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Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today's episode. We're going to focus upon young John F. Kennedy and the lessons and insights from his early career for our somewhat difficult and partisan political moment today. What can we learn? And what do we take away from John F. Kennedy's early career? We have with us his biographer, who is a very distinguished historian and good friend and someone who's written quite a lot about American foreign policy, American politics and the lessons of history for contemporary affairs. This is Fred Logevall. Fred. Good morning.

I'm delighted to be with you, Jeremi.

It's our pleasure to have you. Fred is the author of 10 books. He's the author and editor of 10 books on American politics and foreign policy. Among my favorites and those which I know everyone has read, uh, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, which really transformed our understanding of Lyndon Johnson's choices for war in 1964-1965. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, which Fred co-wrote with Campbell Craig, another historian, which looks at the influence of domestic politics on American Cold War foreign policy. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire in the Making of America's Vietnam, which is really about early French and American activities in Vietnam before we would, we traditionally called the Vietnam War in the United States. Embers of War won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other rewards and then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well. And then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

When Fred is not busy scribbling, he is the Lawrence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Professor of History at Harvard University. And as I said, Fred is a longtime friend and really a major figure, not just in historical circles, but in scholarly and public intellectual circles in the United States. So before we turn to our discussion of JFK and this really fantastic and fun new book, I really found it fun to read this new book that Fred has just published.

We're going to turn to Mr. Zachary, as we always do each week, for his scene-setting poem. Zachary, what's the title of your poem?

The Ghost of JFK.

Oh, I'm a little scared now. Let's hear about The Ghost of JFK.

The ghost of JFK yielded its head today as I spoke with my teacher of memory. As I spoke with my teacher of memory, he told me of the fateful day when he was to see JFK on the aged steps of the Capitol. On the aged steps of the Capitol, I stood on an afternoon in May and watched all the children play as we marched past to the Capitol door. As we marched past to the Capitol door, I thought of the man that day when he bled to death in a limousine and all hope went away. It was not like the oceans had parted. The seas were still stable that day and no Constitutions were carted away. No ceilings fell in and no highways collapsed. The army didn;t stop playing taps. It was youth that was killed from the book depository on the square in Dallas by the grassy hill. It was youth that was killed in Dallas and we're waiting again for it still.

I love the arc of that poem, Zachary, really taking us all the way to the tragic end of JFK's life. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about trying to ask what made JFK such a symbolic figure in American history and what made him so important in the memory of his generation, even only having served a few years as president.

Well, that is the perfect spot to turn to President Kennedy's biographer. Fred, we live in such a cynical age. Your book, as I read it, is in some ways a wonderful antidote to that cynicism. I think the place to start is why did John F. Kennedy, this person born to such privilege, such wealth, why did he get involved in the dirty world of politics?

Well, let me just say, Jeremi, that that was a wonderful poem we just heard. That was just marvelous. So hats off to you, Zachary. I'd love to hear more of your stuff. Maybe I will.

Well, each week, each week, he opens every poem, every episode, Fred

Oh, fantastic. Oh, this is such a great thing and that one was, I thought, really powerful.

You know, I think it comes for Jack Kennedy from, in part, a bedridden childhood. He was sick a lot as a kid and read, became a voracious reader and his preferred genre or the things he liked to read about were, in fact, politics, especially European politics, diplomacy, statecraft, tales of adventure and chivalry. He was drawn to that stuff and I think also his mother, I think she encouraged his interests in politics. She was the daughter of Honey Fitz Fitzgerald, a legendary Boston politician and who, by the way, was also close to his grandson.

So he and Jack were close. So he took something, I think, from Honey Fitz, even though they became very different kinds of politicians. JFK was much more sort of reserved and much more urbane as a political figure.

But those are two early influences and then I think it grew from there. It developed in college, his wartime service, which we could discuss. But you do see these early influences as well.

Well, and let's turn to his wartime service. Much of your book actually covers that. And I have to say, it's a really riveting part of the book and an area where I think you have a lot of new, many new things to say about both his wartime service and his travels. I was really taken with the many quotations you have from his travel diary, Fred. So tell us more about how the travels and the World War II experience contributed to his development as a political animal.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I suggest in the book is that he developed both a historical sensibility, but also an international sensibility. And here again, I think Rose, who often doesn't get enough credit, it seems to me, in the scholarship, his mother encouraged him to have this wider lens, to look to the outside world.

It's not that Joe Kennedy, his father, didn't have that or didn't urge that, but maybe not to the same degree. And as you say, he traveled, beginning in a serious way in 1937 with his good friend Len Billings during college. They traveled through Europe and then there was a major excursion, which I think is really consequential in 1939, right on the eve of war, where young JFK is traveling in about a dozen countries, meeting with officials, seeing the sites.

He was in Berlin, basically right on the eve of war. I think it has a really big impact on him. And then, as you say, Jeremi, he is in the South Pacific in 1943.

This is after graduation, after he publishes his senior thesis on basically development of British appeasement policy in the 1930s. Then he's in the service. And I think it is probably like it was for many people who were in combat.

It was, I think, had a profound effect on Kennedy, made him in two different ways.

The first was that it made him, I think, wary of the military instrument as a means of solving political problems that I think he had, and I trace this in the book. He continued to have this really for the remainder of his life. But secondly, I think he came out of the war convinced that the United States had to play a major leadership role on the global stage.

So it's in some ways almost a kind of contradictory, or they don't, the two attributes, the two conclusions don't necessarily mesh perfectly, but I think it's partly what he took from the war, no question.

And it's worth underlining the fact, and this is a point you make, that really most of the leadership of American society for the next 50 years would have come out of this experience of World War II. Figures like, obviously, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush. Although it does seem Kennedy's different from them.

That's another point you're making, that he's of his context and time, but he's also exceptional. What do you see as his exceptional qualities, Fred?

Well, you know, it's a strong word to use. And I do think one sees certainly similarities between him and, say, George H. W. Bush, the elder Bush, in terms of the commitment to service, the kind of low-key approach to their own wartime service in terms of how they talked about it. But I do think that JFK believed strongly that he himself had a role to play.

And he, by the way, I think made his own decisions to seek political office in the early aftermath of the war. I don't think this was something that his father, you know, insisted that he do, which is often claimed. Kennedy was, JFK was really his own master when it came to his political decisions and his career decisions.

But I think he felt that this wartime generation of which he was a part would now, in the aftermath of the war, in the late 40s and beyond, have a very important role to play. He decided he was going to be part of this. I don't think it was inevitable that politics would be his chosen career.

But it was a decision he made on his own. And he formed, I think, a distinctive, how should I put it? Political philosophy early on. It was a kind of pluralist, liberal outlook, which was idealistic in some respects, but also leavened with a certain pragmatic realism that I think proved to be a winning one for him, if I can put it that way.

I think this is really one of the stunning parts of your book, Fred. Unlike most of the other authors and commentators that I've encountered, at least, you give a lot less attention and influence to the father figure. Here we've gone almost 10 minutes into this discussion. It's the first time Joseph Kennedy has come up. What can you tell us about that relationship between father and son?

Well, he was certainly a devoted son. And I think previous authors have been absolutely correct to talk about the fact that Joe Kennedy was a giant figure in the lives of his children, including young Jack. He was a towering father figure, no question.

But yeah, I think it was striking to me in the research, Jeremi, in the voluminous letters that we have and other documents that we have in the oral histories, etc., the degree to which the second son, Jack, was willing to separate himself from his father in a way that the golden child, the oldest son, Joe Jr., who was killed in the war in 1944, was never able to do, never willing to do.

And so the most dramatic example of this, I think, is the, in effect, the split between the father and the son, between Joe Sr. and Jack on the issue of U.S. intervention, on the issue of, if you want to put it this way, isolationism versus interventionism, where Joe Sr., as ambassador to Britain, and then long after having been ambassador to Britain, was a kind of unvarnished, was an unapologetic appeaser and isolationist.

And Jack decided he could not be. And I think this is where the Harvard years are especially illuminating, because you see that gradually, clearly, but gradually, but clearly, this shift away from the father's position. Really interesting.

And let's talk a little bit about JFK's distinctiveness from his father, his critique of appeasement, his critique of the isolationism, and even somewhat pro-Nazi tendencies of his father. How would you characterize his emerging, shall we say, Cold War viewpoint?

Well, I think he decided, and this is partly on the basis of discussions with his professors in college, not so much the student body. I was surprised to learn of the degree to which isolationism, if we want to use that term, excuse me, the degree to which isolationism really held pretty firmly, pretty firm within the student body at Harvard. But the professors, his own reading, I think his travels that we've discussed, all of them, I think, convinced JFK by, let's say, by late 1940, or by the middle part of 1940, around the time that he completes his thesis, publishes the book, that it's really an untenable position that his father holds, that in order to really be able to thwart the Germans and the Japanese, the United States has to commit itself, has probably to enter the fight at some point.

It certainly has to support the British and the French to a very large extent. And therefore, his father's position, which is that you can have a kind of fortress America in which the country more or less seals itself off from the rest of the world, just is not going to fly. And he is willing, as I've said, in a way, Joe Jr. is not, to actually confront his father with this position.

So it's fascinating to me, Fred, how that lesson for John F. Kennedy and so many others, and this is something many of us have written about you in particular, how those lessons of appeasement carry forward. And of course, one of the things both you and I teach and write about are the dangers of an analogy from one historical time being brought into another context.

This is something I thought you were playing around with in very thoughtful ways in the last part of the book. Can you say more about what Kennedy takes from what you just described so well, his emerging internationalist outlook? You called it earlier a liberal internationalist outlook to some extent, tempered with realism. How does that affect his emerging views of international affairs when he's a member of the House of Representatives and then a senator after World War II?

Well, it's an interesting one because it's kind of a complex picture that at least for me emerges. Because on the one hand, I would say that John F. Kennedy, as I say in the book, he's an original cold warrior.

He is. And here, the difference between the father is, again, pretty interesting, because Joe Kennedy articulates positions that at least some historians would later come to hold, namely, the Soviets are not out to invade anybody. The Soviets are not a mortal threat to the existence of the United States. We can afford, therefore, to take a sort of standoffish approach.

That's Joe Sr.'s position. Jack, I think, is very much committed to what Truman is trying to do in 46 and 47. He endorses the Truman Doctrine.

He is wholly supportive of a kind of expansive American global posture. But alongside this, emerging, I think, in 1950-51, and thereafter, is also a nuanced understanding of the power of decolonization, the power of nationalism in the developing world. And he argues, I think, quite presciently, when he visits Indochina in 1951, for example, but also other parts of Asia, that the United States, if it wants to be on the right side of history, and if it wants to succeed in the broader superpower struggle, needs to be attentive to what these voices are clamoring for, and including people like Ho Chi Minh.

That, I think, tension in Kennedy's position is there really through the remainder of the decade, I would argue, and I haven't written volume two yet, so this is still sort of preliminary. But that tension, in some ways, exists right through to the end. He argues in his inaugural address for a...we often think of that address as being a kind of Cold War call to arms, but I don't think it really is.

If you look at the address in its entirety, it's really quite conciliatory in tone. And he says, we shall never, let us never fear to negotiate. So it's a complex picture, Jeremi, but one that I think, I hope in the second volume to further flesh out.

What makes JFK such an appealing presidential candidate, but also a congressman and a legislator? What can we learn from his rise about what kind of politician we should be nurturing today?

Oh, it's such a good question. I think that what people saw right away, maybe even in that first congressional campaign in 1946, and I do think this holds something for us today, is they saw somebody who believed in politics, loved politics even, and I think there's no crime in loving politics. And one of the reasons he loved politics from an early point was precisely because he believed that it was important that in a democracy, what we expect, what we demand of our elected officials can have a hugely important effect on our lives.

And I think he believed and developed a philosophy, which basically said that government can't solve all of our problems, but it has a vital role to play in creating a more just and a more equitable society. And I would say one more thing here, and this is something he develops in his book Profiles in Courage in 1956, but you see it much earlier. In fact, I think I show that you see it again in this first campaign, and that is the vital importance in a democracy of compromise, of reasoning from evidence, of seeing political opponents as adversaries rather than enemies.

This is something that I think he stressed, and I think it's a very important notion for us today. I think that democracies need to be able to handle moments of conflict and needs to, and politicians need to be able to focus, speak to common interests. And boy, is that hard today in this country, but I think it's a more important message than ever.

It's so crucial, Fred, and it's one of our key themes week in and week out over more than 100 episodes. We've seen, I think, in such a range of figures, how important those precise qualities that you just highlighted so brilliantly, that those qualities of compromise and attention to evidence and deliberative policymaking, how crucial they are to a democracy.

How did Lyndon Johnson interact with John F. Kennedy? Because one of the issues that comes up quite often in some of our prior discussions and in a lot of the scholarship, as you know better than anyone, is this rivalry between Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy family. We could also talk about Joe McCarthy, but I thought we'd focus on Lyndon Johnson. How did JFK handle that differently from politicians today, and what can we learn from that?

Well, I mean, you know, I'd say in some respects, I guess, a preliminary answer, Jeremi, because this is one of the things that I really want to delve into and will need to delve into in volume two. What I can say to this point is that it's pretty evident. Well, a couple of things are evident.

One is that Kennedy respected LBJ's unsurpassed skill at maneuvering in Washington, his ability to buttonhole lawmakers and to get them to do what he needed them to do. This is evident even when he's obviously the chieftain in the Senate. And I think Kennedy rightly marvels at this ability and respects Johnson for it. One of the things that one of the appealing aspects of John F. Kennedy is I think he respects people who are really good at what they do, regardless of field and he could see this in Johnson.

On the other hand, you know, it's clear that when he becomes vice president, and arguably has an important role to play in securing this razor thin victory against Nixon in the election in 1960, you know, he and his team, they don't treat Lyndon Johnson very well in terms of his role as vice president, the kinds of duties that they give him, the degree to which they include him on important policy decisions, especially in foreign affairs.

You can see, one can see why LBJ becomes resentful. There's, of course, a special friction with Robert Kennedy, which, of course, I also need to delve into as I get into this research, but I think Kennedy understands Johnson's importance to him. I think he does credit him with helping him win. Arguably, this was one instance in recent U.S. history in which the vice presidential choice actually did matter in the outcome, but then a problematic relationship thereafter.

Well, what I love about this first volume is I can see how you're laying the seedbed for where you're going to go with these issues forward. I want us to close as we always do by looking toward our listeners today, particularly young listeners, and what they can take away from your book in this fraught political moment we're in today. But before I do that, Fred, I can't let us get to that concluding point without asking the question I know everyone is going to ask you. What should we make of Kennedy's extramarital affairs that you discuss a bit in the book and the question of morality and political leadership?

If Kennedy is perhaps a model of political compromise, and as you say, working with adversaries without making them enemies, his personal behavior is probably not something that we would put up as a model for others. How does that affect your judgment of him as an early politician?

Yeah, it's something obviously that I grapple with a lot, Jeremi, and I will continue to grapple with as I work on volume two, because one of the things that I conclude is that he shows a capacity for empathy, empathetic understanding, which I think is critical in a leader. And we see it maybe most notably at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he's actually able to put himself into Khrushchev's shoes, which is what empathy is, to be able to see things from the other side.

He's not able to do that. He does not show that empathetic understanding with respect to his wife, Jackie. He cheats on her before the wedding, he cheats on her afterward.

And if I'm going to argue, as I do in the book, that he is his own man when it comes to politics, that he's not under his father's control, that he's willing to separate himself from Joe Sr., then I can't very well say, well, you know, he became a chronic womanizer because his father was, and it's because of the example that his father set. And his father certainly did set an example. He said, in so many words, that he expected Joe Jr. and Jack to follow in his footsteps, to view women as objects to be conquered.

But I can't, you know, give him credit for his independence in one area and say that he didn't have it in the other. So it's a really good point. And this is one that, especially as I think, as I get into volume two, and he becomes in a strong power position, which makes this still more problematic, I have to reckon with.

Well, we will all look forward to that. It strikes me that you're approaching it exactly as you should as a historian, which is different from a journalist in this element, insofar as his personal behavior matters to us, it seems to me, as it relates to his role as a politician. Your book is Young JFK, his own man, but politician.

And so, you know, if people are interested in the lurid details of his affairs, that's not what you're writing about. You are writing about how those affected him as an individual insofar as he becomes a politician. And I think that's the right way to approach it.

I think it's actually refreshing in a certain way without in any way diminishing the enormity of this issue, as you just pointed out so well. So, Fred, we like to finish every one of our episodes by really, really speaking directly to our audience, which includes a lot of young people, and I'll include you and I as still young people, who are concerned about our world today, concerned about democracy.

We started this podcast a year and a half ago. We do it every week because we're trying to bring historical knowledge and at least maybe some historical inspiration to thinking about reforming and improving our democracy in a nonpartisan way. And I know you and I agree, we've talked about this many times, that history has a lot to offer us, but it doesn't offer us a roadmap. It offers us thoughts and knowledge and wisdom, we hope, for moving forward.

You've spent a good part of your life now writing about John F. Kennedy. You're going to continue doing that. What do you want young people, people who are concerned about our politics today, people who want to change our politics today, what do you want them to take away from the work you've done and from this wonderful volume?

I think I want them to take away that government can have the capacity to speak to society's highest aspirations. That may be kind of an impossible thing to believe, given how corrosively cynical we have become. But I think it's absolutely true. I think it's something that John F. Kennedy really based his political career on, this idea that it is absolutely vital that we have a strong, functioning democracy.

And he says in one of his college papers, this is when he's 20 years old, and I'm paraphrasing that in effect, unless democracy can produce capable leaders, it is in serious trouble. And I think that's true.

But on a more hopeful note, I would also say that in his inaugural address, I think a kind of theme of that address is that everyone can make a difference. And I think it's important for young people in particular to grasp that, to understand that if they become involved in public life, maybe choose even a career in public service, they can make a difference, that democracy in some ways hinges on this democracy hinges on having a well informed citizenry paying attention to the issues and at least to some degree but getting involved in those issues. I think that, too, is a message that JFK, flawed figure in many ways, somebody who had both successes and missteps as a politician. But this is something I think he both believed and he lived.

So Zachary, your wonderful poem this morning was the ghost of JFK. And one of the early reviewers of Fred's book, a mutual friend of ours, David Kennedy, talks about how John F. Kennedy still beguiles us and that in some ways Fred's book is a wonderful analysis of that. Zachary, does John F. Kennedy still inspire young people like yourself? And what inspiration do you take from this? And from our conversation with Fred?

I think that John F. Kennedy is still universally, universally powerful to young people because of his youth and because of what he represents as a someone who believes he can use government to help people. I always find it very interesting whenever I ask people who their favorite presidents are. John F. Kennedy is always near the top of the list, which is very interesting, seeing that he only served for a couple years. And so I think that his short time at the forefront of American politics continues to inspire young people and will continue to inspire young people.

Well, I think that's a perfect spot for us to come on. Fred, did you wanna make the last comment on that?

No, I just want to say that Zachary, that's really well put, if you know, as the saying goes, from your lips to God's ears. I think that if this is indeed what especially the people of your generation and they say the generation above the young people, if they can see in JFK and in other politicians of both parties in this country, somebody to somebody to look to try to emulate in some way and, more importantly, just to become involved and become informed and engaged and commit oneself to good faith, reasoning and bargaining, I think we'll be fine.

That's so well said. And I think what your book displays really in wonderful ways, in entertaining ways too, Fred is that we have that capacity within us. It's John F. Kennedy is his own man. But John F. Kennedy as such a quintessential product of American society, product of the mixing of different groups and our politics, which produces this messiness but also this capacity for compromise and evidence based creativity. So, Fred, thank you for joining us today. I know you're very busy out and around, or at least virtually on your book tour. Thank you for stopping. Stopping in with us virtually. I hope all of our readers and listeners will read Fred's exciting new book, John F. Kennedy. It's available on Amazon. It's available at all of your local independent bookstores. Just look up Logevall, JFK, and it will come right up. Zachary, thank you, as always for your poem and most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy

[Music] Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today's episode is going to focus on a topic that's been in the news quite a bit, and a topic that's ever present in American national security and foreign policy, but a topic we don't talk enough about, the role of dissent. What role dissenters within the policy establishment play.

These dissenters are often known as whistleblowers. We'll discuss that topic as well. But our real focus is on the role of individuals who are intimately involved with national security and intelligence, defense, the State Department, elsewhere, and their role in bringing to the public attention about misdeeds and deviations from constitutional authority and the appropriate uses of power.

We have with us two historians who have done more to elucidate and write about these issues than anyone else, Hannah Gurman and Kaetan Mistry. Hannah teaches U.S. history and American studies at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She's the author of The Dissent Papers, The Voices of Diplomats, and The Cold War and Beyond, which is a book I learned a lot from, an editor of A People's History of Counterinsurgency, and the co-editor of this new wonderful book called Whistleblowing Nation.

Hannah, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

We have also, Kaetan Mistry, who is a historian of the U.S. and the world and teaches at the University of East Anglia in England. He has authored Waging Political Warfare, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of the Cold War, which is really quite a fascinating story. I encourage people to read Kaetan''s wonderful work on this early important moment in the Cold War. He's edited Reforms, Reflection, and Reappraisals, the CIA and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1947, and he's the co-editor with Hannah, of again, this wonderful book, Whistleblowing Nation.

Kaetan, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

Before we turn to our discussion of dissent and national security, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What's the title of your poem, Zachary?

"Cross of Gold."

Wow, I didn't know we'd have William Jennings Bryan joining us today. Okay, Zachary, let's hear it.

"Aristotle wrote of the golden mean in a land of Grecian fields, and so too did the centuries proclaim moderation, my underlings, my dears. A scale is never balanced if the masses are uneven, and the tide can never come here if it never pulls from there. If the water is never gone, it will never reach the pier. And so too did the sages write of living in the middle, and so too did the poets sing of overzealous love. But what is there to do in life if virtue is a dove? Sometimes is there not a moment for a sudden movement, a second for a second path? A period for a period of change, and a time for a time of shift and sin? For is it not that the scale is never a truly balanced ship, that the oceans are only calm because they often overflow, that the sages were radical in their steady consultation, that the poets could never leave overzealous love for moderation? The cross of gold could martyr the farmer. Aristotle will smother his innocence, and moderation will suffocate the truth."

Wow, Zachary, that covers quite a lot there, and I love the movement from Aristotle to moderation and the truth. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the importance of radicalism and dissent in policymaking, but also in life and society in general.

Right, except at home, right? No dissent at home? I think there's actually too much dissent at home, and that's a good thing. Hannah, let's start with you if we could. This incredible book that you and Kaetan have edited with so many authors looking at dissent and the search for truth in national security.

Echoing Zachary's poem, how do we understand this relationship between secrecy and dissent, and why is there such an almost ever-present tension in American national security?

Sure. Well, first, I wanted to comment a little bit on the poem, because one thing that strikes me, a question that we were working through as we navigated the complexities of whistleblowing was whether or not it is a radical act. I think one of the points that we wanted to underscore, and one of the discoveries that we made, is that in many respects, whistleblowing is an act of desperation, but it is not necessarily radical.

It's a kind of historical phenomenon that has made it radical. So that's why it's important to trace this history. So you asked, you know, what are the tensions between secrecy and democracy? And those are always going to be, you know, central to national security, right? There's going to be the state that has a right to keep certain things secret, right? Max Weber famously pointed that out.

At the same time, the building of the national security state in the United States is relatively modern. So when we talk about state secrecy, we're talking about a modern regime that developed over the course of the 20th century, and really not before then. And so what we're talking about is the erection of a kind of overzealous obsession with state secrets that needs to be traced historically.

And one thing that's rather unique about the United States is that it has freedom of speech embedded in the Constitution, and it doesn't allow official state secrets like the United Kingdom and other democracies around the world, so the secrecy regime had to get around that fact. We have the principle of free speech, but we also have a state that needs to protect a growing number of secrets.

And that's part of what makes whistleblowing in the United States such a complicated phenomenon is that this regime developed in an ad hoc and improvisational manner to try to come up with a way around the fact that the United States doesn't have an official secrets act. And it left many fundamental issues of secrecy and democracy unresolved. So on the one hand, the ambiguity of official secrets makes whistleblowing more possible, but it also makes the act of whistleblowing extremely risky.

And that's where you get, you're kind of creating the conditions for this series of dramatic episodes that you see over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, but particularly in certain periods like the 1970s and the post 9/11 era.

That gives us really a powerful way of thinking about this and particularly the ways in which the growth of the national security state after World War II, the necessities of that also create sometimes these excesses and a tension between the public's right to know and an individual's right to speak, and what are at least perceived as the needs of maintaining secrecy in certain areas.

Kaetan, one of the topics that you cover in the book, you and Hannah and your authors, is the Espionage Act, which goes back, of course, a little earlier than the Cold War. I thought it'd be helpful maybe to begin with a discussion of that as well. What is the Espionage Act and how does it relate to this tension that Hannah described so well?

Right. So you mentioned the national security state, and it's famously a creation of the post World War II era, but many of the issues around national security and the protection of information date back to the beginning of the 20th century. The Espionage Act is a key plank of that infrastructure.

So as Hannah mentioned, the United States doesn't have an official secrecy act like the UK because of constitutional reasons, but it has a de facto secrecy regime and much of it has to do with the Espionage Act. So it emerges during the World War I era and it's a piece of legislation to police dissent and disseminate information, but it soon evolves into a classification tool. Now, it's a very flawed piece of legislation, which is recognised at the time and commentators continue to point out its flaws even now.

But what has happened over time is that it's ensured that the state can keep secrets whilst also allowing the press to publish them if it reaches the public domain. Yet the only way that it could reach the public domain, of course, is via whistleblowers and internal dissenters.

And what has happened is that a legal infrastructure is developed around it where the legal burden falls on that individual. All of which is to say, the Espionage Act is the key tool that's been used to prosecute whistleblowers from the earliest cases in the 1930s up until the very recent examples in the 21st century. Leading all the way up to Reality Winner and the revelations around Russian meddling in the election of 2016. So the Espionage Act is a key part of the modern secrecy regime in the United States.

And it's fascinating, Kaetan, that it goes back, as you said, to World War I, but emerges as a larger presence in our legal structure and our policy structure and our democracy after World War II. That's an interesting example of a decision in one era influencing events in another era. One of the strengths of your book, Hannah and Kaetan, is that you walk us through the many cases of the different ways in which this plays out.

We've seen this in front of us in recent years, with the impeachment hearings and related matters, but the book walks us through so many of these cases. Hannah, how does it work when an individual, let's say in the Pentagon, comes forward with evidence of wrongdoing?

Why is there a complicated structure around that and how does it work? Why isn't it just a matter of that individual releasing the information and the public responding? Your book shows there's obviously much more to this involving inspector generals and others.

Could you walk us through that process?

Sure. Well, I think the first distinction that needs to be made is that there are essentially two different categories of whistleblower. One of them you could call an internal whistleblower, meaning an individual who uses internal channels that were created and sanctioned by the state.

Those channels are varied, but for the most part, they developed after the 1970s in the wake of Ellsberg's infamous whistleblowing. And they were there to keep whistleblowing contained within the institution. They, it's important to point out, they have a very narrow conceptualization of what whistleblowing is, so you have to stay inside. And for the most part, these are around issues of waste, fraud, and abuse of power, not really dissent from the substance of a policy, per se. And in theory, these whistleblowers are protected under the law.

But in practice, they are often retaliated against and they don't have much influence. So you mentioned inspectors general, they're the people that are there to manage this process. And we saw how vulnerable even inspectors general are to political power. Often, historically, they themselves are partisan, or at least kind of attend to the bipartisan consensus that has historically treated whistleblowers with a fair degree of mistrust, so those are internal whistleblowers.

And then there's another category, called public interest whistleblowers, or we call them public interest whistleblowers, that is people who disclose information to the public in the name of a public interest, usually through journalists. And what's important to underscore is that there is in the United States, no legal protection for these whistleblowers. And in fact, the state does not recognize them as whistleblowers. That would be considered an unauthorized disclosure.

So probably the most famous whistleblower of the 20th century, Daniel Ellsberg, is not legally a whistleblower. And what happens when they disclose information to the public, is that you immediately have the state kind of pronounce them, you know, this is not whistleblowing. This is unauthorized disclosure.

And then that kick starts a process where the public has a controversial contest over whether or not this person is a hero or a traitor. Frequently, this person is sanctioned and punished. Sometimes they go to jail.

In Ellsberg's case, he was lucky in that his case ended in a mistrial, but you quickly focus on the whistleblower themselves in this divisive hero-traitor binary. And the substance of the disclosure is often marginalized.

And the fundamental question of how democracy handles secrecy and transparency becomes unresolved, so we were really kind of trying to tackle and observe the fact that there is this historical holding pattern that we're stuck in. Right?

It is not a story of linear progress. It's much more a story of periodic return, with leaving these fundamental questions unresolved.

Yeah, so this is a question for Kaetan. In other institutions in the American government, we often see that with new administrations, the dissenters become the ones in power in these institutions.

And that policy can really be shaped by political appointees. Why is it that in this sort of foreign policy and national security state, it's so hard for change like that to be enacted from above? Why do we need these whistleblowers? In a way, we really don't in other bureaucracies.

Yeah, that's a great point. One of the things that came about, one of our findings from the project, was that the issue is often considered in political terms. But the way it plays out is relatively apolitical, in curious kind of ways.

So when we talk about national security whistleblowing, then it should be, we should sort of underline the point that national security whistleblowing stands apart from whistleblowing in other sectors, in the corporate world, for example, other areas of the state. The fact that it deals with national security information, places it in a somewhat of a different category, which affects the questions of reform as well. So there's a contestation, as Hannah pointed out, around who exactly is a whistleblower.

But rather than sort of quibble over labels, there are some clear characteristics that emerge. What they are could be defined very sort of generally as an insider with privileged information who makes a disclosure. This doesn't always have to be classified information, interestingly enough.

The individual's identity often authenticates the information that's being exposed. Then you have this debate around whether they are a hero or a villain, a traitor, a savior. This often plays out when politicians and the press obsess around sort of the personal motives and political ideology, rather than the content of the disclosure itself.

Another characteristic is that the state moves to persecute national security whistleblowers, and this often leads to questions, again, of the character of the individual, rather than debate over the substance of that disclosure. This is a pattern that's repeated in virtually every case over the last century. It's very much embedded in US political culture, which is what distinguishes and makes the US context quite different from other countries.

It's something which has been quite stable over different administrations, often across different political parties, and also consistent throughout the US government, across the executive branch, the congressional branch, and the legislative branch. There is much greater consensus over the approach to national security whistleblowing and the persecution of them than is commonly understood.

That's really helpful in framing this and understanding the complexities of it, which your book brings out so well. Hannah, one of the other points that comes out so powerfully in the book, is that there was an effort in the 1970s in the United States.

Particularly following Daniel Ellsberg, who you mentioned before in his release of the Pentagon Papers, the internal history of the Vietnam War, which was very critical and exposed the lying of American political leaders about the war. Following that, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, there was a very strong effort within Congress to create legislation to protect whistleblowers and dissenters, and to manage this process and deal with many of the difficulties and paradoxes that Kaetan and you have pointed to.

Why didn't that process of reform work? Why are we still, as you say in the book, stuck in this liminal space on this issue?

Yeah, I think it's a great question, and it speaks to some of the ways that Kaetan mentioned. National security is historically the exception rather than the rule. While whistleblowing has become known to the American public largely through these cases that involve national security, like Daniel Ellsberg, like Chelsea Manning, like Edward Snowden, the legislation has historically carved national security whistleblowing out as an exception.

So the early laws that protected whistleblowers at the federal level did not protect national security whistleblowers at all. That was the exception to the rule. It's a really fascinating irony.

So somebody like Ernie Fitzgerald, who blew the whistle on Lockheed Martin during the Nixon administration, reporting that they had vast cost overruns that were really at the taxpayer expense. Fitzgerald became a sort of early icon of whistleblowing. The Carter administration kind of mentioned him a lot as it was advocating for whistleblowing legislation, but the legislation itself wouldn't have protected most national security whistleblowers, particularly public interest whistleblowers who disclose to journalists.

So that's a fundamental problem. Over time, Congress began to recognize that they needed to have more protections for national security whistleblowers. So over the last several decades, different branches of the national security establishment, including the Defense Department and the State Department and the Intelligence Establishment have created these internal channels that I mentioned earlier.

But also, as I said before, they don't protect people who go to the public. So there's really an intense faith in the idea that the system can handle it. But inherent to whistleblowing is a kind of recognition that the system isn't working.

And so, there has yet to be a kind of recognition that we need a public interest whistleblowing system, that you have some kind of outside adjudicator rather than the system kind of handling its own dissent. That seems structurally flawed, even though, as Kaetan mentioned, there has been a bipartisan consensus historically for that very system.

Right. And it does seem in your book for very good reasons that, Hannah, you and Kaetan sympathize very strongly with the Chelsea Mannings, the Edward Snowdens, the Vindman brothers, who recently were responsible for releasing information about misuses, abuses of power regarding Ukraine by the Trump administration. You're sympathetic to them.

You don't treat them as heroes, but you're sympathetic to them for seeing the risks they take, the career costs they pay, and particularly their efforts to inform the public. Is that a fair assessment?

I think one of the misconceptions around this topic is that it falls into sort of a left right binary or a hero villain binary or the idea that you have to either valorize or to criticize whistleblowers. Whereas, one of our attempts was to avoid those sort of very black and white kind of approaches, because the more we dug into the history of the phenomenon, which in many ways continues to the present, the more these sort of political ideological lines become blurred.

You mentioned the Ukraine whistleblowers, or Snowden, Manning, Ellsberg. You can go back to Nickerson in the 50s, Herbert Yardley in the 1930s. It's a very mixed bag in terms of what their politics would be, what their motives would be.

The one thing unifying them in many ways is the notion of public interest whistleblowing. Now you can define, you can argue about what the public interest is, but it certainly wasn't, these were not individuals who were just looking to raise their concerns internally. So the question then becomes, what is the significance of whistleblowing and how do the ramifications reverberate beyond that specific issue?

And it's had quite wide ramifications in terms of secrecy, but also the reporting of secrecy, and going back to the beginning of our discussion around democracy and dissent more generally. So an interesting way to sort of think about this would be if we use the analogy of concentric circles.

So the impact of whistleblowing may begin with the individual, you'll have new rules or laws that are brought in to prevent whistleblowing. But these have ripple effects which go out across institutions and affect different groups, so it's not just that the state is suspicious of a Daniel Ellsberg.

But there is suspicion and surveillance that's extended to collaborators. So Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer, Leonard Bodine, was also under surveillance. Famously, Ellsberg's psychologist's office was broken into, which of course begins the long road to Watergate.

This suspicion has also extended in surveillance to journalists who collaborate or work with whistleblowers. Very contemporary cases like Jim Risen, who lives at the New York Times, Judy Miller, who was also at the New York Times at the time, who famously would go to jail for not revealing a source. But then also censorship moves beyond the whistleblower to other officials and those closely associated with the state.

So a presidential commission or commission into a congressional commission, all the staffers around it would be forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement, a secrecy agreement. People who are not even state officials, perhaps scholars, historians who work, who have some sort of relationship with the state, who perhaps collaborate or work with the state in some way. Colleagues that you will know, Jeremi, as well, people who perhaps serve in government.

Subsequently, all of their work will have to go through pre-publication review. And these are lifetime secrecy agreements. They're not time restricted.

So there's a great article, one of the contributions in our books by Richard Immerman, well regarded distinguished historian, and he points out the many absurdities and inconsistencies in the pre-publication review, all of which is to say you have a wide, vast lineup of characters and there's very little that they have in common, but they're all caught up in this web that's spun by the state in response to whistleblowing.

It's quite extraordinary. As I was reading that chapter, I was thinking, of course, of John Bolton, whose recent memoir has been surrounded by controversy over the pre-publication review, which the Trump administration claims he didn't fully satisfy and he claims he did. And to have John Bolton in the same book in a certain sense as Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden is quite a range of actors, and it makes your point very well.

I did want to focus a bit on Snowden, just for one minute, because he's probably the most famous and controversial recent whistleblower. How should we think about him?

He blurbs your book also, and in many ways he embodies what you're talking about, someone who comes forward and informs the public about illegal uses of surveillance within our democracy, a topic that certainly threatens many of our core democratic values.

But he also potentially shares information with an American adversary, Russia. So how should we think about this? How do you think about this, Hannah?

Yeah. I mean, we've thought a lot about Snowden because, as you say, he is probably the most famous and significant whistleblower of this generation. And he also kind of amplifies a lot of the questions and issues that have been around for over a century.

So a few things to say about Snowden. I mean, I think a case could be made that Snowden is one of probably a minority of whistleblowers who had some impact on policy reform. So his revelations of warrantless surveillance, led to some reforms and put some limits on what information could be collected and how.

And although, it's also worth underscoring that those reforms were rather limited, but arguably, this is not really what matters most about Snowden. And it is worth pointing out that those reforms coexisted with Obama's response, which said, thank you, Edward Snowden, in a sense, for giving us an opportunity to have this debate.

And also, Edward Snowden, you broke the law and what you did was an unauthorized disclosure. So Obama's response to Snowden was very much emblematic of that paradox and the fundamental contradiction of public interest whistleblowing.

And similar to Ellsberg, as Obama pointed out, Snowden raised public consciousness about the tensions between democracy and secrecy that have really riddled the national security state for over a century. Another thing that is really important to recognize is that this is a transnational phenomenon.

We say it's the United States, but in several instances, and Snowden is one of them, the act of whistleblowing reverberates beyond the nation.

And in Snowden's case, around Europe in particular, there was a lot of response. And his disclosure helped to galvanize transnational advocacy around issues of surveillance.

And Kaetan could tell you a lot more about other cases, particularly Philip Agee in the 1970s, who Keaton is really the expert on, analogous histories of transnational responses to U.S. national security whistleblowing. But like Ellsberg, Snowden also becomes a cultural icon.

So one of the things we do in the book is not just look at legal contexts and questions at the state level, but also how do these whistleblowing cases reverberate beyond the state. And so you can't really, really appreciate Snowden's significance without understanding how he becomes a cultural icon, also not unlike Daniel Ellsberg.

So we think in the end, the public debate, the questions around fundamental issues of secrecy and democracy are one of the more significant kind of legacies of a Snowden, not unlike Ellsberg.

Right. And it's likely that not just those of us who are historians, but many people concerned about democracy will be debating and discussing Snowden for many years, as we're debating and discussing Ellsberg, here we are 50 years later.

I wanted to turn, as we always do at the close of our sessions, to a forward-looking question and a hopeful question, I hope.

One of the real lessons from your book, particularly, as you mentioned, some of the case studies. I loved, Kaetan, in your chapter on the 1970s and the anti-imperial, as you call them, dissidents and whistleblowers.

What should citizens today, especially younger listeners who are going into policy positions or going into institutions like universities, where all of us work, where oftentimes one does see things that are not right, sometimes even crossing the line of legality, what should we take as lessons from this?

If we believe that in a democracy, citizens should speak up when they see wrongdoing, but we also recognize, as you point out so well in this book, the other pressures, the professional pressures, but also the pressures of organizational purpose and policy that get in the way sometimes.

What are some of the lessons that readers should take away for their own activities in these settings? Kaetan, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, that's---we've reflected and thought about these questions as we were sort of bringing the book to a conclusion, and it may sound pretty simplistic, but dissent is a healthy feature of democratic society, and it's essential for a healthy debate.

When it comes to national security whistleblowing, I think one of the key changes that could be made is to acknowledge that these are whistleblowers. One way to protect whistleblowers, national security whistleblowers in particular, is to recognize that they are that.

And this, I think, requires a shift in the conceptualization of whistleblowing to include the notion of disclosures in the public interest. So much of the debate is framed by political and legal frameworks when there is a bigger debate, I think, that comes to the fore, particularly looking at the history of it. We mentioned somebody like Ellsberg at the time.

There was debate as to whether he was a whistleblower. Today, he is considered as an icon, as sort of the archetypal whistleblowers. Ernest Fitzgerald, who we mentioned, reputations change over time as a political pressures context.

So it's interesting how these phenomen[a] are reconceptualized over time. But thinking forward as to what we can do in the future, I think there are some questions, some issues that can be reformed, reforms that are not radical, things like changing the Espionage Act, we're having a discussion around it; reform of the classification system, which is something which periodically always comes up. Every single political party will agree that classification is excessive, yet there's never been a serious attempt to try to rectify that.

So we started the discussion talking about whistleblowing as a radical act, but many of the sort of changes that would perhaps be required are not radical. It requires [a] sort of people to challenge the framework and to engage in discussions, I think. And that would be the key thing to, I think, emphasize for the next generation who are coming through and will be joining institutions and looking to change them for the better.

It's a great point that we need to be attentive to our institutional structures and strengthen the structures and build upon them that protect this work. And as you say, the declassification process for secrecy, which is indeed something every administration promises to work on, but very few make progress on because it's either not a priority or something that they turn against, in fact. That's a really important point.

Hannah, you teach at an institution, the Gallatin School, which has a social mission attached to it, as all of our universities do, but particularly the Gallatin School. And I know you think about this, as Kaetan and I do, as a personal issue as well as a historical issue.

What advice do you give to students who will be entering work environments where these issues will come up, whether it's a public institution or a private institution?

What should they take away from this, from your book?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is something that's relevant to everybody, whether or not you work within the national security state. Another way of thinking about whistleblowing historically is that it invokes the idea of a professional ethic, that we all operate in different dimensions of our lives in a democracy.

Yes, we're citizens, if we have that in the United States---eroding privileges of citizenship---but we are also, in many cases, professionals. And whistleblowing is an important way of thinking about what you owe as a professional to both the institution, but also to the public.

And Ralph Nader, who was very influential in helping to popularize the concept of whistleblowing, would underscore that idea of a professional ethic.

And so, at a place in higher education, a lot of what you're doing is inculcating people into the beginnings of what will eventually become a profession.

And as long as we're talking a few weeks before one of the most pivotal elections in American history, it's worth pointing out that these questions of professional ethics are alive and well in COVID, right? The questions about if you work at the CDC or you head the CDC, how long does it take for you to go public with your argument that the Trump administration is politicizing its response to the pandemic?

And we saw that with the resignation of Dr. Rick Bright just this past week, so I think it is relevant.

It is, you know, our project was about national security whistleblowing, but I think there is a takeaway for anybody who's going to operate within any institution that there are going to be these questions about, you know, when and how do you take sensitive information public if you no longer believe it is being handled properly within the institution?

Right. That's very well said. And one of the points I often try to make to students is that, and to other people who are new to the national security world or other settings like that, is that whistleblowing or speaking truth to power seems obvious and easy from the outside.

But when you're inside, it's very hard and you have to have a true sense of your duty and professional ethic to remember your role, because the pressures against dissent, as you point out in this book, are so powerful.

Zachary, as a young person who thinks about these issues and talks about these issues a lot, do you feel that we're preparing young people, or what could we do better to prepare young people for both the professional ethic and responsibility that Hannah articulated, but also the difficulties and challenges in living up to that professional ethic on a day-to-day basis?

I do think we're doing a very good job at teaching young people to embrace this professional ethic. I think young people are wired to, not to be whistleblowers, but to appreciate whistleblowing and dissent. So in that sense, I think that it's a trend that will hopefully continue with my generation.

But I do think the real question is when my generation begins to get into the institutions of power, how much is it that the institutions shape them, or we shape the institutions? And so I think the real question in the next decade or so will be how do the institutions change within the generation, and less how the generation itself changes.

Well, that's very well said, and it comes back to your poem on the pressures and difficulties of moderation.

I really enjoyed this conversation. I think, Hannah and Kaetan, I think your book offers such an important historical perspective on issues that, as you both said, are now ever-present with us, and issues that are actually only going to grow in importance in coming years as we try to figure out what's happened in the last few years in American society, and as we try to move forward as an international community from this moment.

I want to thank you both for joining us today.

Thank you, Jeremi.

Thank you so much for having us.

And I want to encourage all of our listeners to read their wonderful book, Whistleblowing Nation, the History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy. It's available in paperback, and it has really wonderful case studies as well as an overview chapter and a concluding chapter, that I think allow listeners to learn more about the subject, and also dig into topics and figures like Ralph Nader, like Edward Snowden, like Judith Miller, the journalist who was in prison for protecting her sources, and many other cases that I think will be really interesting for our listeners.

I want to thank Zachary for his poem as always, and most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we have with us one of the foremost scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals in the world, writing about a topic that's very close to us. I think every day, where history matters for us every day, which is how we think about memory and the ways in which memories of the past, particularly memories of a traumatic, guilt ridden, difficult past, the ways those memories are used or not used to improve or limit our democracy. In other words, what is the role for historical memory in addressing past injustices?

Susan Neiman, who is our guest today. Susan has written some of the most important work on this. She is the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and that's central to a lot of her work. But she studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität in Berlin, was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University before moving to Berlin, moving back to Berlin for the Einstein Forum. She is the author of numerous books of contemporary philosophy and political philosophy as well, a number that I just like to mention, Evil and Modern Thought, particularly relevant, perhaps to our world today. Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, I'm not sure that I'm a grown-up idealist, but at least give one a try. [Laughter]

You probably are if you're doing this podcast.

[Laughter] Thank you, Susan, that makes me feel a lot better. And her most recent book, the book that's really going to be at the center of our discussion today, which is really a phenomenal book. Both Zachary and I have read it: Learning from the Germans' Race and the Memory of Evil. It has just come out, in paperback, with a brand new final section, at least for now, on the Black Lives Matter movement, and how it relates to Susan's really in depth discussion of historical memory in Germany and the United States over the last century.

Susan, thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure. Before we turn to our discussion, as always, we have our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri and today's poem is actually a bilingual poem from Zachary. This is the first of your bilingual poems in one hundred and twenty or so [episodes], I think. Zachary, what is the title of your poem?

"Herbst ich erinnere mich," or "Fall I remember." Let's hear it.

"Fall, I remember. You sneak up on us from behind the orchard fence. You seem cold and distant until the signs at the gas station begin to freeze. Herbst, ich erinnere mich an dich, der alte Mann in dem Supermarkt mit kaltem Haar, zwischen geöffnet und geschlossen Hoffnung. Fall, I remember you like a blessing, a prayer for the lost souls in tandem with the damp leaves trodden underfoot. The air is burning now. The earth is burning. The fires are so hot they feel as if they could be frozen. Und dann von hinter der Regalen hat ein Mann deinen Arm berührt. And then from behind the shelves, a man has touched your arm. He is memory. Er ist die Erinnerung. And there are the eyes of your underlings, and the eyes of the mistreated ones, and the eyes of your fathers, and your mothers and your great, great forgotten ones. Es gibt die Schuld deines Land. There is the guilt of your country. Es gibt die Schuld deiner Hand. There is the guilt of your hand. Wie kommt das Ende der Geschichte mit dem Ende der Erinnerung? Wie kommt das Ende der Erinnerung mit dem Ende der Zeit? Wie kommt das Ende der Schuld mit Erbst, mit Zärtlichkeit?"

That was really powerful. Very powerful. I think you should translate that last section for us and tell us what your poem's about.

Well, so I'll answer the latter question first. So my poem is really about how we think about historical memory and guilt. And it's particularly about this moment we find ourselves in in the fall of 2020, right before the presidential election, sort of thinking about our history and how it's going to affect our future.

And the last six lines of the poem in German translate roughly as how does the end of history come with the end of memory? How does the end of memory come with the end of time? How does the end of guilt come with fall, with tenderness?

It evokes a little bit of T.S. Eliot, right? Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Well, I was also thinking, Zachary, I don't know if you know, there's a fairly well known poem of Rilke. I don't know its title anymore, but it starts with es ist herbst, it's fall. Do you know that?

I think I may have come across it, but I was definitely going more T.S. Eliot.

But yeah, I prefer T.S. Eliot to Rilke myself, actually. But that, his herbst poem, is a good poem.

It is. You know, I'm glad you mentioned that, Susan. I read it years ago. I'm going to go back and find it when we're done and maybe put it up on the website with the link to your book. That's really, really wonderful. Susan, building on Zachary's poem and the sort of haunting elements of memory, maybe you can take us through a little bit about why you wrote this book, Learning from the Germans. It's a deep, thoughtful, intellectual book, but it's also a very personal book, which I loved.

Thank you. Yeah, it's not an academic book, although sometimes I call myself a recovering philosophy professor. [Laughter] But much of it's written in the first person.

It also contains a lot of interviews. I thought it was very important not just to have my voice in in the book, but also to have the voices of many, many people both in in Germany and in the Deep South, which is where I focused my research, not because I believe racism is only a problem in the Deep South, I should emphasize. But because the South works like a magnifying glass for the rest of the country. Everything is out in the open.

And, you know, you certainly can't say that people aren't concerned with their history. But let me go back to this book. It has two beginnings, actually. One was in the fall of 1982, when I first came to Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship, thinking I was going to stay for a year and go back.

And the reason I didn't go back was that I became absolutely fascinated with this German concept of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which I translate as working through the past. Germans like the long compound words.

Yes.

But it's not a concept that exists in any other language.

And, you know, there's a sense in which it simply emerged as a way of saying, "what the hell are we going to do about the Nazis?" And coming to Berlin in 1982, I was absolutely struck by the ways in which people were talking about the Nazi past. It was just before the 50th anniversary of the Nazi takeover of power.

And people in Berlin were preparing to commemorate it with a year's worth of exhibits and discussions and theater and people doing research about their neighborhoods and what their neighborhoods were like in the Third Reich. I should say, this was at the time, not at all a government sponsored project. And it wasn't even a majority of, certainly not a majority of, Germans and not even a majority of Berliners, who have always leaned somewhat to the left of the country.

But those were the people that I would have normally gravitated to, that is intellectuals, artists, activists. And they were examining their country's history, which also meant their parents and their teachers' complicity, with an intensity that I immediately had to ask, why aren't we doing this in the United States?

And at the time, I wasn't even thinking very far back about our history. I was thinking we don't talk about the Vietnam War anymore. We've never really talked about Hiroshima.

And that was a moment when I began to think about the contrast between the ways in which Americans dealt with their history, and or don't, and what the Germans were doing with theirs. So it's a subject that I've been thinking about, you know, for more than 35 years.

And the immediate impetus to writing the book, was when I was watching President Obama give the eulogy for the nine churchgoers massacred in Charleston in 2015. And in tears from my Berlin apartment, and thinking, however, because, you know, Nikki Haley did take down the flag, it was the first time that a major national politician had called for dealing with, or getting rid of, Confederate symbols.

And I thought, gosh, America is finally beginning a Vergangenheitsaufgabeitung. And since this is something I've thought about for a long time, maybe I can make a contribution. But I didn't want to simply do it from afar.

I had a sabbatical coming to me from my institute, and I wanted to spend some time with them, you know, even in 2016, there were Americans looking at this history, particularly around questions of racial reconciliation. So I based myself for a year in Mississippi, following people around who were doing this work, as well as people who were absolutely opposed to it, as a way of trying to figure out what would be a genuinely American Vergangenheitsaufgabeitung working of the past.

I do believe we have things to learn from what the Germans have done with their history, including their mistakes, and there have been many.

I don't think any two countries' histories are the same. And the first chapter of the book talks about all the differences between, you know, American and German history, because I knew, of course, people would object immediately. So, of course, there are many differences in those two histories.

You're a historian, so, you know, it's important to care about cultural and historical differences, but I still think there are lessons.

Well, and I have to say, I first became aware of your book [when] it had just come out and I think I had read a review of it, but I was at a meeting of the World War Two Museum, the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, where I'm on the board. And we were talking about memories of World War Two.

And it was, it became so evident to me as we were planning a conference on World War Two memory, how little Americans have thought critically about our own war experience. And that's in no way to trash the experience of the United States in World War Two, but how much more advanced German thinking was on this. And this is a theme that resonates, I think, in your book.

Why is it that around many of these issues, the Germans have seemingly done more thinking about this, more of the work of addressing the dark and embarrassing and traumatic parts of their history than Americans? Why is that?

Well, there's several, several reasons for, you know, we can give several reasons. One is, I don't know if it's OK to swear on your podcast or not. [Laughter] Go ahead.

OK, I was actually in a radio program in, of all places, the Bay Area. And I used a slightly profane expression and the moderator apologized to her audience. So you never know.

But I'm quoting here James Meredith, one of the people that I interviewed in the book, the great civil rights hero from Mississippi. And one of the things he said to me, he said, "well, the Germans got their ass kicked and we didn't." And of course, there's a way in which that's true.

And one can say if there's any moral agreement in the world, it's that the Nazis committed the worst crimes in human history. I'll agree with that. And of course, since they were devastated at the end of the war, there was some pressure on them from the outside to, you know, do something about their history, although it was slow and faltering, certainly in the West.

And I think that's a very important message for Americans to learn. We tend to assume that the crimes of the Nazis were so awful that the minute the war was over, they fell on their knees and begged for atonement. That is not what happened at all.

In West Germany, in particular, they thought of themselves as the war's worst victims. And when I realized that, and it took me decades to realize this because it's not something they like to talk about at all. You have to work to ferret it out.

I realized that the tropes with which, West Germans in the first decades after the war spoke about the war, you know, we lost a quarter of our territory and seven million people were killed and our men were in POW camps if they survived at all. Or they were wounded and our cities were burned and we were hungry, just barely alive. Maybe you'll catch the reference there. And on top of it, the damn Yankees wanted to tell us it was all our fault.

Yes.

And I suddenly realized they sound just like the defenders of the lost cause.

Yep.

And from that, I think one can actually get a measure of hope because if it turns out that even, you know, Nazis took a long time to acknowledge that they had some atoning to do, it's no wonder that those people who are asking, you know, for similar confrontation with our history in the U.S. are getting pushback. It's no wonder that we're having a cultural war over this, because people tend, in the first instance, they like to think of their people as heroes. If they can't think of them as heroes, they think of them as victims.

That's the next best thing. But, you know, people focus on their own suffering. That's what people do.

But what was historically unique, was that the Germans made a further step, which is to say, yeah, we suffered and it was rough, but other people suffered more and it was our fault. And, you know, so yes, the defeat played a role. There's some other, however, things that sound more prosaic.

You have no idea what kind of a media landscape we have here, public media landscape. And I'm, you know, I'm pleased to see podcasts like yours appearing to make up for the fact that, you know, most radio programs and almost all of television is commercial television. It does not go in for long form discussions of any kind.

And that's entirely different in Germany. In Germany, most of the media is public and we all pay a little tax. The funny thing is that I don't actually have time.

I watch much German television or radio, but I am so happy every year to pay my little tax, which is not very much. It's like, let's say, $100 a year, because I know that that ensures that we don't have Fox News, you know, so the German public is used to serious discussions in television, in radio, in the newspapers of a kind, that we don't have enough outlets in the United States for doing. That's another thing that plays a role.

So what about a personal, confrontation? I remember reading recently a book called Germany and the Germans by John Arda in from the 1990s. And he describes going to, I think it was at the University of Stuttgart, where they had like the grandfathers and grandmothers who had lived through the war, [talk] one on one with students who grew up after the war. And there was very much a sort of generational tension.

How much of the sort of Vergangenheitsalphabetung was personal? And why haven't we had that in the United States?

So that's a really good question. And of course, it depends whether the person you're confronting is your grandfather or your father. In the late 60s, when people were confronting their parents who had served in the Wehrmacht or, you know, and certainly gone along with the Nazis. Even if they hadn't actually been members of the party, the confrontations were terrible, understandably.

And you had a sense of family structures being quite destroyed in many cases. The interesting thing, I felt like the family structures weren't destroyed. I mean, I was once invited to, you know, spend a weekend in the country with somebody who said her parents were away and said, use our house. And the parents had, you know, pictures of the father in uniform over the house. And I left the next day.

I can imagine. Yes.

[Laughter] You know, if this is what it means to have a nice relationship with your parents, I'm not sure that I'm going for it. Look, I think so. So there are people now talking about the ways in which people, you know, didn't confront their grandparents and where the grandparent was, in particular, a Nazi criminal or even a serious Nazi, that has left real scars. One of the people I interviewed in the book, Alexandra Semft, has written about her grandfather, who was actually one of the very few people executed as a war criminal, and, you know, talked about the way that that destroyed her family.

So, you know, the confrontations didn't happen at all for decades. And they certainly happened. You know, there are sort of waves of these things.

And of course, every family is personal. Look, I think the biggest problem in the United States is this hundred year old hole in our memory, as I talk about in the book, between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I was fortunate, I grew up in the South, although I know you don't hear it. My parents were from the North, but my mother was very active in the civil rights movement in Atlanta. So I'm kind of a civil rights kid. That was the you know, that was the atmosphere that I grew up in. But nobody talked about history. Everybody was much too focused on the present, you know, focused on getting rid of segregation.

And, you know, it was a time, Zachary, you're fortunate to have had your young political consciousness formed by, you know, an African-American president of great integrity and intelligence. When I was young, we couldn't imagine it. We couldn't even imagine a black cabinet member at that point.

So the focus was on the present and the future. People were not talking about the history. At least white people certainly weren't. And I rather think black people weren't either. They knew more of it, of course, than white people did, but it wasn't a focus of attention.

So we tended to think, OK, there was slavery. Slavery was terrible, but then we fought a war in order to end it. That was still the line, you know, that I learned mostly. And then there was Jim Crow, I think Jim Crow is a terrible expression.

I'm on a minor campaign to snap it out because it's a euphemism. It prettifies what Bryan Stevenson calls the age of racial terror, which I think is a much more accurate expression.

I agree.

Yeah. And the words Jim Crow allow us to think, OK, there were racial stereotypes, there was racist prejudice. But, you know, We we don't know about the web of legal continuation of various things that have been called neo-slavery.

The way in which ordinary behavior, if carried out by African-Americans, was criminalized, the way in which there was actually a deliberate turn from, you know, thinking of African-Americans as stupid and lazy, which was the stereotype during slavery days, to thinking of them as criminals. All the way through, you know, redlining and the ways in which people of color were barred from getting mortgages, were barred from getting Social Security.

So and and, of course, in the background, lynching as a real instrument of terror to intimidate people of color. So, you know, we we tended to think that all of that was more or less so. We think, OK, it was, you know, it was too bad that there was segregation, but then we had the civil rights movement and it wiped it out.

And, you know, our ignorance, and I must say myself ,very much until 2015, until I I started thinking about these questions, I was as ignorant as anybody else. And I know professors of American history who didn't know very much about it.

Of course. [Inaudible] Well, there is for a long time it wasn't even in our scholarship. I mean, you could be a scholar of American history without addressing these issues until, you know, 30 years ago.

Right. And then you had to be a scholar. You know, you had to be Eric Foner or, you know, in order to address those issues. And, you know, if it wasn't your field, it didn't get into public discussion in the way that it is now. So I think that's the main reason why Americans have not examined our racist history.

There's a second issue that I'm only going to mention because I know we don't have time to go into it. I think we are still living in a time where the Cold War has cast its shadow over American history, which is why great, you know, civil rights activists like Paul Robeson [are] almost forgotten, which is why we don't talk about Hiroshima and we don't talk about Vietnam. But that's a question for a podcast in itself.

Yeah. So we also see you talked about this in your book a lot as well. Later on, particularly in recent decades, an effort by Germans not only to talk about their past, but to take actions, to atone for it, to accept refugees and to send aid to Israel and other such activities.

How big of a part of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is this? And has it been applied in the United States? And how could it be?

So [that is a] very good question. I mean, let me start by saying that Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung has, you know, it's not one thing. It's not a, you know, a one off vaccination, OK?

It involves, you know, constructing a different national narrative, but that itself is not just something to be done by historians. And it's not just something to be done in history books.

It involves popular culture. You know, it involves movies, literature, songs, all of that stuff needs to be rethought of. I think reparations need to play a role.

And they have certainly played a role in Germany with reparations to Holocaust victims, reparations to the state of Israel. And here is something that Americans tend to forget or not ever to have known about. The Wehrmacht laid waste to Poland and Russia and killed 14 million Slavic civilians.

So East Germany paid a huge amount of reparations to Poland and the Soviet Union as well. So obviously, where there's been damage and, you know, again, it's a complicated subject. The damage needs to be materially repaired if there are still people who need to be brought to justice. They need to be brought to justice. We need to think about the iconography of our cities, as I say in the book. There is no Hans Wehrmacht in Germany.

I mean, I just made that up as a counterpart to Johnny Reb. Yes. What there are are thousands of memorials to both victims and the few resistance heroes that there were. All of that is part of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.

So Susan, this is such a powerful narrative that you put together here, and it is so compelling because it's thoughtful and you draw out interviews with major figures. You've mentioned Brian Stevenson and many others on the German side and the American side. We always like to close our podcast episode, Susan, with a forward looking, hopeful denouement.

What do you take from this about the possibilities going forward? I think Americans are maybe at least a younger generation. It seems to me, and I find this certainly with my students, are much more open to talking about a lot of these issues than my students were even 10 years ago.

So what do you see as the positive pathway forward for us taking into account your analysis of historical memory and the uses and misuses of it?

I see a lot of hope at the moment, but I think we're in a perilous time. It surprises me to complain about polarization because it's such a centrist thing to do. And I am not a centrist. I'm a Social Democrat and I'll say it to anybody who wants to hear it. I've always been on the left. But I think we need to be very, very careful in this moment.

I agree with you that people are finally in America connecting the violence, which still outrageously exists more towards people of color than towards anyone else. That violence with the violence in our past and the need for a new narrative. But I think it's extremely important that this be seen as a universalist project.

I know the word universalism is, you know, not very popular these days, but I'm making an argument to revive it. And I try and do that in the book. This is American history.

This is not black history. And it's very important, I think, that white Americans not consider ourselves as allies. An ally is someone who is, you know, has a temporary alignment of interests with someone else like the U.S. and the Soviet Union did during World War Two.

Right.

But wasn't an alliance based on principle? I support Black Lives Matter, not out of interest, but as a matter of principle, because I care about universal human justice. And I am part of, you know, many people of many ethnic backgrounds who have always done so.

Hannah Arendt, in her very important book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, criticized the state of Israel because when they indicted Eichmann, they indicted him for crimes against the Jewish people, and she says he should have...been indicted for crimes against humanity.

And I think that's exactly right. And I think we need to see the crimes against African Americans as crimes against humanity that should engage and enrage every decent American as we work to reconstruct a better country.

That's so powerful. Susan, I loved how you closed the book in what you called, "in place of conclusions." Because there is no conclusion to this story, where you talk about how in your words, "I gave tribalism a try," right? But then you say it surprised me. I had a little whiplash at the end. I didn't expect that from you. And then you said, this book itself is offered as an exercise in universalism in the hope that understanding difference will help us to find shared souls.

Zachary, this book obviously moved you. We read a lot together, but I think you really were moved by this. Why did it move you? And do you think that Susan's plea for universalism will resonate with your generation?

Yeah, I think that it really resonated for me because it's a very sort of understanding of American history and world history from a perspective, that is, that is deeply intellectual. And I think, the most accurate depiction of history that we can see.

And I think it's actually a very hopeful thing for young Americans like myself, because I think sometimes it's a little easy to be put off by people who want to be all negative about American history or all positive about American history. And I think that this book in the message of this book offers a great framework for how we can understand our history from a realistic perspective.

Thank you so much. And you know what Jeremy said also resonates with your poem. You know, there isn't a conclusion. This is something you know that's going to go on for a very long time, and it's a multi generational project. So I think it's wonderful that the two of you are doing this together.

And reading your books, Susan, it certainly felt not just like reading an exploration in memory and history, but also an exploration and redemption. What you're talking about is the most hopeful thing, right?

How democratic societies offer the possibility for redemption because this is a theme of our podcast. Weekend and week out. Democracy is about no finality. Democracy denies that there's an end to history. There's no perfect template, and we're not looking to create the perfect man and woman, we're looking to constantly remake ourselves for our times to come.

It's a constant rebuilding or in the Jewish tradition, Ledor Vador, from generation to generation. And, I think your book really captures that so well.

Thank you for joining us from Berlin today for this discussion.

Well, it's been a pleasure, and now I'll look up your podcast more often.

I hope you will.

I will.

And Zachary, thank you, as always for a moving poem in two languages this time. You keep outdoing yourself every week and most of all, thank you to our listeners. And I do want to encourage everyone to pick up a copy of Susan's book. It's now in paperback, Learning from the Germans. The title, very easy to remember.

[Music] Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the topic of participatory democracy.

How have and how can people be more involved in our democracy, not just when it comes to voting, but to day-to-day activities to make our democracy more full, more rich, and more real for people. We're going to focus on a particular moment in our history when a young group of citizens came forward with a statement about the importance of participatory democracy, a statement that inspired hundreds of thousands of people and continues to inspire many people. This is the Port Huron Statement of 1962, written by Students for a Democratic Society.

And we have with us one of the foremost scholars of participatory democracy and Students for a Democratic Society and the Port Huron Statement, Dr. Vanessa Cook. Dr. Cook received her PhD in U.S. history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. She wrote a fantastic dissertation that I in part supervised and had the opportunity to learn from.

It's a dissertation that's been published as a really wonderful book that I encourage everyone to read. The book is titled Spiritual Socialists, Religion and the American Left, and it's about those issues and much, much more with some fascinating figures who contributed to our democracy in all kinds of ways. She's written articles in the Washington Post, Dissent Magazine, Religion and Politics, and she's currently the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency Historian, in residence, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Missing in Action Project.

Vanessa, thank you for joining us this morning.

Oh, good morning. Thank you for having me.

Before we turn to our discussion of participatory democracy and the Port Huron Statement, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's scene-setting poem. Zachary, what is the title of your poem this morning?

"Port Huron Revisited."

Let's hear it.

"We are people of this generation, housed now in, we are people of this generation, do not forget the oceans of incalculable transgressions and the memory of the maimed millions. We are people of this generation, housed now in absurdity and the phosphorescent orbs of radioactive civility. We are people of this generation, standing by obelisks we're not sure make any sense to us now in a sea of so many sanctimonious automobiles. Mark them as the godly idols of our time. We are people of this generation, housed now in, and the black-white haze of centuries of ambiguous certainty. We are people of this generation, sleep, float, remember. We are people of this generation, housed now in absurdity and the windswept deserts of parking lot dystopias. We are people of this generation, standing now on a bluff overlooking the harbor, observe the Lady of Liberty, wonder what oxidized horror she holds beneath the crown. Thus is the spirit of white giant at the reflecting pool, the names in white crawling along the black marble wall."

I love all the imagery there, Zachary, from the parking lots to the Statue of Liberty. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the sort of dissatisfaction with American society and the current sort of American political discourse that drove so many young people to the radical political movements of the 1960s. And I think what's so startling today is how relevant many of their concerns and their criticisms of American society are to young people like myself today. And...that was really what my poem was about, was connecting those two generations and those two time periods.

I love the intergenerational element of that, Zachary. Our podcast is designed to be intergenerational.

Well, and the first line of the Port Huron statement is, we are people of this generation, which is such a poignant and powerful statement in and of itself.

Well said.

Vanessa, can you give us some background on this Port Huron statement of 1962? Who wrote it and what was the message that they were trying to promote?

Sure. So in the summer of 1962, students from Students for Democratic Society or SDS met at a retreat in Port Huron, Michigan, hence the name, to really deliberately come up with a statement or an agenda for their generation, as Zachary referred to. It was about 60 students from all over the country.

SDS was a fairly young organization at that time. It was only about two years old, so there were about a dozen chapters on different campuses across the country. And they put out a notice for anyone interested to come and participate in this convention, as they called it, to write this statement, really outlining the problems and concerns that they saw in American society.

Also suggestions or possible solutions to those problems. But it was all framed around the question of how can we enhance democracy in the country and how can we expand democracy in the country?

And it became, as many listeners will know, a very influential document throughout the 1960s, distributed widely. And SDS chapters really start to crop up on most campuses across the country in the 60s.

Why at this moment in 1962, Vanessa, what led to this moment producing this document?

Well, in 1962, I think there were some valid concerns about the state of democracy and threats to democracy, having just gone through the McCarthy era and the undermining of civil liberties and attacks on civil liberties that became very serious in the 1950s. So many of those students grew up recognizing that threat.

Also concerns about ongoing war. The Cold War was becoming more tense between the Soviet Union and the US. And they talked about that in the document and identified that as a problem.

Nuclear warfare, the threat of nuclear warfare and annihilation in that way, hung over them. And I think you can see that fear on almost every page of the Port Huron statement. And just a concern that there was a lot of apathy about the way that the government was running things in the United States, about the United States' role in the world, and the lack of democracy extended to groups like African-Americans in the South.

It sounds in many ways like an echo or a precursor to a number of issues we contend with today. One being the non-representativeness of the Democratic Party in some ways and other parties.

Members of SDS criticized the Southern Democrats, the so-called Dixiecrats, for resisting civil rights actions and resisting a response to the large numbers of citizens who felt disempowered within the political structure. And then also the concerns about inequality, economic inequality, both of which you mentioned so well.

What were their solutions? What were they proposing in place of what they saw as a stagnant political process that was non-representative and problems of inequality? What were they proposing?

So their sort of catchphrase or what became a concept that they put forward as a fresh take on democratic theory was called participatory democracy, which you mentioned in the opening. And participatory democracy was an open-ended term, and it could mean different things to different people.

But as I understand it, it was a concept that meant that democracy should not just be about voting in electoral politics. It shouldn't just be going on election day and pulling a lever, filling out a ballot for politicians, even though that was incredibly important and it was being denied to certain people like African-Americans. And the Students for a Democratic Society really wanted to ensure that everyone had the right to vote.

But beyond that, they wanted to expand democracy, so that really became a way of life for people. And they talked about democracy as a way of life. So it wasn't just electoral politics, but it was participating in the decisions that are going on in your community.

And that meant becoming an engaged citizen, not just apathetic, not just relying on other people to make decisions for you and, you know, assuming that you have no voice or no power. And so they encourage people to get involved in local politics, to go to board meetings, to go to town hall meetings, to lobby their local and state and national politicians with letters or calls, to express their voice and to make those connections between local politics and national politics and to really hold all those politicians accountable to democratic processes.

Why was this concept of participatory democracy so radical? What made it so new at this time?

Well, I think because people really in America did conceptualize democracy or thought of it as the right to voice your opinion, but usually that was done through, you know, electoral processes and voting. So this expansion of democracy, I think was a new, a fairly new concept that changed people's thinking about how democracy could become more embedded in people's daily lives.

The Port Huron statement has been recognized as one of the signposts for a clear demarcation between what was known as the old left, which was framed around more Marxist analyses of economic systems and workplace issues, to a new left. And so the Port Huron statement represents a break or a new chapter in leftist politics and thought in American society.

And one of the biggest differences is that students for democratic society in the Port Huron statement, they did talk about economic issues and traditional trade issues, shop issues, but they really put it in more cultural and social terms. And so it wasn't just economics or, you know, people's identity as working people or the proletariat that they focused upon.

They really expanded the leftist agenda to recognize issues of social problems, of cultural concerns, of people's identity as, you know, mothers and students and African Americans and women and, you know, all kinds of different identifiers, rather than just as working class people.

You raised a really important issue about culture and social relations. One of the criticisms that was thrown at the Port Huron statement, and that's often thrown at leftist politics, as you described them so well, Vaneessa, is the criticism of being socialist. And many would argue then and have argued now that some of these ideas are un-American because they're socialist.

How do you respond to that?

Well, socialism does have a rich history in the United States. It's not just a foreign import and it isn't necessarily Marxist in nature, doesn't necessarily call for the overthrow of the government. So these kind of ideas that people have that are associated more with the Soviet Union or other totalitarian societies that have adopted socialism, you know, that's sort of the nightmare scenario that people think of with socialism.

But obviously there are different types. Democratic socialism is alive and well in most of the advanced countries and the United States, and that began in the early to mid-20th century. But socialism in the terms that SDS understood it, they did avoid the term, especially in the Port Huron statement, because it was such a weighted concept and that it had such negative connotations, particularly in the Cold War context when everyone was being accused of communism, if they stood up for anything that seemed radical.

But socialism really comes down to equality. And I think Students for Democratic Society, they were advocating for a recognition of more equal treatment of everyone in the country. And that ties into democracy because everyone needs to be seen as equal if they're going to have an equal voice in the political process.

And do you think that this argument and the case that was made so eloquently in the Port Huron statement, did it contribute to the civil rights movement?

I think that went hand in hand. I think the civil rights movement was part of the new left umbrella term or new left umbrella movement, that social movement. And the students for democratic society, mostly white students from the North at first, but they became more aware of what was going on in the South with the Jim Crow laws and threats to voting rights there and denials of voting rights and human rights in the South.

And so when they started to see some of this coverage on the news in the late 50s or read about it in newspapers, hear it word of mouth, this was shocking to them that in this country where they grew up and they actually used this language in the opening of the Port Huron statement, we heard that we're a land of liberty and freedom and justice for all.

And yet we grew up and we noticed these contradictions, these glaring problems that didn't live up to those values. And so they saw this as an inspirational moment, the civil rights movement making momentum in the South and gaining traction there.

And they wanted to be part of that push to enhance democracy in that region and across the country.

So how did this relate to the anti-war movement of the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States? Was it a precursor or does the Port Huron statement sort of reflect an early anti-war sentiment?

There's a lot of talk about the military-industrial complex, among other sort of terms about the war machine in the United States. Yeah, I think the Port Huron statement did recognize some troubling trends that even though the Vietnam War wasn't exactly on their radar as much in 1962 as it would be two or three years later even, I think they did see that the United States government was making some decisions that, you know, were concerning to them.

They were troubled by the idea of the military-industrial complex. That's a term that comes up in the Port Huron statement. It's also something that Eisenhower identified as, you know, he warned about that problem.

And so I think that there was an inherent anti-war sentiment within the Port Huron statement because the Students for a Democratic Society did not want the US government to perpetuate war for the sake of a strong economy, for example. They realized that in World War II, the war economy had helped a lot to turn around the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the Korean War right after World War II or soon after World War II.

And then the Cold War tensions heating up did rationalize the continuation of the military-industrial complex and that tight relationship between the government, big business for, you know, military industry and the military itself. And they saw this as, you know, perhaps a worst, a military state and a endless war type of society that they thought was a threat to democracy.

Vanessa, as you're describing these issues so well with regard to civil rights and anti-war, anti-militarist activities, one can't help but think that these issues haven't gone away. Why do you think that's the case?

Well, there has been, there had been some progress with the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, but since then that has been undermined and chipped away at.

And I think that there is a fear of enfranchisement for, you know, certain politicians who would rather keep people from voting because they fear the consequences of those votes. I'm not saying that one party is more to blame than the other because there are issues with, say, gerrymandering or corruption in both parties. And so that's something people have to be very vigilant about.

But it is unfortunate that even though the Port Huron statement is in need of some updating and many things would be different if young people sat down and wrote an agenda for their generation today, it is unfortunate that some of those issues are still with us and it can be relevant for us today too.

Do you think that in some ways that we forgotten about these issues, that these issues that were put out so eloquently and in such an influential way in the early 1960s and structured many of the debates of that time, that we've sort of forgotten this history? And if so, what do you think is a good way to bring these issues back into our discussions today and to bring young people back into these discussions around these issues?

Well, it's my fear and concern in recent years and, you know, this is just anecdotal. I don't have the evidence for this, but it seems as a historian, I read much more about Americans talking about the need for democracy, valuing that concept and principle of democracy, even using rhetoric like defending democracy, which Woodrow Wilson deployed during the First World War.

That I think props up, comes up more in my reading of 20th century history than it has in recent years. I think today the rhetoric is more around defending the American way of life, which of course you can trace back to FDR and the four freedoms. But today, I think people interpreting, okay, defending the American way of life, that could mean a lot of different things to different people.

It doesn't necessarily mean democracy or include democracy. So I think if we discuss, open up more conversations where democracy is the focus and we reaffirm a commitment to that as Americans and that that's a strong tradition or at least experiment in this country that we need to rededicate ourselves to with programs like this podcast, with, you know, other, not just intellectual or academic forums, but in the general public, I think that we need to reaffirm democracy as a value.

I love what you've said there, Vanessa. I mean, it does seem to me that we use the word democracy, but we too often mean legalistic elements of our society and institutional elements, all of which are important. But the, as you put it, the culture and the personal part of democracy, what it is that brings people together to work together, to participate and address common concerns. That seems strangely to be absent from a lot of our discussions.

And strangely, it seems that that is actually undermined by social media, which often encourages us to yell at each other, not to actually have these deliberative moments where we participate in conversation, bringing our various points of view together. How practically do you think we can build on the SDS and the Port Huron model today to maybe get past these limitations in our current democratic culture?

Well, having those conversations is an important and practical, you know, practicing that discourse, opening that dialogue, even with people who disagree with you. I mean, that's practicing democracy. And I think what you said about social media is right on point.

I think people always want to be entitled to their opinion, and that's important, but they get kind of lost in their stance or their opinion, or they frame things as, you know, Republican versus Democrat, or, you know, this president versus this president-elect, or conservative versus liberal or leftist. And I think that if the conversation were directed more towards democracy and, hey, can we at least agree that democracy is important, that that might bring people together and find some sort of common ground rather than just, you know, pitting this divide against each other.

I know democracy as a concept isn't perfect. There have been many scholars and politicians who found it to be a very slippery concept and not something that could always, that American people could always understand or rally behind. But it's my hope that democracy can still carry that weight of deferring opinions and, you know, multiple worldviews.

And if we reaffirm that, if we use the hope of the Port Huron statement, that we can come together and respect common values and, you know, a common commitment to democracy, that maybe we can heal some of these divides.

How can we inspire young people to think about democracy today? It's something that a lot of young people take for granted or quickly become dissatisfied with. How can we, how can we get young people as excited about democracy as those who wrote the Port Huron statement were?

That is a tough question. I think having a engagement with whatever's going on in your community is a good first step. That can be, like you said, a frustrating experience and it might turn off people pretty quickly. But you need good people in there.

You need to actually, if you do value these principles and you want to make a difference, you know, you can't just, you know, let it up to fate. You actually have to get in there and to make a difference directly. Taking to the streets as some people have done for Black Lives Matter and those more spontaneous eruptions of democratic pressure, that is important as well.

I think also reading, you know, people really could be inspired by just reading about activists in the past, including the Students for Democratic Society in many respects, that that might inspire them to get involved in the process, just keeping that hope alive rather than getting bogged down in the negative.

And of course they could read your book on many activists who valued and stretched and opened the concept of democracy in our society, that these are your spiritual socialists in many ways and they're as spiritual and as democratic as they are inspired by socialist ideas.

Zachary, I wanted to ask you, do you see this work that Vanessa is describing, this work of opening, discussing democracy, bringing more people in, putting ideology perhaps aside and encouraging participation among different kinds of people, do you see this germinating among young people today and do you see a possibility for more of this among your generation of young people who care so deeply about these issues? Where do you see this going?

Yeah, I definitely think that there are a lot of young people, really talented young people thinking about democracy and issues of our democracy today, but I do think there is a sort of lack of a willingness to think creatively and radically about how we can reshape not just policy but our democratic institutions themselves.

And I think that's kind of because our educational system has sort of failed to educate us about how our democracy has shifted and changed throughout its history and how often we've relied on the work of young people to change it for the better and to protect our democracy.

It's very well said, Zachary. It's like Vanessa pointed out earlier, we use the word democracy in our education, but we don't really talk about what it means and as Vanessa put it, how one practices democracy. And maybe a focus on that and a focus on bringing young people together to write and think about it, as Vanessa described, is something we should do more of in our communities and in our educational institutions among other places.

Vanessa, are you hopeful that this work will happen and that it will be done?

I am. I think that some of the troubling signs we're seeing today with the electoral process, I'm hoping will open people's eyes to the need to reevaluate this, to reaffirm it, to actually offer more education about it like Zachary said. You know, everyone wants to add something to the curriculum of our high schools or undergrad courses, but my husband had a course, I think in high school, called "Problems of Democracy."

And I thought, wow, how amazing to have a course that really unpacks that and shows the promise of it but also the problems and issues that have happened throughout our history but also continue today. So that would be a step in the right direction for people in high school who many times don't even have civics classes anymore to start to really think about these issues.

It's such a perfect title, Vanessa.

In many ways, our podcast is designed to be a nationwide course in problems and opportunities of democracy. And one of the really fascinating parts of democracy as a concept is that it encompasses so many different issues and it can encompass so many different people and produce new kinds of ideas, new kinds of solutions to problems.

It's the ever experimental element of democracy that inspires our podcast. It inspired Franklin Roosevelt, in many ways, the historical mentor for our podcast and it is so well embodied. This notion of historical experimentation among diverse groups, it's so well embodied by your work, Vanessa, and what you shared with us today.

Looking back on the Port Huron Statement in 1962, as you've done, really provides us a lesson and inspiration, not to rewrite the statement per se but to think about what an agenda for a new generation and what a more expansive democracy would look like in the 21st century. We need that conversation now more than ever. Vanessa, thank you so much for the work you've done to help ground and inspire this conversation.

You've really shared so much with us today. Thank you.

Yeah, for sure. You as well. I'm inspired by young people like Zachary who are taking this seriously. I know we'll do great things.

It's so true. Zachary and his generation are a new greatest generation in the making. We're fortunate to have them as part of our podcast.

We're particularly fortunate to have Zachary's poems every week. Thank you for your Port Huron revisited reflections, Zachary. Most of all, thank you to our audience for working hard to improve and expand our democracy every day.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we're going to discuss the history of the Republican Party. Where did the Republican Party come from, particularly in the mid-20th century? It, of course, has an earlier history, but we're going to talk about the mid-20th century history of the Republican Party and its development, its evolution, and devolution from the mid-20th century to today. We'll also talk about how the history of the Republican Party can inform us about where the party might be going. We're joined by the foremost scholar of the history of the Republican Party, the person who's written the most important work on the history of the Republican Party in the 20th and 21st centuries, my friend Geoffrey Kabaservice. Geoff is the Director of Political Studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. He's the author of several books, including The Guardians: Kingman, Brewster, His Circle, and The Rise of the Liberal Establishment, which is a really terrific book about one of the key figures in establishment Republican Party politics in the mid-20th century through the 1960s. Then he wrote an even more important book, Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Geoff most recently published another piece, he publishes all over the place, he published a most recent piece in the Washington Post called "The Forever Grievance" on the recent years of the Republican Party and where the Republican Party might be going from where it is today. Geoff, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you, Jeremy. It's great to be back here and also to be reminded of our time in the archives together when we were both graduate students in history at Yale.

That's right. Geoff and I got to know each other very well when we spent long days working through musty old papers in the Yale University archives. Glory days, Geoff, yes? (Oh, yeah.) Before we turn to our discussion of the history of the Republican Party, we have, of course, our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What is the title of your poem today, Zachary? (It's a long one. It's titled "For Joseph McCarthy and His Brethren in Moral Promiscuity.") Wow. McCarthy and Moral Promiscuity. I'm a little concerned about where we're going. Let's hear it.

Twice gone from persecution, I crossed the sea in countless boats and discovered your humanity in '76's sacred notes. Far from the banks of promised lands, one came in chains, the other on the sea. And then you fought a long fought fight to make this stolen land more free. Blood dripped, the river sipped, and oceans touched the shores of Camelot. And now beyond the aching bones of ignorance, you've sat for thoughtless years and wondered at the power of the murmurs and the fears. Far from the arms of incapacity, you've turned the migrants from the door and hope to see our future still in sky-high department stores. Too far from vulnerability, you formed the pillars of cathedrals and found your gaze on golden heights above people tortured by the needles. Removed from truth equality, you've reached for automobiles and watched paper dancing elephants above emaciated squirrels. Your streets are always flooding with what remains of Mother Nature, sweeping back her poverty from the steps of your legislatures. Where, in '76's sacred notes, I see the reflection of the boats and the memory of your humanity, the promises from across the sea. Where, in the memory of '63, I find a picture less of you and more of me, the single portrait of the iceberg Atlantic that has hit your long-gone sinking Titanic.

That closing note on the Titanic, Zachary, that really sneaks up upon you. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the rise of the Republican Party in the late 19th century around shared humanity and success, and how that sort of deteriorated to the point where we find ourselves today very far from the founding ideals of the party.

I think Reagan's election was very significant, but not quite for the reason that people think. There's this kind of assumption that you even hear political historians make, which is that the Republican Party became conservative when Barry Goldwater got that presidential nomination in 1964, and it's remained conservative ever after. And to quote George Will's witticism, Barry Goldwater did win the presidential election in 1964. It's just that they didn't get around to counting the votes until 16 years later. But in fact, the Republican Party did not become conservative after Goldwater's victory. In fact, the conservatives had a real demotion within the party because not only did Goldwater lose in a landslide, but he really took down so many Republicans on the ballot below him, not just in Congress, but also at the levels of state legislatures and governors and even local authorities because his conservatism was simply that unpopular. And that is what gave Lyndon Johnson the ability to pass what amounted to a second New Deal.

Well, that's a great place to start, Zachary. Geoff, the Republican Party in the mid-20th century during the Great Depression and World War II and thereafter, it was very different from the party of Lincoln, of course, and the party that we see today. Can you describe what the party was about and how one thinks about the positions and leadership of the Republican Party mid-20th century?

Well, thanks again for that introduction, Jeremy, and thank you, Zachary, for that poem, which I thought was terrific. The Republican Party is, in a funny way, our last example of a successful third party. It displaced the previous second party, the Whigs, and it was cobbled together from anti-slavery Whigs, but also from some other minor parties like Free Soilers and even the Know Nothing Party, which in many ways is a precursor to the xenophobia and nationalism of much of the Republican Party right now. But of course, it was the Republican Party that brought us one of our greatest leaders, Abraham Lincoln, who also was one of the world's great leaders. And Lincolnism and the Lincoln tradition really defined the Republican Party for most of its first century. There really was a deeply held and dearly held belief in the Lincolnian heritage of civil rights and civil liberties. And that defined the party even though it was usually the more conservative of the two parties in terms of its sympathy toward industrialization and the fortunes of business.

By the time you get to the mid-20th century, the Republican Party is really a coalition of four major groups. The smallest of them actually are the conservatives or people who we think of as conservatives now, people who would be both culturally and socially and economically on the right and also seeing themselves as united in a kind of movement against not just the Democrats, but also the other factions of their own party. The faction that I wrote the most about in my book, Rule and Ruin, was the moderates and the progressives. It seems almost something out of science fiction to say that the Republican Party would have had a progressive faction. But the reality is that it did. And in fact, a lot of the people who came from the big cities, places like New York, such as, for example, New York City's mayor, John Lindsay, who also was a member of Congress before that, these people were motivated primarily by their belief in the civil rights struggle, but also in what they saw as the party's heritage of bringing greater equality to all Americans and the kind of unfolding of that democratic promise inherent in the founding that Zachary referred to so eloquently in his poem.

The biggest faction in the party, though, at the time were thought of just as rank-and-file Republicans, mostly from the Midwest, mostly followers of Senator Robert Taft. And they believed mostly in small business and a lot of the traditional pieties of American conservatism. But even there, there was a very strong sense of that Lincoln heritage and a very strong connection to the old civil rights struggle and the Civil War before that. And in fact, there were a lot of Republican Congress people from Ohio who were pretty much down the line in terms of what we think of as conservative. But the Freedom Trail and the Underground Railroad went right through their districts, and they were acutely conscious of that. And even people who did not have many or any African Americans in their district saw themselves as representing the union that had brought peace to the country and reunited the country and freed the slaves. And some of what the Republican Party defined itself against in those days was the Democratic Party's roots in the Solid South, which was pro-Jim Crow and segregationist, and the urban ethnic machines, which were corrupt. And so the Republican Party really didn't see itself as a conservative party. It saw itself as the Republican Party, an American party, one with a long history and heritage, and there was no indication that it would ever become an ideological party, let alone that the small conservative faction would dictate the tone of the entire party.

It's a really important point that you raised, Geoff. I often remind students that Jackie Robinson was a Republican, right? I mean, and it was very natural for someone like Jackie Robinson to think that way. (Mm-hm) When did that begin to change though? When do we see the party that you're describing, the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and to some extent Herbert Hoover and other figures like a John Lindsay and a Nelson Rockefeller, when do we begin to see a split toward figures like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan? And what does that split really mean within the party?

Well, if you want to follow the split back beyond this mid-20th century period we're talking about, it was a fairly significant thing that Theodore Roosevelt led his followers to bolt from the Republican Party in 1912 and to form the Progressive Party. That was really a gateway for a lot of them to leave the Republican Party altogether and to bring their kind of urban middle-class progressivism into the Democratic Party. But I think another significant development was when Franklin Roosevelt came to power, representing those old progressives and his uncle, to some extent, and also then enticing away a large percentage of the African-American electorate into the Democratic Party again, because the African-American voters mostly had stayed with the party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves. But the Democratic Party spoke more to their material interests and concerns and gradually over time became the more pro-civil rights party, though the Republican Party, like I said, still retained a lot of that civil rights awareness and heritage.

But one of the major turning points in the evolution of conservatism was the formation of the sort of new conservative movement under William F. Buckley, Jr., with the foundation of National Review Magazine in 1955. That really became the intellectual flagship and the organizing principle for the conservative movement to come. And that also led to Barry Goldwater's receiving the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona, who was a deep libertarian conservative, and that libertarianism led him to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, bucking the considerable majority of the rest of his party. And that led Barry Goldwater to win votes really only in the Deep South, where people had voted Dixie Crap in 1948 for Strom Thurmond's breakaway party. And that gradually over time led to the incorporation of these Southern, at least somewhat reformed, segregationists into the Republican Party, particularly with Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign.

And Geoff, why did that happen? I mean, I think what you've described has been well documented by you and a number of other historians. But why did that happen? Why did these progressive Republicans and other Republicans, why did they switch parties in this way?

Well, I think the basic reason is that most of American history has been a story of utter domination by one party or the other. And for most of the mid-20th century, it was domination by the Democratic Party. Democrats obviously took control of the supermajority in both houses of Congress with Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932. And that really continued on with only a few breaks, up until the Republicans finally took back the House and made Newt Gingrich the Speaker with the 1994 election. And so, there was a real desperation for Republicans to break out of this permanent minority status. And over time, this made even moderates willing to consider some things that they otherwise might not have if the party had simply alternated power with the Democrats. It would have been a very significant movement, for example, if when Strom Thurmond switched parties and came over as senator from South Carolina from Democratic to the Republican parties, if the Republicans had not given him seniority on their committees, or if they had rejected his bid to become a Republican altogether, if they could have said, no, what you stand for, the segregationist traditions you've upheld are simply too alien to what the Republican Party is about. But they didn't because they were grasping for political advantage.

And another problem that Republicans had, if I may just add this one thing, (sure, please, please) is that particularly moderates among them had a really weak presence at the grassroots. Democrats had those urban, largely ethnic machines, which were a great way of getting people to register and participate in the political process. They also had the unions. The conservatives were really the only grassroots element out there organizing people on the ground. And the moderates didn't really have that. So that was another reason why the conservatives came to play a larger role in the party over time.

One of the most interesting things that I think we've seen in recent decades is the switch from the Republicans envisioning themselves as the party of Lincoln to in many ways, the party of Reagan. How significant was Reagan's election and his term in office?

But that kind of progressive overreach that you saw in the Great Society was part of what led to a rapprochement between conservatives and moderates, and gradually building strength in both factions. Now, it happened that Ronald Reagan was the most talented political performer of his era, and he came pretty close to toppling Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Ford, of course, was the incumbent after Nixon had resigned in the wake of Watergate. And then Reagan won outright in 1980. But Ronald Reagan, in 1980, was not campaigning as Barry Goldwater reborn. Barry Goldwater's political platform was much further to the right than Reagan's was. Barry Goldwater wanted to abolish the social safety net that had come into being with the New Deal, and wanted to get rid of Social Security, for example. Wanted to give battlefield commanders access to nuclear weapons. Derided Americans' craven fear of death, it being unwilling to go to nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Reagan was none of those things. And in fact, he was a big tent Republican. He had a lot of support from moderates, and he made it very clear to his conservative allies that they were not to purge these moderate Republicans whom the party needed. They were not to deride them as RINOs, "Republicans In Name Only." And there, in fact, was a great deal of cooperation between the moderate faction and the conservative factions on issues like supply-side economics, which at that time were thought to be the remedy to economic dislocation under Jimmy Carter. So when people talk about Reagan, they're really remembering an idea that they have about Reagan as the pure culture warrior that actually wasn't the case.

And it brings us back to a point you raised earlier when you brought up William F. Buckley as well. I mean, one of the real struggles the Republican Party had in the 50s, and to some extent the 60s that you've written about, Geoff, was to purge itself of McCarthyism to some extent, and even more in more extreme forms, to purge itself of the John Birch Society and other white supremacist groups. And to make it clear that although the party was critical of certain civil rights legislation, it was not the party of white supremacy. How did they do that? How did they walk that balance in that period?

Well, I slightly dissent from the view you've laid out in the sense that I don't think William F. Buckley Jr. ever really repented of his McCarthyism. And to some extent, that has remained in the conservative DNA. But it's true that Buckley wanted the conservative movement to be intellectually respectable. He actually wanted to build a Republican counter-establishment that would be just as prestigious and just as held in international esteem as the liberal establishment and institutions like the New York Times, let us say, or the mainstream big three television networks. And so Buckley knew that groups like the John Birch Society, with their bizarre, absurd conspiracy theorizing, made the Republican Party look pathological and ridiculous, as he put it. And so he marginalized those groups, at least partly for the conservative movement's own political interest, as well as, I think, what was a sincerely held belief that anti-Semitism was morally wrong. But on the other hand, Buckley was willing to tolerate a considerable degree of only barely reformed segregationists and other forms of racism within the conservative movement.

Do you see that changing, becoming more pronounced with Ronald Reagan? I mean, there are different schools of thought on this. Some point to, of course, Reagan's use of dog whistles, the Neshoba speech in 1980 when he goes near the site of the murder of three civil rights workers and makes a case for states' rights. Others see Reagan, as you said, as a big tent figure, someone who was open to people from different backgrounds. How do we understand that moment in the evolution of the Republican Party?

You know, it's an interesting question as to how Reagan thought of himself in racial terms. I think he felt that he believed in equal opportunity for all, but at the same time, I don't think he much concerned himself with the situation and the plight of minorities in this country, and particularly with African Americans. To some extent, there was a kind of indifference toward racial issues that came to displace the older Lincolnian sense of the importance of civil rights, and particularly equal opportunities for African Americans. But as I said, that was not really a conscious attitude on the part of Reagan. It was just a kind of approach that came to permeate the larger party. But on the other hand, yeah, go ahead.

Oh, I was just following on those comments, Geoff, which are so insightful. I mean, really, to what extent can we see the party becoming, the Republican Party, more of a white civil rights backlash party from Nixon to Reagan forward, or is that unfair?

You know, this relates very closely to the discussions of how people feel about the Tea Party and the Trump movement. Is it simply racial resentment that was being catered to on the part of white voters in both of these movements, or was it, to some extent, rooted in economic and other kinds of cultural grievance? And I've always come down with the answer being that it was some of both. If times are not hard, I do believe that the racism which is in place in people is simply less manifest. They're more willing to see others prosper, thinking that their gains are not coming at their own expense. But when demagogues such as Trump and others can really play on these racial grievances, then obviously they do come to the fore, particularly in harder times.

That makes a lot of sense. Before we talk about Trump, who's of course the elephant or the orange blimp in the room, before we get to that, what about evangelicals? One of the other striking phenomena is the rise of the evangelical movement in the United States and its increasing attachment through the 1980s in particular and thereupon to the Republican Party. How do we understand that connection?

So evangelicals really dropped out of American politics as a conscious and largely organized force after the Scopes Monkey trial in the 1920s. When they re-entered as a consciously organized force, it was actually on the side of Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. Carter was a Southern Baptist. The evangelical movement was largely, though of course not entirely, Southern, and they really responded to Carter as one of their own. But they responded even more strongly to Ronald Reagan, and that really is the date at which the evangelical movement began to provide the kind of grassroots conservative organizing capacity that the Republican Party really had lacked up to that time.

So evangelicals do become a very important component of the Republican Party. But I think where a lot of progressive historians and just people on the left generally go a bit far is thinking that this means that the evangelical movement controls the Republican Party, and I simply don't believe that to be the case. I struggle against people every day on Twitter who believe this, but the reality is that the evangelical movement is a lot more internally variegated than people tend to believe. There are distinct generational and regional differences in terms of where people's belief in God puts them in their politics, and the evangelical movement also really has not achieved the kind of successes that Republican politicians like to promise them, but don't deliver on. And so here we are, these many years later, and Roe V. Wade has been weakened, but it has not been overturned. And America, in nobody's mind, has returned to the kind of godly commonwealth that some of the evangelicals thought it might under Republican domination. So I think evangelicals are an important force, but you can certainly over-exaggerate their role.

Hmm. That's a very insightful analysis. And of course, it's particularly ironic that a number of the presidents the evangelicals have supported, particularly Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, are individuals who do not, by any stretch of the imagination, live the lifestyle that an evangelical would espouse for one's own followers, right? (Right. All too true.) So how then do we explain the capture of the party, if that's the right word for it, and I think you've written about it that way, by Donald Trump? I mean, you've laid out, Geoff, a very sophisticated and detailed history of the Republican Party that emerges out of at least three or four traditions, a party that's gone through many changes over time with a serious intellectual core and a set of political aspirations. I mean, it sounds like a normal party, something that would be recognizable to people in other societies. How did it become so bizarre in the last four or five years?

Well, I think it's been an unfolding of the conservative movement then meeting the unique personality of Donald Trump. So to give you where I think the real starting point is, when Newt Gingrich becomes leader of the House Republicans, he consciously takes the Republican Party in an anti-institutional direction. He believed that the American people would never actually vote to give Republicans power at the level of the House of Representatives, unless they lost faith in the Congress as an institution. So he very consciously set out to destroy Americans' faith in this and other institutions. And Julian Zelizer lays that out marvelously well in his book, Burning Down the House, which came out earlier this year, and really focuses on the period leading up to Gingrich's becoming House Speaker, but stops well short of that, really focusing on his top link of Democratic Speaker, Jim Wright. And Gingrich was the person...

We had Julian on. I'm sorry. Sorry, Geoff. I apologize for interrupting you. We had Julian on the podcast, I don't know, I think a couple of months ago. So our listeners should be familiar with his work. I apologize for interrupting you, please go ahead.

No, no, no. He's great. And I reviewed his book for the New York Times and I thought it was marvelous. But it really was Gingrich who set the Republican Party on this kind of anti-institutional, anti-establishment bent, which built upon strains that were already evident in the conservative movement, but really hadn't come to the fore. And this intensifies with every passing year. And you start then to get litmus tests about who's a real Republican versus who is a RINO, a "Republican In Name Only." And the party starts to lose its moderates and it starts to become uncompetitive in places like New England, which once had been the very core of the Republican Party. And it continues through this movement and the Tea Party accelerates this development because, as I've written in a few recent pieces, the Tea Party really was an anti-establishment movement. It was as much directed against the Republican Party's own establishment as it was against the Democratic Party. And it really built upon a sort of loss of trust by Americans, not just conservatives, in all institutions, not just in Congress. And this really led to the Republican Party becoming an ideological monolith of conservatives, but also a party that was incapable of governing, because to govern is to compromise. And if you believe in ideological purism, then compromise is a defeat and a betrayal. And this kind of hollowing out of the internal diversity of the Republican Party made it incapable of coming up with policy solutions, which is why their attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare utterly failed. And then it left them vulnerable to a hostile takeover by Donald Trump. If you don't actually have a kind of internal diversity in your party, if you're just used to sort of following litmus tests and taking orders, then you'll take orders from a charismatic leader, even if the policies that he's putting forward, or at least the beliefs, are really completely at variance with a lot of what you have grown up believing.

What I don't understand, Geoff, is what happened to all those figures who were establishment Republicans, if we can call them that? Where did they go? I mean, many of them remain in the party. I mean, these are the Mitch McConnell's, the John Cornyn's, the George W. Bush's. Where did they go? And how were they silenced? Or how were they coerced into these, what seem antithetical positions that they've been forced to adopt?

Well, there simply were fewer of those kind of moderate Republicans in the Congress. And there was also a lot less ideological overlap with their conservative democratic counterparts. National Journal kept a graph for a number of years about how many members of both parties had ideological overlap, depending, of course, on how they were plotted along something like a Poole-Rosenthal-D.W. nominate line. And there used to be considerable overlap. And now there is none. There is complete separation between the two parties. The most liberal member of the Republican Party is well to the right of the most conservative member of the Democratic Party. And that's a big change in American history. I should also add the necessary caveat that while the Democratic Party has gone somewhat further left, it hasn't gone as far as the Republican Party has gone as far right. It's asymmetric polarization.

I guess I struggle with that. And I know a lot of people I talk to struggle with that, because on the one hand, that's obvious in the rhetoric that they use. On the other hand, if you take someone like, let's take Chuck Schumer, senator from New York, who might be the next majority leader or minority leader in the Senate, and someone like John Cornyn from the great state of Texas, senior senator, who is still the Republican whip in the Senate, they actually agree on a lot of things. They believe in free trade. They're ardent capitalists. They believe in a system that provides more social security benefits to older people. They believe in internal investments in infrastructure. How is it that they look so different on these graphs, but yet seem to those who are really critical of American capitalism, they look like they're pretty much the same on many issues?

You know, I persist in what seems an old-fashioned belief. That Americans still agree on more than what they disagree on. And to some extent, I think those kind of underlying beliefs are shared by most members of both parties in Congress, but the reality is that the kind of cooperation that was once routine under presidents as dissimilar as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan has now really broken down, and this is largely motivated on the Republican side by fear of the base. If the only thing you have to worry about in terms of retaining your power in the Senate is being outflanked from your right in a primary election, then that motivates you to hew to a conservative or Trumpist line, whatever you perceive the base as wanting, and it's been a long time since I can really think of a lot of Republicans standing up for what they believed in, even if the base did not, and even in some cases fighting with the base. I mean, the last prominent Republican of that sort was John McCain, which is why I think so many Americans miss John McCain right now.

Where do you see the future of the party going? I mean, this this election cycle, we had John Kasich and Sidney McCain both endorse Biden and speak at the Democratic convention. Is the Republican party too far past that, that moderate moment?

How do I put this? The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks distinguished between hope and optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will go well. Hope means that if we actually struggle consciously, things might go well. I'm not an optimist, but I still have some hope as far as the Republican Party is concerned. If there's any heartening development in recent days, it's that a lot of low-level Republican officials, who most people had never heard of previously, have actually stood up against Donald Trump's demand that they collaborate in a kind of coup, and so there actually is still a kind of core of the Republican Party that does believe in these common ideals that we, as Americans, share. But on the other hand, you know there are litmus tests even now being set up where if you do not profess that Donald Trump had the election stolen from him and that the Democrats are illegitimate and that Joe Biden is not a legitimate president, then you might not win a nomination for the Republican Party, and you might not get reelected if you're not willing to go along with this outrageous and baseless lie.

And do you see these local Republicans, and these include, of course, governors and secretaries of state in Georgia and Arizona and elsewhere, as well as election officials at the local level in various places, do you see them offering an alternative path for the Republican party, or how do you understand their motivations?

You know, I think most of the people that we're talking about, people like Ben Raffensperger, the Secretary of State in Georgia, you know, these are conservative people who don't see eye to eye with the Democrats on much, but at the same time they didn't join the Republican party because they had a burning desire to suppress people's votes. They didn't get into the Republican party because they wanted to overthrow legitimate Democratic elections, and these also are people who have been responsible for the successful carrying out of the election, they know it was free and fair, and they don't actually want to say that they themselves colluded in this fantastical idea of a plot involving Hugo Chavez's ghost. So, for all of these reasons, they're willing to stand up, but you know that's only partly because the Trumpian effort to overturn the election has been so inept and comical, a more successful, smarter, more nakedly authoritarian Republican leader might have better success with a similar effort in the future.

Right, that's the scary part of it. It also seems to me that a lot of these local officials, they're in a situation where they have to actually choose, they can't stay silent, and, and what, what most Republicans have done, particularly in Congress, is they've just stayed silent, right? It's what Eli Wiesel called the "complicity of silence," rather than the act of commission on behalf of illegal activities, or so it seems to me.

And it's really an astounding thing to think that the Washington Post asked all the Republican members of Congress whether they believed that Joe Biden had won the election and is the president elect. Two of them said no, Biden lost, Trump won. Something like 27 have said yes, Biden is the president elect. But then you have 200 elect Republican members of Congress who are simply saying nothing. It's that "cowardly silence," I would call it.

Yeah. No, I've been struck by the image of many members of the Senate running away from reporters who are trying to ask them what seems like a very basic question as to who won the election. Geoff, looking forward, and this builds on the excellent piece you wrote in the Washington Post, we need, as you've argued, and others have argued, we need a healthy two-party system. Our system doesn't function well when one party, either Left or Right, is just committed to tearing things down. What are the things that, particularly, our young listeners can do if they care about these issues, and they feel drawn to, as I think many do, to some of the core positions of the Republican Party, as it once was, to fiscal conservatism, to a belief in more respect for religion and society, many issues of that sort. What are the productive things that people can do to help move the Republican Party in that hopeful direction that you laid out?

Well, my advice is difficult advice. I do believe that the Republican party is the biggest problem in American political life right now, and if the Republican party does not regain some semblance of normality and commitment to American democracy and an ability to address the common problems that we all face, then we're in for disaster. But it's all very well to be a Democrat and talk about how awful the Republican party is and how awful conservatives are. You really have no ability to change that dynamic other than the vote you cast in elections. That's important, of course, but I think the Republican Party would be changed more than anything else if sizable numbers of college-educated civil liberties believing voters registered Republican, and they voted in these small turnout primary elections that give us so many Republicans who are extreme and not committed to the continuance of the American project. I think that's the basic thing. The other thing that people can do, short of joining the Republican Party, is be aware that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are not one unitary thing, and if you can bring it, if you can find it within yourself, then don't simply believe that all Republicans are represented by the worst among them. There are, in fact, a lot of divergences of opinion, even now, particularly the lower you go in terms of the level of government. So, the one place where actually there is more bipartisan cooperation than anywhere else is on the local level, and I think if young people get involved in politics from the local level, they'll have a better appreciation of how politics can work when there actually is some degree of bipartisanship between the parties.

That makes a lot of sense. My final question, Geoff, along those lines is why, why do you think that's a better strategy than then forming a third party, because that's that's another thing I often hear, right? Shouldn't, shouldn't we have a third party to replace the Republican party? Why do you think the long march through the institutions will work better than creating a new set of institutions?

Yeah, it'd be great if I thought a moderate third party could actually be a viable thing, but I don't. There is a political science law, called Duverger's Law, which dictates that in a first past the post system, a third party basically cannot win. And I think it was the historian Richard Hofstadter who had an interesting comment about third parties. He said they're like bees, they sting and then they die, they coalesce around some important issue that the other two parties aren't focusing on, they make a lot of impact, and eventually that position is incorporated into one of the other two major parties, but the third party is not the political beneficiary of that dynamic. So, you know, if people want to get involved with moderate third party efforts, I guess I can't stop them, but the likely outcome of that is simply going to be to empower the most conservative elements in the Republican party, I think it's actually far better to agitate for the ideas that you believe in within the two-party system, as imperfect as it is, and try to at least give some support to the people who are trying to revive somewhat more of a moderate position on the Republican side, and to listen to their proposals when they come up with them on subjects like climate change. There actually are Republican and conservative proposals on climate change, which are worth listening to and supporting. There are Republican proposals for restoring the Voting Rights Act that would be necessary, I think, to a better political future. So, I guess it's the kind of open-mindedness I'm asking for, where the Republican Party and even conservatism are concerned.

Right, and this follows perfectly from the history you've documented, better than anyone else, which shows that this is how the Republican party changed it to where it is now. It was those working within the party who moved it in this direction. There's no reason to believe that there can't be an equal and opposite reaction pulling it out of where it is into another new direction.

Yeah, you know, one of the most high-profile political histories of recent years has been Rick Perlstein's series of books about the conservative movement and the Republican Party, and in my mind the best of them was the first volume called Before the Storm, which was about Barry Goldwater, and it really laid out the model for that kind of organizing, and the way in which a relatively small number of committed people can actually have a big impact within a party.

That's a very powerful message. Zachary, as a young political junkie who cares a lot about these issues, and I know I've heard you debating with your friends about the legitimacy or wisdom of a third party, what do you think has this history that Geoff has laid out so well give you a better sense of how your generation can help rebuild a viable and reasonable two-party system in our society?

I think Geoff puts forward the best solution to within our current system. I do think there is something to be said for a restructuring of our legislature and our governmental system to be more in line with countries like Germany or New Zealand or even the United Kingdom. I think our system definitely has benefits that those systems don't have, but I think it is about time that we start to consider whether the structures put forth in 1783 are still relevant in the same way today.

Right, that makes a lot of sense, whether we actually need more institutional reform in addition to party reform. And, of course, we need some of both. Geoff, you've given us such a strong and firm foundation for understanding these issues, and I want to encourage all of our listeners to read your books and read your articles, we've listed your books on our on our website, and to follow you on what the Niskanen Center is doing. There's so much important work to be done in this area, and it's a case where history matters so much, that's the focus of our podcast each week, using history to better understand our world, and Richard Hofstadter comes up all the time, and so does your point, Geoff, about about hope. Hope is something that is made from using our history to find reasons to build optimism. Optimism doesn't just happen, we have to pursue optimistic paths, and Geoff, you've given us so much to build on here. Thank you so much for joining us this week, Geoff.

Thank you to both of you. I really enjoyed the conversation, and Zach, I hope you don't give up hope.

We won't let him. Zachary, thank you for your hope, for your poetry, which I think helps to feed our hope. And most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us on this episode of This Is Democracy.

[Music] 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 a perennial topic of congressional politics and a perennial debate within our democracy, one that's becoming perhaps more important than it's been in a long time. The question of whether the U.S. Senate should continue to have a rule for a filibuster, which allows a minority, a small minority, in the Senate to prevent legislation and other matters from moving forward.

This is, as I said, an age-old question. It's central to American legislation in American politics, and we're very fortunate to have with us one of the leading scholars of Congress in general, and this topic, among many others.

My friend and colleague, Sean Theriault. Good morning, Sean. Good morning, Jeremi.

Good morning, Jeremi.

Sean is a professor in the Department of Government here at the University of Texas at Austin. As I said, he is an internationally recognized, widely published author and speaker on the various pathologies of the U. S. Congress. Sean has written five outstanding books, many of which have won awards.

He began his illustrious career with the book The Power of the People, appropriately titled for a Scholar of Congress. I guess that's the aspiration of Congress more than the reality. He then published a really prescient book in 2008: Party Polarization in Congress, then another book that I really enjoyed reading. I read this book on the prize committee years ago–The Gingrich Senators–really, one of the best books at explaining how Newt Gingrich and his generation transformed the U. S. Congress.

And then more recently, The Great Broadening. And just this last year, a really important book for educating all of us about these topics, Congress: The First Branch. Sean also writes widely in every major newspaper. He appears on all kinds of news shows.

We could call you, Sean, Mr. Congress. How does that sound?

I'll take that moniker, although Congress isn't so popular these days, Jeremi.

[Laughter] Yeah, well, I think it's safe to say, Sean, you are more popular than Congress.

Thanks, Jeremi.

Before our conversation with Sean, as always, we have our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri.

Zachary, what is the title of your poem today?

With a single speech.

Well, let's hear it.

“It is a kind of arrogance that we think ourselves so sacrosanct that we build for our posterity, a temple of democracy, and hand any old fool a key. It is a kind of arrogance that we think ourselves so chosen that we steal votes from cities, for a slew of empty prairies, to send their any old Tom, Harry, Dick, and Larrys. It is a kind of arrogance that we think ourselves so holy that they can stand among the rubble that they burned right to the ground; and with their fist hollowed oaken desk of storied Asia's pound, and cry out for the freedom of ten hours for their mouths to sound. It is a kind of arrogance that we think are stars so well foretold to turn away the crying of a child for the banknotes, pristinely rolled. To rest our eyes on empty promises, where they rest in rot and mold, and wake up in a stupor, still in the middle of our speech. And sing to the great portraits about the horror to impeach. But the old poets of the tattered haunts, they know it all too well, and can recall of every second to you in a cafe with a screech, as their voices swell. Old men cannot solve our problems with a single speech.”

Zachary, that's lovely. What is your poem about?

My poem is really about the irony that we consider ourselves such an important and original democracy. And we think ourselves so great that we don't actually need to maintain our democracy and perform the basic maintenance of democratic institutions. And even while we have these very archaic institutions, like the filibuster, embedded in our very houses of government.

Well, that's just a fantastic opening for our conversation. Sean, is the filibuster an archaic element of Congress?

So first Jeremi, how dare you make us go after Zachary! [laughter] If I ever sign up to do this show again, I'm going to mandate that he go last, so I don't have to follow that! [laughter]

You're not the first guest to say that. So you should listen to your guests, Jeremi. How dare you sucker punch us off! [laughter]

Right, so the filibuster has ancient roots. There is no doubt about it. And the filibuster has stopped lots of good legislation over time, but it's also stopped lots of really bad legislation over time, so it serves a purpose. I mean, its purpose is now being debated, much more seriously than I think it has in quite a while, right? I'm not sure how long the Senate will still have its filibuster, but it's in place now, and it's having ramifications on all sorts of debates taking place in the Senate today.

And Sean, before we talk about how this filibuster actually works, why is it there?

It's not mentioned in the Constitution, of course. So how did we get this archaic institution?

Yeah, so right. I'll give you a common person's understanding of how it came to exist, and I'm a storyteller, Jeremi. This is the reason I think my students pay attention—You're a great storyteller—on occasion.

And so, the story is that Aaron Burr, who was vice president, was looking at the Senate rule book, and he came across this thing called the motion to order the previous question. And he's like, we never used this thing, we're just going to get rid of it. Right, so this is back in the early 1800s. And so, the Senate decides to delete this motion to order the previous question from its rule book. The House keeps its version, so the rules of the House and the rules of the Senate, back when they first got started, were more similar than they are today. And so, Aaron Burr and the senators decided to get rid of this motion to order the previous question.

And with that, it comes to an understanding that the only way that you can move legislation, then, is through this thing called the unanimous consent agreement. And, of course, unanimous consent agreement is really important because of its first word–unanimous. So in order to get the Senate moving on anything, it requires all senators to agree to move on that thing. And so, what that does is it empowers any individual senator to say, “no, I don't want to move on to that thing,” and as soon as they object, then they have control of the floor.

And then that sends us down a procedural set of steps, whereby the rest of the Senate, if there's sufficient numbers, can tell that senator that they lose control of the floor, and they go into a different set of procedures; whereby they can actually start debating something, and presumably, at the end of the legislative process, even passed something. Its origins, right? The reason we have a filibuster goes back to those early decisions made by Aaron Burr a long time ago.

So like Lin Manuel Miranda's play. I mean, Aaron Burr is the villain, in a sense here, right?

Well, if you think that the filibuster is a bad thing, he's the villain. [Laughter] Or is this the reason that the Senate becomes known as the greatest deliberative body in the world? I mean, I think that it depends on what side of the filibuster fence you're on as to whether or not he's the villain or the hero.

Right. It's extraordinary, though, Sean, isn't it? That as vice president, he had that much enduring power on the way the Senate operates.

Right, and this is actually a really good lesson for the Senate. Right? So this is a precedent that is set early, and the Senate really cares about precedent. And so, a decision that they make kind of just because they never used this thing, ends up having these huge ramifications that we continue to feel throughout the next two-hundred plus years of history. It's a really important lesson in path dependence, how a decision made early has enduring effects, as you say.

How does the filibuster work, Sean?

So it's hard, right? And you know this, Jeremi, but to educate the folks who might be listening to this, so the filibuster, really, in a congressional sense, just means the delay of legislation. And so, the different forms that a filibuster can take are various, right.

So when Ron Johnson makes them read every word of the 1.9 trillion dollar relief bill, the Congress is now in the process of passing; that is a form of filibuster, right? Because that is delaying the legislative process. And so, we could call that a filibuster, but it comes to have a more particular meeting when a senator presumably takes the floor and gives a speech.

And so we normally say that that is filibustering. But we could really claim the Ron Johnson's, again, based on the unanimous consent agreement, normally, a senator, the majority, they were to ask unanimous consent to waive the reading of the bill. And if no senator objects, then the reading of the bill is waived, but Ron Johnson object[ed].

And so, according to the rules of the Senate, that bill has to be read in its entirety, and so [it is] a form of filibuster. So In other words, what the filibuster is, is a delay tactic that any senator can use, in theory, as long as they wish to use. That's right, because so much of the Senate is done through these unanimous consent agreements, there are lots of opportunities for a senator to object, and as soon as they object, they have the floor.

So we normally think of the filibuster is when the senators start[ ] giving a speech, and the only way that a filibuster can be broken at that point is through this process called cloture, and cloture is a petition. And if the petition gets signed by sixty senators, th[e]n, they can attempt to invoke cloture, and then there will be a vote on closure. And then if cloture is invoked, then there is a different procedure again. And what can happen post-cloture? Usually, it's limited to one hundred hours of debate, and then they have to move the legislation after cloture is invoked.

There's been a lot of talk lately about how the filibuster has affected our democratic institutions, not just the Senate, but Congress as a whole. How has the filibuster in the past promoted majoritarian democracy, and how has it undermined that at the same time?

Yeah, so, and it's interesting that you use the word majoritarian.

So what the filibuster does because it requires sixty votes, there's a supermajority. And so what a supermajority means is that instead of only taking fifty votes plus the vice president to pass something, it requires sixty votes in the Senate for lots of different pieces of legislation.

And so when you require those ten extra votes, it means that you're empowering lots of people, usually of the minority party, to sign off on a piece of legislation, which gives them huge control over what the final words of that legislation look like, or whether or not the final words can ever be agreed to.

And so what it means is that it requires more than just a simple majority, as the House of Representatives is just a majoritarian institution. If you have, the number of yes votes are greater than the number of no votes, then the legislation is passed.

But the Senate requires those ten extra votes, and it's even more than that, in some instances, it's sixty votes, right. It's not three-fifths of the Senate, right? So it's a sixty vote threshold. So if their Senate, because of vacancies or deaths, senators not being in town, it's not enough that three-fifths of the Senate agree, but it's that sixty votes, right? So it's literally sixty votes.

Sean, as a scholar of Congress who studied this, I think, closer than pretty much anyone else, what have been the moments when the filibuster has actually built consensus?

That's the argument it seems to me you're making. At certain moments. It forces a party with fifty-two to actually reach out and find those on the other side, at least eight of them to go along with things. And one could see, in theory, the value in that.

So what moments do you see as the moments when this has been a source of consensus building?

Yeah, so I think that we could even just go back in time to a time that most of us remember, some of us more vividly than others. When the Affordable Care Act was passed because it required sixty votes in the Senate at that time, [which] had sixty Democrats. And so what it meant was that every single Democrat had to be in favor of it, which meant that those moderate Democrats from Nebraska and Louisiana had a lot of power in shaping the legislation in order to pick up those last few votes.

Now in some ways, that piece of legislation was improved, particularly for the states of Louisiana, Nebraska, but in other senses, we could say that it required a broader consensus from the Senate as a whole. Where if [it] only required fifty votes or fifty plus the vice president, we could have imagined that there might have been a more lively debate about the public option, but because it required those sixty votes, that was a nonstarter for enough of those Democrats that it didn't happen.

And if we go back in time right, we can go back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965. If we're only talking about the number of yeses being more than the number of noes, then you don't have to have particularly broad conversations among senators to figure out what wording actually works for enough of them to pass the thing.

But because of the super majoritarian requirement in the Senate, it just requires a broader conversation and this has ramifications; absolutely on the Senate. But it also has ramifications on the House because that legislation also has to be passed by the House.

And if in the process they're moderating that legislation, then it means that perhaps it's not passing two hundred and eighteen votes to two hundred and seventeen, but maybe it's passing two hundred and sixty votes to one hundred and seventy. And so legislation that passes with broader margins usually is more sustainable. It's usually broader. It[ ] usually has more buy-in from some of the people who ultimately might object to it, and so we think of it as being longer lasting.

It's a great point. And you can see that certainly, with the civil rights legislation that you mentioned going back to the ‘57 [Civil Rights] Act, that Lyndon Johnson, as Senate majority leader, muscles his way through. And then, of course, the ‘64 Civil Rights Act and the ‘65 Voting Rights Act. What's striking about those examples, Sean, which are terrific examples, is that, you're right, the legislation gains more permanence from having to go through the filibuster threshold.

But historians, I think, would argue, [it] took much longer to get that legislation. And Jim Crow, and of course, before that, slavery, last a lot longer than they might have otherwise because of the filibuster, so you can see both sides. Would you agree with that?

Oh, absolutely, right. So in part of the arguments that we're hearing today is that the filibuster should ultimately be revoked from the rules of the Senate, for perhaps most importantly, because of its racist past. Right?

So we don't get legislation on civil rights until the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because of the filibuster and in the power of the super majoritarian requirement in the Senate. That there was no way that you could [a] get sufficient number of senators to pass something, even though there might have been fifty-one votes much earlier.

How does an effective majority leader do this?

I mean, what do we learn from someone like Lyndon Johnson?

We certainly learned that the majority leader, we learned this from Mitch McConnell too, is incredibly powerful in the Senate.

But it just seems today, when the majority leader's main role is whipping his or her own party, how have they, in the past, been able to get through this threshold? What have they done?

Right? So it means that they're talking to their members, but because it's rare that we have a party having sixty votes just done outside of the aisle, it also requires them to have conversations across the aisle. And so what it means is that there has to be a far more open dialogue between the majority leader and the minority leader than we might otherwise think. And so, good majority leaders are keeping their caucus together, which minimizes the number of votes they're going to have to get from the other side, but they're also making sure that that dialogue happens.

What we see happening, though, interestingly, especially over the last ten or even fifteen years, is that there is another set of senators that feel particularly empowered because of the super majoritarian requirement. And they come to be known as gangs, where they form a group, a bipartisan group.

And usually, the number of people in the group is explicitly tied to the number of votes that it will take to invoke cloture, so that sixty vote threshold. So if the Democrats have, let's just say fifty-five votes, then the gang will be a gang of ten because they know that they need five Republicans. And so they usually form it in a bipartisan way. So five Republicans, five Democrats. But if the Democrats only have fifty-three votes, then it would require a gang of fourteen because you need seven Republicans and then the seven Democrats that they're negotiating with, ultimately, to try and pass legislation.

And so what the filibuster does, is it means that the conversations have to happen across the aisle in a way that certainly, since you've seen since since January 6 in the House of Representatives, there is almost no conversations happening across the aisle; even though, right, Nancy Pelosi's threshold isn't that much bigger than Chuck Schumer's threshold in the Senate. But she's able to, just with her votes alone, pass legislation where it doesn't require her to talk across the aisle the same way that it does for Chuck Schumer.

So I guess, Sean, this is what puzzles me because it seems that over time in most periods, these gangs that are formed, as you say, to control getting through cloture, getting the sixty votes that are necessary. They've generally had a moderating influence on legislation because they usually are a mix of Democrats and Republicans close to the middle.

Someone like the Senator Joe Manchin today from West Virginia, who is probably closer to the middle than many other Democrats would be in the Senate or Susan Collins, I guess on the Republican side for Maine. And they've had an enormous amount of influence on legislation over time, but it seems in the last decade that hasn't happened.

And it seems as if, the filibuster is being invoked, more often than not, just to stop any deliberation, for example, on gun control, to stop deliberation on voting rights.

Is that a newer phenomenon and if so, why?

So it is a newer phenomenon.

And so what's happening is that the parties are sorting at the same time that they're becoming more polarized, which means that there are far fewer Democrats representing Trump voting states and far fewer Republicans representing Biden voting states. Which means that the senators are less cross pressured, which means that forming cross party coalitions has become exceedingly more difficult.

So we used it right if we go back to even Richard Nixon's impeachment, the average percentage that the Democratic candidate for president, so in this case, McGovern would have gotten among states represented by Democrats was exactly the same as states represented by Republicans, right? So you had lots of Republicans who are representing Democratic leaning states, you had lots of Democrats who are representing Republican leaning states.

And so those types of conversations happen much more easily when the—senators feel cross pressure from their constituencies in their parties. But what we know is over time there are so few, right? So the two that you've already mentioned are two of the most obvious examples, and the next closest ones are really tough to come to.

Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, right? Ron Johnson, Wisconsin, where the Democrat wins by a fraction of a percentage point. And so we don't think of them as being nearly as cross pressured as Susan Collins, representing Maine or Joe Manchin, representing West Virginia.

And at the same time, the margins in the Senate have decreased. So in order to get ten Republicans to go along with something that Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats want, you have to get to a pretty conservative Republican representing a pretty Republican voting state.

And so that's just really hard and so those conversations become much more difficult. So to move things like gun control or voting rights, it's just that much more difficult because of the particular political situations of the senators.

And what role, then, does the filibuster play in such a close Senate? Almost fifty-fifty?

How does the filibuster's role change when we get increasingly very close margins in the Senate, every Congress?

Yeah, so what it means is that you're not going to get major pieces of legislation.

The legislation can pass outside of budget stuff, right? So what we're seeing play out right now with the 1.9 [trillion dollar] relief bill is that because it's related to budget, there's a different process involving budget reconciliation, which means that it only requires fifty votes.

But things that don't require money spending like voting rights or gun control, it means that legislation is going to be so difficult to pass that many of us just can't even imagine right. So perhaps there's like at the margins changes, but you're never going to get a big thrust of new gun control or protection of voting rights.

The re emboldening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after the Supreme Court opinion, you're not going to get huge immigration reform. The Senate is a very, stability-inducing place, right? So it also means we're not going to get big changes from Congress to Congress.

Right? So right now the Democrats have a majority by Kamala Harris' vote, and if in four years, the Republicans have the same majority, we're not going to get big flips and legislation because of the super majoritarian requirement.

So over time, Sean, I think, as a consequence of a closely split Senate for quite a while and the difficulty of getting major legislation through there has been a chipping away of the filibuster. The budget reconciliation itself, I think, is one example of that.

Certainly, as I recall, the Democratic Party under President Obama eliminated the filibuster for judicial appointments short of the Supreme Court. And then, of course, the Republican Party under Donald Trump eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, which is how Trump was able to nominate and appoint three different members of the court.

Do you foresee a continued chipping away of the filibuster?

Do you foresee an elimination of it or just leaving it as it is?

So Jeremi, I think the filibuster's days are limited, right? So again, the filibuster in the strictest sense.

Of course, delaying legislation is always going to happen, right? But this process that we've been talking about, especially most recently, its days are limited. Right now, I think that the filibuster is still on the books because of a couple of senators, so Kristen Cinema and Joe Manchin said that they liked the filibuster in any type of process.

To get rid of the filibuster would require a majority vote, and so, the Democrats don't have it right now. So if the Republicans take control of the Senate after the 2022 election, and they get it by a couple of votes, I think that it continues to exist only because they don't have unified government.

But I think as soon as a party has unified government, that is, control of both the House and the Senate and the White House, and they have a sufficiently large margin in the Senate, the filibuster will be dead, right?

So if the Democrats, let's just say, win control, keep control of the White House, and let's say they pick up seats in the 2022 election, so that they have fifty-three or fifty-four votes in the Senate, and still a majority in the House, I think the filibuster would be dead.

Or if, in the 2024 election, Republicans capture all three and they have fifty-three or fifty-four votes and they don't need Susan Collins and maybe one other Republican senator, then I think the filibuster is dead.

So I think its days are numbered as soon as a party has unified control and they have sufficient majority in the Senate, then then the filibuster will be reformed in the Senate.

Or Sean, and this would be a road toward the end you're describing, is it likely that we will see more significant chipping away of it just in the coming months, for example, with Democrats wanting to be able to pass voting rights legislation?

Yeah, and what's interesting to me is, I think, as we've seen, the state legislatures invoke some pretty awful new rules with respect to voting, I think the more ugly process...takes place in state legislatures.

I could imagine Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema coming around, but I can't imagine the carve outs for things like voting rights. And then I can't imagine they would then carve out something to do with gun control or right, like I just can't imagine these carve outs.

But I could imagine them implementing is a particular process. And maybe with a wink and a nod and some type of budget ramifications, them trying to include voting rights within the budget reconciliation rules that currently exist, right? So maybe it has to do with the federal government giving states money to do x, y, or z, so that voting rights certainly now would then have financial ramifications such that it could be read under budget reconciliation.

And I guess this is my last question. Sean, do you foresee the Senate moving to what Joe Manchin himself has mentioned, which is the possibility of at least making those who want to invoke the filibuster make them work harder, make them actually stand up and speak right now?

Oftentimes, right, those who are willing to filibuster simply threatened to do it, and the Senate moves on. But do you foresee them at least raising the pain threshold for filibusterers, as Manchin has suggested?

So I can imagine them doing it in very limited ways, the problem with that and you've already alluded to this the power of the majority leader to set the agenda.

So if the Senate is meeting, then Chuck Schumer wants to use the meeting time of the Senate in a way to advance the Democratic agenda. If he calls up bills that will merely be filibustered and they end up wasting twenty-four, fourty-eight hours, a week because of a filibuster, then that means he's not able to move all the other things that Chuck Schumer wants to move, many of which don't require a sixty vote threshold, right?

Judicial appointments, filling out the rest of President Biden's Cabinet, so the plenary time on the Senate trades off with the filibuster time. And so for every minute that Chuck Schumer is allowing a filibuster, right, raising the pain threshold, forcing Republican senators to talk endlessly on the floor of the Senate, means that he's not able to do all the other things that the Democrats want to do in the Senate.

And so, right, it's a good talking point, but I just can't see it playing out, except and perhaps in very limited cases. It's a great insight, Sean, that there is a trade off in terms of time for the Senate and the majority has very limited time to get things done, especially when you look at the electoral clock with a 2022 election coming up.

Zachary as we close here, what are your thoughts on this?

There's a younger generation like yours. First of all, do you pay attention to this?

Is this something that can motivate people?

I mean one thing Sean is saying is that the filibuster's days are numbered. That certainly means that this is an issue people should pay attention to, do you think that's that's the case?

I do think that's the case. I think a lot of people in my generation are very dissatisfied with the slow pace of everything in the United States Congress. And especially those who feel aligned with the Democratic Party in particular, I think are very frustrated that many of the reforms that young people have pushed the hardest for are being stalled because of these legislative rules. And so I think that you will see a lot more attention to these issues from young people and young voters who are quickly becoming a very important voting bloc in our elections.

Great point. Is that accurate, Sean, do you think?

So it is accurate, but I would warn both Zachary and folks of his generation and people that have his politics, that while it may be beneficial to your side today, in four years when the Republicans have unified control, you could imagine them getting rid of lots of things that the Democrats would not want to put in place. And perhaps even going back further, right?

Not only stripping away some of the Biden administration's achievements, but even going back to the Affordable Care Act or other policies that have lots of benefits to not only Democrats, but also a good number of Republicans.

For sure.

And there we have the reason the filibuster has survived as long as it has.

Sean, this was fantastic. You offer such detailed and insightful knowledge on Congress and related political matters. And you're so good at explaining things and also making it fun and interesting, so thank you, Sean, for joining us today.

Oh, thank you for having me on, Jeremi. It's a pleasure talking to you and Zachary today. And Zachary, thank you for your poem, as always, and most of all, thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. "This week we're going to examine a question that's at the forefront of our news in the future of our society and draws on a long history. Economic stimulus packages in American history. How have they been used in the past by the federal government? What have we learned? And how will that history inform the experience of the most recent economic stimulus package, the 1.9 trillion dollar package passed by President Biden and the Democrats in the House and the Senate."

We're joined today by a good friend and one of the foremost historians of precisely these issues, Julian Zelizer. Good morning, Julian. How are you today?

I'm doing well, thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show again.