh, it was fine to take over Native American lands, but I think it's important to not see the United States as the font of all evil, you know, in the world, as no country ever been as bad as the United States, which some people on the left tend to do sometimes.
- [16:28]
Martin DeCaro
The American Revolution gave rise to the first organized anti slavery politics anywhere in the world, right?
- [16:34]
Michael Kazin
Yes and no. The British were pretty close there as well.
- [16:37]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, they came a little bit after
- [16:38]
Michael Kazin
abolished slavery before the Boston United States
- [16:42]
Martin DeCaro
they abolished in 1833, not the Northern states. Northern abolition came before the British did it.
- [16:47]
Michael Kazin
That began to. It's true. Yes, it's true.
- [16:49]
Martin DeCaro
But my point is the ideals, right, of the American Revolution, the American Revolution, the war did not end slavery, but it did give rise to anti slavery politics.
- [16:58]
Michael Kazin
And even figure like Thomas Jefferson, of course, owned over 600 people. I think during his lifetime. He said that he realized that slavery was evil and did want to abolish it sometimes. He said, if God is just, then slavery cannot last very long. You know, I think it's important to recapture the ambivalence, if you will, of many of the founding fathers about slavery. Less ambivalence, unfortunately, about taking over the lands of Native Americans, because they really thought that the only way to make what the United States, what Jefferson called an empire of liberty, was to really be an empire and take over those lands from people they obviously considered to be savages and uncivilized.
- [17:37]
Martin DeCaro
I see no need to put our founders on a pedestal metaphorically, but there's plenty to learn from them. And again, the ideals of the American Revolution, whatever they may have thought about democracy or African American people. The gist of your essay. Every liberal or progressive cause in the United States drew its inspiration from the founding era ideals. Let's start with the women's rights movement. Suffrage.
- [18:01]
Michael Kazin
A group of female abolitionists with some male abolitionists met in a little village in upstate New York called seneca Falls, New York in 1848. And they wrote a Declaration of Sentiments which began all men and women are created equal. And they went on with paraphrases of the Declaration of Independence, talking about all the injustices that men have carried out against women. And they made demands of which women's suffrage was actually the least popular of their demands. They wanted also women to be able to have custody of children in a divorce. They wanted to make sure that married women could control their own property, which was not true in many states at the time. Other reforms as well. But this really was the birth of the suffrage movement in 1848, and it was created by abolitionists who believe that, well, if you're fighting for the freedom of all people in slavery, you have to fight for the freedom of women who are not slaves, but nevertheless are also under the thumb of male power. And they use the Declaration of Independence. And there's Declaration of Independence paraphrases, the original one, which are used by labor groups, used by African American groups, even used by some Native American tribes. And it's because these are universal ideals. And Declaration of Independence too. Getting away from your question, I'm afraid. But there are over 100 countries that have declared their independence inspired by the American Declaration of Independence, 1804, Haiti, which was of course the first nation, free nation of African people in the world.
- [19:33]
Martin DeCaro
You mentioned how the abolitionists and the women's suffrage movement, two rivers in a confluence that's common in this history of social movements. Right. They flow in the same general stream. For instance, if we want to jump ahead a century to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, that wasn't just about racial issues, economic rights, the labor movement, all very, very important there. I wouldn't say Martin Luther King was a labor leader, but he did appear in public on the behalf of unions. Why don't you pick it up from there?
- [20:06]
Michael Kazin
The 63 civil rights march, which is famous primarily today because of the speech he gave at the end of it. But people forget that the slogan of that march was March for Jobs and Freedom. For Jobs and Freedom. Because even though the American economy as a whole, the macro economy, was doing very well in 1963, African Americans were not doing very well. There are many who unemployed, who had very bad jobs. Minimum wage was, I think $1.50 an hour back then. That march was financed primarily by labor unions, especially United Auto Workers Union, which was one of the more left wing unions in America at the time, run by a guy named Walter Reuther, who privately was a socialist, as was King. This was very much an economic movement as well as a movement to get legal equality. And it continues to be so today. I mean, that's part of the problem the Democrats have, I think, is that they're not, they're not seen as stressing, you know, economic issues as much as they should Be.
- [20:59]
Martin DeCaro
Let's talk about anti war sentiment and Eugene Debs. We discussed this once before, but not everyone listens to every episode. And I've been doing this show for.
- [21:07]
Michael Kazin
I don't know. Why not?
- [21:09]
Martin DeCaro
Well, I've been doing the show for five years now, so new listeners, you know, they'd have to go back to 300 episodes maybe to find something like this. You know, when anti war movement comes to mind, maybe people picture young radicals like Michael Kazin in the 1960s during the First World War, there were no hippies, but there was a wide. Or just simply put, many Americans from diverse walks of life were highly skeptical about American involvement in World War I. And some people, like Eugene Debs, a socialist, actively opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, and he got arrested for it. There's an idea that if you're a socialist, well, that is inherently un American or unpatriotic.
- [21:50]
Michael Kazin
Yeah, Debs, there's a wonderful biography of him by a historian named Nick Salvatore, who recently died, entitled Eugene Debs, Citizen and Socialist. Citizen and Socialist. Because Debs always put his socialist ideals in the context of Americanism, of the Declaration of the Constitution. He really believed that a truly democratic society would be a socialist society because the majority of people in society would own the means of production and distribution rather than a small group of capitalists owning it. So, I mean, we can disagree about this. And of course, you know, patriotism, as we talked about before, is a constant argument, among other things. But he always understood, and this is not cynical, he wouldn't just say, well, I really want a revolution, do away with everything that's American, but I've got to talk about Americanism because people like that. No, he was quite sincere about this. He felt, for example, when he was arrested in 1918 for giving a speech opposing the draft at a picnic in Canton, Ohio, he was given a 10 year sentence by the court for giving a speech the Espionage act that had been passed during the war.
- [22:54]
Martin DeCaro
That wasn't about spying, that was about dissent.
- [22:56]
Michael Kazin
American, he said, this is against the First Amendment. You know, that's all the defense he felt he needed to make. And of course, that wasn't good enough.
- [23:03]
Martin DeCaro
For the most part, American socialists were proud Americans, patriotic Americans who didn't want to establish a gulag here. They may have wanted to ultimately overthrow capitalism, but they wanted to make capitalism work better.
- [23:16]
Michael Kazin
Well, that's true. Not true. I mean, obviously socialists who consider themselves to be revolutionaries as Debs did want to work through capitalism.
- [23:23]
Martin DeCaro
That's true.
- [23:23]
Michael Kazin
You knew that wasn't going to happen right away. It would take years. And he didn't, wouldn't live to see it probably, but. But he did want to overthrow capitalism. He believed capitalism was in its nature an unjust system.
- [23:33]
Martin DeCaro
How about the sewer socialists?
- [23:35]
Michael Kazin
Yeah, and that's true now for a lot of people in Democrat socialists of America, like the mayor of New York, Zoran Mamdani, who does take inspiration from so called sewer socialists who ran Milwaukee for many years, who ran other cities in America for less time. Berkeley, California, Schenectady, New York, Bridgeport, Connecticut and several others. I mean, socialists always in America always face this dilemma that on the one hand, they want to carry out a wholesale transformation of a society and have working people control the society. That's the original idea of socialism. But at the same time they realize most Americans aren't in favor of that. Most Americans have grown up in a capitalist society. They want it to be a fairer society, but they don't necessarily do want to do away with capitalism. So socialists who want to get somewhere have to help people improve their lives in the present. And of course, more recently, and this is very different from Deb's, socialists like Mamdani run as Democrats.
- [24:29]
Martin DeCaro
I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical. As the great senator from Vermont once said, what's radical is a system which gives so much to so few and denies so many people the basic necessities of life. We will strive each day to ensure that no New Yorker is priced out of any one of those basic necessities.
- [24:55]
Michael Kazin
Not as socialists, not in a socialist. Under the banner of a socialist party, as Debs didn't. Debs was a Democratic state legislator in Indiana, but he wasn't a socialist then. Once he became a socialist, he ran only under the banner of the socialist party and that's why he never got elected to anything.
- [25:10]
Ryan Reynolds (Mint Mobile Ad)
Yeah.
- [25:10]
Martin DeCaro
And the attitude that you can't be a loyal American citizen or a patriotic American or pro American, whatever you want to say, while also being a social Democrat or a democratic socialist. We'll get to that terminology in a second. That attitude is still around. And yes, it has always haunted people on the left in this country. Well, for starters, and again, not to get into the whole history here, but if you do want to abolish private property, that would be anti American in the view of many. But the sewer socialists and even people on the left who were in the labor movement. There were communists in the American labor movement. But for the most part, Michael Kazin, didn't the US labor movement not want to Abolish capitalism and the ownership class. They simply wanted the capitalist system to work better for them, which is why they wanted bargaining rights, right?
- [25:59]
Michael Kazin
Yes, yes. And you know, I'm finishing a book about Samuel Gompers, Revise the American labor movement in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And Gomper's giving favorite speech. Well, he was still something of a socialist, actually. In the early 1890s, we said, what does labor want? We want more. Not just higher wages, fewer hours, but we want, he said, more education and fewer jails. He said socialists. He said, they have an end. I have no end. I just want more and more and more for working people in America. The labor movement, when it was successful, was able to mobilize working people of different religions, different immigrant backgrounds, different racial backgrounds around one common demand, which is more democracy in the workplace, but especially higher wages, lower hours, better treatment, more decency at the workplace. And when socialists and communists and even anarchists talked about goals of labor in that way, they're able to get somewhere. When they talked about the goals of labor being revolution or just a general strike forever, then they didn't get very far.
- [26:59]
Martin DeCaro
Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, get early access and enjoy all of our bonus content or go to historyasithappens.com. So today, the new generation of young social democrats, or is it democratic socialists who are entering politics and running as democrats, not as a third party, which is the. The road to failure? Before we get to that and wrap up here, what is the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism, or are they interchangeable?
- [27:44]
Michael Kazin
Most democratic socialists in this country today, most members of dsa, are primarily what you would call in Europe social democrats. That term is never caught on here, in part because I think it sounds too much like being member of the Democratic Party. Social democracy in Europe means a socialist and labor parties who try to get, as I was saying before, better conditions for working people, bigger welfare state, stronger unions, more peaceful foreign policy very often, but without doing away with capitalism. They say, yes, in the long run, we think you can have a better, more fair system without private ownership of the means of production and distribution. But we're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how we can improve people's lives. Right now. I think that's true, Mamdani, even though he does call himself a democratic socialist. Democratic socialism is a faith which begins in the 1820s, 1830s, with utopian socialist colonies. Marx and Engels, of course, are the great theorists of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism in that sense means no capitalism. It means workers controlling the means of production, their factories, their offices, their mines. People can own things. They can own televisions and computers and personal things, but they will not own factories and offices and buildings that hire the people.
- [29:01]
Martin DeCaro
The means of production.
- [29:03]
Michael Kazin
Exactly. And distribution and everything else. Realistically, the only really going concern for socialists these days is social democracy is working within capitalism to improve it. I mean, look, China is not a socialist society either. They have billionaires. In a true social society, you wouldn't have billionaires. So there's no society in the world which even North Korea or Cuba, which is really the kind of society that ideally Democrat socialists would like.
- [29:29]
Martin DeCaro
So I know you've been paying attention to the primaries in the Democratic Party and how some, what you might call centrist or establishment, even some liberal incumbents, have lost to this insurgent class of younger social Democrats or Democratic socialists. Do you think this new cadre, Mom Donnie is one. But there are many others in New York and elsewhere. Not just in New York. We've got a big Senate primary coming up in Michigan soon. Have they rediscovered patriotism? To borrow the headline from your essay in the Atlantic, because they are facing the charge of being anti American.
- [30:06]
Michael Kazin
Hope. So there's a very interesting dialogue on the New York Times site between Ross Douthat, who's a very smart conservative, as many people listening to this know, a New York Times columnist, and Bhaskar Sankara, who's a friend of mine, young guy, he's in the 30s, he's the founder of Jacobin magazine, he's the president of the Nation, was publisher of the Nation magazine, very old magazine, goes back to abolitionist roots. And Bhaskar defended patriotism. He defended the idea that Americans who love the country have been involved in improving it by forming social movements, and some more left wing politicians who've taken office as well, like Bernie Sanders. And I think, I hope that way of thinking about patriotism on the left catches on as opposed to the one we talked about before where leftists just think, oh, the whole country is terrible, but somehow, you know, we're still here and we can keep talking about how terrible it is.
- [31:00]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. What's left then? You have to build from something.
- [31:03]
Michael Kazin
Exactly. You got to stand somewhere. You have to. You know the old joke, everyone has to believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer. Well, you know, you have to, as I said before, believe enough in the country to believe that it's possible to change the country, because otherwise you're not going to change it.
- [31:18]
Martin DeCaro
I mean, if you're going to Washington, what's the point if you're going to be a member of Congress? I know that the social. Yeah, the social media posts of the young woman who won the primary in New York City. I can't remember her name off the top of my.
- [31:30]
Michael Kazin
Chevalier.
- [31:31]
Martin DeCaro
Yes. So she said all these things when she was a bit younger that were truly crazy. Made her look like she's an anti American radical. But we'll see what happens if and when she gets to Washington. I'm generalizing here, but this new generation, they're offering a different kind of patriotism. I don't say they're being unpatriotic or un American. They have a different way of looking at things. No more forever wars, which I think a lot of Americans across the political spectrum would agree with. Aid to Israel has to be either eliminated or conditioned on Israel abiding by US and international law as it destroys Gaza and southern Lebanon. That's a more popular position across the political spectrum. Economic rights, which we've discussed on this podcast in the past, higher taxes on the wealthy, social programs to help families get established. That's hardly radical, and that's what I hear from these people.
- [32:23]
Michael Kazin
But that's really social democracy. I mean, they have. I mean that. The foreign policy, that's a different matter. But the domestic policies, you know, if you're in Finland or Iceland or Norway, you basically have those things because there's
- [32:33]
Martin DeCaro
a sense in our country, again across the political spectrum, that American capitalism in its current form is not working as it should. And they're coming up with alternative ideas, right, that are dismissed by some on the right as communism or doomed to fail. But at least they're coming up with something to try to make American capitalism work better. To me, that's patriotic, and that's part
- [32:54]
Michael Kazin
of the reason they're winning. I think, too, it's not that everyone who votes for them is voting for socialism by any means. They're voting for people who say they want the government to help people. I wrote a whole book, as you know, on the history of the Democratic Party. I argued in that book what it took to win, that Democrats do best when they put forth rhetoric and programs, express something I call moral capitalism, that is, programs that help the majority of people across ethnic, religious, racial, gender lines. And that's something which these Democratic socialists are actually trying to do. And the best thing, too, is that they, for a long time, to be on the left, meant to protest, meant to demonstrate, meant to criticize those in power. Once you're in power, you gotta show you can govern or at least help to govern. You can't just be a protester. Some people say what's going on now with DSA members winning these primaries and of course, elections like Mamdani is like a left wing Tea Party, like a Democratic Tea Party. But the Tea Party was basically, you know, trying to get the Republicans to stop everything Obama wanted to do. Right. Whereas these folks on the left, they believe that government should do things for people. So we'll see if Democrats take control of at least one house of Congress in the fall, if they'll be able to push the Democratic Party enough to actually try to pass some of these programs. As long as Trump's president, they won't actually be signed into law, but nevertheless, they'll show this is ideal. They'll show, if they can do this, that Democrats actually stand for programs and are willing to push and fight for programs that will help the majority of people. It's not socialism, but it certainly would be progress from my point of view. And that's, you know, what people are voting for, I think, is that potential, is that promise.
- [34:34]
Ryan Reynolds (Mint Mobile Ad)
Yeah.
- [34:34]
Martin DeCaro
And it would include humane immigration reform. I don't mean to be so preachy here, Michael. This is my last remark and then we'll, we'll wrap it up. In my view, most American voters are not very ideological. Many Americans don't pay close attention to politics until it's time to vote because I got more interesting things to do. What they want is politicians are gonna make things work. Right. They want results. I know it sounds like consultant jargon there, but the reason Donald Trump won this last time is many people in the middle. Independents voted for him because of these bread and butter economic issues. Now, they were mistaken. Trump has failed to address these things, but there is a receptive audience out there.
- [35:12]
Michael Kazin
Yeah, and as you said before, I mean, there's. Remember the old movie network?
- [35:16]
Martin DeCaro
Oh, yeah, it's a great movie where
- [35:18]
Michael Kazin
the, you know, the famous line from that the, the newscaster sort of goes off message, says, you know, I'm mad as hell, I'm not going to take it anymore.
- [35:26]
Martin DeCaro
That's right.
- [35:26]
Michael Kazin
I mean, that's sort of, you might say, what most, at least American voters who pay attention to politics probably think. You know, the problem is they've got to take it because they're not, they're not running things, but they want politicians and who feel the way they do. And, and Donald Trump's genius, I think, and I have to call it genius, even though I'm not a supporter of his, not surprisingly, is that he understands that. He understands that the way to address people's anger, at least one way to address people's anger, is to be angry himself and to point to the villains who are causing your problems. And that's a kind of populism, I suppose, which obviously can be quite successful and has taken over one of the major political parties in this country. So Democrats shouldn't do the same thing, certainly. But they have to address that anger and they have to do it patriotically, as Trump, for all his crimes and sins, does do.
- [36:18]
Martin DeCaro
Howard Beale of the UBS Evening News.
- [36:21]
Howard Beale (Fictional Character from 'Network')
We know things are bad, worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy. So we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller. And all we say is, please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to ride. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, I'm a human being, God damn it.
- [37:02]
Frederick Douglass (Speech Excerpts)
My life has value.
- [37:04]
Howard Beale (Fictional Character from 'Network')
So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore.
- [37:23]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens, a lot of Americans are as mad as hell at Congress. What happened to Congress? Why has it abdicated its responsibility in the area of, say, war powers? We'll discuss Congress's role in our democracy with Maya Kornberg next. As we report History As It Happens, make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for the name of this podcast.
- [37:54]
Ryan Reynolds (Mint Mobile Ad)
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