um how did the country get so divided is there hope for the country to be reunited or are we in the precious of
another civil war the country got divided by language i mean this is the whole point of of how the south won the civil war
uh the the the deliberate use by the movement conservancy so what
happens is that you get the republicans and you got the democrats coming out of world war ii and both of them agree on what they
call the liberal consensus the idea that the government has a role to play regulating business and and protecting
uh basic social safety net promoting infrastructure and you know people forget until the corona las verona virus fell it was um
dwight eisenhower who a republican who pushed the largest um uh public works program in history
that’s the interstate highway act and uh until a coronavirus uh stimulus and um it’s also republicans who uh
who passed brown versus board of education that is a unanimous decision coming out of a republican supreme court
and it’s also republicans a republican court uh who um decide roe versus wade in 1973
and that decision is written by a republican i mean this is this isn’t something that people agree on but what happened was that
in 1960 um there’s a phil not a philosopher he becomes a
political scientist a guy named phil converse who writes this piece in which he called the american voter in which he
says you know it’s really not worth appealing to people based on ideology because democrats and republicans agree
with each other so what you really need to do to win elections is you need to go ahead and try and nail together coalitions of like
you know mark twain readers over here and duluth typists over here and you know you nail
together these coalitions and stop talking about lofty ideals and you can really see this if you’re interested in if you can go to
youtube and you can watch the um nixon kennedy debates and you will be shocked at the level of the discussion
because they are literally talking about the meaning of government the direction of government
what it means to chair certain committees in congress you know they’re really talking about the kind of stuff i
talk about in the letters and that goes all out the window because um of converse’s idea that you
stop that because we all agree on that now we just got to worry about promising you know my my typists in duluth that they’re going
to get cheaper typewriter ribbons and when that happens uh the movement conservatives who are
those who disagree with the concept of the liberal consensus altogether put in place that policy that um or that
program that william f buckley jr outlined and gotten men at yale in 1951 in which he said you
know we basically have to reject the enlightenment and by the way the subtitle of that book is the superstition of academic freedom and
what he was trying to say was the idea of academic freedom the idea of the enlightenment that you should in fact
move society forward by um presenting factual arguments and people will but you know
the majority people will choose the right one um and move society forward he says you know we got to reject that we have to
start from the principle that the liberal consensus is wrong it’s just dead wrong
it’s like communism we have to start from the principle of what he called free enterprise by which he meant no regulation of business
and christianity um which was he was a devout catholic and from that you know we can maybe talk
a little bit about stuff but that’s our story and instead of trying to impress upon we uh
voters that they want that because every time we try and tell them that they vote for another damn liberal and that would include um
republicans as well as democrats because he’s really going to go rabbit after the election of uh dwight eisenhower who’s a republican
that’s when he starts after brown for support of education is when he starts the national national review instead of actually
appealing to people’s reason we simply have to tell them a story we have to appeal to their emotion and we have to to rise you know to make
them angry and to get them on our team and in 1915 in 1954 when um joe mccarthy senator joe
mccarthy from wisconsin goes after what he calls communists in congress he really gives him a blueprint
for attacking and you know mccarthy says he’s an outsider protecting the country against communism it’s crap he’s a
he’s a senator himself and he doesn’t have a list of communists in congress i mean he made that up
um but he manages to get attention and he lies and he blusters and he
portrays this image of this individual against the behemoth state and that really takes off with the john
birch society which is formed around the idea of john burch a young man in china who discovers that
the state department is deliberately spreading communism and he gets assassinated for his uh for his um his
uh exposure exposing that plot and that idea of the individual against society
is of course such a mythic one i mean it’s really tied into the bible and it’s tied into gilgamesh and it’s tied into you know
every possible little guy story and that i think that language is what captures
so many voters especially when because of american history it’s tied into racism
you know the whole idea of that lone cowboy standing against you know savages and the government is
one that’s born right of reconstruction when the idea arises among those who are opposed to the republicans control of
reconstruction and their use of the government to promote equality for african americans
the idea that that is socialism or communism which they begin calling it in uh that in 1871 long before there’s any
bolshevik revolution or anything else um you tie that idea of the little guy against the state and then you say the
state is helping people of color and later feminist women after 1970 and that’s an idea that
really resonates with a number of people who are increasingly left out of american society first in the
1960s by the social movements in the anti-war movement if you remember in 1980 you
probably don’t but in 1970 time magazine’s person of the year was the middle americans
who um who stood against the people in the streets um time being a conservative magazine
and then um and then that really takes off uh under ronald reagan and the the failure of the the um the
the the abandonment of the fairness doctrine in 18 1987 with the idea that you no longer have to
present both sides of the story and you no longer have to have your ideology based in fact and you know the story that they tell on
places like fox news is a very compelling story it’s a story that of course we reprised in star wars in 1977 right
before ronald reagan is elected and it’s a story that is actually if you do the studies of fox news designed to
release endorphins the same way that professional wrestling is so people really do literally get hooked
on that political story so i think we got divided by that uh by the language that was implied
employed um can we heal from that absolutely we need uh we need leaders that that refuse to divide people and
instead play to the middle and you can see if you’re watching this i should write about this now i think about it if you watch um joe biden and people the
people who who tend to think left on um twitter i was like stop talking about
about working across the aisle um you know i think you have to be a little careful with what biden is doing does he really mean to
um to sort of give up the ghost and and do what republicans say i think what he’s really doing is using
language to reassure people that he can return to a world without
division and if that were the case um the if you look at every single
statistic about gun control about abortion about welfare about all the hot button issues um more than
like on all of the ones i just mentioned more than 70 percent of americans agree
um you know everybody wants some form of gun control every not everybody at least 70 percent
at least 70 percent of americans believe that abortion should be safe and legal under some circumstances
you know there’s there’s all these things on which we agree but you know the whole point of movement
conservatism was to go ahead and movement conservatism of course took over the republican party was to go
ahead and divide people and to convince them to vote for people like george w
bush by convincing them that the libtards as um rush limbaugh used to say i hated
them and that that you know i just think of andrew dice clay the comedian he was incredibly hot and incredibly
popular until suddenly he wasn’t you know suddenly the country turned on the bully and i think that now you’re
seeing people turn on the republican party because they are so blatantly bullying the rest of us
that being said they hold an awful lot of cards right now
okay do i have any reflections about the mobilization after the uh the murder of george floyd especially about the historical role of
policing in the us racial order um you have a lot of thoughts about that and because this is a somewhat closed
group i will actually tell them to you um first of all can i just say long overdue uh one of the things i like
to point out when we talk about black lives matter right now is that the violence against african americans did not begin
in the recent past and the story that i tell about that is um one that um if anybody’s eating
their lunch you should put it down um jeffrey dahmer jeffrey dahmer who was running around
in the early 1980s most people don’t know that they know jeffrey dahmer because he was a serial killer and i’m
so sorry for those of you who are eating your lunch he um he was horrible do not google him
do not read what he did because i did um because i was actually because when i was doing my last book the police
officer who was in charge of him had the same last name as one of the guys in my book i want to say it was
norquist to be honest but i could be wrong about that and so these stories kept coming up and i thought well what the hell’s going on here why should you read about this and
then i did and i regret it anyway um uh dahmer um
dahmer not only uh killed his victims he killed them in terribly gruesome ways that i will not
elaborate upon but he also consumed them and
um one of the things that doesn’t show up in in our popular culture about jeffrey
dahmer is that serial killers almost always specialize in a certain demographic that is that’s
generally how they find them they are obsessed with a certain demographic dahmer is different in that and that
demographic almost always is their own racial background i mean according to what i’ve read i’m
not i’m not a forensic expert but that’s what i read when i was doing all this dahmer was different because dahmer
killed a craw he killed young men and he killed across races but interestingly enough he did not
uh he did not do the it’s hard to say this without saying that the stuff involved um the the really
horrific stuff he did he did not do to his white victims he tended to kill his white victims and dump them
for the people of color he killed uh asian young men boys and african-american
either boys or young men he did worse things now i mention all this because this was in the early
1980s and dom this is important because dahmer lived on the line in milwaukee between the black
community and the white community the black community called the cops on dahmer again
and again and again and again and they kept saying something is really not right here his apartment smells things are bad and
on at least one occasion the police came and checked out dahmer and actually one of his victims had
escaped and they returned the victim to dahmer laughing about the fact as dahmer told
them it was a lover’s spat um and when finally
the um the uh one of the victims um escaped and the
the and took the police back to thomas apartment and the police opened the door and there
were photographs of the victims and everything around i mean it was bad when that came out the black community
took to the took to the newspapers and took to the streets and said we told you we told you that this was going on and
you know first of all under reagan you have cut all of our job programs all of our education programs
all of uh you know all of the things that were making us equals in american society and giving us you know leveling the playing field now
you there’s a white guy who is literally eating us and you are still doing nothing
so milwaukee put together uh um uh uh commission to go ahead and look at
whether or not there really was racial bias in policing in milwaukee this is in the early 1980s and um and
the conclusion was yeah things are really bad here does anyone remember that study i mean it it it came out it fell
into the water and it disappeared so my point is that the george floyd stuff yes but oh come on
i mean this should have and that was the 80s but it’s been going on all along so why now the question is why now and i
always equate what’s going on with the george floyd protest and the black lives matter protests to
abolitionism when you know again the idea of um of the evils of human enslavement
is not new when the abolitionist movement takes off in the 1830s and the abolitionist movement doesn’t really go
anywhere hugely in the 1830s it doesn’t go hugely anywhere in the 1840s never really goes hugely anywhere
never gets more than about one percent of the northern population but that being said it really begins to affect american
political american politics in the late 1840s and 1850s why because at that point the
abolitionists are able to connect what the elite slaveholders are doing to
their enslaved human beings to what is happening to white americans and their civil
liberties i think abolitionism really takes off when abolitionists are able to convince
white americans that the attacks on black people in the 1850s 1840s 1850s
are just the forerunner to what’s going to happen to white people and i don’t necessarily mean literally
white people might not literally have believed in the 1850s that they were going to be enslaved but they certainly believed that they
were going to lose their civil liberties and their economic opportunities at the hands of those large slave
holders and that’s really clear from the writing and i look at that and i think you know why
suddenly does the do the floyd protest take off well they take off in part because they’re cameras now
but they’ve been cameras i mean we’ve seen this stuff at least since the 1980s and the 1990s
once you had cell phones these videos were there and the stories are they are truly horrific um you know
there’s there’s a um a group that’s chronicling these one at a time um and the the stories
are there they’ve been there and and again uh you just feel so so horrible for these families who’s
whose family members were shot in the back and and ignored really anyway um uh so
why now why now because i think the excesses of the trump administration have made americans in general recognize
that their own liberties their own rights are on the table and the george floyd
especially but also brianna taylor um those two especially i think um have
given us an individual they have personified that overreach and of the the federal
government and its attack on civil liberties and um and so i think that jumps out i will say that that
um for for at least i think maybe for women of my age briana taylor was really
a kick in the gut because she’s our children’s age and and you know you look you look at that beautiful young face
and you think oh i remember somebody just like her sitting in my kitchen table and and she was
murdered and in her bed and there’s an argument about whether or not she was in her bed but i you know she wasn’t doing anything um so
i think that gave us a person to to to solidify this fear of civil liberties
by the way i’m telling you what i think about this stuff i’m not the voice of god here i’m just bringing history to this this
this stuff and i could be dead wrong but but you asked me what i think about it so i’m going for it all right
uh yeah i do think so the question is uh do i think that all of the black lives matter movement
and calls for progress will help bring real change to inequality or will things go back to the way they’ve always been since the news dies down
i think that there i think that we’re at a moment of extraordinary change it would this moment parallels that of
the other three major changes of historical changes in american history so if you think about the times
we have brought about real change uh for progress in american society they were the civil war of course
they were which is spar i’m sorry it’s sparked by um uh by westwood expansion that’s a huge
crisis for the country i mean again our textbooks kind of say oh it’s great you know whatever except for the the people were
overrunning but the reality is it’s a societal crisis demographics are messed up as voting is
messed you know it’s a crisis uh the next crisis of course is industrialization in the late 19th
century which gives us the progressive era the next crisis is um globalization if
you will the the rise of a global world after world war ii and now of course we have an internal
enemy an internal fear of the rise of dictatorship and the destruction of democracy in each one of those eras we have come
back much stronger and much better and um the but the kicker to
all of those is that there is one um similarity to all of them that we don’t emphasize enough
and in the on the heels of all of those things what we have had was a a compression
of the economy so that there is not there are not extremes of wealth that we that extremes of wealth and extremism
poverty come much much closer together and whenever people feel like they are um they can feed their families and they
have enough money they are much more likely to suggest that um that the the playing field
should be level they’re much less likely to turn against each other so that’s why i’m always harping on economic rights
over any other kind of rights because you know everyone’s talking about black rights or women’s rights all of which are important
but i’m the one sort of not the one one of the ones saying we’ve got to fix the economy first
that being said there’s also something else really big at stake and that is that rising up from age 30 and under
are people now who see the world in a much more global way than people my age because they were reared under the
internet and they have a really different idea about race and about class
and about upward mobility and about america’s position in the world and they see the world in a
much more multi-valenced way than the people my age and older who remember the ussr
and who grew up through the cold war who really i think tend to see things in an extraordinarily black and white way it’s
us versus them we’re the winners or we’re the losers for people um like under 30 the world is much more
nuanced there’s a lot more gray they understand what it’s like to live in constrained spaces without being a loser
and this is one of the things that i thought um was really apparent with i know he’s older but i
think he um he really picked up on this uh barack obama’s foreign policy
because he he really recognized um multi-faceted foreign policy as
opposed to simply us being the elephant in the room and that i think drove the older guys who were used to americans
simply throwing their weight around absolutely insane because they they thought he was giving something up in fact i think he was really just
recognizing what the world was going to look like if there was not neither a cold war nor
a war on terror and and the fact that we seem to have walked away from that and tried to return to
america throwing its weight around i think is a real loss because i think we were a leader in a new kind
of foreign policy and we have just jettisoned it and that’s that that is unfortunate
so i do think there will be real change there has to be real change look at the climate i mean
it’s either real change or death and you know humans at the end of the day are not stupid democracy is slow
but that that ship does turn around
what can each of us do to help improve the challenges the country is facing perhaps in terms of economic equality so
i’m gonna tell you what i’m gonna what my take on that is but then i’m also going to tell you about somebody else
um my take on this again because i have come to believe that what changes
politics is language is my thing is always take up oxygen
always take up oxygen you know when somebody you don’t have to be horrible about it you know ruth bader
ginsburgs do it in such a way that other people want to join you i think is uh an important one but
you know for a long time people who did not agree with the direction in which the country was going kind of smiled politely or looked the
other way when their neighbor talked in ways that were really unacceptable and um i think we take that space back
and say you know you’re not welcome in my house if you’re going to talk that way or um or on social media um
when somebody posts something you know bashing insane or whatever um saying
not like you’re an idiot but oh did you see that this story was debunked here um and oh i feel stupid you know or i
feel i hate it when i get fooled by these or something like that because what will change
politicians is their constituents so my thing on it is always call people
right people take up oxygen push back think of it like a cocktail party you know you want to isolate
that guy who’s spouting crap in the corner until you can either bring him around or throw him out of the room that being said there are an awful lot
of mechanical things one can do as well in addition to voting and there’s all kinds of organizations
which i’m about to post on my facebook page by my professional facebook page by the way uh gathered by
um by uh one of my readers you know there are their campaigns to text voters
in in other states to help make sure people get to um to the polls to make plans for voting
to put pressure on senators right now not to hold the confirmation hearing for whomever
um donald trump nominates for ruth bader ginsburg’s seat to um to you
obviously to donate money but but actually to to actually mobilize the country and um
you can look for that that’s actually not my thing i’m not really an organizer i’m much more of
an observer but this woman whose name is susan rogan she has a list called rogan’s list um she’s very
good um she has a lot of ideas that what people can actually do and then in terms of economic equality
pressure pressure on your congress people you know as a friend of mine said if i if i hear any more about
i’m sorry by the way somebody who voted for trump and is a republican so you know if i hear any more about tax cuts you know i don’t need i don’t need an
expletive tax cut i need you know for my kids to be able to work a job without
and to get decent pay and and for the all the monies to stop going to the top so just make your voice heard
uh what should we read listen to and watch in order to be well informed of the issues from all sides personally i
read individuals less than papers although that being said i think the la times and the washington post have been
absolutely knocking it out of the park lately i also really like um
um there’s a new crap i can never remember the name of it it’s not the bulwark it’s the new one
there is a new um uh conservative not republican some of them
are never never trumpers um uh conservative magazine what the heck is can somebody help me
out what the heck is it called it’s it’s it’s uh bill crystal writes for it got a lot of young new voices and
they’re really good um crap i can’t think of the name of it i’m sorry um
it’s not it’s the something but it’s not the bulwark has good stuff too but it’s not the bulwark
that being said um we’re in a funny moment because um because the the trump people really are
way outside the norm way outside the norm so when people say oh you’re you’re
you’re not being fair to trump it’s like well well you know i can’t be you know i would love to be fair to
true conservative ideas like the ones that are presented in the bulwark or in oh come on crap
and so it’s a red and black just drawn a blank on it or that i mean those ideas are worth reading and they’re worth engaging with
um but they are um uh those are you know republicans
trumpers call them um call them left wing and and they’re simply not you know right now
we are so far to the right and every statistic will say say that to you it’s very hard to read things that defend trump that are not
way way off the charts so if you’re interested in again in stuff from the right as well as from the left
um uh well jennifer rubin has been again knocking it out of the park although she took the word conservative
off of her id the other day because she said i can’t i just can’t even have this word here anymore because the people who
call themselves conservative are off the charts crazy um but the wall street journals has some stuff some good stuff
and i read i always read tom nichols i always read just security i always which that’s a blog tom nichols
is a is a security guy i always read tom nichols i always read um uh lawyer’s guns and money
i always read the law fair blog actually you get some really good stuff from from uh people on the right writing
on law fair blog um who else is good that i will never overlook um that’s that’s enough i think
isn’t it i always look at talking points memo simply to see what josh marshall is watching um he’s got some he’s got tierney snead
she’s a great new writer and um uh not the weekly no no nope it’s not it’s not the ball work
or definitely not weekly standard which has been crappy crappy late i’m sorry i shouldn’t say that which per never mind
i’m not the ball work um i just can’t can you if that’s uh cassie can you uh can you look at uh
william crystal and see um and and um
the thing is actually published on sub stack so you can go to sub stack and and see um see if you can figure out which one
he’s writing for anyway you guys can google it too i’m sorry i just can’t think of the name of it i’m getting old here
um so um it looks like that is the end of our uh 50 minutes
is that i don’t know if that’s correct tim do you want to come back on and and hit anything else that you might like to
hit uh yeah sure hi everybody um first of all i wanted to thank you heather for engaging and indulging us
in a provocative conversation that at least on my part has produced plenty of endorphins i think of a
construction constructive sort i can’t often think of the magazine either i’ve been googling wildly but
let me you talk and i will do it right now because it’s actually really quite good um and also wanted to thank everybody
for for joining in um as heather says this is a moment for her book um it fits uh in so many ways in its
provocativeness but also the kind of historical thoughtfulness that it’s not just provocative it’s based
in history and historical context it makes it very special so i’m simply filling time while heather
looks up the magazine which is not the bulwark and not the weekly standard but
okay let’s hold on um
go ahead tim tell us what you got on the on the uh on the docket these days oh well um that’s such a good question
uh happy too let’s see uh the book that i’m excited about at the moment uh is lou mazur’s concise history of
united states history um it’s 260 pages um of lou mazer’s aggregated wisdom over
50 years of teaching and thinking about it and it’s just such a good book it’s like a short jill lapore
um really it’s about yeah it’s about a third the size of it but um so i’m hoping that that book will do
well it’s called the sum of our dreams uh a concise history of america so that’s what i’m excited about
but i’m also excited that your book is still selling so let’s not uh you know that that goes without saying
did you find it i did it’s the dispatch again you don’t have to agree with everything that’s
written in the dispatch but there’s some you know what what i found really exciting about it was that it’s got really it’s got new ideas
and it’s got new internally logical ideas and it’s you know it’s pushing new intellectual
envelopes and that’s really overdue i think for uh the conservative movement because it has
become such a such an echo chamber and a lot of these people have stepped out of that echo chamber and are making you know
arguments that are worth grappling with and so i was a huge fan when i found that um and it would be good if i could
actually remember the name more often wouldn’t it and send more people to it well there you are and now we know and now we’ve been provoked um
so um i can sort of see your next book which i think is the language of politics
how language defines narrative and how narrative defines us which in many ways of course is what you’ve already written
but slightly different um just thinking about you’re taking on hayden white and really sort of philosophical basis
of narrative and language itself and the political unconscious um anyway enough of this we definitely could do
that but i think my next book is sleep how do i love them
absolutely deserved again thank you heather so much thank you for everybody for joining in and signing off