D (55:24)
I kind of threw that out because I knew you'd like it 100%. So listen, I can't speak for young people in this country because I'm not one the of. I can tell you what I read, but, you know, it's not the same when you don't have the references. And my great example of this is always those of us of a certain age, when you see a red telephone on a desk in a television show or a movie, you know what it means. It's the hotline. And it's the hotline between a leader and either Russia or something. To people who are below a certain age, it simply has no meaning because they don't understand the Cuban Missile crisis. They don't understand why we got the hot phone and all that sort of thing, which was never a telephone, by the way, and so on. So the one thing I would say, though, from my observations at my age about where the country has been, is that for those of us who are over 55, we do remember a period in which politics was really about negotiation and making sure the government was doing the best it could for the most people. Now, you could disagree with what one president or another was doing, and certainly I suspect both of us did at times. But that was the idea. And beginning at least by the 1990s, and I think it was at least partly tied into the collapse of the Soviet Union and the idea that America was top dog and wasn't gonna have to worry any further about standing off against another country, there was an increasingly powerful drive on the part of the movement. Conservatives, that faction that took over the Republican Party simply to destroy the Democrats, simply to destroy their political opposition. And the Democrats, by the way, and those Republicans that people like Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the house in the 90s, called RINOs, Republicans in name only. And by that, the people who embraced that idea put into the same basket, anybody who believed that the government had a role in regulating the economy or providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, or protecting a rules based international order. And by doing that, and by trying to destroy those people who thought that way, gradually that faction of the party, as it took over the Republican Party began to treat its opponents as illegitimate. So after the Motor voter act in 1993, you start to see in 1994, the argument on the part of those movement, conservative Republicans, that Democrats are only winning by cheating, by ballot fraud, by voter fraud. And you know, there's never any evidence of that, but they hammer on this idea again and again and again. And they, you know, they impeach Bill Clinton, thinking that this is gonna be the end, we'll get rid of all Democratic presidents, you know, from now and forever. Amen. In the year 2000, you see the Miami Dade recount in Florida stop to guarantee that it comes out the way that the Republicans want. And then, then voters elect Barack Obama in 2008. And in 2010, we get operation Red Map, which is the Republican operative attempt to dramatically gerrymander states, the Republican dominated states across the nation. So we get these extreme gerrymanders, we get Citizens United, which opens up the floodgates for dark money to come into our political system. In 2013, we get the gutting of the Voting Rights act, which is only gonna get worse. And you get right to the fact that you get to January 6, 2021, which where a Republican president literally refuses to leave office with the argument that the election of a Democratic opponent has been illegitimate. And I think you're seeing that now with the Trump administration, the attempt to delegitimize the idea of Democratic opposition and Democratic loyal opposition to what Republicans are doing. So they're not seating Adelita Grijalva, the person who was elected on September 23rd to represent Arizona. They're not talking to the Democrats about ending the shutdown. They're simply saying, saying your complaints are illegitimate. And that is something entirely new in our political system. And it utterly negates what that system should be. And it makes it unable to function as a democracy. Part of that and part of the way I think that the Republicans got that kind of power was through the leveraging of that idea of, of the cowboy image, the idea that a real American was a cowboy. And that cowboy image has enormous roots or has its roots in the Reconstruction era, when to stand off against the idea of a federal government that protected black rights in the American south, former Confederates, especially and people living in the west began to champion the cowboy as the true American hero who wanted nothing from the government except to work hard and rise, which was completely a myth. The west depended more on the federal government than anything other region of the country did. The cowboys were actually analogous to workers in the mills back East. I mean, you could go on and on about why that was never true. But that idea that to be an American means taking your gun and protecting your woman folk and working hard without the government really embedded itself among a certain group of right wing Americans. And I think you can see it still. The CNN had an article yesterday about the rise again of cowboy imagery and cowboy clothing. Because he. It's a certain kind of way of thinking about what it means to be a man in America and a woman. Cause this is the same period. By 74, you're gonna have Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie becoming a smash hit on television. And the idea of prairie dresses and women being taken care of in this system in which in that particular show, literally the cowboy Little Joe becomes pa. Right. So you've got that on the one hand, and I would argue that that ideology, the idea that you can create your own future is a crucially important aspect of American society. But in terms of survi and I started, well, that's a rabbit hole. But in order for a society to survive, the other form of what it means to be a man and a woman in the United States is one that I think is exemplified, as I was saying, by those people coming out of World War II II, in which they did what they did for the good of everybody. And that I think you saw in our presidents who had been in the war or who had been close to the war after it. And that, you know, well, you really got away from that when you got away from political leaders who hadn't been in the war and who didn't have that idea that we have to make sacrifices for the greater good. And that goes as far back in our history as the other image does, and even farther. That idea that we are here as a community trying to do the best for the most people. That's as deeply rooted as the cowboy image, or even more because it goes back further.
