This is democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the Vietnam War and its legacies, its continuing legacies in American society, in global policy, and particularly in light of a recent set of conflicts that produced similarly controversial outcomes for American society and global policy, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are very fortunate to be joined by a friend, colleague, distinguished author, and distinguished scholar, Mark Lawrence.

Mark is the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum here in Austin, Texas, which is the best presidential library, and I say that without any bias at all. Mark is also a professor in the UT Department of History, and he has taught courses on American and international history and various other topics. He's written three fantastic books.

His first book, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. His second book is a wonderful narrative history of the Vietnam War as a whole, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and it's the only history of the Vietnam War I've seen that is truly concise. It's very hard to write a concise history of the Vietnam War.

And Mark's most recent book, the book that has just come out that we're going to talk about today, is on the Vietnam War and its legacies. It's called The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Mark, congratulations on your book, and thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much, Jeremi. It's wonderful to be here. Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem.

Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem. What is your poem titled today, Zachary?

It is Hard to Build Utopias.

Let's hear it.

It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy, and you shoot your own children smack dab in the middle of their righteousness. It is hard to build utopias when they are already covered in your own rusty tanks and pierced by your own bullets, when they have already realized they don't need to be saved by you, when your own children are blowing up buildings just so you'd turn around and care a little.

It is hard to build utopia, let alone democracy, let alone peace.

Very moving, Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the very naive American attitude that we can go anywhere and build the greatest societies out of places that we've already destroyed, and we've already meddled in for long periods of time, and places where things are much more complex than peace and war and democracy and tyranny.

That's a perfect gateway into our discussion with Mark Lawrence. Mark, these are issues you've grappled with in your scholarship for decades.

I have, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to top Zachary's poem. Zachary, that was awesome. Thank you. I think our session is over

It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?

Well, I think the United States was in many places around the world in the 1960s, trying to demonstrate the applicability of its own economic and political and social systems as a way of waging the Cold War and sort of demonstrating to people all over the world that the United States had the answers when it came to human progress and development and effective governance.

This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.

And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.

But there are a lot of people who, especially nowadays, who would argue that American intervention abroad was, if not purely self-interested, was motivated mainly by self-interest. Is that accurate?

Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.

And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?

I think that is a fair reading. I tried to pick case studies, and you've listed them, Jeremi, thank you, that would illustrate a range of patterns in American behavior across the 1960s. Two of them, Brazil and Indonesia, are very similar in demonstrating the ways in which Americans supported right-wing coups that basically eliminated very uncertain political situations in very important countries in favor of regimes, military regimes, that would clearly serve American interests much more directly and be reliable partners of the United States.

But in Iran, I think you see a similar pattern. There isn't a change in regime, but the United States becomes much more supportive and much less critical of the Shah, a deeply authoritarian figure over that time. And then I also threw in a couple of case studies that illustrate how the United States behaved in places where there was no reliable authoritarian alternative. So I look at India, where Americans had great hopes for a new kind of partnership with a regime that was hardly a candidate for a close alliance with the United States in the early 1960s. And I try to show how the United States sort of soured on that whole idea of building connections to India. And basically by the end of the decade was very much at arm's length with the Indian government and largely given up on its ambitions there.

And in Southern Africa, I try to show how in the early 1960s, Americans believed that they could find ways to support racial justice in this region that was plagued by the vestiges of colonialism and white settler rule in several places, largely abandoned those hopes and really settle for a deeply problematic status quo that at least had the advantage of being stable in the short term and therefore not a situation that would require that the United States expand vast resources or political capital on very, very difficult problems.

And Mark, why this arc? Why in each case does it seem not only that the United States is less ambitious as you put it so well in your title, but also that the United States becomes, I don't know if this is fair, but it seems to me more cynical in its policies.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.

So if there were reliable alternatives to be had out there in the Third World, LBJ was increasingly likely to seize on those and privilege stability above change across the board, I think you could say, by the end of the decade.

And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?

I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam that he sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.

So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?

Well, because I think that it came to dominate so thoroughly the American home fronts by 1967-1968. LBJ was nothing if not a political creature who was deeply sensitive to what was going on politically across American society, deeply sensitive to what was being said about him and his leadership. And so over time, I think he came to see Vietnam as the single major issue that confronted his administration.

And for this reason was prone to seeing every other issue through that prism. And I think you see it not only in connection with foreign policy issues, where you might be more likely to see connections among different foreign policy questions. You also see it in the domestic arena, where LBJ's attitudes toward his advisors, toward members of Congress, were deeply informed by his perception of where they stood on Vietnam and how they were likely to support him or not. It's, I think, one of the tragedies of the Johnson presidency that Vietnam becomes so all-consuming for him that every other issue becomes in some ways subordinate to it.

Right. You and I have talked about this before. I mean, even his views of students in the United States become defined by where they stand on the Vietnam War, which is extraordinary if you think about that. Zachary.

Yeah. So you very clearly and convincingly laid out this idea of the end of ambition and the limits that it places on foreign policy decisions. But how do you square that with the rise in global connections and global awareness among young people and others during this period?

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.

He was aware that activism and unrest was increasingly a global phenomenon. And I think for this reason, was drawn to the idea that where stability seemed to be possible, where he could find partners who would cooperate with him and clamp down on at least some of this unrest, he was ready to seize those opportunities. So, you know, I bite off a piece of that larger story by looking at American relationships with countries in the third world.

But, you know, Jeremi, I think your book Power and Protest gets at another dimension of this broad phenomenon, the quest for stability and security and predictability in an increasingly uncertain world where governmental authorities are losing their ability to control. You know, everything that's happening around the world is in some ways a big story of the 1960s.

Yeah, I thought, Mark, your book did really a wonderful job of taking that story that some of us have focused on and really connecting it to the story of what was called the third world and how this impacted not simply detente policy, a search for stability between the US and the Soviet Union and a search for law and order at home. Lyndon Johnson's the first to really use that phrase, law and order. But as you show in this book, as I think no one has before, how this really comes to define, again, American policy in Brazil and Indonesia, which to me was, again, startling. I had seen hints of this, but my gosh, the depth of it, I think we have not appreciated until reading your book.

I wonder, Mark, what you think about the legacies. I guess I'm asking you in this question sort of for your extended conclusion. You have an excellent conclusion to the book, but how would you extend it on for where this takes us, not just in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in the last decades of the Cold War?

I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1970s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early 60s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.

What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.

So I think what I would try to emphasize by way of the larger implications of the book is that this search for stability, which made a lot of sense under a very particular set of circumstances, gives rise to precisely the opposite as time passes and tends to confront the United States with a number of really pressing challenges. And I don't push this too far in the book, but I think it's not too much of a stretch to connect some of this instability to trends that continue to play out in the 21st century.

Southern Africa, Southern Asia, right? Southwest Asia, at least, remain areas of real contention. And they remain areas of contention for a whole lot of reasons. But I think that the history of the 1960s is not unimportant in understanding why it is that those areas remain sources of concern many years after the period that I write about.

Sure. And the Middle East, you talk about and write about Iran, and that certainly would be a major element of what you're talking about here. Mark, how then should we explain, taking in all that you've shared with us in elucidating these changes in American policy and the implications for American democracy and for international affairs, how then do we situate that in relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have an eerie echo of the period you're writing about?

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

But I think it was really the Iraq War, and particularly the difficulties that the United States ran into there between, say, 2004 and 2007 or so, that brought Vietnam very much back to the forefront, at least in connection with debates over foreign policy. And I think around the same time as political polarization really became that much more extremein the United States, you could also see that Vietnam continued to operate at a very deep level in American society as a touchstone for deep-seated social and cultural debates over some pretty profound issues that tend to divide Americans over questions like their Americans' relationship to their government, the reasonable obligations that government can impose on citizens, the duties of citizens to protest and object to the behavior of theirgovernment, and so forth. A lot of those questions, I think, that Vietnam really put on the table remain very much part of American political life and unfortunately tend to divide Americans very deeply to this day.

I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?

Well, that lesson, I think one has to acknowledge cuts against some pretty deep-seated impulses that run through American history and American political culture, even in the post-Vietnam period. I think going a very long way back in American history, you can see a strong impulse to bring uplift and progress and reform to the wider world, to impose the American model on the rest of the world, to assume that the American model is applicable indeed to the rest of the world. So Vietnam, I would argue, and certainly many other Americans would argue, does teach the lesson of humility, of the fact that there are limits on what the United States can achieve in the world. But I think that one of the things that stands out pretty clearly in the history of American foreign relations in the last years, since the end of the Vietnam War, is that that lesson was only partially learned, only really learned by some Americans. And of course, there's a whole other set of lessons that were learned by people with a different set of preferences when it comes to American foreign policy.

There is an alternative set of lessons that would emphasize that really the key point about Vietnam is that you must not give up too early on American commitments overseas, that the United States really does have the wherewithal to achieve its objectives in the wider world. It's just that we don't sometimes have the staying power to see it through. I think there've been fascinating debates in connection with Iraq and to some extent in connection with Afghanistan that have really revealed the competing ways in which Americans of different political persuasions draw lessons from the war.

Mark, we always like to close with a focus on how history can provide us some optimistic, positive steps forward. And that's an article of faith for our podcast. As you know, it's an article of faith for me.

I have to believe this. And your book is so rich in its recounting of this period. What are the lessons that you hope, especially in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq now, what are the lessons you hope that readers take as they think about American foreign policy and American democracy going forward?

Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.

But here's the other lesson that I think comes, that's a little more original, I suppose, and comes more directly to my book. And maybe there's something a little bit optimistic here. I think that my book shows the risks, the very pragmatic risks, the very practical risks that flow from pumping too much attention and resources into one part of the world. It shows the destructive impacts that can occur in connection with American foreign policy globally if Americans lose the ability to prioritize, to decide what's really important and how much resources any particular problem is worth as Americans confront it.

And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.

I think that's wonderful, Mark. Another way I think of thinking about that and, and you've, you've really provided such a strong foundation for this is to recognize that trying to win unwinnable wars is not what we should be doing. That there are many other opportunities for the use of America's vast resources, right.

That beautifully said exactly Jeremi. And you, you phrased it in even more optimistic way. And I really appreciate that.

I had to find some optimism, Zachary, as, as we close. Uh, I know you and your friends have been talking a lot about what's happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously the Vietnam. Do you see lessons for your generation in this story?

I certainly do. I think one of the lessons is that these issues are always complex and never just black and white, never easy or impossible. And I think part of the problem, and, I think particularly among young people is that foreign policy issues can seem so black and white and, and, and, and, and so easy, but they're so complex. And, and part of the problem is that. Our political conversations, aren't mature enough, uh, in this country to really be able to, to address those issues appropriately.

I think there's a lot to that. And there's a lot between cynicism and the utopia. You talked about it in your poem, right? I think, I think Mark's book shows that there actually are. There's a lot that can be done in between maybe that's, what's abandoned because of the obsession with Vietnam. Mark, this has been a really insightful conversation. I encourage everyone to go out and read and read your book and buy it and give it away as gifts as well. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam era. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jeremi. And thank you, Zachary.

Zachary, Zachary. Thank you for your poem and thank you. Most of all, to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the liberal arts its development. Yep. And the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris. Codine stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find this is democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

This is democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the Vietnam War and its legacies, its continuing legacies in American society, in global policy, and particularly in light of a recent set of conflicts that produced similarly controversial outcomes for American society and global policy, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are very fortunate to be joined by a friend, colleague, distinguished author, and distinguished scholar, Mark Lawrence.

Mark is the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum here in Austin, Texas, which is the best presidential library, and I say that without any bias at all. Mark is also a professor in the UT Department of History, and he has taught courses on American and international history and various other topics. He's written three fantastic books.

His first book, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. His second book is a wonderful narrative history of the Vietnam War as a whole, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and it's the only history of the Vietnam War I've seen that is truly concise. It's very hard to write a concise history of the Vietnam War.

And Mark's most recent book, the book that has just come out that we're going to talk about today, is on the Vietnam War and its legacies. It's called The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Mark, congratulations on your book, and thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much, Jeremi. It's wonderful to be here. Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem.

Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem. What is your poem titled today, Zachary?

It is Hard to Build Utopias.

Let's hear it.

It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy, and you shoot your own children smack dab in the middle of their righteousness. It is hard to build utopias when they are already covered in your own rusty tanks and pierced by your own bullets, when they have already realized they don't need to be saved by you, when your own children are blowing up buildings just so you'd turn around and care a little.

It is hard to build utopia, let alone democracy, let alone peace.

Very moving, Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the very naive American attitude that we can go anywhere and build the greatest societies out of places that we've already destroyed, and we've already meddled in for long periods of time, and places where things are much more complex than peace and war and democracy and tyranny.

That's a perfect gateway into our discussion with Mark Lawrence. Mark, these are issues you've grappled with in your scholarship for decades.

I have, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to top Zachary's poem. Zachary, that was awesome. Thank you. I think our session is over

It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?

Well, I think the United States was in many places around the world in the 1960s, trying to demonstrate the applicability of its own economic and political and social systems as a way of waging the Cold War and sort of demonstrating to people all over the world that the United States had the answers when it came to human progress and development and effective governance.

This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.

And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.

But there are a lot of people who, especially nowadays, who would argue that American intervention abroad was, if not purely self-interested, was motivated mainly by self-interest. Is that accurate?

Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.

And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?

I think that is a fair reading. I tried to pick case studies, and you've listed them, Jeremi, thank you, that would illustrate a range of patterns in American behavior across the 1960s. Two of them, Brazil and Indonesia, are very similar in demonstrating the ways in which Americans supported right-wing coups that basically eliminated very uncertain political situations in very important countries in favor of regimes, military regimes, that would clearly serve American interests much more directly and be reliable partners of the United States.

But in Iran, I think you see a similar pattern. There isn't a change in regime, but the United States becomes much more supportive and much less critical of the Shah, a deeply authoritarian figure over that time. And then I also threw in a couple of case studies that illustrate how the United States behaved in places where there was no reliable authoritarian alternative. So I look at India, where Americans had great hopes for a new kind of partnership with a regime that was hardly a candidate for a close alliance with the United States in the early 1960s. And I try to show how the United States sort of soured on that whole idea of building connections to India. And basically by the end of the decade was very much at arm's length with the Indian government and largely given up on its ambitions there.

And in Southern Africa, I try to show how in the early 1960s, Americans believed that they could find ways to support racial justice in this region that was plagued by the vestiges of colonialism and white settler rule in several places, largely abandoned those hopes and really settle for a deeply problematic status quo that at least had the advantage of being stable in the short term and therefore not a situation that would require that the United States expand vast resources or political capital on very, very difficult problems.

And Mark, why this arc? Why in each case does it seem not only that the United States is less ambitious as you put it so well in your title, but also that the United States becomes, I don't know if this is fair, but it seems to me more cynical in its policies.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.

So if there were reliable alternatives to be had out there in the Third World, LBJ was increasingly likely to seize on those and privilege stability above change across the board, I think you could say, by the end of the decade.

And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?

I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam that he sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.

So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?

Well, because I think that it came to dominate so thoroughly the American home fronts by 1967-1968. LBJ was nothing if not a political creature who was deeply sensitive to what was going on politically across American society, deeply sensitive to what was being said about him and his leadership. And so over time, I think he came to see Vietnam as the single major issue that confronted his administration.

And for this reason was prone to seeing every other issue through that prism. And I think you see it not only in connection with foreign policy issues, where you might be more likely to see connections among different foreign policy questions. You also see it in the domestic arena, where LBJ's attitudes toward his advisors, toward members of Congress, were deeply informed by his perception of where they stood on Vietnam and how they were likely to support him or not. It's, I think, one of the tragedies of the Johnson presidency that Vietnam becomes so all-consuming for him that every other issue becomes in some ways subordinate to it.

Right. You and I have talked about this before. I mean, even his views of students in the United States become defined by where they stand on the Vietnam War, which is extraordinary if you think about that. Zachary.

Yeah. So you very clearly and convincingly laid out this idea of the end of ambition and the limits that it places on foreign policy decisions. But how do you square that with the rise in global connections and global awareness among young people and others during this period?

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.

He was aware that activism and unrest was increasingly a global phenomenon. And I think for this reason, was drawn to the idea that where stability seemed to be possible, where he could find partners who would cooperate with him and clamp down on at least some of this unrest, he was ready to seize those opportunities. So, you know, I bite off a piece of that larger story by looking at American relationships with countries in the third world.

But, you know, Jeremi, I think your book Power and Protest gets at another dimension of this broad phenomenon, the quest for stability and security and predictability in an increasingly uncertain world where governmental authorities are losing their ability to control. You know, everything that's happening around the world is in some ways a big story of the 1960s.

Yeah, I thought, Mark, your book did really a wonderful job of taking that story that some of us have focused on and really connecting it to the story of what was called the third world and how this impacted not simply detente policy, a search for stability between the US and the Soviet Union and a search for law and order at home. Lyndon Johnson's the first to really use that phrase, law and order. But as you show in this book, as I think no one has before, how this really comes to define, again, American policy in Brazil and Indonesia, which to me was, again, startling. I had seen hints of this, but my gosh, the depth of it, I think we have not appreciated until reading your book.

I wonder, Mark, what you think about the legacies. I guess I'm asking you in this question sort of for your extended conclusion. You have an excellent conclusion to the book, but how would you extend it on for where this takes us, not just in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in the last decades of the Cold War?

I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1970s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early 60s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.

What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.

So I think what I would try to emphasize by way of the larger implications of the book is that this search for stability, which made a lot of sense under a very particular set of circumstances, gives rise to precisely the opposite as time passes and tends to confront the United States with a number of really pressing challenges. And I don't push this too far in the book, but I think it's not too much of a stretch to connect some of this instability to trends that continue to play out in the 21st century.

Southern Africa, Southern Asia, right? Southwest Asia, at least, remain areas of real contention. And they remain areas of contention for a whole lot of reasons. But I think that the history of the 1960s is not unimportant in understanding why it is that those areas remain sources of concern many years after the period that I write about.

Sure. And the Middle East, you talk about and write about Iran, and that certainly would be a major element of what you're talking about here. Mark, how then should we explain, taking in all that you've shared with us in elucidating these changes in American policy and the implications for American democracy and for international affairs, how then do we situate that in relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have an eerie echo of the period you're writing about?

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

But I think it was really the Iraq War, and particularly the difficulties that the United States ran into there between, say, 2004 and 2007 or so, that brought Vietnam very much back to the forefront, at least in connection with debates over foreign policy. And I think around the same time as political polarization really became that much more extremein the United States, you could also see that Vietnam continued to operate at a very deep level in American society as a touchstone for deep-seated social and cultural debates over some pretty profound issues that tend to divide Americans over questions like their Americans' relationship to their government, the reasonable obligations that government can impose on citizens, the duties of citizens to protest and object to the behavior of theirgovernment, and so forth. A lot of those questions, I think, that Vietnam really put on the table remain very much part of American political life and unfortunately tend to divide Americans very deeply to this day.

I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?

Well, that lesson, I think one has to acknowledge cuts against some pretty deep-seated impulses that run through American history and American political culture, even in the post-Vietnam period. I think going a very long way back in American history, you can see a strong impulse to bring uplift and progress and reform to the wider world, to impose the American model on the rest of the world, to assume that the American model is applicable indeed to the rest of the world. So Vietnam, I would argue, and certainly many other Americans would argue, does teach the lesson of humility, of the fact that there are limits on what the United States can achieve in the world. But I think that one of the things that stands out pretty clearly in the history of American foreign relations in the last years, since the end of the Vietnam War, is that that lesson was only partially learned, only really learned by some Americans. And of course, there's a whole other set of lessons that were learned by people with a different set of preferences when it comes to American foreign policy.

There is an alternative set of lessons that would emphasize that really the key point about Vietnam is that you must not give up too early on American commitments overseas, that the United States really does have the wherewithal to achieve its objectives in the wider world. It's just that we don't sometimes have the staying power to see it through. I think there've been fascinating debates in connection with Iraq and to some extent in connection with Afghanistan that have really revealed the competing ways in which Americans of different political persuasions draw lessons from the war.

Mark, we always like to close with a focus on how history can provide us some optimistic, positive steps forward. And that's an article of faith for our podcast. As you know, it's an article of faith for me.

I have to believe this. And your book is so rich in its recounting of this period. What are the lessons that you hope, especially in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq now, what are the lessons you hope that readers take as they think about American foreign policy and American democracy going forward?

Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.

But here's the other lesson that I think comes, that's a little more original, I suppose, and comes more directly to my book. And maybe there's something a little bit optimistic here. I think that my book shows the risks, the very pragmatic risks, the very practical risks that flow from pumping too much attention and resources into one part of the world. It shows the destructive impacts that can occur in connection with American foreign policy globally if Americans lose the ability to prioritize, to decide what's really important and how much resources any particular problem is worth as Americans confront it.

And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.

I think that's wonderful, Mark. Another way I think of thinking about that and, and you've, you've really provided such a strong foundation for this is to recognize that trying to win unwinnable wars is not what we should be doing. That there are many other opportunities for the use of America's vast resources, right.

That beautifully said exactly Jeremi. And you, you phrased it in even more optimistic way. And I really appreciate that.

I had to find some optimism, Zachary, as, as we close. Uh, I know you and your friends have been talking a lot about what's happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously the Vietnam. Do you see lessons for your generation in this story?

I certainly do. I think one of the lessons is that these issues are always complex and never just black and white, never easy or impossible. And I think part of the problem, and, I think particularly among young people is that foreign policy issues can seem so black and white and, and, and, and, and so easy, but they're so complex. And, and part of the problem is that. Our political conversations, aren't mature enough, uh, in this country to really be able to, to address those issues appropriately.

I think there's a lot to that. And there's a lot between cynicism and the utopia. You talked about it in your poem, right? I think, I think Mark's book shows that there actually are. There's a lot that can be done in between maybe that's, what's abandoned because of the obsession with Vietnam. Mark, this has been a really insightful conversation. I encourage everyone to go out and read and read your book and buy it and give it away as gifts as well. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam era. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jeremi. And thank you, Zachary.

Zachary, Zachary. Thank you for your poem and thank you. Most of all, to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the liberal arts its development. Yep. And the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris. Codine stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find this is democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

This is democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the Vietnam War and its legacies, its continuing legacies in American society, in global policy, and particularly in light of a recent set of conflicts that produced similarly controversial outcomes for American society and global policy, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are very fortunate to be joined by a friend, colleague, distinguished author, and distinguished scholar, Mark Lawrence.

Mark is the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum here in Austin, Texas, which is the best presidential library, and I say that without any bias at all. Mark is also a professor in the UT Department of History, and he has taught courses on American and international history and various other topics. He's written three fantastic books.

His first book, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. His second book is a wonderful narrative history of the Vietnam War as a whole, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and it's the only history of the Vietnam War I've seen that is truly concise. It's very hard to write a concise history of the Vietnam War.

And Mark's most recent book, the book that has just come out that we're going to talk about today, is on the Vietnam War and its legacies. It's called The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Mark, congratulations on your book, and thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much, Jeremi. It's wonderful to be here. Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem.

Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem. What is your poem titled today, Zachary?

It is Hard to Build Utopias.

Let's hear it.

It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy, and you shoot your own children smack dab in the middle of their righteousness. It is hard to build utopias when they are already covered in your own rusty tanks and pierced by your own bullets, when they have already realized they don't need to be saved by you, when your own children are blowing up buildings just so you'd turn around and care a little.

It is hard to build utopia, let alone democracy, let alone peace.

Very moving, Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the very naive American attitude that we can go anywhere and build the greatest societies out of places that we've already destroyed, and we've already meddled in for long periods of time, and places where things are much more complex than peace and war and democracy and tyranny.

That's a perfect gateway into our discussion with Mark Lawrence. Mark, these are issues you've grappled with in your scholarship for decades.

I have, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to top Zachary's poem. Zachary, that was awesome. Thank you. I think our session is over

It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?

Well, I think the United States was in many places around the world in the 1960s, trying to demonstrate the applicability of its own economic and political and social systems as a way of waging the Cold War and sort of demonstrating to people all over the world that the United States had the answers when it came to human progress and development and effective governance.

This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.

And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.

But there are a lot of people who, especially nowadays, who would argue that American intervention abroad was, if not purely self-interested, was motivated mainly by self-interest. Is that accurate?

Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.

And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?

I think that is a fair reading. I tried to pick case studies, and you've listed them, Jeremi, thank you, that would illustrate a range of patterns in American behavior across the 1960s. Two of them, Brazil and Indonesia, are very similar in demonstrating the ways in which Americans supported right-wing coups that basically eliminated very uncertain political situations in very important countries in favor of regimes, military regimes, that would clearly serve American interests much more directly and be reliable partners of the United States.

But in Iran, I think you see a similar pattern. There isn't a change in regime, but the United States becomes much more supportive and much less critical of the Shah, a deeply authoritarian figure over that time. And then I also threw in a couple of case studies that illustrate how the United States behaved in places where there was no reliable authoritarian alternative. So I look at India, where Americans had great hopes for a new kind of partnership with a regime that was hardly a candidate for a close alliance with the United States in the early 1960s. And I try to show how the United States sort of soured on that whole idea of building connections to India. And basically by the end of the decade was very much at arm's length with the Indian government and largely given up on its ambitions there.

And in Southern Africa, I try to show how in the early 1960s, Americans believed that they could find ways to support racial justice in this region that was plagued by the vestiges of colonialism and white settler rule in several places, largely abandoned those hopes and really settle for a deeply problematic status quo that at least had the advantage of being stable in the short term and therefore not a situation that would require that the United States expand vast resources or political capital on very, very difficult problems.

And Mark, why this arc? Why in each case does it seem not only that the United States is less ambitious as you put it so well in your title, but also that the United States becomes, I don't know if this is fair, but it seems to me more cynical in its policies.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.

So if there were reliable alternatives to be had out there in the Third World, LBJ was increasingly likely to seize on those and privilege stability above change across the board, I think you could say, by the end of the decade.

And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?

I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam that he sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.

So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?

Well, because I think that it came to dominate so thoroughly the American home fronts by 1967-1968. LBJ was nothing if not a political creature who was deeply sensitive to what was going on politically across American society, deeply sensitive to what was being said about him and his leadership. And so over time, I think he came to see Vietnam as the single major issue that confronted his administration.

And for this reason was prone to seeing every other issue through that prism. And I think you see it not only in connection with foreign policy issues, where you might be more likely to see connections among different foreign policy questions. You also see it in the domestic arena, where LBJ's attitudes toward his advisors, toward members of Congress, were deeply informed by his perception of where they stood on Vietnam and how they were likely to support him or not. It's, I think, one of the tragedies of the Johnson presidency that Vietnam becomes so all-consuming for him that every other issue becomes in some ways subordinate to it.

Right. You and I have talked about this before. I mean, even his views of students in the United States become defined by where they stand on the Vietnam War, which is extraordinary if you think about that. Zachary.

Yeah. So you very clearly and convincingly laid out this idea of the end of ambition and the limits that it places on foreign policy decisions. But how do you square that with the rise in global connections and global awareness among young people and others during this period?

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.

He was aware that activism and unrest was increasingly a global phenomenon. And I think for this reason, was drawn to the idea that where stability seemed to be possible, where he could find partners who would cooperate with him and clamp down on at least some of this unrest, he was ready to seize those opportunities. So, you know, I bite off a piece of that larger story by looking at American relationships with countries in the third world.

But, you know, Jeremi, I think your book Power and Protest gets at another dimension of this broad phenomenon, the quest for stability and security and predictability in an increasingly uncertain world where governmental authorities are losing their ability to control. You know, everything that's happening around the world is in some ways a big story of the 1960s.

Yeah, I thought, Mark, your book did really a wonderful job of taking that story that some of us have focused on and really connecting it to the story of what was called the third world and how this impacted not simply detente policy, a search for stability between the US and the Soviet Union and a search for law and order at home. Lyndon Johnson's the first to really use that phrase, law and order. But as you show in this book, as I think no one has before, how this really comes to define, again, American policy in Brazil and Indonesia, which to me was, again, startling. I had seen hints of this, but my gosh, the depth of it, I think we have not appreciated until reading your book.

I wonder, Mark, what you think about the legacies. I guess I'm asking you in this question sort of for your extended conclusion. You have an excellent conclusion to the book, but how would you extend it on for where this takes us, not just in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in the last decades of the Cold War?

I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1970s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early 60s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.

What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.

So I think what I would try to emphasize by way of the larger implications of the book is that this search for stability, which made a lot of sense under a very particular set of circumstances, gives rise to precisely the opposite as time passes and tends to confront the United States with a number of really pressing challenges. And I don't push this too far in the book, but I think it's not too much of a stretch to connect some of this instability to trends that continue to play out in the 21st century.

Southern Africa, Southern Asia, right? Southwest Asia, at least, remain areas of real contention. And they remain areas of contention for a whole lot of reasons. But I think that the history of the 1960s is not unimportant in understanding why it is that those areas remain sources of concern many years after the period that I write about.

Sure. And the Middle East, you talk about and write about Iran, and that certainly would be a major element of what you're talking about here. Mark, how then should we explain, taking in all that you've shared with us in elucidating these changes in American policy and the implications for American democracy and for international affairs, how then do we situate that in relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have an eerie echo of the period you're writing about?

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

But I think it was really the Iraq War, and particularly the difficulties that the United States ran into there between, say, 2004 and 2007 or so, that brought Vietnam very much back to the forefront, at least in connection with debates over foreign policy. And I think around the same time as political polarization really became that much more extremein the United States, you could also see that Vietnam continued to operate at a very deep level in American society as a touchstone for deep-seated social and cultural debates over some pretty profound issues that tend to divide Americans over questions like their Americans' relationship to their government, the reasonable obligations that government can impose on citizens, the duties of citizens to protest and object to the behavior of theirgovernment, and so forth. A lot of those questions, I think, that Vietnam really put on the table remain very much part of American political life and unfortunately tend to divide Americans very deeply to this day.

I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?

Well, that lesson, I think one has to acknowledge cuts against some pretty deep-seated impulses that run through American history and American political culture, even in the post-Vietnam period. I think going a very long way back in American history, you can see a strong impulse to bring uplift and progress and reform to the wider world, to impose the American model on the rest of the world, to assume that the American model is applicable indeed to the rest of the world. So Vietnam, I would argue, and certainly many other Americans would argue, does teach the lesson of humility, of the fact that there are limits on what the United States can achieve in the world. But I think that one of the things that stands out pretty clearly in the history of American foreign relations in the last years, since the end of the Vietnam War, is that that lesson was only partially learned, only really learned by some Americans. And of course, there's a whole other set of lessons that were learned by people with a different set of preferences when it comes to American foreign policy.

There is an alternative set of lessons that would emphasize that really the key point about Vietnam is that you must not give up too early on American commitments overseas, that the United States really does have the wherewithal to achieve its objectives in the wider world. It's just that we don't sometimes have the staying power to see it through. I think there've been fascinating debates in connection with Iraq and to some extent in connection with Afghanistan that have really revealed the competing ways in which Americans of different political persuasions draw lessons from the war.

Mark, we always like to close with a focus on how history can provide us some optimistic, positive steps forward. And that's an article of faith for our podcast. As you know, it's an article of faith for me.

I have to believe this. And your book is so rich in its recounting of this period. What are the lessons that you hope, especially in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq now, what are the lessons you hope that readers take as they think about American foreign policy and American democracy going forward?

Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.

But here's the other lesson that I think comes, that's a little more original, I suppose, and comes more directly to my book. And maybe there's something a little bit optimistic here. I think that my book shows the risks, the very pragmatic risks, the very practical risks that flow from pumping too much attention and resources into one part of the world. It shows the destructive impacts that can occur in connection with American foreign policy globally if Americans lose the ability to prioritize, to decide what's really important and how much resources any particular problem is worth as Americans confront it.

And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.

I think that's wonderful, Mark. Another way I think of thinking about that and, and you've, you've really provided such a strong foundation for this is to recognize that trying to win unwinnable wars is not what we should be doing. That there are many other opportunities for the use of America's vast resources, right.

That beautifully said exactly Jeremi. And you, you phrased it in even more optimistic way. And I really appreciate that.

I had to find some optimism, Zachary, as, as we close. Uh, I know you and your friends have been talking a lot about what's happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously the Vietnam. Do you see lessons for your generation in this story?

I certainly do. I think one of the lessons is that these issues are always complex and never just black and white, never easy or impossible. And I think part of the problem, and, I think particularly among young people is that foreign policy issues can seem so black and white and, and, and, and, and so easy, but they're so complex. And, and part of the problem is that. Our political conversations, aren't mature enough, uh, in this country to really be able to, to address those issues appropriately.

I think there's a lot to that. And there's a lot between cynicism and the utopia. You talked about it in your poem, right? I think, I think Mark's book shows that there actually are. There's a lot that can be done in between maybe that's, what's abandoned because of the obsession with Vietnam. Mark, this has been a really insightful conversation. I encourage everyone to go out and read and read your book and buy it and give it away as gifts as well. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam era. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jeremi. And thank you, Zachary.

Zachary, Zachary. Thank you for your poem and thank you. Most of all, to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the liberal arts its development. Yep. And the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris. Codine stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find this is democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

 This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics, and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next.

 Welcome to our new episode of "This Is Democracy." This week we are going to discuss the history of unions in the United States, and we're going to look at the current strike by auto workers, in the United States. These are auto workers who belong to one of the oldest and most important unions, but one of many unions in the history of the United States, the United Auto Workers.

 And we are fortunate to be joined by one of the leading historians of workers' unions and race in the United States. This is our friend, Professor William Jones, who is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

 He's the author of, many articles and two really important books. The first, "The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South," and then, more recently, "The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights," a book that puts the March on Washington, which everyone has heard of, especially because of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

 Will's book puts the March on Washington in the context of labor history as well as civil rights history, which is really important. Will, thank you so much for joining us today.

 Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

 And of course, we have our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? "From the UAW Picket Lines." Wow, we're gonna get an on-the-scenes account from you, Zachary? Or at least an imagining of one, yes. Okay, well let's hear it.

 So here we are, waiting on the picket line, for the world to change, for the times to rhyme. They sold us the lie that if we just worked hard the dough would fry and line our pockets with bread.

 Pretty soon we were left the only ones not caught up in the net or dead on a cot. They told us when we asked that they had nothing to say. Forget tomorrow. Clock out today.

 But we will not be told that our futures were sold in Washington or in Detroit where the rivers fold, and wash our cars out to sea.

 We will not be told to keep standing still, when the steels arrive from the mill, and we have the parts to rebuild the heart of what made this country go. We will not be told to accept our fate, to wait and say nothing forever. If anything yet we're far too late, but better too late than never.

 Hmm. What's your poem about, Zachary? My poem is really about, how, the ravages of the global economy in the past few years have hit at the heart of manufacturing jobs in the United States and have led to a lot of dissatisfaction, with, not just with government but also with big corporations, in Detroit and across the country. And how labor action can hopefully move towards solving those problems or at least, finding a better solution for workers.

 And that's your point about late but still important, right? Exactly.

 Will, this moment we're living in now that Zachary captures, I think, a bit in his poem, is that how you would frame the current labor action against the automakers? Is that really what it is? Is it about automation or what's really at the root of this?

 Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a number of things involved, and yeah, automation is an important part of it, and the struggle over jobs and the sort of number of jobs and employment. I think there's really three main issues at the heart of this, this current strike.

 One is the issue of the two-tier employment system that the Big Three auto workers have adopted, which is a product of concessions that were made by the UAW during the recession in 2009 when the auto companies were really in bad shape. And the UAW agreed to allow them to essentially start hiring workers, new workers under different systems, under lower wages, less, in some cases no benefits, healthcare benefits, pensions. And the idea was that, you know, when the auto companies were in bad shape and needed some help in recovering, the UAW, the workers agreed to take these concessions.

But now the Big Three are doing very well, and the feeling is that they, you know, the workers should not consider, continue to take these concessions. Some of the issues are around wages, and I think the union has framed that in the broader context of, I think a conversation we've been having over the past several decades about rising levels of economic inequality, the ways in which the wealthy have done well at times when the less wealthy, when the 99% has seen their living standards and their income decline.

 And then the third one I think is this issue of jobs. It's related in part to automation. It's also for the auto industry, particularly related to the transition to electric vehicles, which, you know, are easier to manufacture and so they require less labor and there's a concern about the ways in which that shift to a, you know, a lower labor demand is going to affect the current workers. Right. And they're concerned about that.

 Will, that's really helpful in framing this, and I wanted to come back to your first point because I think that's one that at least to my reading of the news has received a lot less attention. The fact that the auto workers not only gave up certain benefits to help the automobile companies during the 2008 recession, but also that they actually agreed to create a two-tiered system. Can you just say more about that, how that's worked and what the expectations were when that was negotiated in 2008? Right. Well, I mean the expectations were that this was going to save an industry that was really on the brink of collapse and so that, you know, which, in a sense, that has happened. The way it works though is that you get, you know, something that you hear a lot in interviews with workers on the picket lines is they'll say, you know, like they're standing next to workers who do the same jobs under the same conditions as them who earn, you know, in some cases half of what they earn with no benefits.

 So they, you know, there's a sort of a fundamental sense that this is unfair, but there's also a recognition that this is a really dangerous situation when you're trying to build solidarity between workers, and it sort of pits workers against each other. And has the potential to really divide the workforce in a way that I think this strike is aimed at, you know, overcoming and sort of uniting.

 Well, that point, Will, it seems to me leads really to the bigger historical question, which is what role have unions played? Why does the UAW exist? I get this question from my students all the time. Maybe that's just a function of those students being in Texas. I don't know. But, what you're describing seems to me to actually be an anathema to what unions historically have been about. Is that correct?

 Yeah. I think in some respects, it's certainly anathema to the history of the UAW. And, you know, just as an aside, my students here in Minnesota, where there's a very vibrant labor union, they personally often have very little contact with the labor movement. And so, you know, I'm sure that it's more intense in Texas, but across the United States, people have very little sense of what unions do and where they come from.

 The UAW is you know, comes from a particular history of one of the industrial unions of the 1930s. It was one of the founding unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which is, you know, half of the AFL-CIO. The other half, the AFL, is much older, and it actually comes from a tradition that is in some ways based on drawing lines among workers or between workers. I mean, it was a sort of built by skilled workers who really kind of circled the wagons around their own particular skills, and were very exclusive. So many of the AFL unions, you know, they would limit their membership to men. They would, some of them actually explicitly said that you could not be a member of them unless you were white. So they were exclusive, and the idea was to try to draw a very narrow line and control the labor market and the access to skills within a particular labor market. The CIO unions, like the UAW, took exactly the opposite approach. They felt, "If we can organize as many people as possible across as many different lines of skill and status, across lines of race and gender, we can be more powerful if we have everybody in the same union."

 And so that's really, the UAW really exemplifies that history. It emerged in the 1930s, organizing auto plants where the, which were really deeply divided, right? You had very, very highly skilled machinists, working alongside, you know, janitors, alongside, people who were, who had very little experience. You had, you know, people of many different, you know, immigrants from all over the world. People of different races, men and women working in the same factories. And the UAW was one of the first unions to say, "We're going to try to put everybody in the same union." So this idea of the concessions really cuts at the heart of that idea, of the two-tier system, and gets really to the heart of the history of the UAW.

 Zachary? And what has been the recent history of industrial unions in the United States? Where in the sort of long history of American labor do you see this particular strike fitting?

 Yeah. Well, I mean, so since the 1970s, we've seen a really dramatic change in the way in which labor laws have been enforced. We've again seen a weakening of the enforcement mechanisms. We've seen a sort of emboldening of employers to really ignore the labor laws, which are, in some ways sort of inherently weak, as there aren't very many enforcement mechanisms or serious enforcement mechanisms in them. At the same time, we've seen a decline in the number of workers who are employed in the core industries in the United States, partially due to automation, partially due to the globalization of manufacturing, the rise of the service economy.

 And the auto industry has been, you know, at the core of that, right? They've been, we've seen declining numbers of people. It's not so much that the, you know, the cars use fewer workers. It's that a lot of the parts that are used in cars are manufactured overseas. So increasingly, auto plants in the US are really assembly plants. They're, you know, taking things from all over the world and putting them together into a finished product, and that takes fewer workers than if you have to make those products from scratch. And that has really challenged unions like the auto, the UAW. They've responded in a number of ways.

 One way they've done, responded is to sort of branch out and organize other workers. I think about 20% of the UAW are actually academic workers. They're graduate students. They're contingent faculty at, mostly in the UC, the University of California system.

 They've also made the, you know, they face this problem of, you know, do you sort of make concessions and do you, you know, recognize that you are in a place of weakened you know, clout and respond to that by making concessions? Or do you in as, you know, in the language of the sort of the people who run the union movement now, or the UAW now, do you fight back? And one of the important things about this strike is it occurs after the election of Shawn Fain who ran against a sort of entrenched union bureaucracy that had really been responsible for a lot of these concessions. He ran on a reform slate that was supported by people who have been fighting within the UAW for many years, for decades, to try to push the union toward a more aggressive stance in trying to push back against some of these concessions. So that's a strategic change that, you know, and I think we'll see how it plays out.  I think the strike, you know, raises that. We don't know how the strike's going to end.

 Will, your discussion of the election of a new UAW leader brings up an important issue. I often hear people say very derogatory things about unions, and I think some of this comes out of the rhetoric of the 1970s and '80s that unions are corrupt and that unions are run only for the leadership. That's obviously not true, but why do you think that's said so often, and what's your response to that?

 Well, I mean, it's said, it is in part true. I mean, there is a truth to the fact that there has been corruption in unions. I think like any large institution, there's room for corruption. I think it also has gained strength from the position that these big industrial unions have found themselves in, where they, it's been very difficult for them to actually deliver for their members, so there's this, you know, a sense that they don't get much done. You know, they've done an important, they've played important roles in at least holding the ground. But I think, you know, that's something that's very hard for people to see, and so there's a sort of, yes, sense that these are institutions that are on their back, and it's hard to sell them even to their own members.

 On the other hand, I think it's important to keep in mind that unions have really been central to any advances that we've had toward economic equality in the United States and in other respects in terms of other forms of equality. So, you know, the UAW came out of the 1930s, but it really, I think, played its central role in the United States in US politics in the 1950s and '60s, the sort of heyday what some historians call the heyday of American liberalism. It was the UAW that pushed for universal, for healthcare programs, for workers, to provide health that employers, this sort of employer-based system that we now have. The UAW actually initially pushed for a universal healthcare program. When the auto companies pushed back vehemently against that, the UAW said, "Well, okay, then employers need to step up and provide healthcare for workers."  They pushed for, you know, all of the sort of liberal provisions of what we might call the welfare state of the 1950s, was pushed for by industrial unions like the UAW.

 The UAW also played a really critical role in the civil rights movement. It was one of the unions that, you know, provided consistent funding for the major campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The UAW sent money to help support the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the March on Washington. The president of the UAW, Walter Reuther, spoke at the March on Washington, you know, just before Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. So this, these are institutions that have really been vital to American democracy and to the sense of sort of creating a more egalitarian United States.

 I'm so glad you explained that Will, because it is striking and I think undeniable that moments in our history when unions have been stronger, we have seen less economic inequality in moments such as the 1970s and '80s. When we see unions receding in American history we see more inequality. So there's at least a correlation there, as my economist friends would say. That's right. That's, I mean, if you, one chart that I like to show my students is if you chart the level of income inequality in the United States over the past century, and you chart union representation rates, they're in exact reverse correlation, right? That as unions have declined, we've seen wealth inequality grow.

 Will, do you think that's why it appears that there is at least some kind of renaissance of unions in the United States? You see Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, and various others talking about unions in ways we hadn't seen before. Is that part of the story?

 I think it is. I mean, one of the really remarkable things that we've seen in the Gallup polls is that, so in 2010, the Gallup poll, you know, Gallup poll every year since the '40s has asked people whether they think unions are good or bad, sort of a basic public, you know, opinion poll of unions. In 2010, that number reached its all-time low. It actually, for the first time, since they started asking it, it dipped below 50%. Wow. Last year, that number reached 70, over 75%. And so in the, you know, since 2010, we've seen the, that public approval of unions go from its historic low to close to an all-time high. And I think, you know, there's a number of reasons for that. I think, you know, there has been growing attention to income inequality. You know, 2010 was around the time that we saw the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. There was this sort of conversation around wealth inequality. There were the big protests in Madison, Wisconsin, that you and I both witnessed. Yes. I think they called attention to the historic importance of unions in a way that we haven't seen in a very long time. Since then, I think we've seen, certainly during the pandemic, I think there were a number of ways in which the pandemic contributed to this growth of unions. One was the sort of outward display of workers who were really, you know, were essential, were critical for the functioning of our society, critical to protecting people from the pandemic and caring for people when they got the pandemic. Those workers were often the lowest paid, the worst treated workers in the economy. Yes. Yes. And that highlighted this contradiction, I think it led to a lot of those workers, going on strike and forming unions.

 I think the third thing that I'd point to is actually this reform movement within the union movement that, you know, really goes back to the 1970s, but that people have been working within the unions to make them both, you know, to sort of root out corruption, but also to make them more aggressive and to sort of take on some of these concessions. And that, I think we're seeing, you know, all of the leadership of many of the big unions and of the AFL-CIO comes out of these reform movements that started back in the 1970s. So I think we're in some ways seeing the results of those.

 In recent weeks, we've seen both the current president of the United States, and his predecessor visit UAW picket lines or at least speak with UAW strikers. How should we understand the role that this strike, will play and is playing in our national politics so close to a presidential election?

 Yeah, that was really fascinating. I thought, you know, in both cases. I mean, I think it's important to point out that Donald Trump did not go to a UAW plant. He went to a non-union plant. He was also invited by the employers who were, who are sort of a vehemently anti-union, parts manufacturers. So I think that's important to keep in mind.

 Biden, on the other hand, was invited by the president of the UAW, and spoke very powerfully. For the first time in history, a union, a sitting president really took a very strong position, in favor of the union, and I think really, you know, framed his remarks in the tone that the union is saying, that this is about wealth inequality, that the CEOs of the auto manufacturers have done very well, and the workers deserve to do well also. And you know, I think that that signaled that this conversation is going to be, is clearly going to be a really important part of the coming election. And I think for a first time in a very long time, we're seeing, you know, the politics of unionization, and of wealth inequality really being at the heart of the conversation leading into this presidential election.

 Will, there's a lot of talk and you've been part of this discussion too about working class voters. From, you know, the period of Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt's presidency forward, there was a presumption in part because of the connections between the Democratic Party and some of the major unions that working class voters would be Democratic voters. Then the Trump movement seems to have reversed that, at least in some areas, perhaps particularly in the Midwest. How do you see that issue today? Are working class voters MAGA voters? Are they Trump voters? Are they Democratic voters? What would you say?

 Yeah. I mean, I think it's important to keep in mind who, you know, what we mean when we say working class voters. I mean, there's a very, I think a very small sort of narrow segment of working class voters who are overwhelmingly white and male, they're largely rural, who have, you know, who are, have become Trump voters. Many of those voters have been conservative voters for a very long time. I mean, they were, you know, going back to Reagan, even going back to before that, to Nixon.

 The working class is extremely diverse and the working class as a whole still is decidedly Democrat. But if you, if you look at a particular, you know, segments of workers, I thought it was actually interesting that, you know, Trump, spoke, gave his speech when he went to Detroit in Macomb County, which is the sort of classic place where, the sort of origin of the term Reagan Democrats. The sort of long-term Democrats who had turned to the Republican Party with the, in 1980 to vote for Reagan. So I think, you know, I think Trump's politics are often sort of framed in the context of the 1980s. Right. And he seems sort of stuck back there. But I think that was definitely part of his, thinking and going.

 Is it fair to say that the white male elements of the working class that we associate also with traditional unionism, the traditional people working in Henry Ford's plants and others, is that a smaller and smaller part of what you'd call the working class today?

 Well, in some respects it's always been a small part of the working class. They've been the working class that has been most visible. I see. But certainly, I mean, in, like, if you look at core industrial jobs, I mean, if you look at the pictures of UAW picket lines, you know, they look very different. It's lots of women, and lots of Black and Latino men. So in that sense, the sort of core sort of UAW, which has always been a racially diverse union, right? But it's become, its sort of core constituency has become more racially and gender diverse. Certainly gender diverse. Right. That makes sense.

 So Will, we always like to close our episodes by bringing together the enormous reservoir of information and knowledge that guests like you are sharing with us, and we're fortunate to be able to participate in that and to benefit from your knowledge. We like to bring together this historical knowledge with a forward-looking perspective. Based on this really deep and complex history of unions and workers in the United States that you have such a strong command of, what would you say to a President Biden, or it could be to a Republican presidential candidate, what would you say to them about how one could be both pro-worker and pro-growth? It seems too often we see these as dichotomous positions in our history, that you have to either be for growth or for unions. Of course, many periods of economic growth have been periods of union growth and union prosperity in our society as well. So how can we bring those two together looking forward today?

 Yeah. I mean, as you said, I would point to history. I mean, if you look at the post-war period when the UAW was at its most powerful, that was also the point in which the U.S. economy was growing more rapidly than it ever has, before or since. And so I think that, you know, again, it's correlation. But it raises the question as to whether there is a fundamental sort of tension between growth and, you know, better wages, better working conditions, sort of a more prosperous working class.

 I think also I'd point to, you know, a lot of that conversation goes around the sort of sense that sort of better wages for auto workers is going to be damaging for consumers, right? That, like, if we raise wages for auto workers, you know, it's gonna raise the cost of a car. We hear this in a lot, you know, if we pay fast food workers too much, it's gonna, you know, shut people out of McDonald's, right? And I think it's important to keep in mind that in each of those cases, the actual cost of labor is just a fraction of the cost of making any product. I think the cost of labor, the labor cost for making a car is around 10 to 15% of the total cost. So there's a lot of other factors going into that.

 It has to do with, you know, getting products from overseas and trade policies that affect that. It has to do with, with the compensation that goes to management, and also, more importantly, the compensation that goes to shareholders and out in profit. And I think it's important to, you know, to keep in mind that those all mean that we can actually, in many cases, it's beneficial for the broader economy to make sure that people have better wages. It stimulates consumption. And that there's certainly not a contradiction between improving conditions for workers and promoting a prosperous economy.

 Zachary, you spent the summer in Germany, and of course, Germany's a country with very strong unions. Do you agree with Will that Germany's an example of economic growth and worker protections going hand-in-hand?

 I think so, and I think one thing about this moment that maybe is a little optimistic is that I think the attention from both parties to the issue of economic equality, albeit from two different perspectives and one often much more about cultural resentment than actual economic policy, I think that should be a positive sign that most Americans or a large number of Americans recognize that the future of our economy is not going to be in the same places and organizations that we've relied on in the last decade or so that we have to look back to the past but also look forward to find new ways of thinking about wealth distribution and economic prosperity in our country.

 And Zachary, for young observers like yourself, are unions part of that story? Do you feel that your generation is giving more attention to unions than maybe the generation just before yours?

 I think so, and I think quite simply it's one of the places in American politics that is most exciting but also most accessible. I think it's a engaging, exciting, political movement as much as it is a very serious, critique of our economy.

 So Will, that was the last question, the really last question I had for you, which was for our listeners, particularly our younger listeners, if they're interested in learning more about unions as scholars and perhaps as activists, what are the best ways to get involved and to become knowledgeable of this subject matter?

 Yeah, well, I think you can, I'll do a plug for taking labor history classes. Sign up for my classes. Go to Minneapolis and sign up for Will's class. That's right. Well, you, you don't have to come here. You can in most universities there are classes, you know, related to labor history and labor studies more broadly.

 I do think that, you know, Zachary's right in terms of the accessibility. I mean, in a lot of cases young people, you know, learn about unions 'cause they go to work in a place where there's a union drive. And, you know, I've been, there's a Starbucks down the street from my house, and I've had a great time talking to people who are trying to build a union there. And they're, you know, they're all in their 20s, and they have, you know, they haven't been involved in unions before, but they're learning a lot about unions, and they're really interested in it. So that's a way that I think, you know, whether you work in a place like that or you, you know, you go to a business like Starbucks, I think you can talk to the people who work there about their experiences. And, you know, I think depending on where you live, there are a lot of union members who, you know, they don't wear their UAW hat everywhere, but they're, you know, they're around and they have experience with unions. So those are other ways you can learn about unions.

 Its such a great point. Even in a state like Texas, which traditionally doesn't have the same strong unionization as other parts of the country, teachers are part of a union, right? That's right. What I know your next project is on, Will, public service workers, right? That's right.  My wife, who's a city council member, she's actually part of AFSCME, which is the public sector union. And so there are actually a lot of people around who work with or are involved with unions. And, as you say, Will, I think that talking to them and getting a sense, positive and negative, of what their experience is, is important in informing ourselves when we're discussing these issues politically.  Yeah. I mean, it's true that, you know, if you're in high school, the chances are your teacher is a union member.

 Right. Right. Well, Will, thank you so much for sharing this excursion, a necessary excursion today into the history of unions and workers in American society. There's obviously much more you could say. You could fill, I think, 500 podcast episodes on this, but you've given us really a wonderful introduction to the topic, and I hope our listeners will dig in for more. So, thank you Professor Will Jones for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. It was great to talk to both of you. And thank you, Zachary, of course, for your, inspiring and really imaginative poem bringing us to the picket lines where we all could learn a lot. And thank you for doing that, Zachary. Thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

 This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio. And the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Haris Khodini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every week is special on our podcast, but this week is really, really special. We're joined by one of my best academic friends, one of my best friends as a whole, and one of the truly great scholars of race and democracy in our society. He's been on our podcast a number of times before. But today we are really privileged and fortunate to have Dr. Peniel Joseph with us to discuss his brand new book, which is just out this week, which I hope every one of our listeners will be reading in the next few days. It's called The Third Reconstruction. Peniel, thank you so much for joining us at such a busy time to talk about your new book.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeremi. Thank you.

Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair for Ethics at the LBJ School and the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of numerous seminal groundbreaking books that have shaped the way that we think about our history as a society.

He began his career writing some of the cutting-edge scholarship on the Black Power movement, then went on to write about Stokely Carmichael and Barack Obama, and now, of course, this really great book on The Third Reconstruction. I should also mention, I almost forgot, his wonderful and really groundbreaking book on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as The Sword and the Shield. And now, as I said, we have The Third Reconstruction. Before we go to our discussion with Dr. Peniel Joseph, we have, of course, Zachary Suri's scene- setting poem. What's your poem titled today, Zachary?

The Third Reconstruction

You're stealing his title. Come on, man. Shamelessly. Go ahead, Zachary. Let's hear it.

The Third Reconstruction. The first time I ever saw a voting booth, I voted for a black man. My father let me check the box in the basement gymnasium of a high school in Madison. I stood on his feet, probably at four years old, as I maneuvered the pen over the seemingly interminable names. As they fed the ballot into the great machine, I watched the digits advance on the little screen and held my breath.

The first time I ever heard the President of the United States, it was his voice on the radio. It was his face on the television screen. And when I first understood what it meant to be an American on a corduroy couch on January 20, 2009, they were his words.

The first time I ever saw my father cry, I was watching the same man from a pulpit in Charleston. I was hearing the same voice cry out the words of that ancient song. He was asking for grace. He was demanding our epiphany. He was saying that, in the end, they will always lose. And the first time I ever cried for a reason, it was his eulogy from another pulpit in Atlanta, singing the praises of John Lewis, a man I saw once in a giant auditorium from afar, just as, in the same auditorium, I saw that same man speaking to the stars.

And though I never understood his words, though what he was trying to say was never really clear, it made all the difference in the world, even if, in the end, they do sometimes win.

You're going to make me cry again, Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem is about how powerful it was for me, as a young person, born at the turn of the 21st century, to grow up with a black man as president, how important and how transformative that was. And I think that that's really the core of what we're talking about here in the Third Reconstruction. Absolutely, the promise and the peril of that. Indeed.

So, Peniel, one of the things I love about your new book, and what's unique, I think, to this book from the rest of your work, is this book, you're really quite personal. You talk about your mom, and you talk about what Obama meant to you pretty early on in this book.

Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, as a fellow writer, the older we get, the more introspective we get. And we're also trying to flex different muscles. So I think putting in memoir and writing in a different way was really exciting, in addition to the historical and the political analysis. So I'm really excited about the book in that way.

You have a really powerful statement. You have a lot of powerful statements in here, but one that jumped out at me pretty early on, around page 23. You say, American history, since the end of the Civil War, has involved a struggle between Reconstructionists and Redemptionists for the nation's very soul. The contrasting approaches of these two perspectives have shaped the nation's entire history, not only on matters connected directly to race, but also in how Americans have defined citizenship, which is a key topic in your book, the national identity and democracy since 1865. What do you mean by that really powerful sentence?

Well, no, thank you. I think it's like me and you have had these conversations for really two decades now, and I think the further you become a student of history, the past, the more it enables you to understand the present. So I think when we think about Barack Obama, and Zachary's great poem was just about Obama, but also people like John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer, and then we think about the movement for Black lives, and then we think about Trump and MAGA and the Tea Partiers and the birther movements. The way in which I argue in the book that we should make sense of January 6th, both the white riot, but also the hearings and the debates about it.

Justice Ketanji, you know, Jackson. How do we make sense of all the things that are happening around us? And I think Reconstructionists versus Redemptionism is really what has framed American democracy from 1865 to the present. And I think there are times when Redemptionists win and are winning that debate, and there are times when Reconstructionists are winning that debate. And I think Obama was so important, and I argue that he's the first hinge point for the third Reconstruction, because you look at how that affected Zachary, how that affected all of us.

It affected generations of people, both in the United States and globally, because it made people think that we could be a multiracial democracy for real. You know, France doesn't have a Black prime minister. The UK doesn't seem like it'll ever get a Black prime minister or even a South Asian prime minister, whether they're conservative, whether they're Tories or liberals, right? It's a real big deal.

And so I think that when we see and frame it, Reconstructionists versus Redemptionists, we're able to say a lot about not just race, but about American democracy, big government versus small government, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and like you were alluding to, really citizenship and dignity, and how is that going to look, even in Austin, Texas, our own beloved Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin, because even in liberal and progressive states and cities and paradigms, you have Redemptionist inclinations that frame when we discuss school choice or we discuss climate change and environmental racism, segregation, when we discuss political power or wealth and equity.

So I think it gives us a good conceptual tool to understand why Charlottesville, but also why Obama, right? And Obama in Richmond, Virginia, and how did that happen? In the Capitol of the Confederacy and the night before the election, he's in tears and there's over 100,000 people there, predominantly white. And so people would say, well, wow, that's amazing. How did that happen? And I think this gives us a framework in the history that's told here, a way for us to conceptualize both the past, the present, and hopefully the future.

Right, and you see a cycle, right? I mean, in some ways, you're doing your own cycles of American history here, right? You see these cycling through these moments of Reconstructionist promise, the first one after the Civil War, the second one after the Second World War, reaching its pinnacle with the Civil Rights Movement and the third with Obama. And you see also in each case a pushback or a backlash, as you call it, right?

Absolutely. I think we are in these unhappy patterns of history and we can see it in all three periods of Reconstruction. I think the reason why we usually focus more in the second Reconstruction than the first is because it provides us with a context to get to Barack Obama. And like I say in the book, it's not just Barack Obama, though. That second Reconstruction really configures a social justice, racial justice consensus for the next 50 years. And that's how we get Hillary Clinton. That's how we get John Ossoff. That's how we get really the most wealth and power and equity that people of color have ever had, and women, in the whole history of the republic. It's from 63 to 2013.

When you look at our republic before then, you don't have as many people of color and women who are elected officials, who are businesspersons and entrepreneurs, who are successful, fabulously successful, who are able to create wealth, who are able to become leaders in so many different industries, not just acting and pop culture and sports, but in the sciences and at universities. I mean, me and you are examples of that. So I think that period is hugely, hugely important.

And it makes sense that during that period, people thought that Obama's victory was sort of going to be a capstone. But as we see, and I try to delineate in the book, especially when I talk about Obama and BLM and sort of that creative tension, Obama was really not just the end of one era, but it was also the beginning of a new period of reconstruction where you were going to see that kind of backlash against everything that Obama represented, because he represents so much.

You know, I think it's really interesting the way you describe the sort of cyclical nature of American history and of this reconstruction at a societal level. But how do we understand it at the personal level? How can people who voted for Obama in 2008, 2012, and then turn around and vote for Trump in 2016, how do we understand that phenomenon, that those two conflicting ideas can perhaps exist in the same person?

Well, I think that those two ideals can exist in the same person, but part of it is how we tell the narrative and the story about Barack Obama and also American history. I think one of the most powerful aspects of all three periods of Reconstruction is the narrative power, the narrative power, both by Redemptionists and Reconstructionists. So in the first Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is the Lost Cause Redemptionist narrative, over and above the Emancipationist narrative, the abolition democracy narrative of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.

In the second Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is going to be King's narrative, the I Have a Dream narrative, John F. Kennedy's narrative, the narrative that it's a moral issue of civil rights and human and political rights.

And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.

And those protesters shouted, the whole world is watching. And they were really mocking the United States. They were mocking the notion of American democracy because in certain ways, when we look at 1968 in Chicago, they were saying the whole world is watching that American democracy is a sham. We are being beaten and brutalized, including there were grandmothers being beaten by the Chicago PD in the summer of 1968. You flash, you fast forward 40 years later and it's a peaceful demonstration with really a couple of hundred thousand people in Grant Park celebrating a president-elect who many thought was an impossible dream. That's really, really powerful. So that narrative seems to be winning.

And then we see the birther narrative, the Tea Party narrative, and really the Trumpian MAGA narrative is really the first narrative, I would argue, since the Reconstruction era. So I think Trump and MAGA, the narrative is even more powerful than George Wallace. t's more powerful than Reaganism. It's more powerful than Goldwaterism, right? Because it goes back to that 19th century, that idea that Black success was going to repudiate white privilege and white supremacy and had to be stopped at all costs. So we are locked into this narrative war.

And then BLM, Black Lives Matter, has another narrative. And their narrative is a narrative of really radical and revolutionary abolition democracy. And what Du Bois meant by abolition democracy was this idea of a world after slavery that was free of systems and institutions of punishment and marginalization and death and anti-Blackness. And that was going to be a multiracial democracy where all people were going to have positive outcomes and aspirations and opportunities. And I think when we look at those different narratives, the 1619 Project versus the assaults on so-called critical race theory, we see how important the power of storytelling is.

So I still think Barack Obama, hugely important. I admire him a whole lot. But what I show in the book, the narrative that Black Lives Matter was articulating was really equally important because it was a narrative of Black dignity from below, people who perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama never would have met in their lives, people who are incarcerated, people who are on the margins, people who are disabled mentally and physically, and that those people mattered and that the president didn't understand their suffering at the level that the people who were experiencing it understood.

And that's why I have a part in the book where in December of 2014, he has a meeting, Obama has a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists in the White House, and they're going back and forth on change. And I say that Obama at that meeting never could have imagined a Donald Trump presidency. And the juxtaposition is that the Black Lives Matter activists, the Ferguson activists, absolutely could. And they were warning him in that meeting, this is coming, this is coming. And he absolutely refused to believe it until 2020.

One thing I show is that the optimism of 2004 and 2008 is replaced in 2020 with one of the darkest speeches Obama ever gives during COVID at the Democratic National Convention, which is, of course, on Zoom at that point because nobody can be there in person. And Obama says that democracy is in peril. This is the person who's absolutely the most optimistic leader of any race of his entire generation. He switches because he sees the coming storm that I think BLM had already witnessed.

It's a part of your book that I think jumps out, and I have those pages marked up as I mark things up when I enjoy reading them. Right before that section, Peniel, you talk about Barack Obama as the first president to visit a federal prison, right? And I didn't know that, actually. So at some level, he is trying to reach out, right? And part of what I feel is underlying your argument in your book is that there's a certain desire to connect, but yet there's also an exceptionalist narrative that he carries and perhaps a naivete about the pushback, the backlash. And your book is basically reminding us that every moment of progress seems to spark this backlash. What should Obama have been doing that he wasn't doing but that he could have done if he had known the history you outlined so well here?

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and I think me and you agree with this, Jeremi, is that we need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but that doesn't mean we don't need a positive story of America, right? And I'll say that again. We need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but it does not mean we don't need a positive, consensus-building, aspirational story of America. Martin Luther King Jr. called it building the beloved community.

So what I mean by that specifically is that, you know, Obama needed to tell us about not just the beauty but the bitter parts. And I know that's not great for campaigns. I completely understand that that's not great for campaigns, but it's super important for us to have a narrative that can talk about histories of racial slavery, anti-Semitism, discrimination against women, queer folks, Latinx folks, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, disabled people, just the whole gamut, but also talk simultaneously about the activists of all colors, of all backgrounds, who've pushed back against that, who've dreamed of a different, reconstructed America, a multiracial democracy, an abolition democracy, and have pushed all of us into getting Labor Day, Memorial Day, rights for veterans, rights for poor people, who want to end homelessness and racism and anti- Semitism, who really want to build that beloved community and make this country a shining city on the hill.

So I think that that story is what's so necessary. That's why I'm a supporter of the 1619 Project. I think, like anything, it can be criticized. Nothing is completely perfect, but I like the idea of this new origin story for American history that looks at the good, the bad, the ugly, but also the beautiful parts of American history. And once we provide people those parts of American history, it makes them stronger. It makes our democracy more stronger. It makes people more patriotic. It makes people love the country more once they understand all that we've been through, and it makes us try to change, as James Baldwin says, to achieve our country for the first time. So Obama didn't give us all the benefit of the doubt. I think we're all stronger than politicians ever assume. I think we're smarter than politicians ever assume. I think we're more resilient, and we have more empathy and compassion than politicians ever assume.

So you could talk about the bad that happened during the first, second, and third Reconstructions, but like I do in this book, I also talk about the good and the promise and the potential. That's the whole thing. So what we have to say is that, yes, we can be the greatest country ever on the face of the earth. We're not quite there yet, but there's many people who have strived to make us that golden, that shining city on a hill. And I think Obama starts to do that really starting in 2015 when he's not facing any elections. He starts to do more of that.

A great speech on history at Selma, a great speech towards the NAACP about mass incarceration. He starts to knit together a much more humanistic story where he's more comfortable talking about the flaws of the country, because if we just keep on talking about American exceptionalism, we can't explain the gun violence in the country, the racism, the police brutality, by saying all we're doing is constantly perfecting our union. It's a bedtime story, but it doesn't mean we can't have this positive feeling and this love of country, but we have to love the country enough to criticize the country.

Right. I agree 100%. I think that opens up another really important question that you raise so well in the book, which is, and it's an issue through each of the three reconstructions. How do you get people who have had power to feel comfortable sharing it with those who have not had power? And you make the point in the book very well that there's a through line, you call it, from Nixon to Reagan to Trump, of those who have had privilege, often racial privilege, but not exclusively, it could be economic privilege that's not always racial, hoarding that privilege, not wanting to share it. How do you craft a narrative along the lines you just described that makes people comfortable sharing their privilege, Peniel?

Yeah, I think that's the test and the challenge. And I think part of it is laying bare the most important parts of our history. I think you can see why from a redemptionist perspective, there's been such an assault, not just on the critical 19 project, but calling any kind of effort to have a more complex, truthful American history, critical race theory that is somehow anti-white and going to brainwash our kids. You could see that from a redemptionist perspective because stories are really the most important part of all of this. And I know you agree, the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our families, the way in which I tell my daughter, you tell Zach, it's so important, the stories we tell.

So the 1619 project and the way in which so many hundreds of thousands of teachers were using that and continue to in certain states that are allowed to use it, that was important because I think when you tell a deeper story of American history, it means that the newer generations, people who are the sons and daughters of those who are in power are going to be much more receptive to the idea of power sharing. Because yeah, we can legislate this, we can come up with policies, we can come up with nonprofits, but then at the end of the day, the institutions are us. We are the institutions, right? And so we have to have a baseline understanding of American history.

I think these three reconstruction periods are really the most important parts of our history. So I think the more in which we're able to craft a narrative that's inclusive, a narrative that lets people see themselves in that story, but also understand what happened with Tulsa, what happened with Japanese internment camps, what happened with the long and bitter history of anti-Semitism here in this country, what happened with what we've done to our Latinx, our Hispanic population, what we've done to indigenous folks, what we've done to AAPI folks and queer folks, the better off they're able to understand how we can build that beloved community and really the sacrifices that are going to be called for. Because we've embedded a system of unequal power relations and when people hear this word equity, they become frightened because they think their kid's not going to get to the right school and have the right outcomes, or they're not going to any longer have access to the same neighborhoods.

But power sharing means not that you're going to be diminished, but everyone is going to be, or more people are going to be elevated. And I think part of that, the central part of this is the story we tell about America and us and our place within America.

I want to be careful how I phrase this, but how do we tell that unified American history? How do we come to one narrative of our country that acknowledges the many flaws, the many, I don't want to say mistakes, but tragedies in our history without splitting us into people groups, if you understand what I mean? How do we use this difficult reckoning with our history to create unity and not division?

And Zachary, before Peniel answers, maybe you should also share your struggles at your school over these issues, struggles you've had in diversity council and elsewhere to get people to come together around these issues.

I think what I would just say is I think there's an unwillingness sometimes among certain people to recognize the complexity of these issues, that it's not as simple as splitting people into people groups or to say that these are the oppressors and these are the oppressed. It has to be a nuanced understanding. And I guess my question is, how do we have that nuanced understanding, but also come to some sort of consensus about our history and what we need to do moving forward?

Well, I think that's a great question. I think, one, we have to be willing to speak truth to power, because there are structures and systems that have oppressed folks and continue to. I think, two, we have to learn and listen to each other's stories. So I make it a point of reading, obviously, not just African-American history, but histories of, we see the late Barbara Aaron Reich just passed away, histories of white working class, histories, think about Tommy Orange and They Are There, history of Native people, histories. I read Julian Zeller's great book on Rabbi Heschel, histories of Jewish Americans, just histories of the whole multiracial component of the United States.

It's important to read that. But we also have to acknowledge that the core feature of American democracy, one that I think has been a stain on our democracy, but also has been unifying, especially for redemptionists, and in certain contexts for reconstructionists, is really anti-Blackness.

And so anti-Blackness is what creates the racial caste system that Isabel Wilkerson and others talk and write about, that hierarchy. You think about the caste system as a ladder with Blackness at the bottom, whiteness at the top, and other racial groups in between trying to figure and oscillate between both of those poles where they fit in. So I would say, Zachary, there are oppressors. It doesn't mean that somehow all white people are that. But systemically, there is a system of white supremacy in the country that goes back to the founding of the country. But in 1865, we actually had a way out through Freedman's Bureau, reparations, through land and equity for African-American farmers. We actually had a way out of white supremacy.

And what we see through the history of the Third Reconstruction, the First Reconstruction, and I write about it in this book, is that it was violently repudiated. It wasn't just policies and Black codes and convict lease system. This was organized systematic terror. When we think about January 6th, 2021, January 19th of 1871 is when Congress launches the official investigation into Klan violence. And by March of 1871, there's going to be public congressional hearings that lead to the enforcement acts during the Grant Administration.

So this is big news. Thaddeus Stevens is saying colored people are being slaughtered by the thousands in the South. That's what Thaddeus Stevens is saying, the venerable congressman from Pennsylvania, who is one of the stalwart abolitionists and reconstructionists of the time period. So we have to be courageous enough to call that out, especially now because we're facing a backlash that really happened very quickly after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and has really been congealed in legislation, but a backlash against that kind of truth-telling. But we have to listen and learn about each other's stories, Zachary. I would say that's the biggest thing.

We have to listen and learn about each other's stories. And sometimes people will say, well, my group suffered, your group suffered. The organizing principle of the suffering actually has been anti-Black. And it's important for us to understand that. That's why the struggle for Black equality and Black citizenship and dignity is a universal struggle. It's just universal and Black, because if we get that, no other group is going to somehow be isolated and suffer because anti-Blackness has been the organizing principle of the racial caste system, both in the United States and globally.

So part of it is courage. Part of it is listening. Part of it is going to be struggle. It's going to be struggle because it takes White people who are in solidarity with anti-racist movements to really help us push forward. And in certain ways, I think 2020, one of the most optimistic aspects was the number of White people who were out in the streets alongside of Black and other people of color during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer. And we had never seen that level of outrage or commitment in either of the first two periods of Reconstruction. So that still gives me hope.

I wonder, though, how do you approach an issue like since it's Labor Day, labor unions, right? Where you have a structure that was in some cases created to try and keep Black people and people of color out of the workforce, but at the same time, in other cases, was created to help Black people attain greater rights in the workplace. I guess my question is, if we're looking at every issue of American history through this understanding of anti-Blackness in America, how do we avoid overlooking the economic, the otherwise social and political divisions that also shape our country and an issue like organized labor?

I think we look at it simultaneously. I think labor is a great example because I talk about SCIU 1199. My mom was part of a labor union for 40 years at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. So that's very near and dear. In a lot of ways, my politics were shaped by labor and labor movements and reading about labor movements.

Labor is a complicated issue. On the one hand, when we think about labor movements, a lot of times we always leave out enslaved Black people as part of labor movements. I think the work of Robin Kelly and Saidiya Hartman and other scholars have really gone a long way towards rectifying that. So we've got to think about labor capaciously. Then at the same time, we've got to be truthful about both labor that has been anti-racist, even in the 19th century.

You think about the Wobblies, the international workers of the world versus the Knights of Labor. You think about the CIO versus the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations versus the American Federation of Labor. You think about Eugene Debs' socialism versus Hubert Harrison's socialism. So we have to be very cognizant of the pitfalls of just saying, oh, we can have Black, white, unite, fight kind of slogans. But one thing I'll say, Zach, when we think about contemporary labor, it's become much more multicultural and much more multiracial. Bus riders unions, justice for janitors.

1199, SCIU is the most multiracial union in the country. So we have to tell that complete story. The story of Black people forced to be so-called scabs because they weren't allowed in labor unions, but also the story of utilizing the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, DRUM, and the different revolutionary union movements coming out of Detroit and wildcat striking against the UAW so that Black folks could be foremen and have dignity on the shift line and on the worker line.

So we have to tell that whole story. And I think telling that whole story now, when we think about labor and so many immigrant laborers, in terms of we've got 11 million undocumented in the country. So many of those are Spanish speakers, but there's also from West Africa, from the Caribbean. And how does that shape the labor movement, especially household labor? Most of us, me and your dad are generation X. If we live long lives, we're going to have Caribbean and Spanish- speaking home health aid workers, because unless you're somehow healthy until you're 100 years old, you don't need anybody. I mean, maybe that could be your dad. He's going to be fine, right? I hope so. I hope so.

Most people, millions across the United States are going to need them. So I would say this requires courage because yeah, you have to remember Dr. King pissed people off. Obama pissed people off. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker. You're not always going to get the standing ovation when you tell people what they need to hear instead of telling people what they want to hear.

But one of the things King says in his speech, a drum major, for the drum major speech is that he's not interested in molding some kind of phony consensus. He says, I'm a builder and I'm going to shape consensus through my organizing. That means you tell people what they don't want to hear. So part of this, it requires courage on us, really. And again, it requires a lot of study and listening and patience because yes, the story is complicated, but there are some really robust truths that we should all be willing to articulate. And I think at our best, we do.

I think you think about the president and the student loan forgiveness and when people were pushing back, the White House was tweeting out all the PPE loans that conservatives had gotten from the government and not paid back. Millions and millions of dollars, but they were upset over these 10 and $20,000 loan forgiveness. So we have to be ready to speak truth to power.

And I think in certain ways, because of the times we live in, sometimes people think it's going to be easy. Like you saw George Floyd, you saw the millions of people in the streets, but that didn't translate into the policy at the federal level that a lot of people thought or assumed. So there's been no George Floyd Justice and Policing Act passed. There's been no For the People Expansion of Voting Rights Act passed. There's been no John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act passed. So part of it is we have to be in it for the long haul, Zachary. We have to be in it for the long haul because the backlash is right here. It's thick. It's among all of us, especially us.

We live right here in Texas, even at the University of Texas. The backlash is here. And this is the point in our history where you can see it's a time for choosing and actually living up to your commitments and principles becomes the hardest thing to do in this time rather than in 2020 or 2008. It's easy in 2008. It's very easy to say you're on the right side of history. You've got 69 million people backing you up. It's harder when you're in that minority, and we have to, again, be principled enough to live up to our commitments at this point.

So, Peniel, I want to close by quoting part of your conclusion, and then I want to ask you to reflect, if you would, for a few minutes at our closing on your mom because I think she's sort of the angel hovering over this book in many ways. I've known you for so long, but I've learned so much about you reading this book. There's a wonderful photo of you and your mom. Also, little tiny Peniel with his mom. I love that photo, by the way. Worth the price of the book just for that. But you write at the end beautifully

I believe that the struggle for black dignity and citizenship can be achieved in our lifetime, but it must continue even if it takes several lifetimes. And then at the very end, you say today in the midst of another period of reconstruction, which you've described so well for us here, we have a grave political and moral choice to make. I choose hope. It seems to me a lot of that hope comes from your mom. And I'd like to close, if you're willing, just reflecting on her influence on your analysis and all that you've shared with us today.

No, thank you, Jeremi. Yes, my mother, Germaine Joseph, 83 years young, still lives in Queens, New York. Really my biggest teacher and the most influential person on me intellectually, politically, morally, the whole works.

Haitian immigrant who came to United States in 1965, worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for 40 years. I was on my first picket lines in elementary school and really somebody who encouraged me and my older brother to read and to write and to think, but also to be active, to be active citizens. If you believed in something, she was fine with you going out and demonstrating that belief.

Certainly, she wanted you to be careful, but to demonstrate that belief. And so she's been hugely, hugely important. The history of Haiti and the Haitian revolution, which I discuss and its connection to Black American history, the connection between Black feminism and these different social movements, but also just American politics and history. She's a big fan and reader of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy alongside of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Really loved reading books on not just the Haitian revolution, but Theodore Roosevelt and the American presidents. I remember getting my first book on the American presidents and kindergarten with her from the local public library in Queens. And that was a book that we used to always check out, check back in, check out, check back in.

And the final president there, initially when we checked it out was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was the president. Reagan had not been elected yet. And so they had Jimmy Carter's 1977 and they had a dash. And I remember that book, right? And that's how I memorized the first 39 presidents of the United States. So she's been my biggest champion, but also my biggest teacher.

And she, again, throughout the book, I look at these different Black activists, a lot of them Black women like Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, but she's been my biggest example. And she does provide me a measure, a large measure of hope. And hope really is a discipline. It's a faith and it's a discipline and it's a belief. And it's a discipline based on our practice. I think sometimes people who don't feel hopeful are really not out there in the world trying to help and do good.

I think the more you're out there in the world trying to help and do good, the more hopeful you feel because you're not just reacting and sitting back on the couch and woe is me and you're actually rolling up your sleeves and getting into the arena. And it's important for us to do that. And I think my mom did that just through example of going to work every day, very, very long commute from Queens Village to East 92nd Street every day, sometimes six days a week, like I write.

So it's really, you know, our parents worked harder than us. And as you know that better than me, Jeremy, and, you know, it's really important for us, all of us who are so privileged to be able to read and write and study, to remember that there were generations who absolutely worked harder than us, suffered more than us, right. And were more resilient than us.

So the only thing we can do is try to match their courage and that resilience because we have given, been given so much privilege in our lives, right. In our lives, we're never going to work as hard as they did. We're never going to have to go to another country, learn another language on the fly like they did, right. I mean, this is extraordinary. So they're the role model. So really we have no right to complain personally. And I don't mean politically, but I mean personally. So the example that she set and the discipline that she exemplified is really something that I, that lives within me to this day. And so the book is really dedicated to her and, and, and these, these Black and really other women, all women who've, who've shaped so many of us men who've been fortunate enough to be at their, at their, the stool by their feet, just taking in their wisdom.

Yeah. Well, as you know, Peniel, in the Jewish faith, we, we have a phrase, Lador Vador, which means from generation to generation. And, and I think that captures your book so well, your book is a mitzvah because it, it captures the importance of one generation teaching another.

And we go through different periods of reconstruction because sometimes we forget and to remember and to learn the history and to keep building on that history and improving ourselves and pushing harder in creative and hopeful ways. I think your book is a chronicle and analysis of that, but also an inspiration from your mom for us to do more of that. I encourage all of our listeners to pick up the book, The Third Reconstruction. It's now available and in every bookshop, go pick it up, go find an independent bookstore to buy it from. Peniel, thank you for joining us today.

Oh, thank you. Thanks to you and Zachary. Thanks for reading it. And I really enjoyed this conversation.

So did we. Zachary, thank you for your really tear-jerking poem and for your insights and for your bringing these issues every day into the discussions you're having with young people, which is so important. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every week is special on our podcast, but this week is really, really special. We're joined by one of my best academic friends, one of my best friends as a whole, and one of the truly great scholars of race and democracy in our society. He's been on our podcast a number of times before. But today we are really privileged and fortunate to have Dr. Peniel Joseph with us to discuss his brand new book, which is just out this week, which I hope every one of our listeners will be reading in the next few days. It's called The Third Reconstruction. Peniel, thank you so much for joining us at such a busy time to talk about your new book.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeremi. Thank you.

Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair for Ethics at the LBJ School and the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of numerous seminal groundbreaking books that have shaped the way that we think about our history as a society.

He began his career writing some of the cutting-edge scholarship on the Black Power movement, then went on to write about Stokely Carmichael and Barack Obama, and now, of course, this really great book on The Third Reconstruction. I should also mention, I almost forgot, his wonderful and really groundbreaking book on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as The Sword and the Shield. And now, as I said, we have The Third Reconstruction. Before we go to our discussion with Dr. Peniel Joseph, we have, of course, Zachary Suri's scene- setting poem. What's your poem titled today, Zachary?

The Third Reconstruction

You're stealing his title. Come on, man. Shamelessly. Go ahead, Zachary. Let's hear it.

The Third Reconstruction. The first time I ever saw a voting booth, I voted for a black man. My father let me check the box in the basement gymnasium of a high school in Madison. I stood on his feet, probably at four years old, as I maneuvered the pen over the seemingly interminable names. As they fed the ballot into the great machine, I watched the digits advance on the little screen and held my breath.

The first time I ever heard the President of the United States, it was his voice on the radio. It was his face on the television screen. And when I first understood what it meant to be an American on a corduroy couch on January 20, 2009, they were his words.

The first time I ever saw my father cry, I was watching the same man from a pulpit in Charleston. I was hearing the same voice cry out the words of that ancient song. He was asking for grace. He was demanding our epiphany. He was saying that, in the end, they will always lose. And the first time I ever cried for a reason, it was his eulogy from another pulpit in Atlanta, singing the praises of John Lewis, a man I saw once in a giant auditorium from afar, just as, in the same auditorium, I saw that same man speaking to the stars.

And though I never understood his words, though what he was trying to say was never really clear, it made all the difference in the world, even if, in the end, they do sometimes win.

You're going to make me cry again, Zachary. What is your poem about?

My poem is about how powerful it was for me, as a young person, born at the turn of the 21st century, to grow up with a black man as president, how important and how transformative that was. And I think that that's really the core of what we're talking about here in the Third Reconstruction. Absolutely, the promise and the peril of that. Indeed.

So, Peniel, one of the things I love about your new book, and what's unique, I think, to this book from the rest of your work, is this book, you're really quite personal. You talk about your mom, and you talk about what Obama meant to you pretty early on in this book.

Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, as a fellow writer, the older we get, the more introspective we get. And we're also trying to flex different muscles. So I think putting in memoir and writing in a different way was really exciting, in addition to the historical and the political analysis. So I'm really excited about the book in that way.

You have a really powerful statement. You have a lot of powerful statements in here, but one that jumped out at me pretty early on, around page 23. You say, American history, since the end of the Civil War, has involved a struggle between Reconstructionists and Redemptionists for the nation's very soul. The contrasting approaches of these two perspectives have shaped the nation's entire history, not only on matters connected directly to race, but also in how Americans have defined citizenship, which is a key topic in your book, the national identity and democracy since 1865. What do you mean by that really powerful sentence?

Well, no, thank you. I think it's like me and you have had these conversations for really two decades now, and I think the further you become a student of history, the past, the more it enables you to understand the present. So I think when we think about Barack Obama, and Zachary's great poem was just about Obama, but also people like John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer, and then we think about the movement for Black lives, and then we think about Trump and MAGA and the Tea Partiers and the birther movements. The way in which I argue in the book that we should make sense of January 6th, both the white riot, but also the hearings and the debates about it.

Justice Ketanji, you know, Jackson. How do we make sense of all the things that are happening around us? And I think Reconstructionists versus Redemptionism is really what has framed American democracy from 1865 to the present. And I think there are times when Redemptionists win and are winning that debate, and there are times when Reconstructionists are winning that debate. And I think Obama was so important, and I argue that he's the first hinge point for the third Reconstruction, because you look at how that affected Zachary, how that affected all of us.

It affected generations of people, both in the United States and globally, because it made people think that we could be a multiracial democracy for real. You know, France doesn't have a Black prime minister. The UK doesn't seem like it'll ever get a Black prime minister or even a South Asian prime minister, whether they're conservative, whether they're Tories or liberals, right? It's a real big deal.

And so I think that when we see and frame it, Reconstructionists versus Redemptionists, we're able to say a lot about not just race, but about American democracy, big government versus small government, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and like you were alluding to, really citizenship and dignity, and how is that going to look, even in Austin, Texas, our own beloved Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin, because even in liberal and progressive states and cities and paradigms, you have Redemptionist inclinations that frame when we discuss school choice or we discuss climate change and environmental racism, segregation, when we discuss political power or wealth and equity.

So I think it gives us a good conceptual tool to understand why Charlottesville, but also why Obama, right? And Obama in Richmond, Virginia, and how did that happen? In the Capitol of the Confederacy and the night before the election, he's in tears and there's over 100,000 people there, predominantly white. And so people would say, well, wow, that's amazing. How did that happen? And I think this gives us a framework in the history that's told here, a way for us to conceptualize both the past, the present, and hopefully the future.

Right, and you see a cycle, right? I mean, in some ways, you're doing your own cycles of American history here, right? You see these cycling through these moments of Reconstructionist promise, the first one after the Civil War, the second one after the Second World War, reaching its pinnacle with the Civil Rights Movement and the third with Obama. And you see also in each case a pushback or a backlash, as you call it, right?

Absolutely. I think we are in these unhappy patterns of history and we can see it in all three periods of Reconstruction. I think the reason why we usually focus more in the second Reconstruction than the first is because it provides us with a context to get to Barack Obama. And like I say in the book, it's not just Barack Obama, though. That second Reconstruction really configures a social justice, racial justice consensus for the next 50 years. And that's how we get Hillary Clinton. That's how we get John Ossoff. That's how we get really the most wealth and power and equity that people of color have ever had, and women, in the whole history of the republic. It's from 63 to 2013.

When you look at our republic before then, you don't have as many people of color and women who are elected officials, who are businesspersons and entrepreneurs, who are successful, fabulously successful, who are able to create wealth, who are able to become leaders in so many different industries, not just acting and pop culture and sports, but in the sciences and at universities. I mean, me and you are examples of that. So I think that period is hugely, hugely important.

And it makes sense that during that period, people thought that Obama's victory was sort of going to be a capstone. But as we see, and I try to delineate in the book, especially when I talk about Obama and BLM and sort of that creative tension, Obama was really not just the end of one era, but it was also the beginning of a new period of reconstruction where you were going to see that kind of backlash against everything that Obama represented, because he represents so much.

You know, I think it's really interesting the way you describe the sort of cyclical nature of American history and of this reconstruction at a societal level. But how do we understand it at the personal level? How can people who voted for Obama in 2008, 2012, and then turn around and vote for Trump in 2016, how do we understand that phenomenon, that those two conflicting ideas can perhaps exist in the same person?

Well, I think that those two ideals can exist in the same person, but part of it is how we tell the narrative and the story about Barack Obama and also American history. I think one of the most powerful aspects of all three periods of Reconstruction is the narrative power, the narrative power, both by Redemptionists and Reconstructionists. So in the first Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is the Lost Cause Redemptionist narrative, over and above the Emancipationist narrative, the abolition democracy narrative of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.

In the second Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is going to be King's narrative, the I Have a Dream narrative, John F. Kennedy's narrative, the narrative that it's a moral issue of civil rights and human and political rights.

And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.

And those protesters shouted, the whole world is watching. And they were really mocking the United States. They were mocking the notion of American democracy because in certain ways, when we look at 1968 in Chicago, they were saying the whole world is watching that American democracy is a sham. We are being beaten and brutalized, including there were grandmothers being beaten by the Chicago PD in the summer of 1968. You flash, you fast forward 40 years later and it's a peaceful demonstration with really a couple of hundred thousand people in Grant Park celebrating a president-elect who many thought was an impossible dream. That's really, really powerful. So that narrative seems to be winning.

And then we see the birther narrative, the Tea Party narrative, and really the Trumpian MAGA narrative is really the first narrative, I would argue, since the Reconstruction era. So I think Trump and MAGA, the narrative is even more powerful than George Wallace. t's more powerful than Reaganism. It's more powerful than Goldwaterism, right? Because it goes back to that 19th century, that idea that Black success was going to repudiate white privilege and white supremacy and had to be stopped at all costs. So we are locked into this narrative war.

And then BLM, Black Lives Matter, has another narrative. And their narrative is a narrative of really radical and revolutionary abolition democracy. And what Du Bois meant by abolition democracy was this idea of a world after slavery that was free of systems and institutions of punishment and marginalization and death and anti-Blackness. And that was going to be a multiracial democracy where all people were going to have positive outcomes and aspirations and opportunities. And I think when we look at those different narratives, the 1619 Project versus the assaults on so-called critical race theory, we see how important the power of storytelling is.

So I still think Barack Obama, hugely important. I admire him a whole lot. But what I show in the book, the narrative that Black Lives Matter was articulating was really equally important because it was a narrative of Black dignity from below, people who perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama never would have met in their lives, people who are incarcerated, people who are on the margins, people who are disabled mentally and physically, and that those people mattered and that the president didn't understand their suffering at the level that the people who were experiencing it understood.

And that's why I have a part in the book where in December of 2014, he has a meeting, Obama has a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists in the White House, and they're going back and forth on change. And I say that Obama at that meeting never could have imagined a Donald Trump presidency. And the juxtaposition is that the Black Lives Matter activists, the Ferguson activists, absolutely could. And they were warning him in that meeting, this is coming, this is coming. And he absolutely refused to believe it until 2020.

One thing I show is that the optimism of 2004 and 2008 is replaced in 2020 with one of the darkest speeches Obama ever gives during COVID at the Democratic National Convention, which is, of course, on Zoom at that point because nobody can be there in person. And Obama says that democracy is in peril. This is the person who's absolutely the most optimistic leader of any race of his entire generation. He switches because he sees the coming storm that I think BLM had already witnessed.

It's a part of your book that I think jumps out, and I have those pages marked up as I mark things up when I enjoy reading them. Right before that section, Peniel, you talk about Barack Obama as the first president to visit a federal prison, right? And I didn't know that, actually. So at some level, he is trying to reach out, right? And part of what I feel is underlying your argument in your book is that there's a certain desire to connect, but yet there's also an exceptionalist narrative that he carries and perhaps a naivete about the pushback, the backlash. And your book is basically reminding us that every moment of progress seems to spark this backlash. What should Obama have been doing that he wasn't doing but that he could have done if he had known the history you outlined so well here?

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and I think me and you agree with this, Jeremi, is that we need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but that doesn't mean we don't need a positive story of America, right? And I'll say that again. We need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but it does not mean we don't need a positive, consensus-building, aspirational story of America. Martin Luther King Jr. called it building the beloved community.

So what I mean by that specifically is that, you know, Obama needed to tell us about not just the beauty but the bitter parts. And I know that's not great for campaigns. I completely understand that that's not great for campaigns, but it's super important for us to have a narrative that can talk about histories of racial slavery, anti-Semitism, discrimination against women, queer folks, Latinx folks, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, disabled people, just the whole gamut, but also talk simultaneously about the activists of all colors, of all backgrounds, who've pushed back against that, who've dreamed of a different, reconstructed America, a multiracial democracy, an abolition democracy, and have pushed all of us into getting Labor Day, Memorial Day, rights for veterans, rights for poor people, who want to end homelessness and racism and anti- Semitism, who really want to build that beloved community and make this country a shining city on the hill.

So I think that that story is what's so necessary. That's why I'm a supporter of the 1619 Project. I think, like anything, it can be criticized. Nothing is completely perfect, but I like the idea of this new origin story for American history that looks at the good, the bad, the ugly, but also the beautiful parts of American history. And once we provide people those parts of American history, it makes them stronger. It makes our democracy more stronger. It makes people more patriotic. It makes people love the country more once they understand all that we've been through, and it makes us try to change, as James Baldwin says, to achieve our country for the first time. So Obama didn't give us all the benefit of the doubt. I think we're all stronger than politicians ever assume. I think we're smarter than politicians ever assume. I think we're more resilient, and we have more empathy and compassion than politicians ever assume.

So you could talk about the bad that happened during the first, second, and third Reconstructions, but like I do in this book, I also talk about the good and the promise and the potential. That's the whole thing. So what we have to say is that, yes, we can be the greatest country ever on the face of the earth. We're not quite there yet, but there's many people who have strived to make us that golden, that shining city on a hill. And I think Obama starts to do that really starting in 2015 when he's not facing any elections. He starts to do more of that.

A great speech on history at Selma, a great speech towards the NAACP about mass incarceration. He starts to knit together a much more humanistic story where he's more comfortable talking about the flaws of the country, because if we just keep on talking about American exceptionalism, we can't explain the gun violence in the country, the racism, the police brutality, by saying all we're doing is constantly perfecting our union. It's a bedtime story, but it doesn't mean we can't have this positive feeling and this love of country, but we have to love the country enough to criticize the country.

Right. I agree 100%. I think that opens up another really important question that you raise so well in the book, which is, and it's an issue through each of the three reconstructions. How do you get people who have had power to feel comfortable sharing it with those who have not had power? And you make the point in the book very well that there's a through line, you call it, from Nixon to Reagan to Trump, of those who have had privilege, often racial privilege, but not exclusively, it could be economic privilege that's not always racial, hoarding that privilege, not wanting to share it. How do you craft a narrative along the lines you just described that makes people comfortable sharing their privilege, Peniel?

Yeah, I think that's the test and the challenge. And I think part of it is laying bare the most important parts of our history. I think you can see why from a redemptionist perspective, there's been such an assault, not just on the critical 19 project, but calling any kind of effort to have a more complex, truthful American history, critical race theory that is somehow anti-white and going to brainwash our kids. You could see that from a redemptionist perspective because stories are really the most important part of all of this. And I know you agree, the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our families, the way in which I tell my daughter, you tell Zach, it's so important, the stories we tell.

So the 1619 project and the way in which so many hundreds of thousands of teachers were using that and continue to in certain states that are allowed to use it, that was important because I think when you tell a deeper story of American history, it means that the newer generations, people who are the sons and daughters of those who are in power are going to be much more receptive to the idea of power sharing. Because yeah, we can legislate this, we can come up with policies, we can come up with nonprofits, but then at the end of the day, the institutions are us. We are the institutions, right? And so we have to have a baseline understanding of American history.

I think these three reconstruction periods are really the most important parts of our history. So I think the more in which we're able to craft a narrative that's inclusive, a narrative that lets people see themselves in that story, but also understand what happened with Tulsa, what happened with Japanese internment camps, what happened with the long and bitter history of anti-Semitism here in this country, what happened with what we've done to our Latinx, our Hispanic population, what we've done to indigenous folks, what we've done to AAPI folks and queer folks, the better off they're able to understand how we can build that beloved community and really the sacrifices that are going to be called for. Because we've embedded a system of unequal power relations and when people hear this word equity, they become frightened because they think their kid's not going to get to the right school and have the right outcomes, or they're not going to any longer have access to the same neighborhoods.

But power sharing means not that you're going to be diminished, but everyone is going to be, or more people are going to be elevated. And I think part of that, the central part of this is the story we tell about America and us and our place within America.

I want to be careful how I phrase this, but how do we tell that unified American history? How do we come to one narrative of our country that acknowledges the many flaws, the many, I don't want to say mistakes, but tragedies in our history without splitting us into people groups, if you understand what I mean? How do we use this difficult reckoning with our history to create unity and not division?

And Zachary, before Peniel answers, maybe you should also share your struggles at your school over these issues, struggles you've had in diversity council and elsewhere to get people to come together around these issues.

I think what I would just say is I think there's an unwillingness sometimes among certain people to recognize the complexity of these issues, that it's not as simple as splitting people into people groups or to say that these are the oppressors and these are the oppressed. It has to be a nuanced understanding. And I guess my question is, how do we have that nuanced understanding, but also come to some sort of consensus about our history and what we need to do moving forward?

Well, I think that's a great question. I think, one, we have to be willing to speak truth to power, because there are structures and systems that have oppressed folks and continue to. I think, two, we have to learn and listen to each other's stories. So I make it a point of reading, obviously, not just African-American history, but histories of, we see the late Barbara Aaron Reich just passed away, histories of white working class, histories, think about Tommy Orange and They Are There, history of Native people, histories. I read Julian Zeller's great book on Rabbi Heschel, histories of Jewish Americans, just histories of the whole multiracial component of the United States.

It's important to read that. But we also have to acknowledge that the core feature of American democracy, one that I think has been a stain on our democracy, but also has been unifying, especially for redemptionists, and in certain contexts for reconstructionists, is really anti-Blackness.

And so anti-Blackness is what creates the racial caste system that Isabel Wilkerson and others talk and write about, that hierarchy. You think about the caste system as a ladder with Blackness at the bottom, whiteness at the top, and other racial groups in between trying to figure and oscillate between both of those poles where they fit in. So I would say, Zachary, there are oppressors. It doesn't mean that somehow all white people are that. But systemically, there is a system of white supremacy in the country that goes back to the founding of the country. But in 1865, we actually had a way out through Freedman's Bureau, reparations, through land and equity for African-American farmers. We actually had a way out of white supremacy.

And what we see through the history of the Third Reconstruction, the First Reconstruction, and I write about it in this book, is that it was violently repudiated. It wasn't just policies and Black codes and convict lease system. This was organized systematic terror. When we think about January 6th, 2021, January 19th of 1871 is when Congress launches the official investigation into Klan violence. And by March of 1871, there's going to be public congressional hearings that lead to the enforcement acts during the Grant Administration.

So this is big news. Thaddeus Stevens is saying colored people are being slaughtered by the thousands in the South. That's what Thaddeus Stevens is saying, the venerable congressman from Pennsylvania, who is one of the stalwart abolitionists and reconstructionists of the time period. So we have to be courageous enough to call that out, especially now because we're facing a backlash that really happened very quickly after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and has really been congealed in legislation, but a backlash against that kind of truth-telling. But we have to listen and learn about each other's stories, Zachary. I would say that's the biggest thing.

We have to listen and learn about each other's stories. And sometimes people will say, well, my group suffered, your group suffered. The organizing principle of the suffering actually has been anti-Black. And it's important for us to understand that. That's why the struggle for Black equality and Black citizenship and dignity is a universal struggle. It's just universal and Black, because if we get that, no other group is going to somehow be isolated and suffer because anti-Blackness has been the organizing principle of the racial caste system, both in the United States and globally.

So part of it is courage. Part of it is listening. Part of it is going to be struggle. It's going to be struggle because it takes White people who are in solidarity with anti-racist movements to really help us push forward. And in certain ways, I think 2020, one of the most optimistic aspects was the number of White people who were out in the streets alongside of Black and other people of color during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer. And we had never seen that level of outrage or commitment in either of the first two periods of Reconstruction. So that still gives me hope.

I wonder, though, how do you approach an issue like since it's Labor Day, labor unions, right? Where you have a structure that was in some cases created to try and keep Black people and people of color out of the workforce, but at the same time, in other cases, was created to help Black people attain greater rights in the workplace. I guess my question is, if we're looking at every issue of American history through this understanding of anti-Blackness in America, how do we avoid overlooking the economic, the otherwise social and political divisions that also shape our country and an issue like organized labor?

I think we look at it simultaneously. I think labor is a great example because I talk about SCIU 1199. My mom was part of a labor union for 40 years at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. So that's very near and dear. In a lot of ways, my politics were shaped by labor and labor movements and reading about labor movements.

Labor is a complicated issue. On the one hand, when we think about labor movements, a lot of times we always leave out enslaved Black people as part of labor movements. I think the work of Robin Kelly and Saidiya Hartman and other scholars have really gone a long way towards rectifying that. So we've got to think about labor capaciously. Then at the same time, we've got to be truthful about both labor that has been anti-racist, even in the 19th century.

You think about the Wobblies, the international workers of the world versus the Knights of Labor. You think about the CIO versus the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations versus the American Federation of Labor. You think about Eugene Debs' socialism versus Hubert Harrison's socialism. So we have to be very cognizant of the pitfalls of just saying, oh, we can have Black, white, unite, fight kind of slogans. But one thing I'll say, Zach, when we think about contemporary labor, it's become much more multicultural and much more multiracial. Bus riders unions, justice for janitors.

1199, SCIU is the most multiracial union in the country. So we have to tell that complete story. The story of Black people forced to be so-called scabs because they weren't allowed in labor unions, but also the story of utilizing the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, DRUM, and the different revolutionary union movements coming out of Detroit and wildcat striking against the UAW so that Black folks could be foremen and have dignity on the shift line and on the worker line.

So we have to tell that whole story. And I think telling that whole story now, when we think about labor and so many immigrant laborers, in terms of we've got 11 million undocumented in the country. So many of those are Spanish speakers, but there's also from West Africa, from the Caribbean. And how does that shape the labor movement, especially household labor? Most of us, me and your dad are generation X. If we live long lives, we're going to have Caribbean and Spanish- speaking home health aid workers, because unless you're somehow healthy until you're 100 years old, you don't need anybody. I mean, maybe that could be your dad. He's going to be fine, right? I hope so. I hope so.

Most people, millions across the United States are going to need them. So I would say this requires courage because yeah, you have to remember Dr. King pissed people off. Obama pissed people off. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker. You're not always going to get the standing ovation when you tell people what they need to hear instead of telling people what they want to hear.

But one of the things King says in his speech, a drum major, for the drum major speech is that he's not interested in molding some kind of phony consensus. He says, I'm a builder and I'm going to shape consensus through my organizing. That means you tell people what they don't want to hear. So part of this, it requires courage on us, really. And again, it requires a lot of study and listening and patience because yes, the story is complicated, but there are some really robust truths that we should all be willing to articulate. And I think at our best, we do.

I think you think about the president and the student loan forgiveness and when people were pushing back, the White House was tweeting out all the PPE loans that conservatives had gotten from the government and not paid back. Millions and millions of dollars, but they were upset over these 10 and $20,000 loan forgiveness. So we have to be ready to speak truth to power.

And I think in certain ways, because of the times we live in, sometimes people think it's going to be easy. Like you saw George Floyd, you saw the millions of people in the streets, but that didn't translate into the policy at the federal level that a lot of people thought or assumed. So there's been no George Floyd Justice and Policing Act passed. There's been no For the People Expansion of Voting Rights Act passed. There's been no John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act passed. So part of it is we have to be in it for the long haul, Zachary. We have to be in it for the long haul because the backlash is right here. It's thick. It's among all of us, especially us.

We live right here in Texas, even at the University of Texas. The backlash is here. And this is the point in our history where you can see it's a time for choosing and actually living up to your commitments and principles becomes the hardest thing to do in this time rather than in 2020 or 2008. It's easy in 2008. It's very easy to say you're on the right side of history. You've got 69 million people backing you up. It's harder when you're in that minority, and we have to, again, be principled enough to live up to our commitments at this point.

So, Peniel, I want to close by quoting part of your conclusion, and then I want to ask you to reflect, if you would, for a few minutes at our closing on your mom because I think she's sort of the angel hovering over this book in many ways. I've known you for so long, but I've learned so much about you reading this book. There's a wonderful photo of you and your mom. Also, little tiny Peniel with his mom. I love that photo, by the way. Worth the price of the book just for that. But you write at the end beautifully

I believe that the struggle for black dignity and citizenship can be achieved in our lifetime, but it must continue even if it takes several lifetimes. And then at the very end, you say today in the midst of another period of reconstruction, which you've described so well for us here, we have a grave political and moral choice to make. I choose hope. It seems to me a lot of that hope comes from your mom. And I'd like to close, if you're willing, just reflecting on her influence on your analysis and all that you've shared with us today.

No, thank you, Jeremi. Yes, my mother, Germaine Joseph, 83 years young, still lives in Queens, New York. Really my biggest teacher and the most influential person on me intellectually, politically, morally, the whole works.

Haitian immigrant who came to United States in 1965, worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for 40 years. I was on my first picket lines in elementary school and really somebody who encouraged me and my older brother to read and to write and to think, but also to be active, to be active citizens. If you believed in something, she was fine with you going out and demonstrating that belief.

Certainly, she wanted you to be careful, but to demonstrate that belief. And so she's been hugely, hugely important. The history of Haiti and the Haitian revolution, which I discuss and its connection to Black American history, the connection between Black feminism and these different social movements, but also just American politics and history. She's a big fan and reader of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy alongside of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Really loved reading books on not just the Haitian revolution, but Theodore Roosevelt and the American presidents. I remember getting my first book on the American presidents and kindergarten with her from the local public library in Queens. And that was a book that we used to always check out, check back in, check out, check back in.

And the final president there, initially when we checked it out was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was the president. Reagan had not been elected yet. And so they had Jimmy Carter's 1977 and they had a dash. And I remember that book, right? And that's how I memorized the first 39 presidents of the United States. So she's been my biggest champion, but also my biggest teacher.

And she, again, throughout the book, I look at these different Black activists, a lot of them Black women like Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, but she's been my biggest example. And she does provide me a measure, a large measure of hope. And hope really is a discipline. It's a faith and it's a discipline and it's a belief. And it's a discipline based on our practice. I think sometimes people who don't feel hopeful are really not out there in the world trying to help and do good.

I think the more you're out there in the world trying to help and do good, the more hopeful you feel because you're not just reacting and sitting back on the couch and woe is me and you're actually rolling up your sleeves and getting into the arena. And it's important for us to do that. And I think my mom did that just through example of going to work every day, very, very long commute from Queens Village to East 92nd Street every day, sometimes six days a week, like I write.

So it's really, you know, our parents worked harder than us. And as you know that better than me, Jeremy, and, you know, it's really important for us, all of us who are so privileged to be able to read and write and study, to remember that there were generations who absolutely worked harder than us, suffered more than us, right. And were more resilient than us.

So the only thing we can do is try to match their courage and that resilience because we have given, been given so much privilege in our lives, right. In our lives, we're never going to work as hard as they did. We're never going to have to go to another country, learn another language on the fly like they did, right. I mean, this is extraordinary. So they're the role model. So really we have no right to complain personally. And I don't mean politically, but I mean personally. So the example that she set and the discipline that she exemplified is really something that I, that lives within me to this day. And so the book is really dedicated to her and, and, and these, these Black and really other women, all women who've, who've shaped so many of us men who've been fortunate enough to be at their, at their, the stool by their feet, just taking in their wisdom.

Yeah. Well, as you know, Peniel, in the Jewish faith, we, we have a phrase, Lador Vador, which means from generation to generation. And, and I think that captures your book so well, your book is a mitzvah because it, it captures the importance of one generation teaching another.

And we go through different periods of reconstruction because sometimes we forget and to remember and to learn the history and to keep building on that history and improving ourselves and pushing harder in creative and hopeful ways. I think your book is a chronicle and analysis of that, but also an inspiration from your mom for us to do more of that. I encourage all of our listeners to pick up the book, The Third Reconstruction. It's now available and in every bookshop, go pick it up, go find an independent bookstore to buy it from. Peniel, thank you for joining us today.

Oh, thank you. Thanks to you and Zachary. Thanks for reading it. And I really enjoyed this conversation.

So did we. Zachary, thank you for your really tear-jerking poem and for your insights and for your bringing these issues every day into the discussions you're having with young people, which is so important. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.

This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

Welcome to our latest episode of This is Democracy. I'm Zachary Suri. I'm hosting this week. We're mixing things up a little bit.

We often think about history in terms of pivotal years, 1776, 1848, 1989, and 1968 is often an entry in this list, identified by many historians as the key turning point in our democracy and democracies around the world in the 1960s. But our next guest, his new book makes the case for a different year, 1963.

Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, and he joins us now. Thank you for joining us, Peniel.

Thank you for having me, Zachary and Jeremi.

In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution, Professor Joseph argues that 1963 marked the first critical successes and several important but tragic losses of the civil rights movement that would transform American democracy. 1963 was, he writes in the book, quote, "the defining year of the black freedom struggle." And because of the importance of this year and one of the documents it produced, a letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of a poem this week, we will be hearing Dr. King read a section of that speech and he will read what is perhaps one of the most famous sections.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

So, Professor Joseph, Birmingham and this letter play a central role in the story that you tell. It's the site of some of the most brutal televised police crackdowns on peaceful protesters in 1963. It's where MLK is arrested and writes this letter, of course. Why Birmingham? Why were the events there in the spring of 1963 so critical to the cause of civil rights and to the history of our democracy?

Well, Birmingham is very interesting because, as I show in Freedom Season, there were other hot spots and sites that might have become Birmingham, including Greenwood, Mississippi and Jackson, Mississippi.

But Birmingham becomes such a huge global site of struggle for dignity and citizenship in 1963, primarily because of the brutality that is experienced by peaceful demonstrators and over time by really thousands of young Black students who were called Negro students in the context of 1963, unless Malcolm X was speaking about them. And what's so interesting, Zachary and Jeremi, about Birmingham is that so Birmingham is a dying steel town. It's the citadel of the old Confederacy.

And what's interesting about 1963 with Birmingham, there's two competing governments by May of 1963 in Birmingham. Birmingham is shifting to a mayoral system from a three-person commissioner system. And one of those commissioners is Eugene Bull Connor, who's the rabid, not only racist, but anti-communist, who's a former radio sports broadcaster who gets his nickname for his expertise at shooting the bull, Eugene Bull Connor.

And what's so interesting about Bull Connor's Birmingham is that there's going to be an election. There's going to be a new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who's really sort of an elegant segregationist. But for a while, like during the first Reconstruction period, there's going to be two competing governments in the city of Birmingham who are both claiming that they are the official government.