Episode 115: Young JFK: Lessons for Democracy Today
00:19
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.
01:03
I'm delighted to be with you, Jeremi.
01:05
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.
02:08
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.
02:41
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?
02:49
The Ghost of JFK.
02:51
Oh, I'm a little scared now. Let's hear about The Ghost of JFK.
02:55
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.
03:48
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?
03:57
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.
04:11
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?
04:36
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.
04:48
Well, each week, each week, he opens every poem, every episode, Fred
04:51
Oh, fantastic. Oh, this is such a great thing and that one was, I thought, really powerful.
04:58
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.
05:41
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.
05:57
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.
06:13
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.
06:39
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.
07:01
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.
07:33
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.
07:47
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.
08:07
It was, I think, had a profound effect on Kennedy, made him in two different ways.
08:16
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.
08:47
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.
09:05
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.
09:25
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?
09:34
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.
10:12
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.
10:32
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.
10:53
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.
11:21
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?
11:45
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.
12:04
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.
12:36
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.
13:10
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.
13:30
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?
13:50
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.
14:53
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.
15:21
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.
15:46
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?
16:12
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.
16:25
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.
16:41
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.
17:02
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.
17:56
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.
18:26
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.
18:46
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?
19:01
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.
19:44
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.
20:34
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.
21:01
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.
21:25
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?
21:53
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.
22:10
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.
22:53
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.
23:22
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.
24:00
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?
24:39
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?
24:57
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.
25:26
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.
25:37
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.
26:15
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.
26:42
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.
27:06
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.
27:18
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.
27:45
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.
28:12
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?
28:32
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.
29:11
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.
29:29
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.
30:26
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?
30:54
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.
31:32
Well, I think that's a perfect spot for us to come on. Fred, did you wanna make the last comment on that?
31:36
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.
32:22
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
Episode 120: Dissent and National Security
00:16
[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.
00:44
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.
01:10
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.
01:41
Hannah, thank you for joining us today.
01:44
Thank you for having me.
01:46
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.
02:20
Kaetan, thank you for joining us.
02:22
Thanks for having us.
02:24
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?
02:35
"Cross of Gold."
02:37
Wow, I didn't know we'd have William Jennings Bryan joining us today. Okay, Zachary, let's hear it.
02:43
"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."
03:46
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?
03:54
My poem is really about the importance of radicalism and dissent in policymaking, but also in life and society in general.
04:03
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.
04:26
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?
04:37
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.
05:12
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.
05:43
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.
06:15
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.
06:45
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.
07:23
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.
07:43
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.
08:07
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?
08:27
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.
08:50
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.
09:27
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.
09:49
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.
10:29
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.
10:57
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?
11:16
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.
11:31
Could you walk us through that process?
11:33
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.
11:54
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.
12:40
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.
13:22
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.
13:54
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.
14:16
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.
14:35
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.
14:50
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?
15:10
It is not a story of linear progress. It's much more a story of periodic return, with leaving these fundamental questions unresolved.
15:21
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.
15:36
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.
15:55
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.
16:19
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.
16:52
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.
17:15
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.
17:40
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.
18:11
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.
18:42
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.
18:58
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.
19:31
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?
19:39
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.
20:18
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.
20:36
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.
21:22
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.
21:55
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.
22:16
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.
22:44
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.
23:11
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?
23:20
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.
23:56
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.
24:18
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?
24:52
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.
25:16
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.
25:37
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.
25:56
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.
26:24
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.
26:54
Subsequently, all of their work will have to go through pre-publication review. And these are lifetime secrecy agreements. They're not time restricted.
27:02
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.
27:31
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.
27:58
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?
28:12
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.
28:29
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?
28:39
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.
29:02
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.
29:25
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.
29:50
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.
30:11
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.
30:35
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.
30:46
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.
31:02
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.
31:26
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.
31:54
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.
32:12
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.
32:27
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.
32:37
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.
32:52
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?
33:15
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.
33:32
What are some of the lessons that readers should take away for their own activities in these settings? Kaetan, any thoughts on that?
33:41
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.
34:06
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.
34:28
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.
34:59
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.
35:20
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.
36:04
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.
36:34
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.
37:00
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.
37:18
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?
37:28
What should they take away from this, from your book?
37:32
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.
37:34
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.
38:21
And Ralph Nader, who was very influential in helping to popularize the concept of whistleblowing, would underscore that idea of a professional ethic.
38:32
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.
38:45
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?
39:20
And we saw that with the resignation of Dr. Rick Bright just this past week, so I think it is relevant.
39:26
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?
39:48
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.
40:08
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.
40:20
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?
40:43
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.
41:03
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.
41:22
Well, that's very well said, and it comes back to your poem on the pressures and difficulties of moderation.
41:29
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.
41:56
I want to thank you both for joining us today.
41:59
Thank you, Jeremi.
42:00
Thank you so much for having us.
42:02
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.
42:36
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.
Episode 121: Historical Memory and National Trauma
00:21
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?
01:02
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]
01:45
You probably are if you're doing this podcast.
01:48
[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.
02:20
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?
02:39
"Herbst ich erinnere mich," or "Fall I remember." Let's hear it.
02:46
"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?"
03:59
That was really powerful. Very powerful. I think you should translate that last section for us and tell us what your poem's about.
04:02
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.
04:31
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?
04:48
It evokes a little bit of T.S. Eliot, right? Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
04:54
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?
05:06
I think I may have come across it, but I was definitely going more T.S. Eliot.
05:11
But yeah, I prefer T.S. Eliot to Rilke myself, actually. But that, his herbst poem, is a good poem.
05:20
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.
05:46
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.
06:00
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.
06:31
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.
06:51
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.
07:08
Yes.
07:10
But it's not a concept that exists in any other language.
07:14
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.
07:38
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.
08:16
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?
08:40
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.
08:52
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.
09:13
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.
09:47
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.
10:02
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.
10:42
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.
10:51
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.
11:12
You're a historian, so, you know, it's important to care about cultural and historical differences, but I still think there are lessons.
11:22
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.
11:38
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.
12:01
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?
12:17
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.
12:28
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.
12:44
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.
13:02
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.
13:36
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.
13:52
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.
14:09
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.
14:41
Yes.
14:42
And I suddenly realized they sound just like the defenders of the lost cause.
14:46
Yep.
14:47
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.
15:30
That's the next best thing. But, you know, people focus on their own suffering. That's what people do.
15:36
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.
15:58
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.
16:35
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.
16:39
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.
17:15
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.
17:46
How much of the sort of Vergangenheitsalphabetung was personal? And why haven't we had that in the United States?
17:50
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.
18:17
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.
18:52
I can imagine. Yes.
18:54
[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.
19:42
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.
20:00
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.
20:22
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.
20:51
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.
21:17
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.
21:36
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.
21:58
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.
22:13
I agree.
22:14
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.
22:37
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.
23:19
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.
23:46
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.
24:00
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.
24:11
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.
24:36
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.
25:08
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.
25:27
How big of a part of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is this? And has it been applied in the United States? And how could it be?
25:38
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?
25:50
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.
26:04
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.
26:20
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.
26:47
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.
27:28
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.
27:48
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.
28:12
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.
28:29
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?
28:41
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.
29:06
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.
29:34
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.
29:47
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.
30:12
Right.
30:14
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.
30:41
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.
31:03
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.
31:25
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.
31:57
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?
32:10
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.
32:27
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.
32:49
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.
33:15
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?
33:24
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.
33:45
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.
33:53
Thank you for joining us from Berlin today for this discussion.
33:56
Well, it's been a pleasure, and now I'll look up your podcast more often.
34:01
I hope you will.
34:03
I will.
34:04
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.
Episode 126: Participatory Democracy from the Sixties to Today
00:16
[Music] Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the topic of participatory democracy.
00:35
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.
01:11
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.
01:34
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.
02:08
Vanessa, thank you for joining us this morning.
02:10
Oh, good morning. Thank you for having me.
02:12
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?
02:28
"Port Huron Revisited."
02:30
Let's hear it.
02:32
"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."
03:39
I love all the imagery there, Zachary, from the parking lots to the Statue of Liberty. What is your poem about?
03:49
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.
04:19
I love the intergenerational element of that, Zachary. Our podcast is designed to be intergenerational.
04:26
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.
04:36
Well said.
04:38
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?
04:48
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.
05:09
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.
05:34
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?
05:47
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.
06:01
Why at this moment in 1962, Vanessa, what led to this moment producing this document?
06:07
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.
06:29
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.
06:43
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.
07:10
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.
07:24
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.
07:44
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?
07:55
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.
08:14
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.
08:42
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.
08:57
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.
09:32
Why was this concept of participatory democracy so radical? What made it so new at this time?
09:43
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.
10:08
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.
10:35
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.
11:01
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.
11:25
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.
11:50
How do you respond to that?
11:52
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.
12:15
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.
12:47
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.
13:07
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?
13:16
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.
13:45
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.
14:07
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.
14:23
And they wanted to be part of that push to enhance democracy in that region and across the country.
14:31
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?
14:43
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.
15:15
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.
15:28
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.
15:57
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.
16:24
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?
16:39
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.
16:50
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.
17:15
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.
17:34
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?
18:00
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.
18:26
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.
18:51
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.
19:27
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.
19:57
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?
20:22
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.
20:37
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.
21:17
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.
21:41
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.
21:56
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?
22:14
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.
22:31
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.
22:54
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.
23:12
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.
23:30
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?
23:58
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.
24:21
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.
24:39
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.
25:07
Vanessa, are you hopeful that this work will happen and that it will be done?
25:11
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."
25:40
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.
26:04
It's such a perfect title, Vanessa.
26:08
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.
26:32
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.
26:51
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.
27:16
You've really shared so much with us today. Thank you.
27:18
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.
27:25
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.
27:34
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.
Episode 128: The Republican Party
00:18
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.
01:51
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.
01:59
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.
02:37
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.
04:07
That closing note on the Titanic, Zachary, that really sneaks up upon you. What is your poem about?
04:15
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.
04:27
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.
04:33
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?
04:58
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.
06:10
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.
07:22
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.
08:57
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?
09:33
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.
10:41
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.
11:52
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?
12:11
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.
13:39
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.
14:12
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?
15:32
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.
17:14
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?
17:48
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.
18:56
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?
19:27
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.
20:11
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?
20:28
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.
21:17
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?
21:44
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.
22:29
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.
23:39
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?
24:37
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...
25:33
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.
25:44
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.
27:43
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?
28:09
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.
29:00
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?
29:53
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.
31:02
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?
31:19
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.
32:25
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?
32:48
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.
33:51
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.
34:15
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.
34:41
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?
35:41
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.
37:28
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?
37:51
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.
39:21
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.
39:40
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.
40:05
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?
40:33
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.
41:04
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.
41:59
Thank you to both of you. I really enjoyed the conversation, and Zach, I hope you don't give up hope.
42:04
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.
Episode 138: The Filibuster
00:00
[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.
00:29
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.
00:55
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.
01:09
My friend and colleague, Sean Theriault. Good morning, Sean. Good morning, Jeremi.
01:11
Good morning, Jeremi.
01:13
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.
01:31
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 agoâThe Gingrich Senatorsâreally, one of the best books at explaining how Newt Gingrich and his generation transformed the U. S. Congress.
02:01
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.
02:16
We could call you, Sean, Mr. Congress. How does that sound?
02:18
I'll take that moniker, although Congress isn't so popular these days, Jeremi.
02:22
[Laughter] Yeah, well, I think it's safe to say, Sean, you are more popular than Congress.
02:28
Thanks, Jeremi.
02:30
Before our conversation with Sean, as always, we have our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri.
02:38
Zachary, what is the title of your poem today?
02:40
With a single speech.
02:42
Well, let's hear it.
02:44
âIt 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.â
04:03
Zachary, that's lovely. What is your poem about?
04:06
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.
04:35
Well, that's just a fantastic opening for our conversation. Sean, is the filibuster an archaic element of Congress?
04:44
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]
04:56
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]
05:06
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.
05:36
And Sean, before we talk about how this filibuster actually works, why is it there?
05:41
It's not mentioned in the Constitution, of course. So how did we get this archaic institution?
05:47
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 attentionâYou're a great storytellerâon occasion.
05:59
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.
06:32
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 wordâunanimous. 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, âno, I don't want to move on to that thing,â and as soon as they object, then they have control of the floor.
07:03
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.
07:29
So like Lin Manuel Miranda's play. I mean, Aaron Burr is the villain, in a sense here, right?
07:36
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.
07:52
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.
08:01
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.
08:25
How does the filibuster work, Sean?
08:28
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.
08:45
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.
09:08
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].
09:27
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.
09:55
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.
10:32
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?
10:47
Yeah, so, and it's interesting that you use the word majoritarian.
10:52
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.
11:08
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.
11:26
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.
11:40
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.
12:02
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?
12:14
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.
12:26
So what moments do you see as the moments when this has been a source of consensus building?
12:31
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.
13:01
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.
13:30
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.
13:50
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.
14:04
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.
14:31
It's a great point. And you can see that certainly, with the civil rights legislation that you mentioned going back to the â57 [Civil Rights] Act, that Lyndon Johnson, as Senate majority leader, muscles his way through. And then, of course, the â64 Civil Rights Act and the â65 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.
14:58
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?
15:12
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?
15:26
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.
15:45
How does an effective majority leader do this?
15:51
I mean, what do we learn from someone like Lyndon Johnson?
15:54
We certainly learned that the majority leader, we learned this from Mitch McConnell too, is incredibly powerful in the Senate.
16:00
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?
16:10
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.
16:41
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.
17:00
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.
17:34
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.
18:03
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.
18:24
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.
18:41
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.
18:53
Is that a newer phenomenon and if so, why?
18:55
So it is a newer phenomenon.
18:57
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.
19:20
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.
19:45
And so those types of conversations happen much more easily when theâsenators 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.
20:06
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.
20:22
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.
20:38
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.
20:51
And what role, then, does the filibuster play in such a close Senate? Almost fifty-fifty?
20:58
How does the filibuster's role change when we get increasingly very close margins in the Senate, every Congress?
21:06
Yeah, so what it means is that you're not going to get major pieces of legislation.
21:10
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.
21:27
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.
21:48
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.
22:05
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.
22:19
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.
22:37
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.
22:56
Do you foresee a continued chipping away of the filibuster?
23:00
Do you foresee an elimination of it or just leaving it as it is?
23:03
So Jeremi, I think the filibuster's days are limited, right? So again, the filibuster in the strictest sense.
23:09
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.
23:29
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.
23:50
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?
23:58
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.
24:14
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.
24:26
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.
24:39
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?
24:53
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.
25:08
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.
25:23
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.
25:51
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?
26:07
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?
26:17
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.
26:26
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?
26:46
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.
27:11
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.
27:32
Zachary as we close here, what are your thoughts on this?
27:37
There's a younger generation like yours. First of all, do you pay attention to this?
27:42
Is this something that can motivate people?
27:44
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?
27:53
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.
28:29
Great point. Is that accurate, Sean, do you think?
28:31
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?
28:52
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.
29:07
For sure.
29:09
And there we have the reason the filibuster has survived as long as it has.
29:12
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.
29:28
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.
Episode 139: Economic Stimulus
00:26
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."
00:59
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?
01:09
I'm doing well, thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show again.
01:12
It's wonderful to have you on, Julian.
01:14
Julian Zelizer is one of the leading experts of modern American political history, particularly the influence and role of Congress in American history. He's the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, class of 1941, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He's the author and editor of 19 books on American political history. Whenever I say that, I feel like I'm woefully insufficient. Among his many important books that I recommend to everyone, still one of my favorites, his first book, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress and the State, 1945 to 1975, explains how Congress does appropriations, which is very relevant to what we're talking about today. The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society. We'll discuss this a little bit today. Lyndon Johnson's congressional programs, and particularly his efforts to alleviate poverty and inequality in American society. Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974, which was co-authored with historian Kevin Cruz. And most recently, a book I encourage everyone to read, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. Julian discussed that book with us on this podcast a few months ago.
02:29
Julian, we're gonna get right into it, beginning with Zachary's scene-setting poem, of course. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today?
02:37
Until Suddenly We Could See.
02:39
Well, let's see.
02:41
I can almost see the shore from here. Our raft is tattered and the remains of our luxury hang ironically halfway in the sea. Just like twelve years ago, we tried to make money flow radiant from the bathtub faucet and see through rock in the homes that had been built so we could glow in the dark. But from here, I can almost see tomorrow, and I long for it like the rest of my generation, as we stand up on the ragged pieces of driftwood and try to see our fate on the hiding horizon. Just like twelve years ago, we lay down on the cold ground and stared up at the ceiling, replaying our childhoods and our yesterdays in the imperfections of the stucco. And I can almost see it in my memory of that day, how chilling it was to see the dark waters envelop the globe, the sea unfolding like a blanket over the land. Just like twelve years ago, we could smell the prosperity at the end of our ordeal, and it made us jump so thick and yet invisible. And we covered our noses with our own hands before click. Someone with foresight found the light switch with their hands fumbling on the black wall, and we were blind, all still blind as the lights came back on, until suddenly, many months later, we could see.
03:56
I love the imagery, Zachary. What is your poem about?
04:00
My poem is really about the similarities between my experience post-COVID and during the COVID crisis, and right after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. And it's really about the emotional experience of those two events, but also the irony of those two events occurring amidst so much prosperity in our country.
04:25
Well, that's great. I think that's a perfect spot to turn to Julian. Julian, everyone has watched how difficult it was to get this economic stimulus package passed. Historically, why are these so difficult? I mean, the United States is a prosperous society. The federal government prints the money. Why is it so difficult to get a stimulus package during a time of difficulty?
04:46
Well, some of it is the traditional opposition to expanding government doesn't dissipate even in times of crisis. And you'll have various parts of the political spectrum, conservatives in Congress, parts of the business community, which still believe that even in a depression, even in a pandemic, it's better not to increase the obligations of government. It's better not to expand the reach of what Washington does. And maybe most importantly, it's important not to set up a situation where tax hikes are likely inevitable. And so the opposition, believe it or not, will kick in even in the most desperate of times.
05:31
And historically, have those objections proven accurate? Is there a reason for business groups and others to appropriately fear that a stimulus package will hurt them in the long term?
05:43
I think there's pretty good evidence now, if you look back at the record, that government interventions help. And in many ways, business should be ecstatic about this kind of intervention. It's only government that can save us in times like these.
06:00
So obviously, if you go to the 1930s, without the huge intervention of the New Deal, the economy would not have stabilized, it would not have started to move toward a path of recovery, which takes a long time.But the government foundation is essential. And more recently, in 2009, after the financial markets collapsed, and after the economy was in a deep recession, President Obama is able to push through a stimulus plan that's very much on President Biden's mind today, that by all accounts, helped us out of a terrible state, lowered unemployment, led to an economic boom, and was the foundation, again, of the good times that we were able to experience.
06:50
I want us to come back to the Obama package soon. But I think it's good to start with the New Deal, which you mentioned. What have we learned about the positive effects that came out of the New Deal? And maybe you want to take us also into the Great Society as well. What have we learned historically that we should know today when we discuss these issues?
07:10
Well, most important, the stability of the 1930s, for example, with a banking system that was literally imploding when the President took office, without the measures that the President Roosevelt took to ensure deposits, for example, that system was on the brink of collapse.
07:33
And then over the course of the 1930s, there's just many initiatives, more than we can go through, in the course of a question on a show, from federal subsidies to the agricultural sector, to electrification programs, to very importantly, public jobs and public works programs, which start to create the conditions for economic recovery.
07:59
And that will culminate in World War Two and all the spending that takes place during the early 1940s.
08:07
The Great Society is different in that economic times are pretty good. And the whole premise of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s was that when the economy was growing, and when income was rising, there was no reason not to use a moment like that to address many problems which had been ignored, whether you're talking about entrenched poverty in this country, or the struggles of elderly Americans, who had no health insurance, and often were living in an incredibly vulnerable state, based on the health that they had or didn't have. And so that was less of a stimulus. But again, a very important economic intervention that stabilized key parts of American society, like the health insurance that older Americans now have.
09:02
And so what, what were the elements of FDR and Lyndon Johnson's efforts that allowed them to succeed against the opposition that you described so well before? This is one of the things you've written about in such detail, Julian, how did these two men get through what you defined as the traditional opposition to these kinds of programs?
09:23
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think different for both of them. I think, in the 1930s, we're looking at a number of important factors. One is just the total complete crisis that the nation was in did create conditions of desperation that undercut some of the opposition. It was harder to oppose the government helping when after four years of President Hoover, it was clear that government assistance was needed. And I think the electorate was certainly in a place where it was easier for FDR to make the appeal. And I think the electorate was certainly in a place where it was easier for FDR to make the appeal.
09:59
FDR took those conditions and he moved aggressively, boldly, and didn't hesitate to put forward a pretty big agenda over the first few years. And I think his leadership was obviously important from what he put forward to the way he spoke to the nation. And finally, don't forget that Democrats had control of Congress. And so you had united government. And even though Democrats were deeply divided between Southern Democrats and liberal Northern Democrats, they found ways, often at the expense of African Americans, to create relative party unity over many of the key programs.
10:43
Lyndon Johnson faced a different situation. And I'd say what was most important for him were two factors. One was the civil rights movement, which before he came into office, it just created an atmosphere where a status quo that did nothing on race and on other issues was no longer acceptable. And they put pressure from the bottom up in ways that made the conservatives feel as if they were on the defensive. And after 1964, LBJ is reelected against Barry Goldwater in a landslide election.
11:20
Democrats have huge majorities on Capitol Hill with the balance of the Democratic Party shifting from conservatives to liberals. And in 1965, it was just very hard for Republicans to say no anymore and very hard for Southern Democrats to stand in the way of these liberal majorities. So the window opens for Johnson for about a year, year and a half, where he can push through lots of programs.
11:47
And obviously, Julian, in the Obama administration knew this history. And so it would be it seems to me it's a good idea to turn to their program at this point. When when President Obama came into office in 2008, 2009, during the Great Recession, how did he use that history to define and pursue his stimulus package?
12:09
Well, I think it was two histories that were influencing Obama in 2009. One was he is someone and was someone who was very cognizant of the importance of those interventions. He was not hesitant or torn up about the idea that government was essential as the economy was plummeting when he took office. Even before he was president, he had been very important to helping President Bush push through his stimulus package in 2008, which many Republicans opposed. But the candidate Obama giving support to that already indicated he understood that government mattered. He understood his New Deal history. He understood his Great Society history. And he very much came from that tradition.
12:57
So it wasn't a surprise in 2009, when he instantly moved forward with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But the other history that was on his mind was the polarized America history. And obviously, he was very aware of that. He became a national figure in 2004, making a speech at the Boston Democratic Convention, saying we didn't have to be a red and blue America and that we could be a United States of America instead. And I think there was a tension in 2009, between his understanding that government was essential, another round of stimulus to get us out of the crisis, but also knowing very well that Washington was an incredibly divided place and Republicans were not particularly eager to support him. And yet he wanted to find a way to get them to support him to break through the fault lines. And I think that tension really shaped how he approached his stimulus.
13:59
So let's talk about that a little bit. The stimulus package that the Congress passed and President Obama signed in 2009, which, as you said, is foremost on President Biden's mind these days, because President Biden was, in a sense, the person put in charge of implementing this package. It's an $800 billion package in comparison to $1.9 trillion for the current package. So it's much smaller, less than half the size. Was the size, the smaller size, was that a function of the effort to build bipartisanship by President Obama?
14:32
That's exactly right. There were many people in the administration, economists like Christine Romer, and there were also pundits and economists who write on the op-ed pages like Paul Krugman, who argued that you really needed a stimulus at that point, closer to $1.8 trillion, closer to the number actually that we just saw with the American Rescue Plan. But President Obama and some of his other advisors were really hesitant. They thought that was a number that wasn't a bad number in terms of helping the economy, although some economists like Larry Summers thought it was too much. But it was also a number that would never get Republican support.
15:20
And President Obama was very determined to make this bipartisan and to find a way to get Republicans to sign on. And so he lowers the number to the, initially it's kind of the $600 to $800 billion range, which is obviously a lot of money. It's a huge number, but it wasn't nearly enough in terms of what was necessary to stimulate the economy, but President Obama sides with the lower number. And he's hoping that by doing that, he's going to be able to persuade Republicans, particularly in the Senate, to sign on. And many liberals are not happy with this. They believe that this is going to circumvent a full and quick recovery, and that he will end up pushing for something that's controversial anyway, without getting the benefits of a kind of Big Bang stimulus.
16:11
But as I'm sure many of our listeners remember, the forthcoming years of the Obama administration were certainly rife with partisanship, particularly in Congress. What happened? Why did these efforts at bipartisanship in many ways fail?
16:30
Well, I think in many ways, you don't even have to add that they did fail. I mean, the stimulus plan does end up getting the support of three Republicans in the Senate, Senators Collins, Snow and Specter. But that's hardly really evidence of bipartisanship. And those numbers, those small numbers would diminish over the years.
16:57
I think the fact was that Republicans were in a place already by 2009, where there was no appetite for compromising with the president. Ideologically, I think the party had moved as a whole to the right so much that they weren't going to accept any significant government intervention other than a handful of Republicans. And I think strategically, Senator McConnell, Mitch McConnell, made it very clear that obstruction was the game plan, and that they weren't going to let this president secure any victories so that they could set up a better situation for winning control of Congress and defeating him.
17:43
And there was a story the same in the House that David Obie, who is the head of the Appropriations Committee from Wisconsin, approached Jerry Lewis of the Republican Party, trying to secure his support on the bill. And Lewis was very honest and said that he had orders not to cooperate. And this is something that was repeated in many different interviews and histories that we have of the period.
18:11
So I think Obama was very optimistic, overly optimistic, that he could break through to a Republican Party that had no interest in ever working with him. And the criticism is, of Obama, that he kept doing that, and he kept undercutting his own programs in an effort that was never going to work and didn't end up with the kind of legislation that he might have had he just focused on his own party.
18:42
So before we move on to maybe talk about the effects of the stimulus package in 2009 a little bit more, I just want to ask, what are the policy precedents and maybe historical background that informed these Republican positions beyond just the political expediency? Is there a historical precedent that they see as a better response to an economic crisis?
19:07
Well, I think Republicans in general, certainly since Ronald Reagan was president in 1981, have focused on supply side tax cuts and a combination of that and deregulation as the best path forward to getting markets to work well.
19:26
And so in 1981, when we're also in pretty bad economic times, trying to crawl our way out of the 1970s, Reagan's major initiative is a supply side tax cut that basically provides the best benefit to upper income Americans and businesses with the idea that by doing that, you ultimately stimulate the entire economy and the benefits would trickle down to everyone else. President Bush, George W. Bush, did the same both in 2001. And then again, when we were in the middle of war in 2003.
20:11
And I think this is the preference for Republicans. And I think this is part of why President Obama structured around a lot of his plan around tax cuts. It was actually heavier on tax cuts than on direct spending, again, to the consternation of many liberals. But part of that was an attempt to appeal, Zachary, to what you're talking about, this preference for tax cuts. But it turned out when it was in a democratic package, that wasn't enough.
20:42
It seems, Julian, we have enough of a historical record, especially the last 20 years with the Reagan tax cuts, the Obama stimulus, the tax cuts of George W. Bush before Obama and the tax cuts of Donald Trump to assess, does direct spending work better to stimulate the economy or tax cuts work better?
21:02
Well, look, I'm not an economist and I can't give you as good of an answer as some of the best would. But I think the evidence is that direct spending has just had very beneficial effects on boosting us out of these times. And I think the record is much muddier with the tax cuts, with just using tax cuts as a mechanism.
21:31
And I think if you take the 1930s, if you take the 2010, 11, 12 period over time and some other benchmark moments, it's pretty clear that a big dose of government spending is often just what the economy needs. And often it pays off in that it leads to increased tax revenue and helps alleviate some of the fiscal burden of government. And I don't think the record is quite as clear that supply side tax cuts have that kind of effect.
22:07
And so with that context, do you see the Biden plan targeting direct spending in the right places, right places defined as places that will contribute to economic recovery for communities and for areas of the economy that have suffered, particularly during the COVID crisis?
22:27
I think so. I mean, the complicating part about this stimulus relief package is we're still in the pandemic and we're not out of it. And ultimately, this isn't about a recession or depression that happened because of the economic cycle. And then you have a debate, tax cuts versus spending. It's a moment of economic fragility that is being caused by the pandemic and that pandemic isn't over.
22:55
So I think, and this is why a lot of Republicans actually not on Capitol Hill, but in the electorate support the bill, the money is probably being targeted in the right places. It's a combination of relief for states and local government. It's money for the vaccination program and it's money to families through the child tax credit or the direct payment. Families that have really been struggling since March of 2020 to make it through this state that we're in.
23:28
The problem is the pandemic isn't over and the signs are good. The vaccine program is picking up steam, but all you have to do to get worried is to look overseas at somewhere like Italy and now France and see the kinds of challenges that still lay ahead. So the big question is, does this stimulus work if the pandemic doesn't continue to dissipate? If it gets worse, if it gets worse in certain pockets of the economy, will the targeted spending be enough? And that's just an unknown. And it will play a big role, I think, in determining the political future of President Biden and the Democratic Party going into the midterms.
24:15
And what about the argument that's made that it's just too much money?
24:19
Well, it's a legitimate argument and it's not always a partisan argument. I mean, there were some Democrats for sure who thought it was too much.
24:31
But I think the lesson that Biden learned from Obama's package, which over time proved very effective, but it was much slower than they thought, was that if you're going to do this, if you're going to take the political heat for pushing a big intervention like this, go big, that ultimately going big is still safer.
24:54
If the economy is roaring, money will come into the Treasury. That's the important thing to remember because tax revenue goes up. And that ultimately, I think President Biden thought it was the best bet. And even the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who is not his appointee, wasn't worried about going too big on this, given the state that we're in. So I think that's why those arguments won out. But it's a concern that's out there.
25:28
What's the Biden political strategy moving into 2022? I think it's pretty clear that the Democrats have in many ways a popular mandate to do this kind of very important economic work. But at the same time, they have a very, very tight margin in Congress.
25:50
Yeah, they have a miserable outlook for the midterms. And I'm sure Ron Klain, chief of staff, and many of the Biden team are well aware of this. Their margins are as narrow as can be. In the House, they're certainly narrower than they were hoping for. Because of redistricting, Republicans are in a pretty good position to do well in the House. So somehow, Biden has to use his window between now and the midterms to do as much as he can, and hope that there's a way to defy political nature, so to speak. Remember, midterms almost always go poorly for the administration, those first midterms.
26:33
So I think the strategy, the only bet that could change this, I think, is if this American Rescue Plan works, combined with the vaccine rollout, helping us avoid the state that Italy's in right now, and actually getting us back to normal.
26:54
If you imagine a fall and winter, where the economy's doing pretty well, unemployment is low, you have a lot of growth, and some of the sectors of the economy really hurt by COVID are rebounding. Combined with the normalcy we all hope to have, and that ranges from not fearing these massive death rates anymore, to families being able to get together, to children being able to go to school, to the simple pleasures of just eating in a restaurant inside, and not fearing that something catastrophic will happen. If all that is happening by, say, next winter, you could imagine these midterms might not continue to follow traditional patterns, and that Americans would feel pretty good about the administration and the political status quo. And I think that's the bet that Biden is making. And it's where good policy and good politics occasionally work in the same way.
27:56
That's exactly where my mind was going, my hopes were going, Julian. And I think that's an appropriate place for us to ask our closing question. Roosevelt, in particular, and to some extent Lyndon Johnson, if we take the Vietnam War out of things, which of course we really can't do, but certainly Franklin Roosevelt establishes a new consensus in American politics, to the point where Republicans have to start supporting New Deal policies because they're so popular. Is that a possibility?
28:27
Can we see Biden playing that kind of role, not necessarily as a Roosevelt, but as a shepherd for a new consensus around some of these policies aimed at addressing economic inequality, aimed at addressing communities that have been left behind, aimed at addressing our healthcare deficiencies in our country?
28:46
It's tough. Because of the state of the Republican Party, it's not simply that we're a polarized country. It's, as we've discussed, the Republican Party has moved very, very far to the right in the last few decades. And Republican leaders are not in a place where they're willing to join a consensus of the sort that you're talking about. And I think as we've seen during the pandemic, there are many Americans who refuse to wear a face mask as a political stand, who are not going to be eager to say, I'm persuaded by what the Democrats have done, and let's make this a new foundation for American life.
29:28
So it's tough. I think the way that it can happen isn't through persuasion. It isn't through President Biden being able, through fireside chats or televised addresses, to convince Republicans to think in a different way. It's only if the case is made by government policy itself. It's kind of like Medicare, which was controversial when it started. It was hated by a lot of people in the Republican Party and the medical community but ultimately within a decade of its creation in 1965, lots of Americans, red and blue, love the program and had no interest in ever letting it go because they saw what it could do. And they saw how it could heal some of the problems American families faced.
30:16
And so the way you might get some sort of consensus, not a consensus. But an acceptance is if the package that went through today, combined with the role of government in public health because of the pandemic, start to create more support in Red America, not just blue America, for the value of government in dealing with the personal challenges we face, you might see expanded support. And thatâs maybe why a lot of Republican voters, at least now say theyâre fine with the American Rescue Plan. They like it, but itâs going to be really tough. Weâre in a place as we have all seen in recent months, where creating a consensus in this country is probably the most difficult challenge that we face.
31:07
Itâs a very persuasive argument you make Julian, but as you and I know as historians, also, we do go through these cycles, and at some point the cycle does have to turn back. But when it does, who knows? Who knows? It does seem as if this might be a moment for that. Zachary, as as a young person watching all of this, do you do you share the hope that I have and that I think Julian has, Julianâs cautious hope, about the role of government being rebuilt in the minds of many citizens? Or where do you see things going?
31:40
I think that in many ways, government already has been the higher position of government has already in many ways been restored in the minds of young people by the Biden administration, or at least partially. But I think the issue is that there are so many restrictions being put in place now to prevent those very people from voting. And so I think, yes, that we need to convince people through good policy, that thatâs the only way that that the Biden administration and future administrations that seek to help the American economy can convince the public. But we also need to open our democracy to more and more people instead of restricting it.
32:20
Well, thatâs I think, a crucial point. And Iâm sure Julian would agree that that voting rights are at the center of any effort to rebuild any kind of consensus in American politics. We discussed this, of course, in a prior episode with Sean Theriault on the filibuster. Which is, of course, a key element in Congress restricting voting rights legislation right now. Julian, thank you so much for joining us today. Youâve given us the kind of historical context only you can, and we really appreciate you taking the time.
32:48
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to talk to both of you
32:51
And Zachary. Thank you for your poem, as always and for your insights and most of all, thank you to our listeners. Thank you for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.
Episode 146: U.S.-China Relations
00:24
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we're going to discuss a topic that's front and center in everyday newspaper and every discussion in our society about foreign policy, the past and future of the U.S.-China relationship. And we're very fortunate to be joined by, I think, the person who's writing some of the most sensible, historically informed, and creative work on the topic, a good friend, Dr. Charles Edel.
00:55
Charlie was on our podcast before a little more about a year ago, a year and a half ago, and we're delighted to have him back on. Welcome, Charlie.
01:03
Thanks so much for having me back on.
01:06
Charlie is a global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and he's also a senior fellow at the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, at the University of Sydney. His research and policy expertise is actually truly vast and deep at the same time. He has particular expertise in politics and security in the Indo-Pacific and U.S. strategy toward that region, as well as American foreign policy, grand strategy, and American political history. So he really covers the U.S. side of the story as well as the Asia, Indo-Pacific side of the story.
01:38
He wrote a fantastic first book, a book I assign to students all the time, on John Quincy Adams, who was probably America's greatest secretary of state. The book is called Nation Builder, John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic. And then he co-wrote a book that we had him on the podcast to discuss, co-written with Hal Brands, The Lessons of Tragedy, Statecraft and World Order. Currently, Charlie is writing a book on a fascinating topic on dealing with authoritarian regimes. I imagine China will be one of the regimes in your book. Is that correct, Charlie?
02:14
It is indeed correct.
02:15
Charlie, in addition to his extensive academic and scholarly work, he writes frequently for major newspapers and magazines and journals. He's frequently on television and the radio, and he has extensive policy experience as well. From 2015 to 2017, he served under the U.S. Secretary of State's policy planning staff, playing a pivotal role in Asia-Pacific issues at the time. And he's also worked extensively in the region. He was a Henry Luce scholar at Peking University and spent an extensive amount of time in Australia, in East Asia, and of course, in the United States. Charlie, we're delighted to have you with us today.
02:55
Before we turn to our discussion with Charlie, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's scene-setting poem. What is your poem about today, Zachary?
03:05
Well, it's called A Good Fight.
03:07
A Good Fight. A Good Fight. Okay. I hope you're not referring to our altercations. No. Certainly not. All right. Let's hear it.
03:15
Ah, the start of a good fight. It's something we all seem to crave. That moment captured on the television screen as the two boxers stare each other down across the ring. The instant when first punch flies into nose and first blood breaks.
03:30
We love a good fight. In the kitchen cooking dinner, pumping our fists to eye of the tiger, stirring our boiling pots and staring down splotches of map like the lines themselves are inimical. Others get excited for the latest cure, the latest indecency, others the latest dream, but nothing makes our salutes to the flag and slurring pledges seem more meaningful than someone who wants to tear them down.
03:57
Someone who also stands up and salutes, but to a different flag. We love the start of a good fight. Sometimes we even love the climax when our tanks roll victorious through liberated cities, when our neighbors high five us on the street on the 4th of July, when our sons and daughters can find meaning in the not yet empty missions of their parents.
04:18
We love the start of a good fight, the beginning of a smack down, but we seem to forget how they always end, how we are always left aching that our son, our daughter is gone, how they are left aching that their son, their daughter is gone, how we get stuck with our own fists up in the air, swinging them round and round until our arms hurt and our joints ache and it all doesn't seem to matter anymore.
04:44
It's a wonderful reflection, Zachary, on I guess the empty glamour of conflict and war. Why did you write that poem for a discussion of US-China relations?
04:54
That's a good question. I think that the main reason I think that this sort of American belligerence is so relevant is that part of what motivates us as a society is having an enemy. And it's something that I think has been a key part of our history in the last 100 years or so. But I think it also means that we are very quick to find enemies and a lot slower to reach out to those on opposite ends of the global stage. And I think that's part of the issue we're facing with China. And that's not the whole story, but I think that's a very important part of it.
05:30
Charlie, is that part of the dynamic as we look back, you as a historian bring a real thoughtful perspective to the current issues. As we go back to 1949, right, to the beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party regime and its difficult relations with the United States from that period up to the present, does Zachary capture an important dynamic here or is that not accurate?
05:55
I thought it was a terrific poem for a couple of different reasons. And so let me answer your question a bit of a roundabout way. So first of all, I loved the image of the start of a good fight because where we really are in terms of US-China competition is things have changed so rapidly in the state and trajectory of our relationships with China across almost virtually every sector of endeavor that people feel a little bit of whiplash. And it does seem like all of a sudden we went from being good friends with China or not great friends, but important relations to having a very competitive relationship. And it seems to be true under both Republican and Democrats now on the baton. So one of the things that, you know, when Zachary is talking about the start of a good fight, we really are at the dawn of something new at this point.
06:50
You can trace back to 2016, you can trace it back maybe a little bit earlier than that, but we really are competing with them in the ring. So I think he really does capture the sense of where we are right now. The second thing I would say is I love the analogy. It's what most people around the world talk about, right? That it's China and the US slugging it out and they don't want to get trampled in the fight in between them, but it's not quite accurate. Because the fight is not just between the United States and China and caging it in that way makes certain sense, but it is really a larger competition of systems that is much larger than the United States and China alone.
07:35
And so one of the things that I found myself talking about a lot over the last couple of years was when we phrase this as US versus China, that's not quite the accurate way of approaching this because most of the actions that the United States is responding to are issues of concern for many, many nations, not only in Asia, but around the world. Whether we're talking about maritime aggression, whether we're talking about human rights suppression, whether we're talking about economic coercion. So I like framing this in a little bit bigger of a sense. It's not just a fight between two players.
08:12
The final part, which I think is really worthy of a discussion because there are elements of the truth, but then I would add this to this about whether or not it's US aggression as Zachary was just talking about. And I think that it is true, exactly true as Zachary laid out, that nothing concentrates the mind as much as having an enemy or having a competitor that will focus and drive actions. And the United States in fact is better oftentimes strategically when it can focus on a singular threat as opposed to a multiplicity of them.
08:51
But I would caution that looking at this primarily and first off through a belligerent Washington underrates that what we are seeing is a much delayed response from Washington to a cumulating series of actions taken by Beijing to in some ways force a more competitive response from the United States. Sorry, that was a long winded response to a really good poem, but he's really captured a lot of what's happening here.
09:23
And I really like how you use the poem as a springboard to understand not just the US side of this dynamic, but the Chinese side as well. And both sides, you could argue, have a tendency toward forward action and maybe even sometime aggression. I wanted to pick up on so many good points. I wanted to pick up in particular, Charlie, on this point about American interests and American action on behalf of others in the region. I think this has been a mainstay of US-China policy since the end of World War II, that the United States policy towards China is not just about China, but about the wider East Asian and one could even argue Indo-Pacific region with regard to our interests in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Is that the correct framing? Is that the way to think about it in regional terms rather than bilateral terms?
10:14
That is one approach to thinking about it, and I happen to think it's the correct approach. So in some ways, I'd say that the United States has a bit of a yo-yo approach here, that sometimes we do this when we think about Asia, we think about Asia first and China as a subset of Asia. And sometimes we reverse that order, that Asia is China because it's the largest nation because it now has the largest economy because it's the largest military and everything else revolves around that. So there are arguments to be made for which is the better approach. I think we are always better considering we have so many allies in the region. There are so many democracies in the region. We have an economic, no less a security architecture that's predicated around keeping a stable balance of power, keeping the region as open as possible.
11:05
So again, I said there are two approaches, but I think the United States tends to err when it predicates the entire Asia relationship around stable relations with China, as opposed to making sure that China is a very important part of our Asia policy, but getting our Asia policy right means first and foremost, working with our allies in the region.
11:25
And what are America's main interests in the region? What are the things we have historically cared about, which ostensibly we would still care about today?
11:36
Yeah. So I think you could boil it down to only two things, and then a lot of other kind of sub-issues flow out of them. So I think American policy in the region, American interest in the region have been actually very consistent over the long haul. And when I say long haul, I'm not even looking back to 1949, I'm looking way back to the late 18th century. And my thinking here is really informed by Michael Green's terrific book, By More Than Providence, which looks at American grand strategy in the region over its entire history. And part of his argument is that America has always worked for one positive and one negative overriding interest in Asia.
12:20
The positive agenda is to make sure that the region is as open and as free as possible so that there can be as much trade with America, so that there can be as much transmission of American values into the region as possible. That is one kind of driving set of interest that is really a positive sum that we will, as the region gets more democratic, it's likely to get more prosperous and more stable, and we're all going to benefit on that.
12:52
The second one is a negative aim, which is we are going to work to prevent a hegemon from taking hold in the region that subsumes the rest of the region, that creates a sphere of influence. Because whenever that has happened, we have seen that it ultimately ends up threatening American interests and American territory. So obviously we're talking about China in this relationship, but if we think before that, we can go to Japan. Sorry, we think before that, we think about the Soviet Union. So I think it is a constant of American strategy that has been an American interest to prevent as much as we are able to the emergence of a single country that is able to create a closed sphere of influence in Asia.
13:38
Does it matter, Charlie, that China is still, at least in the way it refers to itself, its government, still a communist government ruled by a communist party? Does that matter?
13:50
It does matter, because the direction that China has gone, particularly under Xi Jinping, is there are communists of different stripes, and there are those like Deng Xiaoping, who argued, it doesn't matter if the mouse is black or white, as long as we all get rich together. I've now just kind of elided, unfortunately, two of his great sayings.
14:13
But the point was, as long as we had a China that was working with others in the region, that was trying to keep the region open and integrating themselves into it, that was fine. The fact of the matter is that under Xi Jinping, from his ascension to power, we have seen an increasingly domestically repressive China and externally aggressive China. And you had asked about the focus of the communism within this.
14:42
Xi Jinping is an ideologue. We could debate whether or not he actually believes it himself, but he is forcing his ideological vision of the country onto the country. Xi Jinping thought has now been added to the canon. People are required to learn it. It is being exported around the region. So, yes, it does make a difference. We are not beyond this. This is not something that the leaders of China don't take seriously internally.
15:10
What about the developing countries that China, in the Indo-Pacific, but also outside of the Indo-Pacific, that China has invested heavily in? Where should those countries fit into the United States' grand strategy when it comes to China?
15:29
Well, they should fit in greatly because if one side offers a lot or seemingly offers a lot and the other side doesn't offer a lot, we don't put ourselves in a particularly advantageous position, which is where I think we've been over the last couple of years. However, we need to think very carefully, countries do think carefully, about what it is exactly that China is offering.
15:50
So Belt and Road Initiative is a good example of this. That if it is just an infrastructure build, it's just an infusion of cash or of yen into your country, that's good. But if it is something that comes with strings attached, with collateralized debt that has convertibility onto sovereignty issues, that's a problem. If it's something where the Chinese are building out the entire technological infrastructure of the place that they then have the ability to turn on, that's a problem. And frankly, even if the Chinese don't own it, but if they are creating technological ecosystems that are much more easily controllable and repressive, frankly, that's a problem for the United States of America.
16:32
So all these issues need to play a really big role. And frankly, over the last four years, during the Trump administration, there was much talk about competition, but there wasn't a lot of resourcing put towards this, Zachary, and exactly your question, right, about what about in these other countries, where were we going to actually be competing? So I think this is an area where it of course varies greatly when we talk country by country and what they're looking for and what they're willing to do. But what happens in these other countries, seeding the field is not one that's likely to result in a happy strategy for the United States.
17:10
But how can the United States challenge Chinese aggression abroad when so many of our allies, for example, Germany, rely heavily on Chinese economic investment and trade? How can we balance the economic interests of our allies and the interests of ourselves and the world?
17:30
With great delicacy, part one, part two, by challenging Chinese external aggression. So the fact is, as you raised, I think really nicely in that question, we have a much closer overlap of values and interests with our allies, particularly our democratic allies, than we do with others. But there's never a perfect alignment, nor frankly should there be.
17:51
And this becomes more acute when some of those trade differences point in different ways. But a great example of this, Zachary, is Australia, right? I just moved back from three and a half wonderful years of living in Australia. Australia has a very different type of relationship with China than the United States does, particularly because about 5% to 6% of US trade goes to China, up to 40% of Australian external commerce goes to Beijing, right? So that's a very different type of relationship.
18:22
And yet, if you think about the type of aggression that we've seen, not only, say, in the South China Sea in some obvious places, not only on some of the Pacific islands that are actually very close to Australia, but if we think about some of the influence operations, right? Where the Chinese Communist Party has been bribing Australian parliamentarians, where they have worked itself into the Chinese-Australian community in order to make sure that fair conversations, open conversations can't happen in Australia, in Australia, not in China. So frankly, on that, the response by Australia, even with 40% of trade going there, has been quite robust
19:09
So Australia is a different case, say, than Germany. But I think the answer to your question is, there is really an impetus for pushback against the more destabilizing practices that Beijing has, but we have to see which countries are willing to do what on which particular issues. That's a vague answer, but I also think it's the correct one.
19:31
Well, and I will highlight, Charlie, a wonderful piece you recently wrote that emphasizes how the Australians, despite this trade dependence on China, have actually moved their trade relations in response to Chinese bullying and Chinese coercion. And so it does show that this is possible, and that's part of what managing relationships are about. Do you think that the Biden administration is moving in that direction? Are they moving in a direction of working, as you and Hal Brands in another article write, toward building a sort of alliance of democratic solidarity with other democratic societies like Australia and Germany to not only push back against China, but to enforce certain rules of behavior?
20:15
Yes, I do. Look, when Biden was campaigning for office, we know that China was a volatile issue for a number of reasons. But one of the critiques was not in terms of the racist card being waived by Trump himself a lot of the time, but the real critique was not, in my mind, was not that the Trump administration wasn't competing, it's that they weren't doing so effectually. And the nub of that critique was, it's great to say that you're in competition, but how the heck do you plan on doing it if you're not bringing our allies and partners on board? And how can you possibly do that if you're going after them with trade wars as well?
20:56
And so, because we know that one of the very few things that Beijing responds to is concerted counterpressure. The most important thing that the Biden administration could do was to make sure that it was working with its allies, not at cross purposes, and that it was supporting democracy as opposed to undercutting it by its own actions internally within the US. So, it strikes me as both on the campaign trail, and frankly, in the not quite state of the union that Joe Biden gave last week, his address to Congress, he talked about this explicitly, that democracy versus authoritarianism was the number one challenge that we faced.
21:37
China was a challenge that was really going to put the United States to the test about how competitive we would be in the 21st century, and that we had to do this working alongside partners and allies. So, yes, I've seen a ton of effort if you look at initiatives that have rolled out, everything from the quadrilateral security grouping, right? That's Japan, Australia, the United States, and India, kind of working together with a really substantive set of do outs.
22:06
If you look at Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, was just working with both Japan and South Korea and the US, right? That's a relationship, that trilateral configuration that's gone by the wayside. If you look about the fact that President Biden called for a summit of democracies to happen before his first year of office is out, yes, it strikes me as the number one issue is how we can work with allies together to harness and leverage our collective strengths.
22:35
Is there a danger, Charlie, and this stems in part from historical experience, that although this can be very productive, both at an international and at a domestic level in disciplining people at home, it's one of the issues where Democrats and Republicans can agree in many respects. Nonetheless, does it not create a bifurcated world? Does it not create an adversarial relationship and reinforce certain adversarial assumptions which then make cooperation, where possible, more difficult?
23:07
Yes. However, I would argue that we're already in an adversarial bifurcated world. And what we saw over the last four years, what we're continuing to see over the first couple of months of the Biden administration, is a belated response by the United States.
23:21
So the question becomes, if the free world really is under pressure, really is under assault, and has seen its wins ebb over the last couple of years, what is the appropriate strategy for that? And this strikes me as the most likely strategy that we could pursue to make sure that the world is as free and open as possible. That said, right, as we kind of put on our historian's hat and look back, there are big dangers here. And they're not only dangers on the competition spectrum, but there are real dangers on what happens at home when you are talking about rivalry with China and Asian Americans get caught in the crossfire.
24:05
This is not something that we're not going to do, compete with China, but we have to be really careful about our language, right? That's something that we have to be much better at doing than we have been doing. You know, one of the things that the China Watcher community talks about a lot of the time is, let's be really clear, right? What we are talking is the harmful effects of the Chinese Communist Party, not of Chinese people, not of China, not of Asians by any stretch of the imagination.
24:32
You know, another thing to be careful about, and Jeremi, I know I'm talking to the expert here, is, look, when we do reach back for that analogy of the Cold War, which both does not work at all and also works in some ways, is during the Cold War, we have to be careful about areas of competition that are unhelpful for the United States, chasing our tail into some areas, right? So yeah, you know, it is both a driver, it's one that will focus the mind, but it's also one that we are in and we have to be very careful about as well.
25:08
On the domestic side of this, because we did a podcast episode a few weeks ago with Madeline Hsu, and we talked about the history of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, which as you know well, has a long history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, just a number out of a long history of this. What are some of the concrete things we can do at home? Because there's no doubt we've seen in the last four to eight years, as the international competition has increased between the US and China, that we have seen more incidents of anti-Asian violence in the United States. And for a time, we had an American leader who was blaming and deriding China and many of its people for many of our health issues related to the pandemic in the US. So how do we reverse that dynamic at home? What are some of the concrete things we can do while competing internationally?
26:04
So one, I think I mentioned before, and look, I wish I had the comprehensive answer on this, because it's so important, right, that we do this so that we are protecting ourselves and our citizens, right, not taking aim at each other. So number one, we need to be really careful. And by we, I simply mean our leaders who talk about this, about what language they use. Don't get loose with the language. Don't say Chinese. You say Chinese Communist Party, right? You say Beijing's actions. We don't say China's actions, right? Because of course, you know, the Chinese people is not what we're taking aim at. No less people of Asian ancestry who reside in this country, no less are productive and valuable members of our society. So number one language, I think is really important.
26:52
The second thing which I watched play out in the Australian context, and I think is equally true here, is because we have to be very sensitive of this, that should not shy away from aggressive actions that we need to take to protect our own citizens. And by that, I mean, look, there are racial elements about this because the Chinese Communist Party is trying to use racial elements of this to wedge us, right? To make sure that we don't address this. And one issue that I saw playing out in Australia was if you don't do this, if you don't take care of your own citizens with oftentimes the Chinese Communist Party working inside of constituent communities in Australia, you are relegating your own citizens to second class status, right? Because they're not as worthy of your protection. And that makes for sometimes very uncomfortable conversations, but you need to make sure that you are protecting your own citizens against people who are working within the community but are coming from outside of the country.
28:06
This is a very important point, and we've seen evidence of this at many of our universities. It's been more evident, of course, in Australia. And you're one of the leading commentators and analysts of this, Charlie, right? Which is the ways in which the Chinese government organizes groups in other countries to try to intimidate other citizens of the United States or Australia or elsewhere of Chinese descent who might be critical of the Chinese Communist Party. And tries to intimidate them.
28:38
If you don't mind, I'll just give an example of this in the Australian context. So many, of course, not all, but many people of Chinese ancestry who reside in Australia permanently read Chinese language media. That makes sense. There's been terrific investigative work that basically all of the Chinese language press is owned by CCP interests except for one. All but one. Which means that they are simply reprinting stuff that comes right out of Xinhua or China Daily.
29:15
Second point, when we're text messaging, Weibo, which is one of the apps that is used widely in China and also by Chinese communities overseas, is controlled in Beijing oftentimes. So we saw during some of the elections in Australia that when anything critical was said about the CCP, those messages got shut down in Australia. So again, it's really important when we think about how free societies operate, right? One of them is a free press. But what happens if one particular group isn't getting enough funding, right? Because it's all been sucked up. How do you support a free press in different languages, too, within your countries? I mean, I think this is a really interesting point, and we're just beginning to put our heads around it.
30:02
Charlie, you've put so many interesting issues on the table in a historical perspective, allowing us to see that the competition is real, but it's more complex than just saying we're competitors, and we're going to mobilize all the resources we have. It's a much more delicate game of balancing different interests and different communities abroad and at home. For our listeners who are concerned about this conflict, either leading us to chase our tail, as you put it, in places where we don't want to expend our resources, that's one of the lessons of the Cold War, that competing against a legitimate adversary can lead us to do things that we regret, in retrospect, and get into conflicts we regret. But also, what are the things we can do to avoid the conflict getting out of control? What are the positive steps that we can take and that our listeners can think about encouraging in their political leaders?
30:59
Great question, Jeremi. So I tend to think in order to avoid actual confrontation, we have to show that we are more willing to push back against Chinese aggression than we have been in the past, one. Two, we have to be willing to resource a real competition, right? If we think that, for instance, the commanding heights of the 21st century economy is going to be built around future technologies, AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, we have to be willing to invest in those industries. And that actually means that we're going to be spending a lot more.
31:40
You've seen some of this already coming out of the Biden administration. We're seeing calls, I mean, this is, the funny thing is, if you watch Washington at this point, right, we know that there is no bipartisanship whatsoever, except on China. And if you look at some of the major legislation that's been put forth, we have the oddest of bedfellows possible, right? You have the Endless Frontier Act, which is co-sponsored by Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton. You have some of the stuff coming out of the House would see similar alignments of the right and the left. And we're seeing major dollars, I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars that we need behind us. So I would say that if we actually want to be competitive, we have to be willing to spend in these areas, which we haven't been willing to do before.
32:33
And so part of that is going to see, and it aligns very nicely where I think the Biden administration is driving for both this reason and others. We're going to see an industrial policy. We are already seeing the beginnings of it, the likes of which we have not seen for two to three decades at this point.
32:47
It makes a lot of sense. Zachary, as a young person who follows these issues pretty closely and is concerned, do you see a pathway forward that Charlie's outlined here with his insightful comments about how the United States can compete without recreating perhaps some of the excesses of the Cold War or without going too far in certain areas in dangerous ways?
33:13
I definitely think so. And I think the Cold War analogy works to some extent, but it also doesn't because China and the United States, our societies and our populace are in many ways very connected, not just through trade, but through immigration and travel and other forms of business. So I think that the connection between our societies, people in the United States interacting with Chinese immigrants and people in China interacting with Americans, I think that in many ways, I think, allows for a framework where we can think about competition and challenging Chinese aggression without going too far.
33:54
It's interesting, Charlie. Zachary brought up a point that reminds me of one of, I think, the great insights that our mutual advisor, John Lewis made years ago, that one of the striking things about the US-Soviet relationship was how distant these societies were, how little the United States needed the Soviet Union, in fact. And it's the opposite with China. And Zachary's commenting, I think, on how that could be a positive element. That could be something that prevents some of the, let's say, mistakes and excesses of the past. Sort of as a final thought, do you agree with that? Is proximity and closeness a strength here?
34:28
Yes, but. So I do agree that that's a strength, but this takes kind of both ends playing from this. So let me kind of zoom us back into the distant history of like a year and a half ago, two and a half years ago. So look, there are times in our history, and Jeremi, I know you started with this thinking all the way back to 49, there are times when our governments enter more contentious periods with a lot more friction, with a lot more competition. That is undoubtedly what we have entered, and I think it's going to persist for a long time.
35:01
So when you enter a period like that, I think wise policy says, look, things are going to get a lot more heated, but let's make sure that this doesn't become the all-out crisis where we can never look at each other again, nor are each other citizens. I.e., let's make sure that people-to-people relations are really firmly connected. Because if the government relations are going off the rails, let's make sure that we have some good seed for the future.
35:29
And I think that's really important, some of the points which Zachary raised on that. However, and I think this is a really challenging thing to think about, the CCP's actions have made that much harder to date. Because if you think about this, they have started taking hostages, right? I mean, if we think about the case of the two Canadian Michaels, right? I mean, researchers working in China with long Chinese history, who the Chinese government decided to gain leverage against the Canadian government because they didn't like that Meng had been detained on a Huawei case, and potentially to be extradited to the United States. They just threw them into jail without any charges, and they've now languished in jail for something like 850 days.
36:16
This has also happened to Australian researchers. And what we're beginning to see, and Jeremy, I'm sure you could speak to this, is that the risk assessment for universities and think tanks about whether or not they can have relationships in China for the safety of researchers, of academics, and frankly, of students is really just going way up on this point. So I think that people-to-people relations are something that we should be investing and doubling down on right now. But because of the actions that the Chinese government has taken, that has become so much harder at this point
36:54
Charlie, you have really treated us today to a tour de force, understanding, I think, first of all, how intertwined so many of these interpersonal and geostrategic and domestic and international issues are, how relevant our history is as both an explanation for how we've come to where we are, but also as laying out a set of alternatives and lessons that can at least frame the way we think about these issues. But most of all, allowing us to see that the pathway forward is not going to be a simple one. And although slogans are attractive, it strikes me that what you're laying out is actually the real work of diplomacy and marrying power to idealism, democracy and security hand in hand. And that's at the center of what I think democratic policy is always about. So, Charlie, thank you for sharing your wisdom and insights with us today.
37:48
Well, thanks so much for having me on, guys, for a really important conversation. That, look, as China becomes the main thing that we talk about, the most important thing to talk about is why are we talking about it, right? Otherwise, how do we expect people to be willing to compete to make sure that the United States and the values that it stands for are actually protected? So, thank you, guys.
38:09
I have such high regard, Charlie, for your understanding of that point so well that it is about democracy, but that doesn't mean it's about imposing democracy upon China, but it certainly is about protecting democratic values that we believe in that are at the core of our society. And again, I think your insights and your writing and your policy work really, really capture that.
38:29
Zachary, thank you for your poem, which warned us about competition, and for your questions along these lines. And most of all, thank you, as always, to our listeners. Thank you for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 166: NATO Alliance
00:25
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the transatlantic alliance and in particular NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, an organization that I think historians agree is one of the most, if not the most successful alliance in the history of the world.
00:44
And today we're going to discuss why this alliance exists and what role it's played and how we should think about the future of this alliance, if it has a future, and its relationship to democratic relations across societies and alliances on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A very important issue for politics and international diplomacy.
01:06
We're joined by two friends and scholars and teachers who have written some of the most important work on NATO, two people who have taught me much of what I know about this alliance, Joshua Shifrinson and James Goldgeier. Hello gentlemen.
01:22
Hello.
01:22
Hello.
01:24
Josh Shifrinson is an associate professor of international relations in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His first book, which is a wonderful book with a bright yellow cover, I can see it on my bookshelf now, it always stands out on your bookshelf because of the bright yellow color and the brilliance of what's inside of it, Rising Titans, Falling Giants, How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts, a really thoughtful explanation of how countries, big countries deal with shifts in international power. Related to this, Josh has written numerous articles, particularly on NATO, on the durability of NATO, on its expansion at the end of the Cold War, and various related issues.
02:05
James Goldgeier is a professor of international relations and the former dean of the School of International Service at American University, and he survived his deanship and remained an active scholar. I think no one has ever done that before. Jim, you're the only one who's managed that. He's also the Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute, and he serves as chair of a committee that I have great reverence for, the State Department Historical Advisory Committee, which helps us to get documents that we as historians can use for our research. Jim has written numerous books. I think still the best book on the period from the end of the Cold War to 9-11, America Between the Wars, that he co-wrote with Derek Chollet, also Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War, that he co-wrote with now-former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul. And particularly for our subject today, Jim wrote the first, and I still think the best book on NATO expansion, Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO.
03:07
So we have two scholars and public intellectuals who clearly know more about this topic than anyone else and a lot to share with us.
03:15
Before we turn to our conversation with Josh and Jim, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's poem. What's the title of your poem, Zachary?
03:22
Transatlantic Elegy.
03:25
Transatlantic Elegy. Okay, let's hear it.
03:28
Out of the dust, can you see it now, over there? The giant sits alone, a figure in a wrought iron chair. Arisen from the hole he himself has piled up, the giant looks around, wants your wine inside his cup. It is a lonely habit, overlooking all your friends. It is indeed a lonely hour when they retreat into their dens. But you, giant over there, you behemoth in your gold-plated lair, you have not been forgotten, only tastefully ignored. They remember all your blessings, and they remember how you snored. It is a solitary sport, this gallivanting hopefulness, the smile, the embrace, the recognition of your soulfulness. You sit as if in the impression of a painting on the wall, and they stand beside your picture frame, relating, recall, we believed you were arisen in Kabul before the fall.
04:25
Interesting.
04:26
Wow. That is amazing.
04:30
This is why we have the podcast. We have Zachary's poetry to open up our eyes.
04:35
That's the best thing ever written on NATO.
04:38
Now, Zach, I heard it was called Transatlantic Elegy. Does this mean you'll be running for the nomination in Ohio at some point?
04:45
No.
04:47
No, no J.D. Vance is here for us.
04:49
No J.D. Vance is here. Very good.
04:51
Zachary, clearly your poem had impact already. What is your poem about?
04:55
My poem is really about the ironic position the United States finds itself in as the former center of the transatlantic alliance that was in many ways the strongest alliance of the late 20th century, but now as someone who's seeking to reclaim that, but at the same time trying to make decisions like pulling out from Afghanistan without really consulting our allies in the ways that we have in the past, or at least aspired to.
05:23
We'll come back to that, of course, but I think your poem also implies that there was a golden moment. There was something there. Maybe Jim, how should we start our history of NATO? What is NATO about? Why was it founded and what did it do well in its time?
05:41
Well, I think we start with Zachary's poem and bringing the giant out of the lair. This was the...I think it's really important to remember that this alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and 10 European countries that then added four more European countries during the Cold War and then expanded with 14 more after the end of the Cold War. It was a big deal to form this alliance in 1949 because it really went against the ideas of the founding of this country, George Washington's admonition against permanent alliances, Thomas Jefferson's argument against entangling alliances.
06:32
We got involved in the alliance, the Grand Alliance, in World War II because the world was at stake, but the idea was that when that was over, that would be that. Who thought we would be forming some kind of permanent alliance with Canada and our European allies? There we were in 1949 forming NATO and, of course, other alliances as well during the Cold War. The Soviet threat was deemed to be so sufficiently dangerous to the United States and its partners that the United States did go about forming these alliances only a few years after it had been allied with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom in the Grand Alliance of World War II. So, it really is hugely important that it was established and that here we are in 2021 and Zachary's poem has pointed out that there are some cracks in the thing, but it's still standing all these years later.
07:39
It's amazing. You're certainly right, Jim. As a historian, I always remind my students that the United States, after the revolution, when we had an alliance with the French, we never formed another alliance again until World War II. So, our tradition, as you said, was not to have alliances like this.
07:58
Josh, it's often said, and the quote is apocryphal from Lord Ismay as far as we can tell, but it's often taken as an apocryphal statement that NATO was created to keep the US in, the Soviets out and the Germans down. Is that accurate?
08:13
I think that is highly accurate and it gets a duality in NATO's founding purpose, and I think Jim alluded to this, but it's worth putting a point on it. We think of NATO retrospectively as this exercise in using American power to deter the Soviet threat, to keep the Red Army and the Soviet Union's political influence in check. But of course, founded in 1949, the states of Western Europe and Canada aren't only, even primarily even, worried about the Soviet Union. There's this country called Germany that sits in the heart of Europe.
08:49
Now, of course, Germany in 1949 wasn't a sovereign actor and it was divided between the victors of the Second World War in Europe, but there's a real fear about the resurgence of German power akin to what we saw after the First World War, and this worry that the Germans would run amok again if not checked. So Lord Ismay's apocryphal statement, keeping the Americans in, the Germans down, the Soviets out, really gets at the idea the Americans were going to project power into the heart of Europe and try to manage European security affairs to, on the one hand, check the Soviets, but also check the Germans. And so American power was to focus in this very dual-hatted fashion.
09:29
And how did this actually work in practice, Jim? You've written a lot about this. NATO was actually a relatively consultative structure and still is, right? It wasn't just the United States getting its way all the time, correct?
09:43
Well, yeah, a little bit of both. I mean, the United States clearly has been the dominant actor within NATO, but it is an organization that does operate by consensus. You know, nobody has a veto within NATO, and it's interesting. I have a former PhD student from American University, Balazs Martonffy, who wrote a great dissertation on NATO decision-making in the middle of the Cold War period, and he used archival materials from NATO and showed that actually there were lots of times, lots of conversations within NATO when smaller countries were able to push back successfully against the U.S. position.
10:31
So especially at the end of the Cold War and soon after, we tend to think of the United States as this truly dominant power within NATO, and it provided so much of the wherewithal for NATO to be able to deter the Soviet Union that it definitely had a pretty overwhelming voice. But it does have to consult, and it does have to work with its allies within the institution.
10:57
And Jim, just following on that really interesting point, and thanks for mentioning that dissertation. I haven't read it. I need to read it myself. Would you say that NATO spread or encouraged democracy in Europe?
11:12
I think that's really more of a post-Cold War phenomenon. When we look at the establishment of NATO, I mean, we think about it as this alliance of democracies, but there were countries during the Cold War, Portugal initially, Greece, Turkey. Greece and Turkey come into the alliance in 1952, and both in the 1960s go through challenging periods. It is the case that Spain doesn't come in until 1982, post-Franco, but I mean, the emphasis during the Cold War really was strategic, but it's in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the effort to think about NATO as a more political institution and trying to figure out what to do about Central and Eastern Europe and how one could help encourage democracy and respect for human rights and rule of law.
12:12
It's really in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War that NATO becomes more geared toward trying to help develop democracy in these potential new members, whereas I think during the Cold War, it was really much more focused on its strategic purpose.
12:33
And Josh, on this point of the strategic purpose, which I think Jim is obviously correct about, was at the core of NATO, would you say, before we talk about the end of the Cold War, during the Cold War, did NATO succeed in containing Soviet aggression and did it succeed in, as you discussed before, bringing Germany into the Western alliance in a way that was comfortable and effective for the countries of Europe and for the United States and Canada?
13:00
Oh, I think beyond the shadow of a doubt, by which I mean there was no World War III and the Soviet Empire did not expand in Europe beyond its late 1940s borders. That's a pretty big success in at least overtly stopping the Soviet threat. Now with the turns, you obviously never know if the other side actually intended to act, but just on the surface of it, there was no further Soviet expansion. So that's a win.
13:27
And on the Germany side of the equation, you know, one thing we've only loosely talked about, but I think speaks to this issue that you've raised, Jeremi, is that the initial American plan was to integrate Germany so thoroughly into the European order, the Western European order, if you want to use that term, that the Americans could eventually withdraw, right?
13:50
The plan was for eventually Western Europe to stand on its own two legs against the Soviets and the Americans could move more offshore. Judged against that very high standard, NATO during the Cold War didn't quite meet its goal as Mark Trachtenberg has written quite elegantly on how this problem came about, how these tensions lingered. But in terms of making Germany acceptable to other countries and making France and Britain, Belgium, Holland, so on and so forth, comfortable with Germany, NATO managed to succeed in that mission. And American influence was critical to that project.
14:27
So I often hear NATO spoken of sort of as almost analogous to the Warsaw Pact, but obviously there was much more of a back and forth between the countries. How much did internal relations between NATO members shape NATO policy during the Cold War?
14:46
Jim?
14:47
Yeah, I mean, it's not comparable to the Warsaw Pact. I mean, the Warsaw Pact, I mean, the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. I mean, those countries are really, you know, properly known as client states. And you know, the Soviet Union in most cases installed the leadership of those countries and controlled those leaders, although there were some exceptions and especially as time went on.
15:15
I mean, the United States, you know, did have to work with its allies. And it had some, it had some difficult allies. Tim Sale's written a great history of NATO called Enduring Alliance. And, you know, I was fascinated when I read the sections on, you know, French President Charles de Gaulle. I mean, his, I mean, was just exasperating for American presidents. I mean, a lot of the sort of the ways in which de Gaulle was threatening to walk out, you know, sort of echoed the way Donald Trump would argue about threatening to walk out.
15:52
But of course, it's a big deal for the United States to walk away from NATO. France walked away from the Integrated Military Command and, you know, it's France, not the United States. So it wasn't the end of the alliance. And, you know, of course, it's since come back in recent years. But you know, there certainly, you know, there were some interesting personalities and there were some some issues that had to be managed during the course of the of NATO's existence. And, you know, the old joke is sort of that NATO's always in crisis. Every time we talk about NATO in crisis, it's like, yeah, you know, we've seen this movie before because there's always some issue that's dividing the allies.
16:39
Right. And yet they managed to stay together. That's a that's a perfect segue to to to Josh and your work on NATO expansion. And of course, Jim's written about this as well. So we'll get both of you in on this. What happened at the end of the Cold War, if ostensibly the most obvious reason for NATO to exist was the Soviet threat when the Soviet Union no longer existed after December 25th, 1991. Why did NATO not only continue to exist, but actually expand into places like Poland and the Czech Republic, places that had been part of the Warsaw Pact that Jim just just discussed? Josh, give us give us your understanding of expansion.
17:22
Sure, I'm happy to.
17:23
Well, so first of all, we have to remember that at the end of the Cold War, there were any number of plans and a number of calls to wrap up both of the Cold War alliances. The Warsaw Pact obviously fell apart and there were calls in some quarters for NATO to close up shop and to be replaced with either a new European security organization to anchor European security on the European Union, then the European community, but slowly coming together. The Conference on Security Cooperation in Europe. So there were all these calls to abandon ship or change course.
17:55
But when the Cold War ended and the Cold War ended, above all, with Germany's unification with East Germany melding into West Germany, the Lord Ismay statement of keeping the Germans and the Soviets out, you know, the Soviets were gone, but keeping the Germans in check remained a real concern, number one. And German leader Helmut Kohl at the time was very much aware of European concerns with newfound German power. And so there was a lingering desire to keep the Americans engaged in Europe, keep NATO alive.
18:28
And at the same time, the states that were formerly in the Warsaw Pact, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, so on and so forth, you know, they've just lived on the communist jackboot for 45 years. They're deeply concerned with the Soviet Union coming back. And it's not irrational at the time, right? Russia is going through any number of internal turmoils in 1993, of course, Boris Yeltsin, then Russian president, fires on the parliament. This is not a stable situation if you're living in Eastern Europe.
18:59
So even as NATO is staying alive in Western Europe, there's a real desire on the parts of these former Warsaw Pact states to get the security benefits that come with an alliance with the United States. So that generates to have a perfect storm of external conditions that mobilize the United States to begin looking east. And at the same time, as Jim's written quite elegantly, President Clinton, starting office in 1993, is really invested in keeping the Americans, keeping the United States involved and in some ways in charge of European security affairs. So pulling NATO east, taking NATO east also satisfies American strategic concerns.
19:41
Jim, you have written what I still think is the best book on this, not whether, but when. Why was Bill Clinton so committed or why did he become so committed to NATO expansion?
19:53
Well, I think there were both policy and political reasons for him. And I think it's just really important to remember that both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were very concerned about isolationist sentiment in the United States, very concerned that the American public would not support international engagement. With respect to Europe in particular, the lesson of the 20th century was that they had internalized was when the United States leaves, as it did after 1919, bad things result. You know, staying after 1945 was good for Western Europe.
20:30
The fact that war had broken out in Yugoslavia in 1991 led people to believe that that kind of ethnic conflict could break out all over Eastern Europe. People talked about ancient hatreds. People didn't know that much about Eastern Europe and there was fear that there would just be conflict breaking out all over. So there was a there was a policy reason for trying to figure out how to ensure security and stability.
21:09
But then there was also political calculation was very important in the 1992 campaign for Tony Lake, who was advising Bill Clinton on foreign policy, that Democrats try to woo back the neoconservative elites who had left for the Republican Party in 1980 and supported Ronald Reagan and also voters of Central and Eastern European descent, sort of Reagan Democrats, particularly Polish-Americans, you know, sort of the idea that the Democrats had lost these voters in the 1980s in the two Reagan election victories and then the Bush 88 victory. And George H.W. Bush was seen as slow to recognize the change that was taking place across the communist world. And and Tony Lake thought that using sort of democracy promotion was a way to woo these neoconservatives and also voters of Central and Eastern European descent back to the Democratic Party.
22:11
And Clinton, the Clinton team felt they did that successfully in 92 and they were going to keep those supporters in 1996. And it's no accident then when Bill Clinton makes his big announcement about NATO enlargement in October 1996, it's no accident that he goes to Hamtramck, Michigan, to speak before a largely Polish-American audience. You know, this this this this this constituency in the Midwest and Northeast was very important to the Clinton Democrats.
22:45
And your compelling account, Jim, belies the notion that domestic politics are separate from foreign policy. Clearly, they're integrated even in something that is sometimes a more archaic issue like foreign alliances, right?
23:00
Yeah, and I just think in this case, you just had, you know, again, especially for somebody like Tony Lake, the sort of the political needs and the policy desires just meshed together so well. You know, in political science, we would talk about over to overdetermination of the outcome. I mean, I think, you know, there were just a lot of factors that went into this. And and it also was a reason why you could get both Democratic and Republican support. You had people who wanted NATO enlargement because it would help promote democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. And you had others, particularly Republicans, who looked at NATO enlargement as a way to to ensure that Central and Eastern Europe was protected against Russia in the future. And and so you had lots of people supporting this for for a number of different reasons.
23:51
Josh, you've written quite a bit about how the story that Jim is telling ran against, as you show, commitments the United States had made or at least commitments the Soviet Union and the Russian leadership believed the United States had made not to expand NATO. Tell us about that.
24:11
Sure. So a little bit before the period Jim just described, this is early 1990, the heyday of the politics behind German unification, reunification. There is a question over what it would take to get the Soviets to consent to allowing East Germany, then a Soviet client state, to reunify with West Germany, right? And the Americans were really eager to do this rapidly and to do this without causing a crisis in European security affairs.
24:42
So in February 1990, then Secretary of State Jim Baker, along with some other officials, including then Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates, flew to Moscow for meetings with the Soviet leadership. And in the course of these conversations, Baker pledges that if the Soviets consent to German reunification, that there would be no expansion of NATO's presence one further inch to the east. And this sort of idea that NATO expansion would be kept in check is repeated throughout the spring and summer of 1990 in various ways, culminating in the formal reunification of Germany in October of 1990.
25:27
Now, we also know from archival releases that even as this deal was coming together, as these promises were being made, and I should add, this was never codified, right? These are diplomatic assurances of the kind that leaders give to one another very often. But even as these assurances are being offered, behind the scenes, the American other policymakers are realizing, hey, look, this is an opportunity to kind of consolidate or begin expanding American influence in Europe. And maybe we don't want to expand NATO right now, but we don't want to foreclose the option. Maybe we even want to think through the conditions under which we'll expand NATO going forward, despite what we told the Soviets. And that conversation really takes off in 1990, 1991, 1992, even before Clinton comes to office.
26:14
So to go to the period that Jim was mentioning, by the time Clinton gets into office, there's already been a lot of discussion and a lot of thinking behind the terms and conditions as to when the U.S. would consent or allow or push for NATO expansion. I've always been struck by then State Department Counselor Robert Zoellick's statement that had Bush been reelected for a second term, he was convinced that Baker and Bush would have pursued NATO expansion, just as Clinton did.
26:44
So is Vladimir Putin, though, correct when he says this was a double cross by the United States, Josh?
26:51
You know, Putin has his own narrative on this one. I would just say that when it comes to world politics, and Jim and I have discussed this at length in our own studies of this topic, you know, in international politics, state policy is often determined by external factors, right? By balance of power, realpolitik, strategic concerns.
27:10
And in 1990, when the U.S. was seeking to unify Germany, it made lots of sense for the U.S. to promise the Soviet Union not to expand NATO. But then once the Soviet Union declined further and the Soviet Union fell apart, there's really nothing to keep the United States in check. Russia certainly wasn't the Soviet Union. So whereas Putin calls it a double cross, as if it's some nefarious long term plan, I would simply say this is world politics. Deals change all the time. It doesn't mean we should accept the outcome. It doesn't mean we should support the American policy in this position. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have anticipated some blowback. But I think it's a little harsh to call it a double cross.
27:49
And Jim, there were efforts that again, you've written about by the United States to to bring this Russia in somehow, right? Not necessarily as a member of NATO, but to make this palatable to them. And of course, that carried forward well beyond the period of expansion. What what was accomplished, if anything, by those efforts, the partnership for peace and things of that sort?
28:10
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's it's a it's a really fascinating thing. I've been fascinated and did a piece in the Journal of Cold War Studies in 2020 because I was just interested in this idea that, I mean, Bill Clinton was so eager to develop a partnership with Russia, was so eager to develop a partnership with Boris Yeltsin, saw Russia as a partner, as being really important for his own for his own agenda, that, you know, he he believed that if if Russia was no longer an enemy, that that would free up defense dollars to be used for his domestic his domestic agenda.
28:49
And so, you know, the obvious question is, well, how is it the person who's so responsible for pushing NATO enlargement is also a person who wanted a great relationship with Boris Yeltsin and wanted the US to have a new relationship with Russia? And I you know, my conclusion was he convinced himself he could do both and that I think that he convinced himself it was largely a political issue, that if he could just keep the process going, but not in a concrete way until after Yeltsin was reelected in in July of 1996, but then make it more concrete before his own reelection in November of 1996, that that that would really solve a lot of the problems.
29:33
I also think from a US standpoint, you know, I mean, Josh mentions the specifics about what was said in 1990, and he's done more than anybody else to illuminate sort of those conversations and what they mean. There's a broader assurance that the United States is giving to the Soviet Union and then the Russians, which is basically we won't take advantage of your retreat from Europe to undermine your security. And the US officials throughout this period, they believe they stuck to that. Their argument would be NATO became more of a political institution. They reduced weapons in Europe through the CFE Treaty. The US pulled troops out of Germany. And that they were doing all these things and then invited Russia to sign the NATO-Russia Founding Act to try to create a NATO-Russia relationship. So, you know, from a US standpoint, the view is, look, you know, we said we wouldn't undermine your security and nothing we did has undermined your security.
30:33
Meanwhile, the Russians are looking at NATO moving closer and closer, taking up all these Warsaw Pact states in 2004. They take the three Baltic countries in 2008, say that Ukraine and Georgia are going to become members of NATO. You know, from a Russian standpoint, it looks very different than it does from Washington. And I just think those perspectives really can't be bridged.
30:59
And, Jim, is that...
31:00
Jeremi, can I jump in for...
31:01
Please, please Josh.
31:02
Just half a second, because I think Jim gets at a really important point, and I'm glad he made it, because there's a parallel, which he's alluding to, between how Clinton viewed the world and how the broader US foreign policy establishment, the foreign policy makers of the time viewed the world. You know, Jim described Clinton not wanting to choose between expanding NATO and antagonizing the Russians and convinced himself you could do both. In a similar way, what Jim's getting at is that American decision makers in the 1990s and early aughts convinced themselves that they could negotiate what Russia saw as its own interest. They didn't have to choose between what the US saw as in America's interest and what we could convince the Russians as to their interests. And, you know, that's a fraught situation for generating the types of perspective differences that Jim's alluding to.
31:50
Right, right. And it's a common issue in international politics, as the dog is indicating as well, right, that different perspectives are brought. Jim, is this difference of viewpoints and interpretation what we need when we try to understand what happened in Ukraine that ended up, of course, with Russia invading and taking control of Crimea after Ukraine sought to become part of NATO? Is that part of the story?
32:18
Well, I think it's part of the story, but, you know, there's no excuse for the fact that, you know, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, annexed part of its territories, fostering civil war in the Donbass and, you know, has refused to really pursue a negotiated solution to that conflict. And, you know, you can understand Russian fears about Western intrusions, but I don't think that, you know, excuses invading another country. But there's no question. I mean, I think this is one of the interesting features of this.
33:00
Bill Burns, who's now the CIA director, was ambassador in Moscow in 2007, 2008. His book, The Back Channel, is an amazing book. He has posted on the Carnegie Endowment website, the Back Channel book website, declassified documents, documents he got declassified, including cables that he sent home, you know, in the run-up to the 2008 Bucharest summit, and he, NATO summit, and he writes that, you know, Ukraine and Georgian membership in NATO, this was a red line for people in Moscow. And he says, this isn't just hardliners or Putin, this is people across the political spectrum just feel that this would be very damaging to Russian interests. And, you know, the Russians see themselves as having a privileged sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. They think they should be able to control the affairs there. They don't want to see these countries, these other countries in Western institutions. They don't really want to even see them as successful democracies.
34:13
You know, the United States views these countries as independent countries that, you know, if they want to pursue democracy, if they want to pursue Western orientation, if they want to draw closer to Western institutions, that's their prerogative and they should be able to do it.
34:28
So, again, you know, you have fundamentally different perspectives. And, of course, Russia is closer and Russia's interests are, you know, much deeper. And, you know, they've been able to carve out this part of Ukraine to control. But at the same time, they've also antagonized the population of Ukraine, which is now more supportive of NATO and large, of being part of NATO than they've ever been.
34:58
So, Josh, how does this lead into the Trump administration's policy towards NATO? Where did NATO find itself in 2017 under Trump administration?
35:09
Right. Well, it's a really good question. I think we need to remember that throughout the 1990s and 2000s, NATO really expanded quite dramatically. By the time Trump came into office, actually shortly after Trump came into office, NATO took in its 30th member. Right? So this is now a very large multilateral organization. At the same time, the alliance has kind of taken on any number of tasks, right?
35:35
This long-term fear of Russia, at least in the 2010s, was back because of Russian machinations in the Ukraine. You know, Germany was largely contained. No one was really deeply worried about Germany at this point in time. But the alliance has been operating in out of areas missions, conducting operations over Libya, intervening in Bosnia in the 1990s, of course, has the Afghanistan mission.
36:00
And there's a concern, which well precedes Mr. Trump, that despite taking on all these new tasks, and despite being the focal point of European security affairs, that the European members of the alliance and Canada have really not been pulling their weight in terms of building military forces that can do the hard security tasks that remain at the core of the alliance's different operations.
36:25
But this was a theme in President Obama's administration, with then Secretary of Defense Bob Gates using his last speech as Secretary of Defense, to really criticize the NATO allies.
36:36
But of course, Mr. Trump comes into office and makes this a real focal point of his foreign policy, daring, you know, saying that if the allies don't step up, the US may go home. Now, this is actually fairly ham-handed, because even as he's saying this, the US is increasing funding for different NATO initiatives at least early on. And so it becomes a very incoherent message. But Mr. Trump ends up both exacerbating tensions in the alliance, because he's queuing to things the Europeans don't want to hear, no one wants to be told, spend more or else. At the same time, he's sending a very different message of, but you know what, the US is still sticking around because we like being in charge, is essentially Mr. Trump's message.
37:17
So Trump is really a force for chaos inside of NATO at this point in time, even as he's oscillating rapidly on the Russia issue, oscillating rapidly on whether the US is leaving Afghanistan. And so the whole thing is just a mess. And historians of the future will have a field day trying to make sense of whether there was any consistency in Mr. Trump's NATO policy.
37:39
We will certainly have our work cut out for us, whether it'll be a field day or not, I don't know. But we'll definitely have our work cut out for us, understanding Trump. Jim, that brings us up to the President right into Afghanistan. What has Afghanistan done to the NATO alliance?
37:56
Well, I think first we should just note the, you know, remarkable nature of the mission in Afghanistan. You know, after September 11th and the attacks from Al-Qaeda that were formulated from the territory of Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, you know, the United States made the decision that if the Taliban wouldn't offer up Al-Qaeda to the United States, that we would go to war. And the decision was made not to include, not to do this as a NATO mission, as had been done in 1999 in Kosovo. And in fact, in part, because there was a belief that the Kosovo mission showed, you know, the United States had to go through all its partners for, you know, getting targets approved and so on. And the Bush administration didn't want to be hamstrung by that.
38:52
And then the Bush administration, you know, even though the allies had invoked article five and stood with the United States in the aftermath of September 11th, but then the Bush administration goes and invades Iraq in 2003 and gets bogged down in Iraq. And then, oh my gosh, it needs Europe. And it's asks NATO in fact, to come and set up an international security assistance force and do reconstruction and stabilization in Kabul. And so you then have this NATO mission and NATO countries and non-NATO countries, lots of partners. And, you know, it's a pretty extraordinary effort by NATO and non-NATO partners to try to, you know, establish some good governance and security in Afghanistan. And so the NATO allies become quite invested in it.
39:45
You know, a lot of times they were made fun of for the caveats that they had on the kind of military operations they would engage in, but they were quite committed to it. And, you know, by this past spring, I mean, they had more troops in Afghanistan than the United States did. And so they were really, they knew that Joe Biden was committed. I mean, Donald Trump had signed a peace deal with the Taliban. They knew Biden was committed to getting out. Biden had wanted the United States to leave in 2009 when he was vice president and he lost that argument. So it was pretty clear he was going to do this. But the way it was done, you know, it was just so troubling. And, you know, allies felt that they weren't consulted and there'd been a lot of pushback on that. People have said, oh, no, they were. And Secretary General was, you know, was consulted and brought allies together for this. But, you know, I think this was done in a way that that the allies really did resent. There wasn't much that they could do about it. I don't know if it'll have any long lasting effects.
40:51
I mean, partly it depends on how the Biden administration looks at its European allies and how it thinks about them. And I think the big question there is, does it think about them as allies to work together to solve problems of a general nature, including specific problems related to that region? Or does it view every ally in terms of what it can do for the United States and its strategic competition with China?
41:18
And I think that's the danger for the alliance, is that the United States is so focused on the Indo-Pacific and China, the people, you know, that are really dominant in the administration are those who are driving the policy toward the Indo-Pacific. And the allies have sort of become an afterthought. And I think that could really come back to haunt the United States. And I think that could really come back to haunt the United States.
41:41
Well, and that really very, very thoughtfully, Jim, takes us into where we always like to close, which is bringing all this history that you and Josh have shared with us to the present and thinking through not how we predict the future, but how we think about possible pathways for the future. Josh, let me turn to you first. You know, what do you think from this history that you know so well, and have shared a bit of with us? What do you think are some lessons going forward? How should we think about the transatlantic alliance going forward? What should it look like? And what are the possibilities as you see them?
42:16
Sure. So I'll echo Jim's point, first of all, just to say, look, the US attention has and will continue to shift, barring anything unforeseen, towards the Indo-Pacific region. So Europe in general is going to do what Asia was during the Cold War, the secondary importance later, but not the focal point of American concern. So NATO in that context, is likely to lose important US time and attention is not going to be as devoted to it. And so I expect NATO to hang together in some way.
43:24
I can tell a story that the EU really steps up and the European allies really step up and bear more of the weight as the US withdraws or turns elsewhere in the world. I could also tell a story that says NATO without the active managerial role of the United States begins to fray at the seams. I likely suspect it's really going to be more of a slow kind of attrition fraying at the margins. But despite that somewhat negative or cynical answer, I think it's also important to step back for a second, right?
43:52
And this is what I always tell myself whenever I come to my net judgment of what the last 75 years in Europe have been. If you had said to an American policymaker in 1949, hey, 75 years from now, you're going to have a Europe that is mostly democratic, where there are no real great power threats, where nuclear weapons have not proliferated everywhere, and most of the countries have settled their outstanding territorial and economic disputes, they would have taken that and run with it. That's a massive slam dunk. So even if NATO falls apart tomorrow, which I don't think it will, the situation in Europe, except for the border regions really, it is unprecedentedly good from the perspective of many European actors and certainly from the United States' perspective.
44:40
That's really helpful, Josh. Jim, to come to you, it seems to me that it's a question of path dependence, right? NATO has been part of this very successful set of developments that Josh describes. But what do we know about the role it should play going forward?
44:55
Well, it's interesting, you know, when Josh mentions sort of, if you had told US officials in 1949, here's what 2021 would look like, you know, how happy they would have been to hear it. And I think they also would have asked the follow up, which was, so that means the United States didn't have to stay in Europe anymore, right?
45:15
Right, right.
45:16
I mean, they would have expected that we would have left.
45:18
That's right.
45:19
So, you know, but there we are. And I think that it's just, what's so fascinating, we started with the focal point of Europe and the Soviet Union, how NATO was formed, what the thinking was at the end of the Cold War. In that period, as Josh said, Europe and Russia were the focal point of US foreign policy. That's what we thought about the most. And that's no longer true.
45:49
We're thinking about Europe and Russia today, just as part of our policy toward China. We want Russia, Biden wants stable and predictable with Russia, so that he can focus on China. He's looking at Europe, what can you do for me on China? And I just, you know, NATO is now talking more about China, but it's not really a great fit for the alliance. And I think that, you know, the more that China becomes the focus, the more clear it's going to be that that's not really the, you know, a purpose for NATO. And, you know, we'll certainly see interactions with allies.
46:31
We saw the US and UK working with Australia on the submarine deal, of course, to the detriment of France's own pursuit of a deal with Australia. So I think we may well see more of those types of things going forward. But, you know, there's still a big institution there and there are a lot of people with a lot at stake in NATO. So like Josh, I think it'll be around for a while.
46:59
So Zachary, I want to come back to you at the end here, because you got us started with your wonderful poem. How do you and your generation of younger people who think about international affairs, think about climate change and topics like that, that have not been traditionally topics for NATO, how do you see an alliance like that fitting into those issues, if at all?
47:22
Well, I think at the very least, this history of NATO and maybe the recent events that have made the importance of NATO to American foreign policy more clear, show us at the very least, that there is no option to just bury our heads in the sand, that the that American economy, the American society is so deeply embedded in the world, that we have to interact with the world and we have to have allies. And I think that's so important, because alliances and actually like sticking with deals isn't very exciting, but it's so deeply important.
47:55
Very well said. And it's been a theme for our podcast week after week, right, that democracy implies a certain amount of multilateralism.
48:03
Exactly.
48:04
And NATO has been fundamental to American international multilateralism, as Josh and Jim have made so clear today. And it certainly in some form will probably be part of that future, but it will be in a different form. What I hear Jim and Josh saying is that NATO will continue to exist, but it won't look the same. Institutions have a history as well. They have an arc of change. And I think your generation, Zachary, will play a major role in reforming NATO as we go forward and building other alliances as well.
48:33
Jim and Josh, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. You've given us a bookshelf worth of history in about 40 minutes, which is really extraordinary. So thank you so much.
48:45
Thanks for having me.
48:45
Thanks for having us.
48:47
And Zachary, thank you for your poem.
48:49
Thanks, Zachary. That was amazing.
48:52
It was great.
48:53
And thank you most of all, or equally as much, thank you to our audience for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.
18:51:00
But more and more, the US's own attention is going to shift elsewhere, which in turn is going to create an opening for voices in Europe, arguing for a greater European pillar within NATO, or simply some kind of EU-based security apparatus to kind of take the agenda and run with it. We've already seen hints of this with President Macron France's calls for a greater European effort. So we're going to see those exercises really step up. Where that goes, I don't really know.
Episode 169: Vietnam War Legacies
00:25
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss the Vietnam War and its legacies, its continuing legacies in American society, in global policy, and particularly in light of a recent set of conflicts that produced similarly controversial outcomes for American society and global policy, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are very fortunate to be joined by a friend, colleague, distinguished author, and distinguished scholar, Mark Lawrence.
01:01
Mark is the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum here in Austin, Texas, which is the best presidential library, and I say that without any bias at all. Mark is also a professor in the UT Department of History, and he has taught courses on American and international history and various other topics. He's written three fantastic books.
01:25
His first book, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. His second book is a wonderful narrative history of the Vietnam War as a whole, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and it's the only history of the Vietnam War I've seen that is truly concise. It's very hard to write a concise history of the Vietnam War.
01:46
And Mark's most recent book, the book that has just come out that we're going to talk about today, is on the Vietnam War and its legacies. It's called The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Mark, congratulations on your book, and thanks for joining us.
02:02
Thanks so much, Jeremi. It's wonderful to be here. Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem.
02:04
Before we turn to our discussion with Mark, of course, we have Zachary's scene-setting poem. What is your poem titled today, Zachary?
02:13
It is Hard to Build Utopias.
02:16
Let's hear it.
02:18
It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy. It is hard to build utopias when you burn their children in the jungle, and your carpet bombings make whole nations synonymous with tragedy, and you shoot your own children smack dab in the middle of their righteousness. It is hard to build utopias when they are already covered in your own rusty tanks and pierced by your own bullets, when they have already realized they don't need to be saved by you, when your own children are blowing up buildings just so you'd turn around and care a little.
03:03
It is hard to build utopia, let alone democracy, let alone peace.
03:09
Very moving, Zachary. What is your poem about?
03:11
My poem is really about the very naive American attitude that we can go anywhere and build the greatest societies out of places that we've already destroyed, and we've already meddled in for long periods of time, and places where things are much more complex than peace and war and democracy and tyranny.
03:29
That's a perfect gateway into our discussion with Mark Lawrence. Mark, these are issues you've grappled with in your scholarship for decades.
03:39
I have, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to top Zachary's poem. Zachary, that was awesome. Thank you. I think our session is over
03:49
It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?
04:24
Well, I think the United States was in many places around the world in the 1960s, trying to demonstrate the applicability of its own economic and political and social systems as a way of waging the Cold War and sort of demonstrating to people all over the world that the United States had the answers when it came to human progress and development and effective governance.
04:53
This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.
05:19
And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?
05:46
Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.
06:57
And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.
07:22
But there are a lot of people who, especially nowadays, who would argue that American intervention abroad was, if not purely self-interested, was motivated mainly by self-interest. Is that accurate?
07:35
Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.
08:37
And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?
09:29
I think that is a fair reading. I tried to pick case studies, and you've listed them, Jeremi, thank you, that would illustrate a range of patterns in American behavior across the 1960s. Two of them, Brazil and Indonesia, are very similar in demonstrating the ways in which Americans supported right-wing coups that basically eliminated very uncertain political situations in very important countries in favor of regimes, military regimes, that would clearly serve American interests much more directly and be reliable partners of the United States.
10:04
But in Iran, I think you see a similar pattern. There isn't a change in regime, but the United States becomes much more supportive and much less critical of the Shah, a deeply authoritarian figure over that time. And then I also threw in a couple of case studies that illustrate how the United States behaved in places where there was no reliable authoritarian alternative. So I look at India, where Americans had great hopes for a new kind of partnership with a regime that was hardly a candidate for a close alliance with the United States in the early 1960s. And I try to show how the United States sort of soured on that whole idea of building connections to India. And basically by the end of the decade was very much at arm's length with the Indian government and largely given up on its ambitions there.
10:56
And in Southern Africa, I try to show how in the early 1960s, Americans believed that they could find ways to support racial justice in this region that was plagued by the vestiges of colonialism and white settler rule in several places, largely abandoned those hopes and really settle for a deeply problematic status quo that at least had the advantage of being stable in the short term and therefore not a situation that would require that the United States expand vast resources or political capital on very, very difficult problems.
11:36
And Mark, why this arc? Why in each case does it seem not only that the United States is less ambitious as you put it so well in your title, but also that the United States becomes, I don't know if this is fair, but it seems to me more cynical in its policies.
11:53
Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.
12:47
Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.
13:15
So if there were reliable alternatives to be had out there in the Third World, LBJ was increasingly likely to seize on those and privilege stability above change across the board, I think you could say, by the end of the decade.
13:28
And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?
13:57
I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam that he sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.
14:45
So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?
15:18
Well, because I think that it came to dominate so thoroughly the American home fronts by 1967-1968. LBJ was nothing if not a political creature who was deeply sensitive to what was going on politically across American society, deeply sensitive to what was being said about him and his leadership. And so over time, I think he came to see Vietnam as the single major issue that confronted his administration.
15:51
And for this reason was prone to seeing every other issue through that prism. And I think you see it not only in connection with foreign policy issues, where you might be more likely to see connections among different foreign policy questions. You also see it in the domestic arena, where LBJ's attitudes toward his advisors, toward members of Congress, were deeply informed by his perception of where they stood on Vietnam and how they were likely to support him or not. It's, I think, one of the tragedies of the Johnson presidency that Vietnam becomes so all-consuming for him that every other issue becomes in some ways subordinate to it.
16:34
Right. You and I have talked about this before. I mean, even his views of students in the United States become defined by where they stand on the Vietnam War, which is extraordinary if you think about that. Zachary.
16:48
Yeah. So you very clearly and convincingly laid out this idea of the end of ambition and the limits that it places on foreign policy decisions. But how do you square that with the rise in global connections and global awareness among young people and others during this period?
17:07
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.
17:53
He was aware that activism and unrest was increasingly a global phenomenon. And I think for this reason, was drawn to the idea that where stability seemed to be possible, where he could find partners who would cooperate with him and clamp down on at least some of this unrest, he was ready to seize those opportunities. So, you know, I bite off a piece of that larger story by looking at American relationships with countries in the third world.
18:29
But, you know, Jeremi, I think your book Power and Protest gets at another dimension of this broad phenomenon, the quest for stability and security and predictability in an increasingly uncertain world where governmental authorities are losing their ability to control. You know, everything that's happening around the world is in some ways a big story of the 1960s.
18:49
Yeah, I thought, Mark, your book did really a wonderful job of taking that story that some of us have focused on and really connecting it to the story of what was called the third world and how this impacted not simply detente policy, a search for stability between the US and the Soviet Union and a search for law and order at home. Lyndon Johnson's the first to really use that phrase, law and order. But as you show in this book, as I think no one has before, how this really comes to define, again, American policy in Brazil and Indonesia, which to me was, again, startling. I had seen hints of this, but my gosh, the depth of it, I think we have not appreciated until reading your book.
19:34
I wonder, Mark, what you think about the legacies. I guess I'm asking you in this question sort of for your extended conclusion. You have an excellent conclusion to the book, but how would you extend it on for where this takes us, not just in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in the last decades of the Cold War?
19:54
I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1970s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early 60s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.
20:32
What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.
21:14
So I think what I would try to emphasize by way of the larger implications of the book is that this search for stability, which made a lot of sense under a very particular set of circumstances, gives rise to precisely the opposite as time passes and tends to confront the United States with a number of really pressing challenges. And I don't push this too far in the book, but I think it's not too much of a stretch to connect some of this instability to trends that continue to play out in the 21st century.
21:44
Southern Africa, Southern Asia, right? Southwest Asia, at least, remain areas of real contention. And they remain areas of contention for a whole lot of reasons. But I think that the history of the 1960s is not unimportant in understanding why it is that those areas remain sources of concern many years after the period that I write about.
22:12
Sure. And the Middle East, you talk about and write about Iran, and that certainly would be a major element of what you're talking about here. Mark, how then should we explain, taking in all that you've shared with us in elucidating these changes in American policy and the implications for American democracy and for international affairs, how then do we situate that in relationship to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have an eerie echo of the period you're writing about?
22:45
You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.
23:28
But I think it was really the Iraq War, and particularly the difficulties that the United States ran into there between, say, 2004 and 2007 or so, that brought Vietnam very much back to the forefront, at least in connection with debates over foreign policy. And I think around the same time as political polarization really became that much more extremein the United States, you could also see that Vietnam continued to operate at a very deep level in American society as a touchstone for deep-seated social and cultural debates over some pretty profound issues that tend to divide Americans over questions like their Americans' relationship to their government, the reasonable obligations that government can impose on citizens, the duties of citizens to protest and object to the behavior of theirgovernment, and so forth. A lot of those questions, I think, that Vietnam really put on the table remain very much part of American political life and unfortunately tend to divide Americans very deeply to this day.
24:45
I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?
25:32
Well, that lesson, I think one has to acknowledge cuts against some pretty deep-seated impulses that run through American history and American political culture, even in the post-Vietnam period. I think going a very long way back in American history, you can see a strong impulse to bring uplift and progress and reform to the wider world, to impose the American model on the rest of the world, to assume that the American model is applicable indeed to the rest of the world. So Vietnam, I would argue, and certainly many other Americans would argue, does teach the lesson of humility, of the fact that there are limits on what the United States can achieve in the world. But I think that one of the things that stands out pretty clearly in the history of American foreign relations in the last years, since the end of the Vietnam War, is that that lesson was only partially learned, only really learned by some Americans. And of course, there's a whole other set of lessons that were learned by people with a different set of preferences when it comes to American foreign policy.
26:47
There is an alternative set of lessons that would emphasize that really the key point about Vietnam is that you must not give up too early on American commitments overseas, that the United States really does have the wherewithal to achieve its objectives in the wider world. It's just that we don't sometimes have the staying power to see it through. I think there've been fascinating debates in connection with Iraq and to some extent in connection with Afghanistan that have really revealed the competing ways in which Americans of different political persuasions draw lessons from the war.
27:21
Mark, we always like to close with a focus on how history can provide us some optimistic, positive steps forward. And that's an article of faith for our podcast. As you know, it's an article of faith for me.
27:37
I have to believe this. And your book is so rich in its recounting of this period. What are the lessons that you hope, especially in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq now, what are the lessons you hope that readers take as they think about American foreign policy and American democracy going forward?
27:59
Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.
28:46
But here's the other lesson that I think comes, that's a little more original, I suppose, and comes more directly to my book. And maybe there's something a little bit optimistic here. I think that my book shows the risks, the very pragmatic risks, the very practical risks that flow from pumping too much attention and resources into one part of the world. It shows the destructive impacts that can occur in connection with American foreign policy globally if Americans lose the ability to prioritize, to decide what's really important and how much resources any particular problem is worth as Americans confront it.
29:35
And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.
30:20
I think that's wonderful, Mark. Another way I think of thinking about that and, and you've, you've really provided such a strong foundation for this is to recognize that trying to win unwinnable wars is not what we should be doing. That there are many other opportunities for the use of America's vast resources, right.
30:38
That beautifully said exactly Jeremi. And you, you phrased it in even more optimistic way. And I really appreciate that.
30:45
I had to find some optimism, Zachary, as, as we close. Uh, I know you and your friends have been talking a lot about what's happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously the Vietnam. Do you see lessons for your generation in this story?
31:07
I certainly do. I think one of the lessons is that these issues are always complex and never just black and white, never easy or impossible. And I think part of the problem, and, I think particularly among young people is that foreign policy issues can seem so black and white and, and, and, and, and so easy, but they're so complex. And, and part of the problem is that. Our political conversations, aren't mature enough, uh, in this country to really be able to, to address those issues appropriately.
31:41
I think there's a lot to that. And there's a lot between cynicism and the utopia. You talked about it in your poem, right? I think, I think Mark's book shows that there actually are. There's a lot that can be done in between maybe that's, what's abandoned because of the obsession with Vietnam. Mark, this has been a really insightful conversation. I encourage everyone to go out and read and read your book and buy it and give it away as gifts as well. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam era. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.
32:16
Thank you so much, Jeremi. And thank you, Zachary.
32:19
Zachary, Zachary. Thank you for your poem and thank you. Most of all, to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.
Episode 186: NATO
00:24
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to focus on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he most successful alliance in modern history, probably the most successful alliance in most of human history. And that's a big thing to say, but probably true. Successful in the sense that it has, for more than half a century, brought together countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to collectively act for their defense as a group and it has generally worked to the defense of its members. That does not mean there have not been crises and problems. But NATO has had remarkable resilience. And lest one thinks that NATO is archaic, it is now at the center of debates and concerns about the future of security in Europe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has raised concerns about further Russian aggression into territories that are part of NATO. It's also raised questions as to whether NATO should expand further east to countries like Ukraine and provide them with the protection that they've long wanted.
01:27
We are fortunate today to be joined by someone who I think knows more about NATO now than almost anyone else. He certainly knows more than me, which is the best thing a graduate advisor can say about one of his graduate students. This is Bryan Frizzelle, who is both a distinguished military officer and a distinguished scholar. Bryan is a colonel in the U.S. Army with 20 years of active duty service. He's commanded at every level, from platoon through battalion. And he served three combat tours in Iraq, which is extraordinary. From 2014 to 2016, Bryan served as a squadron and regimental operations officer for the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany, participating in and planning NATO exercises in 12 East European countries as NATO adapted to Russia's annexation of Crimea and various Russian attacks in the Donbas region. So Bryan has extensive experience in NATO and extensive experience dealing with Russian aggression. Bryan holds a bachelor's of science degree in international strategic history from West Point, the U.S. Military Academy, a master's in policy management from Georgetown, and he's finishing his Ph.D. at the LBJ School of Public Affairs here at UT. And Bryan's Ph.D. is on the history of NATO and how NATO has dealt with internal crises and differences among its members and how it has been able to produce and encourage cooperation among its members despite these crises. Bryan, thank you for joining us. You're the right man for this moment, I think.
03:03
"Ode to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. " You worship your own sanity. You hold yourself so righteous. You draw the borders with a pen. Here the free world. Here the fight is. You leave us to the enemy for lacking the good sense. To have chosen the path of righteousness before Khrushchev built his fence. And yet we hold you dear. You hold us, too, with warmth. We cannot help but wonder at your missiles and your core. I would not trade your wide embrace even for a thousand Swedens. But this could be you that stands right now upon the cold street bleeding. And please remember, I know you do at night, that just because it's not your mother, not your brother, doesn't mean it's not your fight. You worship your own sanity. It's true. It is quite clear today. You have not forgotten the fire-bombing night, the storming beaches day. You have not forgotten the feeling at the crosshairs of their nukes. You do not feel any joy when it's the other man who pukes. But please, they are bombing my apartment block. Please, they are storming my beaches in the snow. The banks of my great rivers ache at every blow. But please, they took my son, they took my daughter. And please, sir, if it's not a bother, I stand in front of tanks in the center of my cities while you sit and sway to your peacetime ditties. You worship your own sanity. The sky shall not fall. Pray, you have not forgotten how the bombs dropped, how you sank their greatest fleets. Sir, today these are my countrymen, today those are my streets.
03:04
Hey, Dr. Suri and Zachary, thanks so much for having me on. It's an absolute honor. I'm super excited to talk about topics that I'm just so passionate about. I do want to open, though, with a quick disclaimer that any views expressed here on this podcast are my own and do not represent Department of the Army or Department of Defense and certainly not NATO policy, but I'm excited to have this conversation.
03:31
We're excited to have you on, Bryan, and thanks for taking the time. We know how busy you are with both your military and your scholarly duties and your family duties right now. So we feel fortunate to have you on. Before we go to our conversation with Bryan, we, of course, have Mr. Zachary Suri's scene-setting poem. What is your poem titled today, Zachary? ("Ode to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.") An ode to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We're moving into new territory here. I love it. Let's hear it.
05:53
I love it, Zachary, and I love the mix of very serious analysis and also some humor. What is your poem about?
06:00
My poem is really about trying to understand NATO's role in global affairs from the perspective of those countries like Ukraine that have been left out to their great detriment from the NATO alliance in recent years and trying to come to terms with the fact that while NATO promises in many ways peace and freedom, it also restricts and leaves out so many others.
06:24
Sure, sure. And there are those who think NATO has expanded too far. And then there are those, you're implying this, who think NATO has not expanded far enough. (Right.) So, Bryan, I think that's a perfect place to start. Why does NATO look the way it does? Why are countries like Poland a part of NATO? It's obviously a late entrant into NATO. Why are countries like that a part of NATO and not countries like Ukraine? How did NATO come into being?
06:51
Sure. So, first of all, I just want to say I love listening to this podcast, mostly for Zachary's poems. And so he's given me a lot to think about there. And something he said in there made me think about this being the first "TikTok war" that we have going on today. So NATO, of course, was founded in 1949 with its 12 original members signing the Washington Treaty. And, of course, this is when much of Europe is in the ashes and just really beginning to recover from the devastation of World War II. And it's, you know, it's sort of the original charter of transatlanticism. You know, the United States and Canada from North America are two of the original members. And then 10 at the time, just Western European countries. And I think one way to think about why is NATO, you know, why are the particular 30 members today up from the original 12? Like, you know, why has this come to pass? I think to some degree, international relations theory shed some light on this. And I think NATO, when it was founded, really fell more into the realist kind of, you know, IR theory camp. And it was, you know, it was always for something, specifically the principles of democracy, individual liberty and rule of law. But it was really against something just as much, and it was against the Soviet Union and what it stood for.
08:29
And it was all about the collective defense of Western Europe at the time. And then, you know, in 1989 through 1991, when, you know, to the surprise of many, the Berlin Wall falls, the Warsaw Pact dissolves, the Soviet Union disintegrates. And NATO's really their reason for existing, i.e. the Soviet Union, you know, is no longer such a threat. And so, you know, the London summit in 1991 is really when NATO leaders ask one another, you know, what is our reason for existing now? And I think this is when we see a fundamental shift, really, from sort of the realist IR theory to really liberal internationalism. And more back to, as I mentioned at the beginning, in 1949, NATO was always for something, not just against the Soviet Union, right? And so really in 1991, this is when we start to see consideration of promotion of democracy, expanded cooperation and dialogue with former Warsaw Pact members and even former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe. And of course, over time, the two biggest tranches are in 1999 with Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary being offered admission. And then in 2004, when, you know, seven more allies are admitted in of particular note, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are the three former Soviet states. And so I think there's this tension inside of NATO where it kind of goes back and forth between realism and liberal institutionalism or liberal internationalism, I should say. And I wonder now if we might be at another inflection point, you know, where collective defense of Europe, it's an original reason for existing there with NATO, I wonder if that again becomes the central task of the alliance.
10:34
That makes a lot of sense. It's a very helpful way of thinking about the different motivations that have underpinned the development of NATO, including its expansion after the Cold War. Bryan, before we move on to that topic, which you've laid out so well, just give us a sense, both as a scholar and as a military leader. How does NATO function? Most people can at least identify it, but very few people know how it works. Some people think it's just a U.S.-led operation. Others have argued, including the last president, that it's a mess and that people are taking advantage of others. How does it really work?
11:12
Sure. So one of the great, one of my central critiques in my dissertation is that NATO historians, scholars, and I would just say everyday pundits treat NATO from, you know, with the state as the central unit of analysis. And NATO is often considered just an aggregation of X number of members' state preferences. The United States, of course, has always had the largest economy and the largest military inside of NATO. And therefore, you know, its preferences are seen as counting, you know, the most relative to other allies. And I think that that's, you know, a fundamentally insufficient means of understanding the alliance and how it works. The institution of NATO matters and the institution of NATO, specifically its political headquarters in Brussels, and then its military headquarters at SHAPE in Mons. And I think too often we overlook the key role that institutional leaders represented by the secretary general, you know, at the political headquarters in Brussels and then the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, particularly during the Cold War, but even still today, really play a central role in what policies or adaptations NATO makes. And so I think NATO is, you know, we have to account for the institution as well in any kind of outcomes and not just treat it as an aggregation of states.
12:47
And just to build on that, Bryan, one of the points you make so well in your dissertation that I think is so relevant for today is that, first of all, the different states have a say in what NATO does, the United States doesn't just get to call the shots, but also that the institutional leaders of NATO, those who have, in a sense, left their own government services and been seconded over to NATO, either in a political role or a military role, that they operate and have great influence on the decisions NATO makes. Is that true? And could you explain to us how that works? Because I don't think most people understand that.
13:28
Absolutely. And I think that was a great synopsis of what I find in my dissertation. But another one of the central themes that you just described is the power of what I call "transnational interpersonal networks." And so, you know, there are a community, it's not formally organized, of just experienced NATO hands. It could be political leaders, it may be many times academics, sometimes it's retired military officers. And through their experience and their jobs, their assignments over their careers, working in NATO, they gain a really rich understanding of sort of what's in the realm of possible, either politically or militarily, for the alliance, you know, to be able to do with whatever the issue of the day is at hand.
14:20
I want to sort of foot stomp on something you touched on with your previous question, Jeremy, which is that it's really key to understand NATO is a consensus-based organization. That means with today with 30 members, all 30 members have to consent for NATO to, you know, to take a policy action. And, you know, I think sometimes we see how hard it is in a simple, you know, to find a simple majority. Right? And so one might imagine that it can be difficult to find consensus. And so a central critique sometimes is that that limits the boldness, let's say, of NATO adaptations, because you need all 30 members to agree.
15:04
With the power of transnational interpersonal networks, in one of my case studies, I look at the NATO training mission in Iraq, which begins in 2004 following the Istanbul summit. And of course, this is on the heels of NATO is trying to heal its wounds over the decision by the American-led coalition of the willing to go to war in Iraq. And of course, you know, several NATO allies, most notably France and Germany, are adamant opponents of this, while others like the United States, United Kingdom and many of the newer allies in Central and Eastern Europe form the coalition of the willing. And so, you know, the alliance is really at a low point here and its political leaders get together at the Istanbul summit 2004 and say, hey, you know, we would like NATO to have a role in Iraq. And the SACEUR at the time, General James Jones, who later is the Obama administration National Security Advisor, realizes that there is no military plan for NATO to have in Iraq. And so he quickly, he leaves the Istanbul summit on June 29th. Rather than flying back to SHAPE headquarters in Belgium, he immediately goes to Washington, D.C. He calls just an informal network of advisors. Some of them, they're multinational on both sides of the Atlantic. Some are academics. Some are retired military officers. In one case, it's a former secretary general. And they convene very hastily in Washington, D.C. and say, you know, what type of military mission do we think is politically palatable? And, you know, we'll add value on the ground in Iraq. And so, you know, they come up with three lines of effort, which is to train the Iraqi security forces in Iraq, a second line of effort to train them out of Iraq, and a third line of effort, which is to equip the Iraqi security forces. And based on the advice and experience of these sort of old hands, that plan is ultimately approved, and the NATO training mission in Iraq moves out with those three lines of effort, and I think makes a pretty significant contribution over seven years to developing the Iraqi security forces. So that's kind of an anecdote that I think really captures the power of transnational interpersonal networks.
17:30
That makes a lot of sense. And that's a great example to see that at work, even in a controversial setting, as in the war in Iraq. Bryan, do you see merit or not in Vladimir Putin's claim that this transnational network and this alliance is inherently threatening to Russia?
17:52
I do not, because I think it takes away the agency of about 15 Central and Eastern European countries. Ultimately, these are countries that have sought democracy, they have sought individual liberty, and they've sought to become part of the West, politically, militarily, economically. And I think that their vote counts just as much as Russia's.
18:16
And so do you see ways in which NATO could have worked more effectively with Russia that were not pursued recently? And why were they not pursued?
18:29
Yeah, so there's one of the sort of inflection points is at 2008, at the Bucharest summit, that I think is very relevant today, you know, for our listeners to understand. At the Bucharest summit, this is where NATO offers a map or a membership action plan to Ukraine and Georgia. At the time, Putin had made a major foreign policy speech earlier in the year at the Munich Security Conference, implying that territorial borders and boundaries change repeatedly over history, and neighboring countries' borders weren't sacrosanct to Russia. And so once NATO offers a membership action plan to those two countries, right after that is when we see, you know, Russian military activity in Georgia, and then ultimately down the road in 2014, and today in Ukraine. And so I think as we think back in 1991, Russia was offered, you know, a spot in NATO's partnership for peace along with other former Warsaw Pact members. And for a time, it was an active member. But after a few years, Russian interest sort of fell off and they stopped participating in NATO.
19:57
Do you think that Putin's obvious obsession with Ukraine, as well as Georgia, and his anger at NATO expansion, were there things we could have done in retrospect, even if it's predominantly driven by his own desires and his own preferences, nonetheless, are there things we could have done? Some have argued that we expanded NATO too fast. Some have argued we could have done more to build peaceful bridges between NATO and Russia. You've lived through this as an officer and you've studied it. What's your take on the decade before where we are right now?
20:37
So I think, you know, obviously, in 2014, when Russia annexes Crimea, and then, you know, sends in, you know, little green men to the Donbass region, it's kind of been, relations have been at rock bottom since then. But I do think that there were some opportunities prior to that. In fact, if we look at NATO's, you know, most recent strategic concept from 2010, it refers to Russia as a strategic partnership. Obviously, that, you know, that phrase looks pretty out of date and irrelevant, as we look at today's events. But, you know, finding peace and partnership is also a two-way street. And, you know, there has not been much indication from the Russian side, despite overtures from numerous presidential administrations for a Russian reset, and also from the institutional leaders of NATO, from NATO Secretary Generals, you know, to find ways, you know, towards peace and a common worldview.
21:50
Why do you think that is? Why is it that Russia seems to find itself at constantly at odds with NATO, or at the very least, sees NATO as an inherently hostile force?
22:02
Sure. So, you know, Vladimir Putin has famously said, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And so, more recently, I think, as recently as last week, we've seen in his speeches, where he also talks even beyond the, you know, the 50 or so year history of the Soviet Union, he talks about the Russian Empire. And he sees Russia as a great power, and Russia has a, you know, a right to a sphere of influence. Because of, again, because of, you know, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, by and large, have demonstrated a desire to be part to be free to be part of the West. And those countries reside, you know, their land is where Putin understands the Russian sphere of influence to reside. And so there's inevitable conflict there.
23:04
Bryan, I want to be attentive to your assets that you cannot necessarily share in our discussion. With that said, what can you tell us about how NATO is responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the last six days?
23:21
I think it's also worth noting that, you know, German Chancellor Merkel, for 16 years, she worked, you know, to bring peace and partnership through economic trade. And, you know, as a result, you know, today, we see that, you know, about 40% of Germany's energy needs comes from Russia. And unfortunately, that does not seem to have satiated Putin's desire to invade neighbors.
23:54
Right, right. Why do you think he's invaded now?
23:58
I think as we look at Russia, they have a long term economic decline projected, I think, as a larger portion, you know, because their economy is so reliant on oil and natural gases. You know, as many countries around the world pursue renewable energy. They also have long term demographic problems. They have poor public health. And I think for that reason, Putin may realize that Russia is probably as strong today as it will be for a really long time. Similarly, as he looks at Ukraine, and we've seen Ukraine aggressively move towards the West. And I think that at the end of the day, Putin's number one concern is staying in power and regime survival. And it really undercuts his autocratic model to see a successful democracy aligned with the West right next door in what he considers his ethnic kinmen.
25:09
Right. So in many ways, this does echo certain elements of the history of World War I and other periods when a particular power sees itself in its maximum moment of leverage and sees trends working against it. This is an old argument among many historians, which is that countries concerned about their decline are actually some of the most dangerous countries. That said, Bryan, what is NATO doing? How are we responding to Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
25:39
So there's a number of initiatives from NATO, and many of them started in 2014 and have been accelerated over the past six months. And I think we'll see them continue to evolve over the next few years. So, again, I think 2014 is the key moment to understand. And this is, of course, as I said, starts with Russia annexing Crimea. And NATO at the 2014 Wales Summit does a number of things which are relevant today and beyond. NATO adopts a readiness action plan. And this is where they triple the size of the available NATO response force on the military side, create a very high readiness joint task force for crises like this, for example, that could be employed. And then on the political side, all allies agree to spend two percent of their national GDP on defense within 10 years, so by 2024. And that was a significant milestone for the alliance in terms of burden sharing. As we look at initiatives going forward, six months before this war in Ukraine started, the NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg had already initiated a strategic concept review and process. As I mentioned earlier, NATO's most recent strategic concept is 12 years old now, written in 2010. And so this summer, pre-conflict this summer, NATO intended to agree to a new strategic concept at the Madrid summit in June. And I think it will be really interesting to watch because the strategic concept process was started before there was the crisis in Ukraine. And so it'll be really interesting to see what stays the same, what moves beyond.
27:37
I really love the process that NATO is using, though, to drive adaptation. So NATO has produced two reports over in the past few months. One of them is called the NATO 2030 report, written by a bunch of leading experts. And in that one, we see calls for increased national resiliency, among other things, you know, energy security as another initiative. And then we also see NATO produces a second report independently created. It's called the Young Leaders report. And I think that it's really important. I think NATO is really getting it right to get the perspectives of multiple generations of NATO scholars as it looks how to posture itself going forward. I certainly, you know, can't predict the outcome of the current conflict in Ukraine, but we absolutely are seeing NATO aggressively, you know, seek to create a deterrence effect along its eastern flank. Nobody knows at this point what Putin's endgame is. He hasn't said, you know, does it go beyond Ukraine? And so I think it's not coincidental that we see the former Warsaw Pact members and former Soviet states, particularly Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and I would put Romania in this category too, as the most vocal. Bilaterally, not through NATO, but bilaterally are transferring the largest number, for example, of anti-tank weapon systems to the Ukrainian people to defend themselves. And so we see that the NATO response force has been activated for the first time for collective defense purpose, you know, since it was created. We've seen increased deployments from the Germans, from the British, and from the Americans to further the deterrence effect, you know, for the forces that were already in place in the three Baltic countries in Poland and Romania.
29:45
And many are saying, including the President of the United States, that this moment has strengthened NATO. German Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz, in announcing a major new German contribution to NATO, transformative contribution also made that point. Do you think NATO will be stronger now as a consequence of Putin's terrible actions?
30:08
So, there's this really tragic dichotomy, right. On the one hand, you can't, can't help but be inspired as we see the bravery and the courage of the Ukrainian citizens against really difficult odds. At the same time, you know, in my 20 years of active service, and, and looking beyond that, as a bit of a NATO historian, this is the most united NATO's ever been, and you mentioned the speech by, you know, Germany's new chancellor, and I think that that's worth double underlining, and you know, I think it was one of the most pivotal foreign policy speeches, I think, in Europe, probably since 2007 when, when Putin made that, you know, really frightening speech at the Munich Security Conference, but you know, Germany, of course, has been the economic heavyweight of the European Union for many years, you know, but in many cases, because of national restrictions they've placed on themselves because of the history of the two world wars, Germany has not wanted to be the leader on the military side of NATO, and so they've always been one of the countries that sort of has a lower percentage of their GDP spent on defense, and it was amazing, and I think groundbreaking, and will really change the future trajectory of NATO when Schultz announced that, you know, an immediate doubling of defense spending, you know, an immediate movement away from energy reliance on Russia, and so I think what we're seeing is the emergence of Germany, you know, not, you know, always, or not always, but you know, for quite a while has been economic heavyweight, and I think that they will become the military heavyweight among European countries and NATO as well, and I think that has a lot of second and third order effects.
32:08
So our closing question here, Bryan, we always like to close on an optimistic note. You have given us so much inside, thoughtful information on the historical trajectory, the organizational roles, and the various adaptations of NATO before and during this war. Are you optimistic about the future of NATO? What are the contributions beyond Ukraine that you look for in a post-Ukraine War moment for NATO. What will NATO do to help make democracies and security more common in Europe and elsewhere?
32:48
So I'm extremely optimistic about the future of NATO and the three principles that it stands for democracy, individual liberty, and rule of law. You know, I wrote down a quote that Chancellor Scholz said towards the beginning of his speech, and he said entering a new era, and that means that the world we now live in is not the one that we knew before. Peace and freedom in Europe have a price tag, and I think that that is really important to think about, you know, before any of this crisis in Ukraine, you know, there's been democratic backsliding in a number of NATO countries on both sides of the Atlantic, and you know, this is an opportunity, NATO, NATO has a history of adapting it needs a crisis to adapt in positive ways to sort of shake it from its state, you know, from from being in stasis, and so this is a real opportunity here. I think we'll see a number of initiatives that come from the alliance to enhance national resiliency, to focus on the protection of democratic processes and institutions, you know, to create a real deterrence effect along the eastern flank to protect its most vulnerable allies, and I think the future is bright for NATO.
34:07
That's that's so compelling and important to hear, Zachary, as a young person who's been deeply moved by the plight of Ukrainians and shaken by the evidence of Russian aggression, we talked about this last week on the podcast, do you share this optimism about NATO? And even more important, really, is NATO an institution that you and other young people think about and look to when you think about the future of security and democracy in the world?
34:35
I think NATO is definitely something that is relevant and indeed increasingly discussed and and debated, but I do think it's important to note that even as NATO recommits itself to its principles and the threats it was founded to counter that there are also broader humanitarian concerns and and moral obligations that it has to countries like Ukraine in crisis and and under threat, even if they don't have treaty obligations or or necessarily legal obligations, so I think that the new rebirth, if you will, of NATO as relevant and deeply important to almost every policy discussion that we're having today, has to also come with a renewed focus on its principles.
35:28
and so you think NATO should be more involved in Ukraine?
35:32
I, obviously, I'm not going to pretend like I know enough to talk about that, but I think that it's important for NATO to to listen to people in Ukraine, and personally I think that probably should be more action in Ukraine, or at least greater efforts to make the Ukrainian people know that we're doing as much as we can.
35:59
Final word for you, Bryan. Any comments on that?
36:01
Yeah, it's, you know, it's really difficult for me to, you know, comment on current policy, but I think, you know, bilaterally, but not through the institution of NATO, many allies are doing a lot of things for for the Ukrainian people right now, in the, you know... and most notably, the economic sanctions in the United Front that NATO members, and really a lot of global allies, have taken as well against Russia, and I guess I would just add, as well, you know, I think it is fascinating, and feeds my optimism for the future of NATO, and the unity, really, of the West. You know, I saw a survey today from a Finnish broadcasting company in January. Only 30% of Finns favor joining NATO. Today, 53%, 66% if done in tandem with Sweden, and I think that that speaks to the values that NATO stands for, and how maybe Putin, because of his, you know, aggressive actions, illegal actions, and war crimes, I think is waking up some historically neutral countries in Europe and around the world, you know, freedom and democracy are worth fighting for, and I think more and more countries are seeing that.
37:23
It's such a great point, Bryan and Zachary, and I think there's another historical insight here, you know, moments of crisis, moments of horror and nightmare, they reveal a lot of things about an institution and a set of actors, and we've learned a lot about Vladimir Putin. Not necessarily new things, but we've learned a lot about him in the last few days. We've learned a lot about Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the leader of Ukraine. We've learned a lot about NATO also, and it is, I think heartening and optimistic to see that in a time of challenge some institutions are able to respond effectively and turn those challenges, as horrible as they are, into opportunities, and it does seem that NATO, at least right now, is doing that, and we're fortunate to have institutions like this. A core point of your research, Bryan, and your career is that these institutions matter. It's not just the policies they pursue, it's the quality of institutions, and it's a central theme in our podcast, week after week. Democracy is not just about democratic actors, it's about democratic institutions that need to be nurtured and protected and respected, and we're fortunate to have NATO, as imperfect as it is, nonetheless there as an institution, as you say, that can defend and promote these values that we care so much about now, and I think that's really central to our discussion. Bryan, you have shared history and contemporary understanding and analysis with us, you've given us a better sense of what NATO is, how it works, and where it's going, and we're very grateful for you sharing your time and insights with us today, Bryan. Thank you so much.
39:04
Thank you. It's absolutely been my pleasure. And every time I hear from Jeremi and Zachary, I learn more.
39:10
Well, as you said before, I think it's more from Zachary than from Jeremi, but that's okay. And Zachary, thank you for your poem, and your question, and your insights. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners. We hope you all are following the news and finding reasons for productive, optimistic historical thinking to move our world forward in this important time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 204: China
00:23
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about a topic that is not only a major news story today, it has been a major news story throughout the last 50 years of American history, but particularly the last decade. And it's the story about the rise of China. Not simply the rise of the Chinese economy, but the rise of China as a military power, and the ways in which that rise has changed American calculations about security, stability, and democracy in Asia, and the ways in which recent events have perhaps shaken some of our historical assumptions about the relationship between the United States, China, Taiwan, and the region. We're joined by two scholars who are really experts, not simply on this issue, but have been thinking about the broader strategic environment in Asia for many years, and both of whom have also done groundbreaking scholarly work and policy advising around these issues. We're really fortunate to have them with us, and they have written a brand new book that I've just read and want to recommend to all of our listeners, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. The authors and our guests today are Hal Brands and Michael Beckley. Hal and Mike, thank you for joining us.
01:50
Thanks for having us, Jeremi.
01:51
Thanks so much for having us, Jeremi.
01:53
Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He writes frequently for Bloomberg Opinion and for many other publications, often with Mike, often with other authors, often just himself. He's written a number of important books that I've been fortunate enough to read, some I've even imposed on my students, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great Power Rivalry Today. Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, he co-wrote that with Charlie Edel, who we've also had on the podcast, and American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump. Those are just three of his recent books that I particularly like. Michael Beckley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Hal is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I should have said that. Previously, Mike was an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and he worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Rand Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense. And Mike's first book, which is an excellent book, I highly recommend, Unrivaled, Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower, that was written in 2018. And Mike and Hal have followed that up, as I said, with this new book, hot off the presses, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. Before we turn to our conversation with Hal and Mike about China, Taiwan, and U.S. policy, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary's scene-setting poem. What's your poem title today, Zachary? ("Probably.") Let's hear it.
03:34
In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who wakes up in cold sweats and worries silently. The sky will fall and no one here will notice it at all. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who stares themself in the face, pieces in the wrong place, And sees in the mirror's trace a blurry line of missing lace. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who sees the ocean from the pier, who watches fishes swim below. Couldn't we be freer like the tuna in the undertow? In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who writes poetry and imagines winter scenes, Who hears and sees and sniffs adventure in the breeze. But his poetry is in his head, the winter scene he dreams in bed. And I can say what I can hear and seek adventure without fear. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, And all I can say is probably someday there will be peace.
04:41
What's your poem about, Zachary?
04:42
My poem is really about the similarities, the societal similarities that can be lost when it comes to superpower rivalry, but also the cold realities that still define that world and the ways in which even though we may be more similar and have more in common than we think that these rivalries will continue.
05:01
Right, the geopolitics still create barriers to cooperation. (Yes, inevitably.) Well, and that's exactly front and center where Hal and Mike's book lands. Hal, maybe we can start with you. I was very taken early on in the book and in your other writings, you and Mike, you talk about the "Chinese dream." And I think it's a way of trying to understand Chinese strategic aims, the way Chinese leadership thinks about its place in the world. How should we understand what you mean by this concept of the "Chinese dream?"
05:31
It's a good question and I think it gets at one of the empirical or methodological difficulties in writing about China. Chinese intentions are often not as inscrutable as we think, but it is true that revisionist powers in general tend to have an incentive not to fully advertise what they intend to achieve over time. And the Chinese system doesn't have anything quite as explicit as the national security strategy or some of the strategic documents that the United States publishes, even though there are defense white papers and meaningful speeches and things of that sort. And so you have to piece it together a little bit from what is said and what is done and occasionally from what is not said.
06:17
And the way that we make sense of it in the book is that we should think about Chinese intentions, or Chinese aims, in four ways or as encompassing four different things. And the first one is just kind of what every authoritarian regime wants, which is to stay in power. If Xi Jinping were overthrown, if the CCP lost its grip on power, that would probably have fatal consequences for Chinese leaders. And so it's not surprising that basically every decision that the Chinese Communist Party makes is filtered through the prism of what will this do for the party's legitimacy and power. But that doesn't mean that China has purely domestically focused or limited ambitions.
07:02
I think a second goal would be making China whole again, so to speak, basically getting back the pieces of China, whether those are Taiwan or Hong Kong or parts of disputed border regions with India that in the CCP's narrative were wrested away from China when it was weak and divided and must now come back to China for China's national rejuvenation to be complete. Some of those territorial claims are actually pretty extensive. They include, for instance, basically all of the South China Sea. And so it can be hard to distinguish that second goal from a third goal, which is carving out a sphere of influence in Asia, basically a domain in which Chinese interests are privileged and other great powers, particularly the United States, are kicked to the margin. Xi once referred to this as Asia for Asians, which is, it appears to be something of a geopolitical euphemism for a region in which China is supreme because the United States has been evicted geopolitically from the region.
08:00
And then the fourth goal and the most ambitious one is to make China the most powerful country in the world. That's probably a longer term objective. To the extent that the CCP talks about it, something that it talks about happening on something like a 15 to 30-year time frame from now. But it's become more and more explicit and harder and harder to miss in a lot of the things that the CCP says and in many of the things that it does as well.
08:27
So, Professor Beckley, it sounds like China, while portraying itself as the anti-imperialist power, is in many ways molding its sphere of influence on a sort of traditional imperialism.
08:40
Yeah, I think Chinese leaders, almost across the board, view China's role in the world as being naturally one of greatness. And China, it's important to remember, is a revanchist power. According to the CCP's narrative, there are lost Chinese territories that one way or another have to be reabsorbed, as Hal has pointed out. And this current situation where the United States is currently the dominant power in China has to grow as a regional power and play by the rules that it didn't have a hand in writing, they see as a giant historical anomaly that they want to set straight. And I think, in addition to all the points that Hal raised, I think it's important to note just how frequently Chinese analysts and leaders look to the United States as the main threat to that "Chinese dream." I mean, part of this is just the obvious fact that the United States prevents the reincorporation of Taiwan, that the U.S. Navy is in the South China Sea, but I think it also reflects historical legacies that color how Chinese analysts and leaders view the United States. There is definitely a dominant sort of strategic culture that tends to portray Eastern culture as harmonious and Pacific and Western culture as inherently militaristic. I think there's a holdover from the Marxist teaching that many of the leaders were raised on that views capitalist powers as inherently imperialist and just using China for its resources and sucking it dry.
10:09
And then there's the offensive realist. I mean, John Mearsheimer is incredibly popular on Chinese syllabi. Every school that I've seen in China always has The Tragedy of Great Power Politics on it. And so there's this strong assumption that a country as powerful as the United States will definitely try to hold China down and then they can find all types of evidence for that. So just the key role that the United States plays, I think it's incredible how often it comes up when you start reading through Chinese strategic writings.
10:37
And Mike, if I could follow up on that, because I think it leads right into another key part of your book. You and Hal argue here, and I think it's a really important argument I haven't seen others articulate as clearly, that the Chinese are not just a rising power, you call them a "risen power," which is to say they have increased their potential, they've increased their power, but they've now plateaued and are facing headwinds and sources of decline. And that in this position of having risen and now at their position of maximum opportunity, this makes them particularly belligerent because of their fear of decline. Did I get that right? And can you elaborate on that?
11:21
That's absolutely right. A key point of the book is that double digit growth rates and a rapid rise is not the norm for any country and certainly not for China. In fact, most of Chinese history is very much the opposite. It's strife and poverty. I mean, really from the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China's getting ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflicts that are among the worst civil wars in recorded history. Even after China unifies under communist rule in 1949, it almost immediately becomes the main enemy of the United States through the Korean War. And then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960, China is the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers. And so it's not until you get to the 1970s that China is not isolated, surrounded, and impoverished. And so in the book, we try to show that China's exceptional rise since the 1970s was the result of exceptional circumstances that we think are all starting to turn into liabilities that will drag China down.
12:21
I mean, since the 1970s, you've had US engagement and that was the start also of the period of hyper globalization. So China suddenly has these opportunities to really become the workshop of the world and export its goods all over the place. You have a Chinese government after the death of Mao in 1976 that says, we don't wanna do another cultural revolution, let's try reform and opening. And so they commit to a sort of smarter form of autocracy that's more technocratic and rewards good governance, especially economically. You have the greatest demographic dividend in history with something like 10 to 15 workers per retiree in China's population in the 90s and 2000s. Most countries don't get anywhere close to 5 to 1. And then you just had relative self-sufficiency in resources and easy access to those raw materials made growth very cheap.
13:08
But now all of those tailwinds that propelled China's rise are becoming headwinds. China's plowed through its resources. Half of its water and arable land, its oil are gone. It's the largest importer of food and energy. It's running out of people. That 10 to one ratio of workers to retirees is gonna collapse to two to one by the late 2030s. The government obviously is sliding back towards this sort of brutal dictatorship and a Maoist cult of personality that is gonna sacrifice future economic growth just to centralize power in Xi Jinping's hands. And then most importantly, the world is just starting to become belatedly a less welcoming environment. The United States used to engage China. Now I would argue it's essentially engaged in neo-containment of China. And many other major economies are following suit to varying degrees. China now faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers today that it didn't even as recently as 10 years ago. So from hyper-globalization to this sort of Cold War II scenario. These things are already dragging down China's growth and we think that they're actually gonna get worse in the years ahead.
14:10
But Professor Brands, I think we've also seen China reach out to other parts of the world, in particular developing countries, to try and increase its grip, which could be seen as an aspect of this imperialism, but does seem to show at least that there is a space for China, if not in the traditional centers of power, in new centers of power.
14:34
I think that's right. And I think one way of conceptualizing that is to view it as essentially a counter-containment strategy. And so Mike laid out all the ways in which countries, particularly the world's advanced democracies, have become more and more skeptical of Chinese intentions and more and more willing to do things to limit the reach of Chinese power, even when they're not willing to say explicitly that that's what they're doing.
15:01
It's interesting that Mike's absolutely right, that we're pursuing a form of containment vis-a-vis China, but we absolutely won't call it that and most other countries won't call it that either. And so the question for Beijing becomes, and this is something that the Chinese have been thinking about for a long time, what are areas where China can expand its influence, where it's less likely to run up against entrenched resistance from the United States and other countries? And the developing world looks like a pretty good place to do that from Beijing's perspective for a variety of reasons. One reason is that democratic governance tends to be less firmly entrenched in the developing world than it is in the developed world.
15:41
And so you have governments that may be more autocratic, they may simply be more corrupt, but they're easier targets in some ways for the expansion of Chinese influence. But even where that's not the case, there is a real desire for relations with China because China has things that the developing world needs, whether that's trade or it could be surveillance technology, it could be a variety of things. And so one of the areas where we think you'll see a particular Chinese push in the coming years is to try essentially to create an economic and technological sphere of influence that encompasses much of the developing world.
16:21
And to give you one example of this, you only have to go back about three years, maybe even a little less than that, to remember that there was a time when it appeared that much of the advanced democratic world might actually fall into part of a Chinese technological sphere of influence by allowing Huawei or other Chinese companies like ZTE to build out important parts of their 5G telecommunications network. That danger has been averted now for the most part because most governments in Europe, for instance, realized with an assist from COVID that they did not wanna be technologically dependent on a company that is enthralled to the CCP. But that argument has proven less persuasive in the developing world. Price may be the all important consideration for countries in Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa that are making choices about the future of their telecommunications networks. And so the fact that the CCP subsidizes companies like Huawei to such a high degree allows them to essentially come in with lower prices than firms in the developed world can. And so you may end up with a situation where China finds that its technological influence is easier to spread in the developing world than in the advanced democracies.
17:40
So Hal, just following up on those excellent points, your book, you and Mike argue that again, China's reached a stage as Mike described, where it has had this extraordinary rise, but now it's fearful of its own decline and its own problems internally. And so that encourages a more aggressive behavior and you draw analogies to late 19th century Germany, to Wilhelmine Germany and to Japan in the early 20th century in that part of the book. Why do you think that argument makes more sense than the argument that had been put forth by people like Kurt Campbell, who is now Joe Biden's key advisor on these issues, the argument he had made years ago about China becoming a more responsible stakeholder as it becomes more dependent upon just what you're talking about, Hal, upon international connections, that globalization will in a sense, almost Gulliver-like tie the Chinese into so many parts of the international system that they won't want to destabilize this system because they themselves are now a part of it? Why do you not find that persuasive? Why should we see the revisionist aggression as more of the accurate description for today?
18:54
Well, I think the basic problem with the responsible stakeholder thesis, which was first explicitly articulated by Bob Zoellick back in 2005, and in some ways provided the intellectual architecture for a lot of US policy toward China during the post-Cold War era. The challenge is that there's just less and less evidence to support it all the time. And so if the responsible stakeholder thesis bore out, we should expect to see a China that becomes more satisfied and more reconciled to the existing international system and all the things that go with it as it became richer, more powerful, more integrated into the system. Because the logic of the idea was that once China saw all of the things it could achieve simply by inserting itself economically into the existing order, it would lose any incentive to overturn or challenge that order.
19:57
But what we've seen, and this is a trend that goes back really to 2008, 2009, and the aftermath of the global financial crisis, is a China that has become much, much more assertive over time. We saw that beginning in the South China Sea at the outset of the Obama presidency in a way that has really continued. We've seen it very markedly with respect to Taiwan, particularly in recent years. And of course, this is something that's been in the news recently with Speaker Pelosi's visit and a fairly bellicose Chinese response. And we've seen it globally in things like the Wolf Warrior diplomacy and China's increasing use of economic sanctions to punish countries that displease it diplomatically or otherwise.
20:41
And so there is just less and less evidence as time goes on to suggest that China is reconciling itself to the existing state of things. And in fact, Chinese leaders have been quite explicit in saying that they are not reconciling themselves to the existing state of things. You can find Chinese officials saying that the US-led international order is a suit that no longer fits, that it basically has to be replaced or substantially modified in order for China to achieve its national objectives. And so the revisionist nature of Chinese foreign policy becomes clearer and clearer every day. And that's going to push China in a more disruptive direction as its power peaks.
21:19
Mike, do you see the current situation in Taiwan as highlighting that point? I mean, your book came out just as Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, just as we've seen this extraordinary increase, actually, in Chinese military exercises around Taiwan. How do you fit that into the story?
21:42
We see that as one of the most important manifestations of this peaking power trap. China is coming off of about a decade of a massive military buildup. It's been churning out warships at a rate that we haven't seen from another country since World War II. And it's been pumping up on ammunition and developing the ability to surge amphibious forces and potentially carry out a blockade of the island. On the other hand, this window of opportunity that China has because of its own military buildup and the sort of slow pace of U.S. and Taiwanese responses in terms of spreading out their forces, making them less vulnerable to a Chinese Pearl Harbor-style attack on U.S. bases on Okinawa and Taiwan. This window of opportunity may not stay open for very long because for one thing, the U.S. and Taiwan have ambitious plans to revamp their defenses to make them much more resilient by the 2030s.
22:37
And at the same time, a lot of those strategic headwinds I talked about earlier are gonna really start to kick in within a decade or so. And so China will be in a position where it could be economically stagnant, demographically collapsing. Xi Jinping will be in his 80s by the early 2030s. And so there's just a lot pointing at this period in the 2020s as being China's vital strategic window if it does in fact intend to use force to bring Taiwan into the fold. And for a little bit, this window will open slightly wider because the United States is about to go through a mass retirement of cruisers, guided missile submarines, bombers. Many of these things were built under the Reagan administration. So there's just this moment of sort of maximum vulnerability from the U.S. and Taiwanese side. And just given this, what from a Chinese perspective is a steady slide towards upping Taiwan's international status, upping the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, upping Japan's relationship with Taiwan. Even the Europeans are sending delegations there. They just are likely to feel that peaceful reunification is becoming less and less likely. And so they have to wonder, should we start flexing some of that military muscle that we spent several trillion dollars building up while we still can? And so for us, this is just a moment of maximum danger in the Taiwan Strait.
23:54
And Professor Beckley, how does the situation in Putin's Russia and the war in Ukraine fit into this sort of Chinese self-assessment of their position?
24:06
Yeah, I think there's the lessons that we would hope China would learn, and then there's the lessons I fear that China may have learned from that. I mean, obviously we would hope they would learn that conquest is really difficult and that the West is more united than maybe a lot of people previously thought prior to the invasion. But what I fear is that one, they've learned you've got to go big and brutal from the start. Putin's, one of his mistakes was to kind of stumble into Ukraine on multiple axes and have this really uncoordinated operation and give the Ukrainians time to pick apart those offensive forces. So China may say, look, if we're going to go, we got to go hard. That means hitting American bases to cripple their combat power early. That means pummeling Taiwan with an air and missile barrage. And then second, do not allow our target to be resupplied in the way that the Ukrainians are being resupplied. So that means sealing off any possibility of convoys coming in. I think that's part of the reason why China's been showing off that it can surround Taiwan on all sides, including on the East coast, where presumably the US would have tried to resupply Taiwan in a conflict. And then third is just to rattle the nuclear saber early and often because that seems to induce caution on the American side. So those could be the lessons that they learn. I think, you know, sober defense analysts have to just assume the worst about that and proceed accordingly. Obviously, maybe it's induced some caution, but just given the show of force that we've seen over the last couple of weeks, I just, it just seems like they are, you know, gonna conclude the worst from it.
25:39
It's so fascinating and horrifying, I have to say, listening to the two of you and reading your book, because, and I think this is your intention in part, right? Those of us who are historians, it echoes World War I in so many ways, the notion of windows of opportunity, peak power, a sense of a moment when the enemy is more vulnerable than other moments, the desire to go hard, go fast, a sort of early blitzkrieg way of thinking of things. How, in light of this bleak scenario, you and Mike are clearly not determinists. You clearly, as good historians, believe there are choices and contingencies. And the last couple of chapters of your book are about what the United States should do, you see, and I'm guessing, as a Cold War historian like myself, Hal, this is really something you've spent a lot of time thinking about, you see lessons from the Cold War for the United States. What are some of the top lessons that American citizens and policymakers should take from the Cold War for thinking about these issues today?
26:42
I'm glad you asked that, because I think one of the misconceptions that sometimes emerges from reading the stuff we write is that we think that war with China is inevitable, and that is absolutely not what we are saying here. I think our hope in writing the book is to inform people that the choices that the United States makes will have a powerful impact on the choices that China makes in the coming years. And so what we need to be thinking about doing is making a set of choices that will reduce the windows of opportunity that China may see militarily and otherwise later in this decade, so that even a more risk-acceptant Xi Jinping will be deterred from making choices that could lead to a war that would just be utterly catastrophic. We want to deter a war, right, rather than fight one.
27:36
And it's interesting to look back at the Cold War, because there are some parallels between the situation that the United States faces now and the situation that it faced during the early Cold War. I think most American officials during the early Cold War believed that the U.S. system would prove stronger than the Soviet system over time, but there were moments when the geopolitical balance appeared extremely precarious, either because Western Europe was in danger of outright economic collapse in 1947, 1948, in a way that might've opened the door to Soviet hegemony in Europe, or during the Korean War, when it appeared that the United States was facing a window of military vulnerability that it had to close very quickly. And so there are a handful of lessons that we take away from this, but I think one of the things that becomes really apparent from looking at the history of the early Cold War is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And so a lot of the legendary policies that the United States pursued during this period, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, things of that nature, were not initiatives that were planned for months or years beforehand. They were things that were basically slapped together in moments of crisis, because the alternative to moving quickly and decisively looked far, far worse. George Kennan's policy planning staff came up with the outline of the Marshall Plan in about three weeks in May, 1947. NATO actually was a European initiative that the United States decided to sign onto. And the sense of the time was that the United States had to be willing to take risks. It had to be willing to work with new partners, including enemies that it had just defeated, like Japan and West Germany. And it had to be able to move quickly to close windows of vulnerability before they became too dangerous. And that's a similar lesson the United States needs to take away in thinking about the China challenge today.
29:37
It's interesting, if you look at the Taiwan Strait, for instance, the problem isn't that Taiwan is indefensible. It actually is a natural fortress. It would be quite possible to defend Taiwan if the United States and Taipei make the right choices. The problem is that we have not moved fast enough to address some of the vulnerabilities that have opened up, and so one of the things that we do in the book is try to explain in some detail how the United States, Taiwan, and other democratic countries actually could mount a pretty credible defense of that island, and thereby hopefully deter China from attacking by using capabilities that mostly exist today, and so we don't need to wait for perfect exquisite military capabilities to become available next decade. We just need to move faster with the things that we have or can quickly develop in order to make an invasion or an assault on Taiwan look prohibitively costly for Beijing.
30:32
And you give some very concrete suggestions in the book, which I encourage listeners to look at, and also you quote Dean Acheson quite often, and I think it's always, always beneficial to quote Dean Acheson, in particular on the importance of showing strength sometimes to prevent worse outcomes from from occurring. Mike, on this line of thinking, though, I wanted to ask you, how do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction? One of the criticisms that Hal and myself and others and you have made about American Cold War policymaking is, although we did good work in many places and other places we sometimes overcommitted, went into wars we shouldn't have been in, and there were often domestic costs as well, and so you know the very period Hal is referring to in the late 40s is also the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, and I know, and I'm sure you and Hal know this better than I do, you know, for many Chinese Americans talk of more explicit American containment policy toward China raises worries about anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, which we saw a lot of evidence of during the pandemic. How do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction?
31:50
I think on the domestic factor, just making sure that you're separating the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, and that our main problem is with some of the policies that the CCP is pursuing, not China necessarily as a nation. In terms of the, you know, we also try to derive lessons from history of what not to do, and you know, the United States imposed a massive oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and that pushed Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor to try to survive, and today the United States could have a comprehensive tech embargo on China to try to trash its economy. It could enact across-the-board trade sanctions against it. It could even take some provocative pages from the Cold War playbook and start a huge covert action program to stir up Tibetan resistance, we hear resistance, foment internal violence, and sow chaos in Chinese society. And I think any of those measures would risk catalyzing the exact kind of conflict that we're trying to avoid.
32:49
So we try to argue that a danger zone strategy, you're trying to prevent war from breaking out, not catalyze it, and so you have to balance strength and caution, and so first of all, it's you have to prioritize that you should really just be focusing on key areas where if China scores a near-term success, it could radically upend the long-term trends that we currently see as favorable overall to the United States, so prioritizing a defense of Taiwan, making sure that China is not able to carve out this sort of authoritarian tech empire across the global south, but if China wants to spend lavishly on white elephant infrastructure projects across the world through Belt and Road, I think those are things the United States doesn't necessarily have to oppose everywhere and at all times. And there's also limits that the United States can draw in terms of engaging in political warfare with the CCP and potentially destabilizing the regime in ways that would make it extremely desperate in the short run, and then I think you just have to have an eyes wide open approach to diplomacy, you know, if you can build the strength and then negotiate from that position of strength, then you can do things like have you really work on crisis management and confidence building mechanisms, military to military exchanges, hotlines, all the classic kind of ways to buffer geopolitical competition. I think can be done as long as you're coming at it from a position of strength that doesn't give your rival this potential window to do a smash and grab operation over something like Taiwan in the short term.
34:22
I really appreciate it in the book how both of you talk about the importance of maintaining diplomatic connections, because I do think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that even in the worst moments of US-Soviet rivalry, talking was important. Diplomatic connections mattered, and the moments when we had least connection were often some of the most dangerous. And I think it's a point you emphasize, and I want to emphasize too, that as one is acting perhaps to strengthen Taiwan's defense, that doesn't mean you stop talking to the Chinese. In fact, it means you talk to the Chinese while you're doing that, and hope that you can make diplomatic progress at that moment. You both make the point in your book that if at some point the Chinese were willing to agree, as the United States did with Cuba, for example, in 1962 to a non-invasion pledge, that might be something the United States would want to talk about as a compromise agreement. I'm correct on this, right, that you, you both see diplomacy as a key part of the story, even as this relationship might become more militarized, yes?
35:26
Absolutely, and I think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that diplomacy isn't silly peacenik stuff, it's actually quite useful from a competitive perspective, as well. It's a way of keeping your allies on side. It's a way of convincing your own domestic public that you are actually trying to exhaust all avenues short of confrontation for getting what you want. It's a way of maintaining contact with the other side, so that you know when a breakthrough may be possible. And so, as Mike said, you've got to have your eyes wide open about it, and we shouldn't think that simply talking to the CCP is going to lead them to change how they think about their interests, but the strategic arguments for doing so, I think, are very compelling.
36:09
And so I guess that brings us to the last question. We always like to close on an optimistic note. One of our purposes each week is to show that history opens options for thinking about policy and society and democracy, and that history offers us a reason to be optimistic, not the pessimistic image that historians sometimes have. I take from your book a very optimistic point at the end that the issues of surrounding China and Taiwan that we've talked about today are actually issues where there's a lot of agreement in Washington across party lines. Your book is not about Democrats versus Republicans. I know that that was intentional in the way you put it together, and I think it's also accurate. Maybe, Mike, I'll start with you, then we'll go to you, Hal. Where do you see the possibilities for this issue, maybe being one of those places where we can finally return to what might seem like more normal bipartisan discussions about strategy and foreign policy in the United States? How do you see that happening?
37:11
Well, I do think one silver lining of geopolitical competition is it tends to promote unity domestically, you know. I think it's no surprise that polarization goes off the charts basically after the end of the Cold War, when we can suddenly turn on each other. So one would hope that if there is this bipartisan agreement among Democrats and Republicans to get tough with China, that it can promote cooperation on on other issues, and I also think it extends to to allies, you know, another silver lining of Russia's recent offensive and China's belligerent behavior is it's forced Western allies to get back together and to really start talking about democracy a lot more than they used to, using that as a focal point of building and revamping an international order that makes the world safe for democracy, that means everything from creating new trade and investment regimes that basically prioritize democratic forms of governance and standards in those, it means more defense cooperation among like-minded democracies to uphold the law of the sea, and so what, what you would hope is that you could have this period of tension, but one that doesn't boil over to catastrophic conflict, and at the same time the fire of that geopolitical competition can actually be channeled in productive directions, everything from international institution building, comedy within countries, as well as a huge increase in research and development spending on all kinds of great technologies that will make life so much better for all of us over the long run, so one would hope that this could be channeled in productive directions, and that's sort of where we leave at the end, saying, look, this, here's some ways that you could actually make that more likely.
38:50
(Hal, your thoughts?) Yeah, well, the book I wrote before this was about lessons of the Cold War, and one of the most hopeful lessons of the Cold War is that geopolitical rivalry gives you an incentive to do things you ought to do anyway to improve your own society, and so the United States, for all of the nasty things it did to itself during the Cold War, also did some really constructive things, it invested massively in its own future by funding the world's best university education system, by developing big infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and through a variety of other means. The Cold War, in this case, and this is a contested argument, but one that I think it's true. Actually, helped the United States become a better version of itself, even though the progress was uneven. I hope very much that we will see the competition with China as an opportunity to do something similar today. I think there has been some initial progress in that direction with the passage of chips just recently, which Mike referred to, of course, there have also been some ugly aspects of the turn toward competition, including a surge in anti-Asian violence and a variety of other things, and so sort of the angels and demons always compete with each other, but we have been successful in the past of using competition as a way to strengthen ourselves internally, and that's the precedent we ought to try to emulate today.
40:18
And I think Zachary, that's a perfect place to turn to you to close us out here, as as a young person who I know thinks and talks about these issues quite a lot. Do you see issues surrounding China, and I don't just mean strategic issues, broader issues, economic issues, issues related to the COVID. Do you see those issues as some of the issues that are dividing us now, or do you see them as actually, as Hal and Mike are saying, as a potential area where we could come together and find agreement?
40:47
I think it is a potential area where we can come together and find some sort of agreement. I think the problem is often we see these geopolitical conflicts as inevitable, and we refuse to see the options that we actually have, the decisions that are are still yet to be made, and I do think that there is hope that this conflict can be avoided, and I don't think that we're going to have the same sort of entrenched social competition that we saw during the Cold War, namely because I think the United States, or at least parts of it, are much more connected to the Chinese people than we were to the Soviet people or to the Russian people.
41:24
Right? And our economies are certainly much more.. this is this is a point John Gaddis made a long time ago, that one of the unique features of the Cold War is that the United States and the Soviet Union actually had very few economic and trade interconnections, that's of course not the case for the US and China right now. I think your point, Zachary, is very well taken, and it echoes what both Mike and Hal said here on the podcast, and say in their wonderful book, which is that we study history, and their book is filled with useful historical analysis. We study history because it shows us that human beings have choices, they're difficult choices to make, and I think our discussion today is about the difficult choices the United States, as a democracy, has to make in order to avoid war, in order to avoid conflict, and hopefully build a more stable international system, where perhaps there's more space, as Mike just said, for a discussion about democracy, as well. I think this book and this discussion open up so many avenues, really, for thinking about current conditions in a useful way, in a way that's not simply about name calling and a kind of determinist assumption about war. And so I really, really appreciate the conversation. I highly recommend the book to all of our listeners. Again, it's called Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, filled with contemporary information, but of course, the part that's always most valuable: historical knowledge and research that's useful in understanding the present. Mike and Hal, thank you so much for joining us today.
42:54
(Thanks, Jeremi) Thanks, Jeremi. Thanks, Zach, too really appreciate it.
42:57
And Zachary, thank you for your poem. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 206: Leadership
00:26
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today we are talking with a great author, good friend, and really outstanding thinker about a topic that we all confront every day. What is good leadership? How do we understand what it means to be an effective leader, as well as a persuasive and ethical?
00:51
In the world of social media, the world of flaming the world of difficult, difficult issues and difficult opposition to getting anything done. Our guest, Mark Updegrove, has written a number of books on presidential leadership. And his most recent book is really an. Excellent elegant study of John F. Kennedy and uses John F. Kennedy in many ways as a window into the possibilities and the limits of leadership in our world. It's a book. I hope you all will pick up and read. It's an eminently readable and deeply researched book. It's called Incomparable Grace: JFK in the Presidency. Mark, thank you for joining us.
01:32
Always a pleasure, Jeremi. Good to hear your voice after so long.
01:35
It is nice to be able to have a conversation. Mark is a presidential historian. He's the author, as I said, of five books on the presidency; he's also interviewed, I believe, just about every living president, except for Donald Trump. Is that correct Mark?
01:51
That's that's correct. Accept the guy down to Mar A Lago.
01:55
Whoever that is.
01:56
Whoever that is.
01:57
Mark serves now as the president and CEO of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation, I get to consider him a neighbor. We don't see each other often enough. And, before that, he was the director of the LBJ Presidential Library.
02:12
Mark is also a presidential historian on ABC News. And, earlier in his career, among other things, he was a publisher of Newsweek. And if you read his newest book, you'll find out that he had a very close relationship with Hugh Sidey, who was the, I guess, the editor of Time Magazine. Is that correct, Mark?
02:29
He was, you know, he was the Washington bureau chief. Jeremi, but it was such an out, it had such an outsized power. He might as well have been the editor of Time Magazine as John Kennedy, knew as so many other presidents that he just had an incredibly important vantage point on the presidency.
02:47
As a consequence, those presidents really looked to his column in so many ways to see how they were doing.
02:56
Well, for those of you who buy and read Mark's book, there's some wonderful insights from Hughes Sidey, that Mark shares as well as insights from Scotty Reston, and many other journalists of the time. Before we get into our discussion with Mark, we have, of course, Zachary's scene sitting poem.
03:14
What is today's title Zachary?
03:17
Never Again the Same.
03:18
Let's hear it.
03:20
Never Again the Same. Let's hear it. Sometimes there are words when whispered they are meaningless, but they mean the world when you shout them in the shadow of a wall or on a football field under a hot sun which obscures the moon. Sometimes there are places when you see them on a map they seem hollow, a couple of old municipal buildings and a square in the town.
03:44
But you can see in the video recorded hazy from across the lawn how this was once for a few moments the center of the world. Sometimes there are moments when described to you they are meaningless, they seem so abstract, so absurd, unexplainable, a bullet flying unimagined. But you would have had to be there, had to have seen the way she held him as he was dying.
04:10
What would we give not to remember how it really was, to stay in that imagined moment when we all cried at the same time, to stay forever remembering the promise that was never fulfilled, the hope that was never realized, words and places and moments that never really were and would never again be the same.
04:32
I love it. Zachary, what is your poem about?
04:34
My poem is about the huge mark that John F. Kennedy, his presidency, his assassination left on the American psyche, but also the ways in which he and his family have sort of become mythologized. And we remember them in hindsight perhaps differently than we experience them as a country.
04:54
I think that's such a wonderful opening mark to discussing your fantastic book. Why did you write this book on John Kennedy? So many other books have been written. What did you have to say that others haven't said?
05:08
Well, first of all, Zachary, what a magnificent poem. And we'll come back to this, I'm sure, Jeremi, but just that phrase, a bullet flying unimagined, is just an incredible way of depicting the unimaginable assassination of John F. Kennedy when it occurred in 1963. But to answer your very good question, Jeremi, yeah, there's an old adage, write the book you want to read.
05:34
And I had read a lot of books about John F. Kennedy, some voluminous and very comprehensive, but not the book about Kennedy that I really wanted to read. And he is such a fascinating and enigmatic subject and led us through such consequential, turbulent times, triumphant in many ways, tragic in others.
05:56
And I wanted to give the reader a sense of that, sort of this cinematic glimpse of Kennedy and all that he's dealing with on any given day, internationally and domestically. I wanted the readers to feel those vicissitudes. And I hoped I achieved it with a brisk, but dramatic take on the two years and 10 months that John F. Kennedy spent in the White House.
06:23
Well, you absolutely succeeded, at least for this reader, in both of the things you just mentioned. It's a brisk read, as you said, but it's also a moving, cinematic, but more than cinematic, rueful and thoughtful account of his life. You open with one of the low points of his presidency, which might surprise a lot of readers, the Vienna Summit of 1961, when in a certain way, the leader of the Soviet Union embarrasses this young president. Why did you start there?
06:54
Because you mentioned Scotty Reston, who was the renowned columnist on the presidency for the New York Times. After this two-day summit that happened in early June of 1961, Kennedy, as you said, has just been ravaged by Nikita Khrushchev through these two grueling days, where Khrushchev is just constantly nipping at his heels and getting the better of Kennedy. Kennedy knows he's been bested.
07:24
He talked about the great chess match of leadership, and he knew he was outmatched by Khrushchev during those two vital days, and knows that Khrushchev leaves that summit emboldened, thinking that Kennedy was, in Khrushchev's words, too intelligent and too weak. By too intelligent, he means he's book smart, but he's not street smart. I can exploit this guy, Khrushchev thinks, coming out of this.
07:50
Kennedy knows this. He goes back to the American embassy in Vienna and talks off the record to Scotty Reston, and he admits to Reston that he has been savaged by Khrushchev. He realizes until Khrushchev doesn't respect him that there could be a crisis that emerges out of Khrushchev's deep confidence that he can outmaneuver Kennedy. That becomes this crucible in Kennedy's leadership. He knows he needs to show Khrushchev that he is a strong leader, or Khrushchev will move to exploit him.
08:29
In your vivid description of this, and it really is vivid, and you bring out Kennedy's words, you bring out his emotions, it does resonate with, I think, the central challenge of contemporary leadership, what President Biden must live with every day, which is the sense that you're in the most powerful office in the world, but you have almost unceasing opposition from external actors of Vladimir Putin or Nikita Khrushchev, internal actors, in Kennedy's case, the military that doesn't trust him.
09:02
You're really detailed in your description, Mark, also in former President Eisenhower and others who really don't think this man is up to the job, this man who barely wins the presidency in the closest election, as you say, in the 20th century. How does Kennedy deal with that? How does he move forward in this almost unwinnable situation?
09:23
You know, you've written about this, Jeremi, you talked about the challenges of modern presidential leadership in the impossible presidency. It's a really difficult task. Kennedy, as you said, comes into the presidency with this very narrow victory, the narrowest of the 20th century, 118,000 votes to the difference between a President John F. Kennedy or a President Nixon in 1961, and yet he moves very quickly to get the American people rallying around him, partly through his iconic inauguration speech, which is so indelible, in which he says, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country, which instantly becomes this eternal expression of the American ideal, thinking about something greater than ourselves.
10:11
But while he had the country rallied around him, he quickly stumbled with the Bay of Pigs and the failed incursion of Cuba as we tried to oust Fidel Castro from leadership. And yet, and this really says something, Jeremi, and yet in that desperate hour in his presidency, so soon into a very auspicious run in the White House, he sees his approval rating at 83%. This is after the Bay of Pigs.
10:41
Only 5% of the American public disapprove of his job performance. And it shows an American far more unified than today. I mean, how different is that than today when so many people are rooting against a Joe Biden as our president?
10:56
But we also realize that it was so important to have a strong leader at a time when the Soviet Union was vying for hearts and minds across the world and trying to dominate much of the world landscape. That was the central crisis of the age. In that moment, Jeremi, and then at that desperate moment in his presidency, I think Kennedy shows to some degree his character. He's humble. He takes accountability. As he says in a press conference, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with me, as Truman might have said. He took responsibility and vowed to the American people to do better. And he does.
11:40
He learns from that very important lessons that help him to circumvent the challenges in his most desperate hour in the presidency, which would come the year after with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
11:52
Why do you think Kennedy was able to become such a unifying figure? I mean, in the years following one of the closest elections in American history, probably nearly every American who was eligible to vote in 1960 remembers voting for John F. Kennedy. How is it possible that he could have become such a unifying figure? It seems almost unimaginable today.
12:12
Yeah, it does, Zachary. I've always appreciated, like your father, as an author, I appreciate the power of words. I do public speaking a lot, and we get how words are enormously powerful in conveying ideas and inspiring people and getting people to coalesce.
12:34
There's a wonderful quote from Clement Attlee that I relate in the book, and Attlee was the successor to Winston Churchill, and he's talking about Churchill's rhetorical splendor during the Second World War when it was so vitally important. And he says, words at great moments can be deeds. And Kennedy shows us this.
12:57
He doesn't accomplish a great deal in the presidency, particularly compared to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who was a legislative genius and promulgated the Great Society, which fundamentally changed America. But those ideas that Kennedy put forth so artfully, so elegantly in the speeches he gave made us believe in ourselves as a nation, and I think made citizens of the world believe in the United States as a leader, as a beacon of freedom. He goes on this rhetorical hitting streak at a last year of his life that is tantamount to Ted Williams in 1941. It's remarkable, all these speeches back to back to back in different areas that fundamentally change who we are in many respects.
13:48
I'm so glad you brought that up, Mark. It's one of the lasting lessons for me from your book, and the quote from Attlee, which is on page 226, I had not actually seen before, and I'm going to use it now and cite you also, obviously. How does one do that?
14:04
I want to dig a little deeper, and you have so many nuggets in your book about this, because every president, of course, tries to be eloquent. Kennedy was in some sense trying to be Franklin Roosevelt, and every president since Kennedy tries to mimic Kennedy or mimic Reagan. Why is it that some presidents are able to do this and others aren't? And why was Kennedy able to do this, and even his successor, who interestingly comes on stage late in your book, Lyndon Johnson, why was he unable to do this?
14:32
It's interesting, because at one point there's an interview that Kennedy does with Ben Bradley, who was then the cover of the presidency for Newsweek. They were good friends, and before a dinner party, Bradley starts interviewing John F. Kennedy, and you can hear this interview at the JFK Library, but Kennedy calls himself the antithesis of a politician, and by that he means he's not the kind of baby-kissing, back-slapping, name-knowing politician that his maternal grandfather, Honey Fitz, the very colorful mayor of Boston was.
15:08
And yet at the same time, Kennedy concedes that he fits the times, and I think what he was suggesting is that he understood that he could master the medium of television. Great politicians, whether for good or for ill, master the mediums of their age. Jefferson did it with partisan newspapers. Lincoln did it with the written word. He was a wonderful writer and had these memorable speeches, but very few people heard those speeches. You read those speeches in newspapers.
15:44
He understood the importance of the art of photography, which he used in his successful presidential campaign in 1860. Roosevelt, who you just mentioned, mastered radio, which was the medium of his time, talking to people directly. Kennedy did that with television.
16:01
The television age was coming into prominence when Kennedy came into office, but for television, it's likely that Kennedy wouldn't have been chosen as our 35th president. The debates, the first presidential debates in history, were held on television between Kennedy and Nixon, and many of us as presidential nerds can summon those images of a very pasty-faced, five o'clock shadowed Richard Nixon versus this glowing, handsome, leading man type in John F. Kennedy, and that image really mattered.
16:38
So, good politicians understand the importance of the mediums of their time, and they understand the importance of image. Kennedy got both of those things very vividly. Just in terms of the speeches he gave, Jeremi, let me just give one example, if I may, of why Kennedy was so effective, and it comes in 1963.
17:01
Kennedy had reacted largely to the crisis of civil rights. He wasn't proactive at all. He was trying, in fact, to tamp down the Civil Rights movement because it exposed not only the nation but to the world to the worst of American apartheid at a time when, as I mentioned, we were trying to compete for hearts and minds across the world with the Soviet Union. That made us look bad, like we weren't living up to our ideals as a nation.
17:26
You call it disengaged at one point
17:29
Absolutely, Jeremi, and you and I have talked about this, how Kennedy was so reactive on this, but eventually, he sees the crisis brewing in Birmingham where Martin Luther King had brought his campaign, the most segregated city in America. He finally realizes he's got to go on TV to ensure that George Wallace, who is standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama trying to prevent its integration, does not get the headline that night, does not get the lead story on the 6 o'clock news. He is encouraged by his brother Bobby to go and speak to the issue of civil rights on television.
18:12
Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, tells Kennedy he doesn't have enough time, in eight hours, to write a presidential primetime speech, but Bobby encourages his brother to go on anyway and to speak from his heart. This very iconic speech about civil rights is largely extemporaneous from Kennedy, who had the courage to go on national television and speak his mind about the issue of civil rights, and in so, he calls it a moral issue, elevating the cause of civil rights to a moral issue for the first time in our history, and it is a turning point in the struggle for civil rights.
18:56
And as you show, civil rights leaders who had been, let's say, lukewarm on Kennedy, like Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and others, they themselves see it as a turning point at that time.
19:07
Uh, as Martin Luther King says, uh, of Kennedy after the speech that white boy just hit it out of the park.
19:15
I wanted to point out also, Mark, that one of the many things I learned from your book is how effective Kennedy's press conferences were as well, which I think is another version of what you're talking about now, his ability, yes, to use the words that Sorensen and other speechwriters, Richard Goodwin, had put together for him, but his ability to own the words and often to extemporize off the cuff and connect with an audience. You say, it's extraordinary, this is around page 60 in the book, that about 18 million people on average saw his press conferences, 90 percent of Americans, 90 percent of Americans watched at least one of his first three, according to a 1961 poll. That's extraordinary, that's the Twitter of its time, isn't it?
19:59
That's exactly right, and I think the American people were able to see Kennedy in his element, going toe-to-toe with some of these wonderful journalists. Kennedy had been a journalist himself at the close of the Second World War when he left the military, he went and worked for Hearst Newspapers in Europe covering the war, and he had great respect for journalists. That didn't mean he always agreed with what they wrote about him, and it certainly took exception to a lot of what they wrote, but he was so beguiling, and I think the American people could see his facility with language, with the English language, his extensive knowledge of the issues, and frankly, this was the must-see TV of its time in many ways.
20:51
We were just so beguiled, the press included, with this young, elegant, auspicious president. It's interesting, five days after his inauguration, I believe a third of all Americans tuned into that first press conference because we were so entranced by him, and among other things, Jeremi, he had to tell the American people to stop sending letters and telegrams because the West Wing was becoming overwhelmed.
21:18
I think one of the biggest concerns that a lot of young people like myself have is that maybe the skills today that are required to run for political office, to win the presidency, to campaign so effectively and win so many people over are not the same ones that are best adapted for governments. How did Kennedy's skills as a communicator translate or connect to his skills in government and as a legislator, not as a legislator, but as someone with a legislative agenda?
21:53
Well, I think he was able to convey those ideas very effectively and successfully to the American people and to a large extent the world. When Kennedy stands in front of the Berlin Wall and says, Ich bin ein Berliner, I am a Berliner because I'm a citizen of freedom, hence a citizen of Berlin, that makes a marked impression. But I think you're right, Zachary.
22:20
Those are two fundamentally different skills. On the one hand, you have somebody who needs to convey ideas to the American people, to the press, and on the other hand, somebody who has to work behind the scenes to get his agenda done. Your dad mentioned LBJ earlier and why LBJ was not able to effectively communicate as JFK did.
22:47
I think, and I just want to add to that, Kennedy, we have this word as though it's a brand new concept in 21st century America, authentic. We had other words that were just like that, sincere or genuine, but Kennedy was authentic. He didn't pretend to be anything that he wasn't.
23:11
He knew he was a child of great wealth. In fact, he gave a press conference where it was expected that he would be running for president. He whipped out of his pocket an imaginary telegram from his father and it read, Dear Jack, don't buy any more votes than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide. He didn't contrive a personality that he thought would fit the American people. He was very much himself.
23:45
Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, while he was incredibly effective behind the scenes, perhaps no one was more effective than him in the 20th century, contrived this ostensibly presidential personality that simply was not authentic. It was disingenuous and it really in effect tamped down the Lyndon Johnson that was so powerful behind the scenes. I think that was part of Kennedy's appeal. He was really the genuine article. He was the real deal and part of that was his authenticism.
24:20
Mark, that's so well said. I think your book lives up to its title. Your story is a story of policy, of course.
24:28
It's a story of an individual. It's a biography. It's an analysis of the presidency, but it is really a story of how Kennedy uses his grace to lead.
24:40
Of course, it's the oldest story in the world that the great leaders, whatever that means to be a great leader, that they have grace. Franklin Roosevelt had a certain grace about him. I think you capture that.
24:53
You describe that as well as anyone I've read on this. I wonder, though, how then you think about that in light of many of the other things you include in the book as the honest historian you are that run against this. I mean, the test of any book is does it capture the complexity of a life and yours certainly does.
25:13
In particular, you very honestly and in great detail talk about Kennedy's affairs and it's hard to have a conversation about Kennedy today without talking about that, particularly the story of Mimi Beardsley, which we only learned about, I guess, a decade or two ago, this 19-year-old intern who I think it's fair to say is sexually exploited by the president. Yet there's the image, of course, of Camelot and Kennedy and Jackie and the children. You're also very clear that Kennedy was not the most engaged father.
25:43
This is not a book on that. Kennedy is not a model of child rearing. I'm just curious how you think about this. All lives are contradictions in a way. How do you think about this in relationship to the grace that you also describe?
25:56
Yeah, it's a fair question, Jeremi, and I had to wrestle with that too, as you do with any biography. Kennedy stands on feet of clay at times and shows flashes of greatness at others, and I think that his great moral failing is his womanizing. That said, I'm certainly not rationalizing womanizing, but I remember talking to Gerald Ford years ago and he was talking about Washington in that age.
26:23
He said that it was quite common. In fact, it was the general rule that a lawmaker on Capitol Hill had affairs, illicit or otherwise. Some were very open. Gerald Ford certainly did not. I think he was faithful to his wife. They had a very close relationship, but most of his contemporaries, most of his peers did.
26:47
Kennedy was certainly no exception. In the testosterone-filled Kennedy household, it was almost a way of keeping score, a way of competing with his father and his brothers, and to some degree, so you can chalk it up to being part of the zeitgeist. By the same token, there is that relationship with Mimi Beardsley that you referenced very astutely.
27:11
You just can't get over that. He not only exploits her, he really objectifies her. He makes her almost this concubine, and in fact, at one point commands her to perform a sexual act on a friend in aid. That just can't be chalked up to the zeitgeist. That is just a deep, deep personal flaw, and it's really hard to get around. By the same token, you see Kennedy in leadership and in these pivotal moments in the presidency, and as you suggested, Jeremi, he does show a certain grace that helps us to circumvent the crises that he was laden with during the course of his presidency.
28:00
Right, and you certainly show that very well, in a really well-described few chapters, I think, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I want readers to read the book. I don't want us to share all that with them. I want them to buy the book to read that, because I think the Cuban Missile Crisis, as you say, is probably the most significant Cold War crisis.
28:18
I'd like us to close, Mark, on the natural place to close, the assassination, and not so much what happens. I think everyone knows the story, but more how we should think about it today. Is it really a turning point in our history, and how do you look upon it?
28:40
It's one of the things I think you do that's very new in this book. You're looking upon that assassination now, not just about 50 years hence, but also from the perspective of what's happened in the last decade or two, to the nature of American democracy. How do you look upon that moment right now?
29:01
It's a great tragedy. We have seen this president through almost three years of, again, this incredibly consequential time in our history, and he is showing tremendous promise. Kennedy is cut down, I'm going to use Zachary's words here, by a bullet flying unimagined when he is in his prime.
29:28
He's 46 years of age. He's gone through perhaps the most dangerous hour of humankind with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and stands on the world at that point unparalleled. There is nobody who has the stature of John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he is killed in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.
29:46
I think there are myths that spring up about Kennedy partly because he's martyred, Jeremi, that get in the way of remembering Kennedy, perhaps as we should. We imagine what Kennedy would've done had he faced Vietnam or civil rights or other things. And I think my guess is there would've been travails that affected Kennedy that would've diminished our view of him in time.
30:15
There were these daunting crises that he would've faced. And we can think of Kennedy and what he would've done and imagine the very best of outcomes, but by no means would Kennedy have necessarily been able to deliver them.
30:30
I think in, and you were alluding to this earlier, in so many ways, Kennedy is also a symbol of what it is to be free.
30:40
Because of the, soaring rhetoric of his administration, including the iconic addresses he makes at the foot of the Berlin Wall and American University and, at his inauguration, we think of him in some ways as symbolizing what it is to be American and what American democracy means to the world.
31:03
I think there's a lot to that. And, our final question, Mark, and it's the one we always ask, and I know it's one you think about deeply. What should we, what should young listeners in particular, take from Kennedy's life? What are the lessons for leadership today?
31:20
You know, I think we look at the, what a perilous state democracy is in right now, I know that this is what this podcast is ultimately about, Jeremi, and we understand its fragility now more than any time in at least a generation.
31:39
But there were existential crises that democracy was going through in Kennedy's era, as well as again, we were at the height at that time of the Cold War and we saw Soviet tyranny, and to a large extent Chinese tyranny, posing a threat on the world stage.
31:59
I think that this is nothing new and we can get through it if we resolve to make this country as strong as possible. And the one thing I would urge young people in particular to do is get involved in the electoral process. Jeremi, I mean, you're married to an elected official, you know how important this is.
32:21
I would urge them to certainly to vote, but also to get to, to, volunteer at the polls, to volunteer on campaigns, to get educated on the issues. There are other things you, we can do to strengthen our democracy, but there's nothing more important than voting the right people into office.
32:43
Absolutely right, and it's one of the central messages of our podcast, the importance of participatory democracy and that means getting involved in all ways that one can, Zachary is Mark's description of Kennedy and this discussion does it open avenues for young people, you think?
33:01
I think so. And I think what's powerful about his analysis is that. It's very much aware of Kennedy's flaws. And I think we have to remember when we look back on our history, that it is not the story of a few perfect moments we've never managed to achieve again, but of a number of flawed and yet, and yet very successful, hopeful moments in our history. And we have to be able to learn from both the enormous achievements of those moments, but also also the failings
33:31
I think, Mark that Zachary has given the perfect answer for why people should read your book. What do you think?
33:37
Zachary I owe you big time, by the way, I think you should run for office, but that's a whole separate conversation.
33:44
We have that conversation quite often. And our listeners often tell me that too. Mark, thank you so much for joining us and for writing this book, I wanna remind our listeners, it's Incomparable Grace by Mark Updegrove, and it's a fantastic book. It's a thoughtful and deep read, but also a quick read.
34:04
And I encourage you to, and a quick read in the best sense in that it's a book you don't put down and you begin it, in New York City and you land in Los Angeles and you've finished it, which is the mark of a good book in my mind. Mark. Congratulations.
34:17
Jeremi, Zachary. Thanks so much. It's been a delightful conversation.
34:21
Thank you, Zachary for your poem, and thank you most of all, to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week's episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 208: The Third Reconstruction
00:25
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every week is special on our podcast, but this week is really, really special. We're joined by one of my best academic friends, one of my best friends as a whole, and one of the truly great scholars of race and democracy in our society. He's been on our podcast a number of times before. But today we are really privileged and fortunate to have Dr. Peniel Joseph with us to discuss his brand new book, which is just out this week, which I hope every one of our listeners will be reading in the next few days. It's called The Third Reconstruction. Peniel, thank you so much for joining us at such a busy time to talk about your new book.
01:11
Oh, it's my pleasure, Jeremi. Thank you.
01:13
Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair for Ethics at the LBJ School and the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of numerous seminal groundbreaking books that have shaped the way that we think about our history as a society.
01:33
He began his career writing some of the cutting-edge scholarship on the Black Power movement, then went on to write about Stokely Carmichael and Barack Obama, and now, of course, this really great book on The Third Reconstruction. I should also mention, I almost forgot, his wonderful and really groundbreaking book on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as The Sword and the Shield. And now, as I said, we have The Third Reconstruction. Before we go to our discussion with Dr. Peniel Joseph, we have, of course, Zachary Suri's scene- setting poem. What's your poem titled today, Zachary?
02:14
The Third Reconstruction
02:16
You're stealing his title. Come on, man. Shamelessly. Go ahead, Zachary. Let's hear it.
02:23
The Third Reconstruction. The first time I ever saw a voting booth, I voted for a black man. My father let me check the box in the basement gymnasium of a high school in Madison. I stood on his feet, probably at four years old, as I maneuvered the pen over the seemingly interminable names. As they fed the ballot into the great machine, I watched the digits advance on the little screen and held my breath.
02:52
The first time I ever heard the President of the United States, it was his voice on the radio. It was his face on the television screen. And when I first understood what it meant to be an American on a corduroy couch on January 20, 2009, they were his words.
03:11
The first time I ever saw my father cry, I was watching the same man from a pulpit in Charleston. I was hearing the same voice cry out the words of that ancient song. He was asking for grace. He was demanding our epiphany. He was saying that, in the end, they will always lose. And the first time I ever cried for a reason, it was his eulogy from another pulpit in Atlanta, singing the praises of John Lewis, a man I saw once in a giant auditorium from afar, just as, in the same auditorium, I saw that same man speaking to the stars.
03:53
And though I never understood his words, though what he was trying to say was never really clear, it made all the difference in the world, even if, in the end, they do sometimes win.
04:06
You're going to make me cry again, Zachary. What is your poem about?
04:11
My poem is about how powerful it was for me, as a young person, born at the turn of the 21st century, to grow up with a black man as president, how important and how transformative that was. And I think that that's really the core of what we're talking about here in the Third Reconstruction. Absolutely, the promise and the peril of that. Indeed.
04:33
So, Peniel, one of the things I love about your new book, and what's unique, I think, to this book from the rest of your work, is this book, you're really quite personal. You talk about your mom, and you talk about what Obama meant to you pretty early on in this book.
04:49
Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, as a fellow writer, the older we get, the more introspective we get. And we're also trying to flex different muscles. So I think putting in memoir and writing in a different way was really exciting, in addition to the historical and the political analysis. So I'm really excited about the book in that way.
05:15
You have a really powerful statement. You have a lot of powerful statements in here, but one that jumped out at me pretty early on, around page 23. You say, American history, since the end of the Civil War, has involved a struggle between Reconstructionists and Redemptionists for the nation's very soul. The contrasting approaches of these two perspectives have shaped the nation's entire history, not only on matters connected directly to race, but also in how Americans have defined citizenship, which is a key topic in your book, the national identity and democracy since 1865. What do you mean by that really powerful sentence?
05:56
Well, no, thank you. I think it's like me and you have had these conversations for really two decades now, and I think the further you become a student of history, the past, the more it enables you to understand the present. So I think when we think about Barack Obama, and Zachary's great poem was just about Obama, but also people like John Lewis or Fannie Lou Hamer, and then we think about the movement for Black lives, and then we think about Trump and MAGA and the Tea Partiers and the birther movements. The way in which I argue in the book that we should make sense of January 6th, both the white riot, but also the hearings and the debates about it.
06:40
Justice Ketanji, you know, Jackson. How do we make sense of all the things that are happening around us? And I think Reconstructionists versus Redemptionism is really what has framed American democracy from 1865 to the present. And I think there are times when Redemptionists win and are winning that debate, and there are times when Reconstructionists are winning that debate. And I think Obama was so important, and I argue that he's the first hinge point for the third Reconstruction, because you look at how that affected Zachary, how that affected all of us.
07:25
It affected generations of people, both in the United States and globally, because it made people think that we could be a multiracial democracy for real. You know, France doesn't have a Black prime minister. The UK doesn't seem like it'll ever get a Black prime minister or even a South Asian prime minister, whether they're conservative, whether they're Tories or liberals, right? It's a real big deal.
07:48
And so I think that when we see and frame it, Reconstructionists versus Redemptionists, we're able to say a lot about not just race, but about American democracy, big government versus small government, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and like you were alluding to, really citizenship and dignity, and how is that going to look, even in Austin, Texas, our own beloved Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin, because even in liberal and progressive states and cities and paradigms, you have Redemptionist inclinations that frame when we discuss school choice or we discuss climate change and environmental racism, segregation, when we discuss political power or wealth and equity.
08:35
So I think it gives us a good conceptual tool to understand why Charlottesville, but also why Obama, right? And Obama in Richmond, Virginia, and how did that happen? In the Capitol of the Confederacy and the night before the election, he's in tears and there's over 100,000 people there, predominantly white. And so people would say, well, wow, that's amazing. How did that happen? And I think this gives us a framework in the history that's told here, a way for us to conceptualize both the past, the present, and hopefully the future.
09:16
Right, and you see a cycle, right? I mean, in some ways, you're doing your own cycles of American history here, right? You see these cycling through these moments of Reconstructionist promise, the first one after the Civil War, the second one after the Second World War, reaching its pinnacle with the Civil Rights Movement and the third with Obama. And you see also in each case a pushback or a backlash, as you call it, right?
09:37
Absolutely. I think we are in these unhappy patterns of history and we can see it in all three periods of Reconstruction. I think the reason why we usually focus more in the second Reconstruction than the first is because it provides us with a context to get to Barack Obama. And like I say in the book, it's not just Barack Obama, though. That second Reconstruction really configures a social justice, racial justice consensus for the next 50 years. And that's how we get Hillary Clinton. That's how we get John Ossoff. That's how we get really the most wealth and power and equity that people of color have ever had, and women, in the whole history of the republic. It's from 63 to 2013.
10:25
When you look at our republic before then, you don't have as many people of color and women who are elected officials, who are businesspersons and entrepreneurs, who are successful, fabulously successful, who are able to create wealth, who are able to become leaders in so many different industries, not just acting and pop culture and sports, but in the sciences and at universities. I mean, me and you are examples of that. So I think that period is hugely, hugely important.
10:55
And it makes sense that during that period, people thought that Obama's victory was sort of going to be a capstone. But as we see, and I try to delineate in the book, especially when I talk about Obama and BLM and sort of that creative tension, Obama was really not just the end of one era, but it was also the beginning of a new period of reconstruction where you were going to see that kind of backlash against everything that Obama represented, because he represents so much.
11:31
You know, I think it's really interesting the way you describe the sort of cyclical nature of American history and of this reconstruction at a societal level. But how do we understand it at the personal level? How can people who voted for Obama in 2008, 2012, and then turn around and vote for Trump in 2016, how do we understand that phenomenon, that those two conflicting ideas can perhaps exist in the same person?
11:58
Well, I think that those two ideals can exist in the same person, but part of it is how we tell the narrative and the story about Barack Obama and also American history. I think one of the most powerful aspects of all three periods of Reconstruction is the narrative power, the narrative power, both by Redemptionists and Reconstructionists. So in the first Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is the Lost Cause Redemptionist narrative, over and above the Emancipationist narrative, the abolition democracy narrative of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.
12:38
In the second Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is going to be King's narrative, the I Have a Dream narrative, John F. Kennedy's narrative, the narrative that it's a moral issue of civil rights and human and political rights.
12:52
And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.
13:52
And those protesters shouted, the whole world is watching. And they were really mocking the United States. They were mocking the notion of American democracy because in certain ways, when we look at 1968 in Chicago, they were saying the whole world is watching that American democracy is a sham. We are being beaten and brutalized, including there were grandmothers being beaten by the Chicago PD in the summer of 1968. You flash, you fast forward 40 years later and it's a peaceful demonstration with really a couple of hundred thousand people in Grant Park celebrating a president-elect who many thought was an impossible dream. That's really, really powerful. So that narrative seems to be winning.
14:37
And then we see the birther narrative, the Tea Party narrative, and really the Trumpian MAGA narrative is really the first narrative, I would argue, since the Reconstruction era. So I think Trump and MAGA, the narrative is even more powerful than George Wallace. t's more powerful than Reaganism. It's more powerful than Goldwaterism, right? Because it goes back to that 19th century, that idea that Black success was going to repudiate white privilege and white supremacy and had to be stopped at all costs. So we are locked into this narrative war.
15:15
And then BLM, Black Lives Matter, has another narrative. And their narrative is a narrative of really radical and revolutionary abolition democracy. And what Du Bois meant by abolition democracy was this idea of a world after slavery that was free of systems and institutions of punishment and marginalization and death and anti-Blackness. And that was going to be a multiracial democracy where all people were going to have positive outcomes and aspirations and opportunities. And I think when we look at those different narratives, the 1619 Project versus the assaults on so-called critical race theory, we see how important the power of storytelling is.
16:02
So I still think Barack Obama, hugely important. I admire him a whole lot. But what I show in the book, the narrative that Black Lives Matter was articulating was really equally important because it was a narrative of Black dignity from below, people who perhaps Barack and Michelle Obama never would have met in their lives, people who are incarcerated, people who are on the margins, people who are disabled mentally and physically, and that those people mattered and that the president didn't understand their suffering at the level that the people who were experiencing it understood.
16:42
And that's why I have a part in the book where in December of 2014, he has a meeting, Obama has a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists in the White House, and they're going back and forth on change. And I say that Obama at that meeting never could have imagined a Donald Trump presidency. And the juxtaposition is that the Black Lives Matter activists, the Ferguson activists, absolutely could. And they were warning him in that meeting, this is coming, this is coming. And he absolutely refused to believe it until 2020.
17:21
One thing I show is that the optimism of 2004 and 2008 is replaced in 2020 with one of the darkest speeches Obama ever gives during COVID at the Democratic National Convention, which is, of course, on Zoom at that point because nobody can be there in person. And Obama says that democracy is in peril. This is the person who's absolutely the most optimistic leader of any race of his entire generation. He switches because he sees the coming storm that I think BLM had already witnessed.
17:58
It's a part of your book that I think jumps out, and I have those pages marked up as I mark things up when I enjoy reading them. Right before that section, Peniel, you talk about Barack Obama as the first president to visit a federal prison, right? And I didn't know that, actually. So at some level, he is trying to reach out, right? And part of what I feel is underlying your argument in your book is that there's a certain desire to connect, but yet there's also an exceptionalist narrative that he carries and perhaps a naivete about the pushback, the backlash. And your book is basically reminding us that every moment of progress seems to spark this backlash. What should Obama have been doing that he wasn't doing but that he could have done if he had known the history you outlined so well here?
18:53
You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and I think me and you agree with this, Jeremi, is that we need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but that doesn't mean we don't need a positive story of America, right? And I'll say that again. We need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but it does not mean we don't need a positive, consensus-building, aspirational story of America. Martin Luther King Jr. called it building the beloved community.
19:24
So what I mean by that specifically is that, you know, Obama needed to tell us about not just the beauty but the bitter parts. And I know that's not great for campaigns. I completely understand that that's not great for campaigns, but it's super important for us to have a narrative that can talk about histories of racial slavery, anti-Semitism, discrimination against women, queer folks, Latinx folks, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, disabled people, just the whole gamut, but also talk simultaneously about the activists of all colors, of all backgrounds, who've pushed back against that, who've dreamed of a different, reconstructed America, a multiracial democracy, an abolition democracy, and have pushed all of us into getting Labor Day, Memorial Day, rights for veterans, rights for poor people, who want to end homelessness and racism and anti- Semitism, who really want to build that beloved community and make this country a shining city on the hill.
20:32
So I think that that story is what's so necessary. That's why I'm a supporter of the 1619 Project. I think, like anything, it can be criticized. Nothing is completely perfect, but I like the idea of this new origin story for American history that looks at the good, the bad, the ugly, but also the beautiful parts of American history. And once we provide people those parts of American history, it makes them stronger. It makes our democracy more stronger. It makes people more patriotic. It makes people love the country more once they understand all that we've been through, and it makes us try to change, as James Baldwin says, to achieve our country for the first time. So Obama didn't give us all the benefit of the doubt. I think we're all stronger than politicians ever assume. I think we're smarter than politicians ever assume. I think we're more resilient, and we have more empathy and compassion than politicians ever assume.
21:30
So you could talk about the bad that happened during the first, second, and third Reconstructions, but like I do in this book, I also talk about the good and the promise and the potential. That's the whole thing. So what we have to say is that, yes, we can be the greatest country ever on the face of the earth. We're not quite there yet, but there's many people who have strived to make us that golden, that shining city on a hill. And I think Obama starts to do that really starting in 2015 when he's not facing any elections. He starts to do more of that.
22:07
A great speech on history at Selma, a great speech towards the NAACP about mass incarceration. He starts to knit together a much more humanistic story where he's more comfortable talking about the flaws of the country, because if we just keep on talking about American exceptionalism, we can't explain the gun violence in the country, the racism, the police brutality, by saying all we're doing is constantly perfecting our union. It's a bedtime story, but it doesn't mean we can't have this positive feeling and this love of country, but we have to love the country enough to criticize the country.
22:50
Right. I agree 100%. I think that opens up another really important question that you raise so well in the book, which is, and it's an issue through each of the three reconstructions. How do you get people who have had power to feel comfortable sharing it with those who have not had power? And you make the point in the book very well that there's a through line, you call it, from Nixon to Reagan to Trump, of those who have had privilege, often racial privilege, but not exclusively, it could be economic privilege that's not always racial, hoarding that privilege, not wanting to share it. How do you craft a narrative along the lines you just described that makes people comfortable sharing their privilege, Peniel?
23:34
Yeah, I think that's the test and the challenge. And I think part of it is laying bare the most important parts of our history. I think you can see why from a redemptionist perspective, there's been such an assault, not just on the critical 19 project, but calling any kind of effort to have a more complex, truthful American history, critical race theory that is somehow anti-white and going to brainwash our kids. You could see that from a redemptionist perspective because stories are really the most important part of all of this. And I know you agree, the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell our families, the way in which I tell my daughter, you tell Zach, it's so important, the stories we tell.
24:24
So the 1619 project and the way in which so many hundreds of thousands of teachers were using that and continue to in certain states that are allowed to use it, that was important because I think when you tell a deeper story of American history, it means that the newer generations, people who are the sons and daughters of those who are in power are going to be much more receptive to the idea of power sharing. Because yeah, we can legislate this, we can come up with policies, we can come up with nonprofits, but then at the end of the day, the institutions are us. We are the institutions, right? And so we have to have a baseline understanding of American history.
25:08
I think these three reconstruction periods are really the most important parts of our history. So I think the more in which we're able to craft a narrative that's inclusive, a narrative that lets people see themselves in that story, but also understand what happened with Tulsa, what happened with Japanese internment camps, what happened with the long and bitter history of anti-Semitism here in this country, what happened with what we've done to our Latinx, our Hispanic population, what we've done to indigenous folks, what we've done to AAPI folks and queer folks, the better off they're able to understand how we can build that beloved community and really the sacrifices that are going to be called for. Because we've embedded a system of unequal power relations and when people hear this word equity, they become frightened because they think their kid's not going to get to the right school and have the right outcomes, or they're not going to any longer have access to the same neighborhoods.
26:13
But power sharing means not that you're going to be diminished, but everyone is going to be, or more people are going to be elevated. And I think part of that, the central part of this is the story we tell about America and us and our place within America.
26:29
I want to be careful how I phrase this, but how do we tell that unified American history? How do we come to one narrative of our country that acknowledges the many flaws, the many, I don't want to say mistakes, but tragedies in our history without splitting us into people groups, if you understand what I mean? How do we use this difficult reckoning with our history to create unity and not division?
27:00
And Zachary, before Peniel answers, maybe you should also share your struggles at your school over these issues, struggles you've had in diversity council and elsewhere to get people to come together around these issues.
27:09
I think what I would just say is I think there's an unwillingness sometimes among certain people to recognize the complexity of these issues, that it's not as simple as splitting people into people groups or to say that these are the oppressors and these are the oppressed. It has to be a nuanced understanding. And I guess my question is, how do we have that nuanced understanding, but also come to some sort of consensus about our history and what we need to do moving forward?
27:39
Well, I think that's a great question. I think, one, we have to be willing to speak truth to power, because there are structures and systems that have oppressed folks and continue to. I think, two, we have to learn and listen to each other's stories. So I make it a point of reading, obviously, not just African-American history, but histories of, we see the late Barbara Aaron Reich just passed away, histories of white working class, histories, think about Tommy Orange and They Are There, history of Native people, histories. I read Julian Zeller's great book on Rabbi Heschel, histories of Jewish Americans, just histories of the whole multiracial component of the United States.
28:27
It's important to read that. But we also have to acknowledge that the core feature of American democracy, one that I think has been a stain on our democracy, but also has been unifying, especially for redemptionists, and in certain contexts for reconstructionists, is really anti-Blackness.
28:46
And so anti-Blackness is what creates the racial caste system that Isabel Wilkerson and others talk and write about, that hierarchy. You think about the caste system as a ladder with Blackness at the bottom, whiteness at the top, and other racial groups in between trying to figure and oscillate between both of those poles where they fit in. So I would say, Zachary, there are oppressors. It doesn't mean that somehow all white people are that. But systemically, there is a system of white supremacy in the country that goes back to the founding of the country. But in 1865, we actually had a way out through Freedman's Bureau, reparations, through land and equity for African-American farmers. We actually had a way out of white supremacy.
29:41
And what we see through the history of the Third Reconstruction, the First Reconstruction, and I write about it in this book, is that it was violently repudiated. It wasn't just policies and Black codes and convict lease system. This was organized systematic terror. When we think about January 6th, 2021, January 19th of 1871 is when Congress launches the official investigation into Klan violence. And by March of 1871, there's going to be public congressional hearings that lead to the enforcement acts during the Grant Administration.
30:14
So this is big news. Thaddeus Stevens is saying colored people are being slaughtered by the thousands in the South. That's what Thaddeus Stevens is saying, the venerable congressman from Pennsylvania, who is one of the stalwart abolitionists and reconstructionists of the time period. So we have to be courageous enough to call that out, especially now because we're facing a backlash that really happened very quickly after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and has really been congealed in legislation, but a backlash against that kind of truth-telling. But we have to listen and learn about each other's stories, Zachary. I would say that's the biggest thing.
31:00
We have to listen and learn about each other's stories. And sometimes people will say, well, my group suffered, your group suffered. The organizing principle of the suffering actually has been anti-Black. And it's important for us to understand that. That's why the struggle for Black equality and Black citizenship and dignity is a universal struggle. It's just universal and Black, because if we get that, no other group is going to somehow be isolated and suffer because anti-Blackness has been the organizing principle of the racial caste system, both in the United States and globally.
31:40
So part of it is courage. Part of it is listening. Part of it is going to be struggle. It's going to be struggle because it takes White people who are in solidarity with anti-racist movements to really help us push forward. And in certain ways, I think 2020, one of the most optimistic aspects was the number of White people who were out in the streets alongside of Black and other people of color during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer. And we had never seen that level of outrage or commitment in either of the first two periods of Reconstruction. So that still gives me hope.
32:22
I wonder, though, how do you approach an issue like since it's Labor Day, labor unions, right? Where you have a structure that was in some cases created to try and keep Black people and people of color out of the workforce, but at the same time, in other cases, was created to help Black people attain greater rights in the workplace. I guess my question is, if we're looking at every issue of American history through this understanding of anti-Blackness in America, how do we avoid overlooking the economic, the otherwise social and political divisions that also shape our country and an issue like organized labor?
33:12
I think we look at it simultaneously. I think labor is a great example because I talk about SCIU 1199. My mom was part of a labor union for 40 years at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. So that's very near and dear. In a lot of ways, my politics were shaped by labor and labor movements and reading about labor movements.
33:31
Labor is a complicated issue. On the one hand, when we think about labor movements, a lot of times we always leave out enslaved Black people as part of labor movements. I think the work of Robin Kelly and Saidiya Hartman and other scholars have really gone a long way towards rectifying that. So we've got to think about labor capaciously. Then at the same time, we've got to be truthful about both labor that has been anti-racist, even in the 19th century.
34:04
You think about the Wobblies, the international workers of the world versus the Knights of Labor. You think about the CIO versus the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations versus the American Federation of Labor. You think about Eugene Debs' socialism versus Hubert Harrison's socialism. So we have to be very cognizant of the pitfalls of just saying, oh, we can have Black, white, unite, fight kind of slogans. But one thing I'll say, Zach, when we think about contemporary labor, it's become much more multicultural and much more multiracial. Bus riders unions, justice for janitors.
34:47
1199, SCIU is the most multiracial union in the country. So we have to tell that complete story. The story of Black people forced to be so-called scabs because they weren't allowed in labor unions, but also the story of utilizing the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, DRUM, and the different revolutionary union movements coming out of Detroit and wildcat striking against the UAW so that Black folks could be foremen and have dignity on the shift line and on the worker line.
35:24
So we have to tell that whole story. And I think telling that whole story now, when we think about labor and so many immigrant laborers, in terms of we've got 11 million undocumented in the country. So many of those are Spanish speakers, but there's also from West Africa, from the Caribbean. And how does that shape the labor movement, especially household labor? Most of us, me and your dad are generation X. If we live long lives, we're going to have Caribbean and Spanish- speaking home health aid workers, because unless you're somehow healthy until you're 100 years old, you don't need anybody. I mean, maybe that could be your dad. He's going to be fine, right? I hope so. I hope so.
36:08
Most people, millions across the United States are going to need them. So I would say this requires courage because yeah, you have to remember Dr. King pissed people off. Obama pissed people off. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker. You're not always going to get the standing ovation when you tell people what they need to hear instead of telling people what they want to hear.
36:34
But one of the things King says in his speech, a drum major, for the drum major speech is that he's not interested in molding some kind of phony consensus. He says, I'm a builder and I'm going to shape consensus through my organizing. That means you tell people what they don't want to hear. So part of this, it requires courage on us, really. And again, it requires a lot of study and listening and patience because yes, the story is complicated, but there are some really robust truths that we should all be willing to articulate. And I think at our best, we do.
37:22
I think you think about the president and the student loan forgiveness and when people were pushing back, the White House was tweeting out all the PPE loans that conservatives had gotten from the government and not paid back. Millions and millions of dollars, but they were upset over these 10 and $20,000 loan forgiveness. So we have to be ready to speak truth to power.
37:47
And I think in certain ways, because of the times we live in, sometimes people think it's going to be easy. Like you saw George Floyd, you saw the millions of people in the streets, but that didn't translate into the policy at the federal level that a lot of people thought or assumed. So there's been no George Floyd Justice and Policing Act passed. There's been no For the People Expansion of Voting Rights Act passed. There's been no John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act passed. So part of it is we have to be in it for the long haul, Zachary. We have to be in it for the long haul because the backlash is right here. It's thick. It's among all of us, especially us.
38:28
We live right here in Texas, even at the University of Texas. The backlash is here. And this is the point in our history where you can see it's a time for choosing and actually living up to your commitments and principles becomes the hardest thing to do in this time rather than in 2020 or 2008. It's easy in 2008. It's very easy to say you're on the right side of history. You've got 69 million people backing you up. It's harder when you're in that minority, and we have to, again, be principled enough to live up to our commitments at this point.
39:09
So, Peniel, I want to close by quoting part of your conclusion, and then I want to ask you to reflect, if you would, for a few minutes at our closing on your mom because I think she's sort of the angel hovering over this book in many ways. I've known you for so long, but I've learned so much about you reading this book. There's a wonderful photo of you and your mom. Also, little tiny Peniel with his mom. I love that photo, by the way. Worth the price of the book just for that. But you write at the end beautifully
39:43
I believe that the struggle for black dignity and citizenship can be achieved in our lifetime, but it must continue even if it takes several lifetimes. And then at the very end, you say today in the midst of another period of reconstruction, which you've described so well for us here, we have a grave political and moral choice to make. I choose hope. It seems to me a lot of that hope comes from your mom. And I'd like to close, if you're willing, just reflecting on her influence on your analysis and all that you've shared with us today.
40:14
No, thank you, Jeremi. Yes, my mother, Germaine Joseph, 83 years young, still lives in Queens, New York. Really my biggest teacher and the most influential person on me intellectually, politically, morally, the whole works.
40:31
Haitian immigrant who came to United States in 1965, worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for 40 years. I was on my first picket lines in elementary school and really somebody who encouraged me and my older brother to read and to write and to think, but also to be active, to be active citizens. If you believed in something, she was fine with you going out and demonstrating that belief.
41:03
Certainly, she wanted you to be careful, but to demonstrate that belief. And so she's been hugely, hugely important. The history of Haiti and the Haitian revolution, which I discuss and its connection to Black American history, the connection between Black feminism and these different social movements, but also just American politics and history. She's a big fan and reader of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy alongside of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Really loved reading books on not just the Haitian revolution, but Theodore Roosevelt and the American presidents. I remember getting my first book on the American presidents and kindergarten with her from the local public library in Queens. And that was a book that we used to always check out, check back in, check out, check back in.
41:53
And the final president there, initially when we checked it out was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was the president. Reagan had not been elected yet. And so they had Jimmy Carter's 1977 and they had a dash. And I remember that book, right? And that's how I memorized the first 39 presidents of the United States. So she's been my biggest champion, but also my biggest teacher.
42:18
And she, again, throughout the book, I look at these different Black activists, a lot of them Black women like Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, but she's been my biggest example. And she does provide me a measure, a large measure of hope. And hope really is a discipline. It's a faith and it's a discipline and it's a belief. And it's a discipline based on our practice. I think sometimes people who don't feel hopeful are really not out there in the world trying to help and do good.
42:50
I think the more you're out there in the world trying to help and do good, the more hopeful you feel because you're not just reacting and sitting back on the couch and woe is me and you're actually rolling up your sleeves and getting into the arena. And it's important for us to do that. And I think my mom did that just through example of going to work every day, very, very long commute from Queens Village to East 92nd Street every day, sometimes six days a week, like I write.
43:19
So it's really, you know, our parents worked harder than us. And as you know that better than me, Jeremy, and, you know, it's really important for us, all of us who are so privileged to be able to read and write and study, to remember that there were generations who absolutely worked harder than us, suffered more than us, right. And were more resilient than us.
43:42
So the only thing we can do is try to match their courage and that resilience because we have given, been given so much privilege in our lives, right. In our lives, we're never going to work as hard as they did. We're never going to have to go to another country, learn another language on the fly like they did, right. I mean, this is extraordinary. So they're the role model. So really we have no right to complain personally. And I don't mean politically, but I mean personally. So the example that she set and the discipline that she exemplified is really something that I, that lives within me to this day. And so the book is really dedicated to her and, and, and these, these Black and really other women, all women who've, who've shaped so many of us men who've been fortunate enough to be at their, at their, the stool by their feet, just taking in their wisdom.
44:33
Yeah. Well, as you know, Peniel, in the Jewish faith, we, we have a phrase, Lador Vador, which means from generation to generation. And, and I think that captures your book so well, your book is a mitzvah because it, it captures the importance of one generation teaching another.
44:50
And we go through different periods of reconstruction because sometimes we forget and to remember and to learn the history and to keep building on that history and improving ourselves and pushing harder in creative and hopeful ways. I think your book is a chronicle and analysis of that, but also an inspiration from your mom for us to do more of that. I encourage all of our listeners to pick up the book, The Third Reconstruction. It's now available and in every bookshop, go pick it up, go find an independent bookstore to buy it from. Peniel, thank you for joining us today.
45:24
Oh, thank you. Thanks to you and Zachary. Thanks for reading it. And I really enjoyed this conversation.
45:30
So did we. Zachary, thank you for your really tear-jerking poem and for your insights and for your bringing these issues every day into the discussions you're having with young people, which is so important. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.
Episode 236: Birchers and Right-Wing Extremism
00:26
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today's episode focuses on the John Birch Society, which was quite well known, quite infamous in the 1960s and 70s, sort of fell off the radar screen, but has now become a more important subject of study and political analysis for our understanding of American democracy and the challenges American democracy faces today.
00:53
The John Birch Society is a far right wing group. And it's a group that has connections to the world that we deal with today.
01:02
We're fortunate to have with us a well known historian who has written what I think is the best book on the John Birch Society and those who were a part of it and those who are connected to it one way or another. The book is titled Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. And the writer and historian and friend is Matthew Dallek. Matt, thanks for joining us today.
01:27
Thank you so much for having me and for the kind introduction.
01:32
Matt is a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University's College of Professional Studies. He's the author of numerous books that I recommend to all of you. The first book of his that I read, which I think is the first book he wrote, is The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics. This was actually one of the first really serious studies of Reagan's influence on American politics from a historical perspective.
02:01
Recently, Matt published about five, six years ago, a really important book on the origins of homeland security, how we think about homeland security in our society. It's called Defenseless Under the Night: The Franklin Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security. Really important for those interested in understanding how we conceive of homeland security in our society. And then most recently, as I already said, he's published just a few weeks ago, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
02:31
Matt also publishes frequently in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Politico and many, many other publications. So he's not only a scholar of the past, but an observer, a keen observer of the present. And that's, I think, one of the strengths of his book and one of the strengths of what we'll be able to talk with him about today, as we think about who the John Birchers were, where this far-right radical group came from, and what effect it had on and continues to have on our democracy.
02:59
Before we turn to our discussion with Matt, though, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What's the title of your poem today?
03:07
L'Chaim.
03:08
Is that the title of your poem or are you just wishing me well?
03:10
That's the title of the poem.
03:13
Okay, let's hear it.
03:15
Quite cold and quiet, they are marching past the gates, crowding into subway cars and walking past the windows of department stores. The scene is stagnant, though they move together in some jagged step, as if ice were tearing at their mustaches and frost turning their long beards gray. Gray beards, they have forgotten whence they came, that they too once smiled at the old men in their trench coats, counting their steps and forgetting to look at the sun. There is a certain banal audacity in this little charade of life, in the slow turn of revolving doors, their grim faces reminiscent of the revolver that stared me awake on one of those grim deportation nights, or the small whip of fire that consummates their perverse burning cross bacchanals. Look me in the eyes, I will give you a real smile, because I know someday there really will be ice in their beards, one of those cold, eternal, nothing freezes that bring even kings to their knees. May it be so. And together we'll go dancing on their frosty lawns, singing some ditty about roses or the beginning of love.
04:33
There's quite a lot you've packed into that poem, Zachary. What is it about?
04:36
I think it's about trying to confront one of the seeming paradoxes of the John Birch Society, and of the far right in the mid 20th century in the United States, which is how they both embraced a sort of very conservative kind of American conformity in a post-war sense, but then also politically with these violent radicals. And trying to come to terms with how someone can both be, as we stereotypically think, a sort of typical suburban American, a corporate office worker, but also have this violent and terribly hateful streak at the same time.
05:11
Yeah, I think that's a great observation, and it's at the center of your book, Matt. Your reaction?
05:16
It's a wonderful poem. I would love you to send it to me. I mean, it really captures, and I love your analysis of it. I mean, it really is one of the themes of the book, and frankly, one of the ideas that was so interesting to me as I did my research, which is that, you know, it's a puzzle, right?
05:35
How can, as I say, these colossi, men, the founders, especially, who, bestriding the world's most dynamic economy, how can they look at the country that, you know, basically gave them so much and say, you know, there are enemies who are overrunning us, and everything here is kind of twisted and distorted from within, and yet, you know, look how successful and powerful we are. And so that tension is really, it is a paradox, and I try to address it in the book.
06:08
And you use this phrase from the very beginning, radical conservatives, or conservative radicalism. I think you use it both ways. Those seem like contradictory terms, don't they?
06:19
Well, they do. Although, you know, it depends, I guess, on what one means by conservative, right? What is, and what does radical mean? You know, conservative, you know, at least in a kind of mid-20th century context for a lot of conservatives, did not necessarily mean conserving, did not mean conserving, let's say, the welfare state, or did not mean necessarily conserving, you know, U.S. foreign policy as it was defined in World War II or the early Cold War. It meant upending, right?
06:54
And so, but of course, the Birchers themselves, one of the reasons that I say that they were radical or ultra-conservative is that they had, believed in conspiracy theories, explicit racism, and isolationism, kind of hearkening back to early 20th century, the old right, and a more apocalyptic, violent mode of politics. And those things, and so their beliefs were really on the fringe and put them in a pretty radical place.
07:30
For those young listeners of ours, or perhaps older listeners as well, who might have no idea what the John Birch Society is, where did this group come from, and what did they become?
07:42
Yes, absolutely. So the Birchers, as big as they were in the 1960s, a kind of household name, you know, nowadays, right? They still exist, but, you know, they're kind of a shadow of their former selves.
07:55
So the Birchers were founded in December of 1958 by a former candy manufacturer named Robert Welch. And they were named after an evangelist-turned-army-intelligence-officer who was killed by Mao's communist forces 10 days after the end of World War II. He was seen as, this guy John Birch, seen as the first victim of World War III. And the society basically developed chapters, 20-person, capped at 20 people.
08:32
They started to spread all around the country. And they were devoted to, at least officially, educating the masses, the American public, about the internal threat of communists that, according to at least the Birch leaders, had begun to overrun America's institutions and was 60% or 70% on the way toward complete domination of American life.
08:59
So what was it that attracted people to this new organization founded by a candy manufacturer? And what did they do as they built this organization?
09:12
Well, one thing that attracted the kind of elites, the industrialists, and the very wealthy people who joined, was that they knew Robert Welch. They knew people in the National Association of Manufacturers. They shared a hatred of the New Deal, a hatred in some of the cultural directions of American life, and a sense that the US should not have been involved in World War II or had lost the peace or had lost basically the war against the communists.
09:49
So they shared those kinds of personal and ideological sensibilities. For a lot of other Americans, sort of upwardly mobile, suburban professionals, as one Bircher said, the Birch Society is the, quote, answer to every anti-communist prayer.
10:06
What did he mean by that? Well, he meant, I think, that the society enabled people to take action in their communities against the communist menace. So instead of just talking about communism, instead of just lamenting that, you know, communists and their allies had made inroads, the society allowed people to act. And in fact, Robert Welch and the Birch Society, the headquarters, one of the innovative things they did is to give people, give members, opportunities to go out in their community and take over a school board or a PTA or, you know, protest Earl Warren or put stickers up.
10:54
So people felt empowered, right? They felt like they could actually do something. And that was one of the, I think, attractions.
11:01
And this is the point actually very early in your book, Matt, where the parallels to today just jump out. Before we get into that in terms of tactics and goals and activism, how many people at the height of the Birch movement, how many people belong to this organization?
11:19
The best estimates are 60 to 100,000 members in the mid 1960s, 64, 65, around the time of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign and shortly thereafter. But it's, you know, it's been hard for historians and contemporaries at the time to get a real handle on the numbers because, you know, the society was quite secretive about its membership. The membership was, I think, constantly in flux. As I said before, they had these small chapters. So it was really hard to track, you know, who was a member, who wasn't.
11:57
But it gives you a sense, you know, 60 to 100,000, not that many in a country with more than 100, well over 100 million people at the time. But as I argue, you know, they demonstrated that 100,000 or 60,000 of members who were devoted to a cause, who were willing to kind of volunteer their time, put themselves and their money on the line, could have an outsized impact on politics and on political debate in a way that maybe millions of voters could not.
12:33
I think, Matt, this is one of the real insights in your book. One of the many contributions, but the one that really stuck with me is how they could have so much influence, yet have such a small, relatively small number of core members. And you remind us in the book of a historical episode that we've largely forgotten, even as historians, which is the impeach Earl Warren movement, which I think is one of these moments that encapsulates the influence of a small extreme group. Can you walk us through that?
13:01
Yeah, it's such an interesting moment. So one of the Birch societies, so the Birch Society actually very early on set up front groups. And the reason they did that was to kind of hide their tracks, so as to not let the communists, that was their thinking, right? Not let the communists know who was behind a particular action.
13:20
And impeach Earl Warren was one of the earliest in the early 60s acts that they undertook. But it was arguably the most effective or one of the most effective. And what they did was, is essentially launch a campaign using billboards. They erected billboards, I think, all across the country or many parts of the country. A lot of people did it at the local chapter level. I think I have one Birch member who helped fund 20 of these billboards. And these became a kind of iconic image of the time, because people saw them, right?
14:01
Remember, there was no social media in the early 1960s. And so, you know, people would see these billboards, it was talked about. And the idea of impeaching Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the United States, who was considered a giant, right, in American politics, he was governor of California earlier, and a giant in the judicial system, was really radical. And even some conservatives said, you know, that's going too far. The other point I'll make about it, though, is that what was kind of innovative about it, too, is that impeach Earl Warren. Well, what did that mean?
14:39
Well, for some Birchers and Birch supporters, it meant Brown versus Board of Education. It meant that Warren deserved to be impeached, because he had trampled on states' rights, and he had basically destroyed what they called the right, the freedom, to segregate by race in their states, in their towns. But to other people, also, it meant they did not like Warren's jurisprudence on banning prayer in schools, giving rights to criminal defendants. All of the kind of what we think of today as these sort of cultural hot-button issues. And impeach Earl Warren could encompass all of these pieces. And some were motivated by one piece, and others another. And it really was, I think, a powerful and memorableâ and also Warren himself, apparently, was not a fan of this movement.
15:36
One of theâ whenever I think of the John Birch Society and of the impeach Earl Warren movement, I think of the scene in Slaughterhouse-Five, the great novel of the 60s, in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who has seen the horrors of World War II, drives around with bumper stickers supporting the John Birch Society and the impeach Earl Warren movement. In what sense do you think that the society is born out of a unique mindset of the World War II generation and of that period post-war? And in what sense do you think maybe there are parallels between that generation or that moment and our own today?
16:17
And I just have to say, I love any time we can bring Kurt Vonnegut into this.
16:21
I mean, it's such a great question. And it's so interesting, too, because I read Slaughterhouse-Five many years ago, but I'd forgotten. I didn't remember that there was a Birch Society reference or a Bircher character in there.
16:35
The first thing I'll say is that it evokes the extent to which, in the 1960s, the Birchers penetrated the popular culture. And, Jeremi, earlier, you had asked, too, about, well, 60 to 100,000, not that many, but yet they had this huge impact. Well, people knew about them, right? Dr. Strangelove, one of the characters in there, Bob Dylan, did a song talking John Birch Paranoid Blues, Slaughterhouse-Five.
17:01
So you see the way in which it became like a cultural trope and both to be made fun of, but also to be supported. In terms of the post-war generation or the World War II generation, look, I think one point to make is that, as historians have argued for a long time, the 1950s were not exactly this harmonious consensus cultural era. There was no real hegemony within American society. There were deep divisions. And you see the Birchers, I think, coming out of not just World War II, but also the New Deal and, frankly, the Progressive Era, if we're going to go back further.
17:47
And they have a sense of a lost America, right, an America that had vanished. And it had vanished in part because of the growth of the welfare state, the encroachment, as they saw it, of civil rights, judicial intervention and overreach, and also the liberal internationalism, right, American engagement in the world.
18:15
One of their biggest slogans was get the US out of the UN. Well, that was born out of the World War II, of course, and the immediate post-World War II era. So I think it's a really perceptive question because they really were born, in a sense, and they were propelled by this sense that there had been decades of really big changes in the structure of American life, American politics, but also America's role in the world, and that those changes were fundamentally flawed and actually alien, right, that they were alien to the Constitution, alien to the country.
18:54
Birchers had a slogan that's apropos of your podcast, which is, we're a democracy, we're a republic, not a democracy, let's keep it that way.
19:04
And that, I think, evokes some of their mission. I can talk a little bit about, you know, comparisons to today, but- Well, there's such an obvious one there, of course, with certain individuals, for example, Senator Mike Lee from Utah today, who's made exactly, the words you used would be very familiar to him, that we're a republic, not a democracy.
19:30
But before we get to that, I want to get at the kind of root issue that you really address so well in the book. And you do it by evoking, of course, a historian that so many of us revere, who was writing at this time, Richard Hofstadter. And he, of course, famously wrote about status anxiety and a paranoid style in American history. Is that what this is? Is this part of a sort of long-term American affiliation or ascription to paranoia, conspiracy, a sense that those who don't feel they're controlling power, that they use conspiracy to delegitimize those who are using power in different ways?
20:12
I think that maybe that's one aspect of the book and kind of some of the themes of the book. I mean, Hofstadter, obviously, I mean, Hofstadter has to inform whether one agrees or disagrees with him. He's really seminal and he informs anyone who's writing about the modern American right. I tend to shy away from the use of the word paranoid in the book because, well, it's clinical and also it's pejorative. And what I also resist is trying to define the Birchers primarily through conspiracy theories, because at the time they were known for the, well, Robert Welch's, the Founder's Theory, that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. And that's a fluoridation of the water supply was a communist plot.
21:02
But, you know, as I argue in the book, the Birchers also tapped into other ideas. Now, conspiracies sometimes were woven through them, but not always. Right. Sex education in the schools. What was what were students learning? What were the books that were on offer in the libraries?
21:20
Isolationism, a more explicit form of racism than a lot of political actors at the time were used. And so, you know, and again, this more apocalyptic mode of politics. So conspiracy theories were were an element of it. And but I do think that it goes beyond that and that it has, you know, and Jeremi, this, of course, intersects with your work as well. Right.
21:50
These sort of much deeper roots in in American history and and a kind of, you know, concerns about sovereignty and nativism and and as I said, isolationism that and, you know, I think the Birchers kind of captured that as well. So, you know, I'll just say I don't want to reduce it right to a kind of paranoid conspiratorial style.
22:18
Right. No, it's obviously a cocktail of many things. And of course, and you talk about this in the book, white supremacy is part of that, too. So one of the traditional things historians and before historians, journalists at the time wrote about were the ways in which it appeared that leading Republican Party figures, Goldwater, but certainly also Ronald Reagan, leading party intellectual William F. Buckley, it appeared on the surface that they were separating themselves from the John Birch Society. Most of them, as you describe in the book, at one moment or another, criticize the leaders of the party, particularly Robert Welch. But you argue in the book pretty forcefully that, in fact, they continued these Republican Party leaders to try to bring Birchers into the fold and they tried not to alienate them. Can you say more about that?
23:12
Yeah, well, I try to capture in the book what I see is a tension within the conservative coalition. So just to back up, right, I argue that there is a significant dividing line between these ultra-conservative fringe Bircher types and mainstream conservatives, the electorally successful figures actually ranging from Eisenhower to Goldwater and Reagan, and that that line was ideological and stylistic, and that they were actually antagonistic to one another oftentimes, that the Birchers and then their successors often distrusted and felt frustrated by these governing conservatives. And I try to capture that dynamic.
24:00
At the same time, I say, well, a lot of these conservative figures, we're talking about maybe the Bushes, father and son, Ronald Reagan, even Bob Dole, at times, especially during their campaigns, they did send signals to what I call these successors to the Birch movement. They sent signals that they were with them, right, that they were on their side, that they were going to champion their agendas. And yet, once they got into office, they often governed in a way that frustrated the fringe's most insistent demands. Immigration, for example, internationalism, right, interventionism in wars, free trade, conspiracy theories, right?
24:50
For the most part, people like Reagan did not govern in any of those ways. And in fact, not just the Birchers, but a lot of their, what I call their successors, were very upset with Ronald Reagan, especially in his second term. They looked at him as a sellout and a traitor. And as one Bircher said, and I think I quote him in the book, he said, you know, a true Bircher never really trusted Ronald Reagan. And they viewed him really ultimately as part of the problem. And so I think it was a kind of tense dynamic. But I think it's also a mistake to lump together these electoral conservative Republicans and the more fringier people.
25:33
Right. But I think what resonated with me, at least, were the ways in which you discuss how members of the party at the leadership level, who were disgusted by a lot of what the Birch Society did, particularly those who were disgusted by their attacks on Dwight Eisenhower, for example, nonetheless, tried to ride that horse, right? Tried to still appeal to them and not renounce them. And I underline this in my book because it resonates so much with what we saw in Charlottesville in recent years and elsewhere. Repeatedly, you have Barry Goldwater, Republican presidential candidate, William F. Buckley, publisher of the National Review, Ronald Reagan, saying that in spite of the problems of the leaders, the Birchers still had some good people. They were still nice people, just as Donald Trump said in Charlottesville that, you know, they were good people on both sides, right? That's very disconcerting to read, I have to say.
26:29
Yeah, yeah. That's a really, yeah, the analogy is really powerful as you're describing it. That's true.
26:37
I mean, look, you know, if we go back, right, Richard Nixon, former vice president, went back to California, ran for governor and very forcefully denounced the Birchers. Well, what happened to him?
26:49
He got primaried by a guy named Joe Schell, who took about a third of the primary vote, was not a Bircher, but won the support of a lot of Birchers who were powerful in Southern California. And that really damaged Nixon. So Goldwater came along and had some critical things to say about Robert Welch, knew him, he was a problem. But as you said, right, he sort of said, you know, I know a lot of Birchers and they're fine people.
27:14
Reagan in 66, four years after Nixon, kind of split the baby right after Goldwater's landslide defeat, he issued a statement, he said, you know, Welch's theory is basically about Eisenhower. I reject those. But, you know, if a Bircher supports me, right, or they're buying my philosophy, not the other way around. So, you know, that is true, right, that they did. Although, you know, there were times, I mean, I don't want to go too far out here, but there were times when conservatives, especially in office, did, you know, they did not toe the Birch line. Right.
27:50
You know, even Ronald Reagan, for example, and George W. Bush, right, they signed renewals of the Voting Rights Act or civil rights laws. They, you know, when Reagan said, well, you know, Martin Luther King will know in 25 years if he was a communist. Well, he had to backtrack and he apologized for that.
28:09
He signed the law for reparations to Japanese Americans in turn during World War II. So, you know, you can go on down or George W. Bush, for example. You know, there were a number of instances in which major conservative presidents and other officials governed in ways that were not in sync with the Birch program or, and even on a lot of these culture war issues, you know, someone like Reagan or George H. W. Bush, they would somewhat cynically, especially for a Bush senior, they would go to Jerry Falwell's moral majority groups and they would say, you know, I support a ban on abortion or I'm going to, you know, pass a, let's do a constitutional amendment banning burning of the flag or restoring prayer in school.
29:03
But they never were able to get it done. And, you know, you see the ways in which they govern in ways that, you know, these, a lot of elements of the fringe did not support. And certainly, you know, when George W. Bush in his second term, when things went south for, for his presidency and he lost popularity, you know, you see people like Mick Mulvaney and, and Sarah Palin and Donald Trump in a sense who are rejecting him and rejecting and repudiating many of his policies and Rush Limbaugh.
29:41
What do you think then is the long-term legacy of the Birchers in our contemporary politics?
29:49
Well, I argue that they bequeathed and they were not the only ones, of course, and there were, you know, groups in the 1930s, you know, as Father Coughlin or America First, right, and groups obviously before that as well. But the Birchers helped to update and sustain and forge what I describe as this alternative political tradition on the far right. And that even as the Birch Society as an organization peters out, right, it becomes basically a shadow of its old self by the early 1970s. And it's a real epithet at that time.
30:30
But some of those individuals in the society and even more importantly the ideas, as I've said before, isolationism, explicit racism, concerns about sovereignty that we would see make a comeback, this conspiracy theories, and again this more apocalyptic mode of politics, the idea that the enemy is within, those ideas, that set of ideas on the far right, I think that -- and also some of the hardline culture war issues as well -- those ideas kind of bubbled along, right?
31:05
They were picked up by what I argue are these even cannier successors. And there are a lot of other reasons why, you know, the far right sort of makes a comeback. And of course, it's not simply the Birch Society transferred to 2016, for example, but there was this kind of ideological legacy. And even if, you know, someone like a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin had never heard of the Birch Society or if they had, they didn't know much about it, they picked up on very shrewdly in a way on a lot of the ideas that Birchers and their successors had sustained.
31:48
Right. So when you say an alternative political tradition, again, this is in some ways a reference to Hofstadter and others who wrote about inherited American traditions. We think of a Jeffersonian tradition, a Hamiltonian tradition. Your argument, and I think it's a powerful one, is that there is this far right tradition in American history and that someone like Donald Trump doesn't have to be well read in it to be able to grab onto it and use words that seem legitimate because they are traditional, correct?
32:19
Exactly. I mean, that's extremely well put. And, you know, Zachary in his poem, I think, evoke this as well, that and this is one of the points I'm trying to make in the book, that this is a deeply American phenomenon and it's not just a conspiracy theories, right?
32:37
It goes beyond that. And because in the 1960s, the criticism, one of the criticisms lodged at the Birchers was that they were alien, right? As I think one senator at the time said, they're a weird presence in America. And, you know, my argument is no, actually they're not. They're deeply, they're kind of endemic to the country and to its traditions. They're not necessarily the majority of the country, but they're a powerful tradition. And I think it's a tradition that since, especially the New Deal and then the Great Society and civil rights movement that many people have thought, many, especially liberals, but also some conservatives too, a tradition had thought had really just been marginalized, right?
33:25
It was not possible to, there's no electoral support. And that's partly why a lot of conservative figures thought that, you know, if you do what Trump did and you call neo-Nazis fine people, as Trump did essentially, that you cannot, you know, you're not going to be elected. And so that assumption, of course, proved incorrect. And, you know, and here we are.
33:55
It's stunning. And I just want to lay this out because I didn't understand this till I read your book. And I think it's why people who want to understand today's politics need to read your book, Matt. Just the number of parallels. And they're not parallels because Donald Trump went back, his supporters went back to, you know, look at the 1960s and 70s as you have so carefully in your research, but because these arguments were out there, they were discredited, but at the same time, they were available to be used in other moments when they could be made to seem logical and seem less outrageous.
34:28
So you talk, for instance, about the parallels between the criticisms of Tony Fauci and the criticisms of vaccines and the parallels with the Bircher criticism of fluorinated water and all the lies that were told about that. Immigration issues, prayer in schools. You have a number of lines where they, Birchers are arguing for legislation to protect, and in some ways almost require, prayer in schools. And then look at the legislation in my state of Texas right now. It's almost almost word for word, Matt.
35:00
Yeah, well, I mean, or Florida, right, for that matter, right? I mean, some of the stuff about outbanning certain teachings, right, progressive teachings, the idea that, you know, these teachings are not just bad for kids, but you're actually indoctrinating them with a socialistic, woke ideas, right? I mean, as contemporaries would put it. Well, that's a similar argument to what the Birchers made in the 1960s. And, you know, your point, I think, is exactly right.
35:31
You know, someone like Trump does not have to be, doesn't have to be a historian of the far right. I mean, you know, the birtherism conspiracy theory, right, that somehow Barack Obama was not born in the United States and ineligible to be president, that he was an alien to the short, well, you know, that there were a lot of other people on the far right who were also pushing that as well. You know, Trump is very entrepreneurial, and I think he's, and he's very savvy politically, and he has picked up on and kind of tapped into a lot of ideas that had been simmering on the far right for decades.
36:07
So one of the purposes of our podcast, Matt, and I know one of the purposes of your book, one of the things you and I share as historians is that we believe that history is useful. It's not a roadmap for the future, but it gives us a better sense of the right questions to ask, and of some of the things we need to consider in our, you know, approach to policy and our approach to social development. What should we do going forward then, based on this history? This clearly indicates that the challenges to our democracy today are not just about Donald Trump or just about Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's something deeper here. So what are the implications of that knowledge for thinking about protecting democracy today?
36:53
Well, it's a great question. I think first, just an appreciation that the United States has faced anti-democratic movements in the past, and that these movements may not have been mainstream in the way that they are today, but that it is a kind of enduring part, right, of American life. And having that appreciation in and of itself, I think, is a little bit, I don't know if reassuring is the right word, but it does put in perspective, right, that, as you said so well, Jeremi, that, you know, Trump is not a sui generis, right, that we have seen these kinds of challenges before.
37:37
The other element, I think, and, you know, it's not quite a lesson because our times are so much different from the 1960s and 70s, but it is worth thinking about, and I actually wrote an article in the Atlantic Magazine about this, which is, you know, how do far-right organizations and far-right movements get constrained, right? The Birch ideas never died, but the Birch Society did fade. As I said earlier, right, it faded as an organization and as a movement by, certainly by the early to mid-1970s. Well, how did that happen?
38:12
A couple things. One is American institutions, government institutions, mass media, but also civic society, right, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, most importantly the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of folks, a lot of groups, worked to constrain the Birchers, to really push them out in the fringes, to make them toxic in the political culture.
38:41
The other point I would make is that the Birch Society, I argue, especially in the late 60s, self-combusted, because its conspiracy theories in particular drew more violent and more bigoted members to the ranks. There was internal dissent, internecine warfare, and they also had some financial problems, and it was a very hard movement to sustain. It became incredibly fractious, and, you know, and it seemed more and more toxic, even to some of its own members.
39:14
So it's not a prescription per se, but it is worth thinking about, you know, look, maybe there are elements of MAGA that, you know, Trump's dinner, for example, with Nick Fuentes and Ye, the rapper, the anti-Semite, the white supremacist dinner that he had a few months ago. You know, there is a way in which I think Trump and MAGA has descended, and, you know, again, you don't want to make predictions, but one can see this kind of radicalization and descending that occurred, and, you know, that is, I think, a note, a faint note, but a note of hope.
39:55
Absolutely, and I think just to underline one of the many excellent points you just made, Matt, I think for me one of the big takeaways from your research and your writing is how important organizations that care about democracy, that care about inclusion, grassroots organizations, how important they are. One of the heroic organizations in your book is the Anti-Defamation League, known to many as the ADL. I don't want to give away the whole book, but I encourage those who are interested to read those sections of the book where you talk about a number of measures, including spying undertaken by these organizations to help federal authorities and help state authorities deal with the threats of hatred and violence, and there's a lot to learn from that, I think.
40:42
I think that's exactly right, and the thing is, too, in mid-20th century America, even in the 1960s, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and others in law enforcement were more interested in trying to ferret out alleged communists in American society. They were less interested in going after, you know, far-right groups that may have promoted racism and anti-Semitism, and so it was even more important then for a group like the ADL to fill that gap, right, because it was a real void, and today, I think fortunately, at least under the Biden administration, for example, we have seen a Justice Department that has taken white supremacy and neo-Nazis and those threats seriously after January 6th, of course, and, you know, there are a lot of insurrectionists who are sitting in jail right now.
41:35
Absolutely. I think about a thousand of them have been prosecuted. Zachary, you've listened to this conversation, you've thought deeply about this, especially since you read Kurt Vonnegut years ago, and your generation, I know, often feels concerned and maybe even despondent about some of these issues that we see around us, especially as we see states like Texas and Florida also passing legislation that looks to, in some ways, bring some of these Birch ideas into law, even. What do you take from this conversation? Do you see optimistic roads forward here?
42:11
I do. I think that one thing that this moment has done for this moment in our politics, has done for young people, is it has laid bare these long threads of far-right hatred and bigotry in American history, and what I think makes that moment in Slaughterhouse-Five so powerful is the irony that a man who had lived through the dehumanizing trauma of modern warfare could do the same thing and be so virulently anti-communist only a few decades later.
42:46
I think one of the lessons that we can draw from this history and that story is that we who have lived, not necessarily through comparable trauma, but through a lot of dehumanizing trauma and political strife, need to come out of this moment committed to something different, not to a further extreme.
43:05
Right, and that that's possible, right?
43:07
Exactly.
43:07
Because, you know, Matt covers this so well. There is the infamous General Edwin Walker, and if we want parallels, he's a parallel to Michael Flynn today, a military hero who actually becomes a fascist, and so I think your point, Zachary, is really well taken on this. Matt, are you optimistic that we can learn these lessons?
43:30
I mean, Zachary, I think your point is really powerful and, you know, thinking about trauma, but then what comes out on the other side. What gives me hope or optimism is the grassroots and kind of organic activism, especially among young people, whether it's March for Our Lives and the students at Parkland or, you know, people in support of voting rights, all the people who have gone out to vote in the last three national elections, you know, on the Dobbs decision and the reaction to that and these referendums that we've seen in even conservative states, right, where people are trying to define freedom as the right to choose, right, if a woman wants to get an abortion.
44:22
So I guess I am optimistic that democracy is incredibly fragile at this moment, as we've seen, and actually is a bit broken in many respects, but it is also resilient as well, and I think it's that kind of tension and may, you know, 10, 20, 30 years from now, who knows, maybe it will be seen as stronger, to Zachary's point, because of the moment that we are living through now. I don't know, you know, that's maybe Pollyannish, but it's not inconceivable.
44:59
Well, I think what your research shows, Matt, and this is true actually throughout all three of your books, but particularly your work on the Birchers, which is that American democracy has enormous capacity to learn and react. We don't always see that on a day-to-day basis. But just as the ADL and the FBI and elements of American politics in the 1970s learned to discredit and in some ways eliminate the Birchers as a major political force, that can happen again. And the craziness, the hate that we see in our politics that comes often from small numbers of people who are amplifying their voices, there are things we can do about that. And I think you give us a lot to think about, and you give us a great example of exactly what our podcast is about each week, which is studying the past, learning from the past, not as a recipe for the future, but as an inspiration for new creativity in our politics today. Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
45:59
This was such a wonderful conversation. And thank you, Jeremi. Thank you, Zach. Your questions were terrific. So it's great to be here.
46:06
And Zachary, thank you for your inspiring poem, L'Chaim, with a great title also. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 240: Evangelical Religion
00:24
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about a topic that is ubiquitous in the news and ubiquitous in our public discourse, but often, rarely interrogated. And we're going to have the chance to interrogate this topic today as we do every week with every topic. This is the topic of evangelical religion. You can't read about American politics without reading about evangelicals and their supposed influence one way or another.
00:50
We're joined today by, I think now it's fair to say one of the foremost scholars of evangelical religion in American politics, particularly the role of Dispensationalists, and Dan will talk to us about who they are. This is Dr. Daniel Hummel, who is a major scholar in the field of religion and politics and international affairs. He is the director of University Engagement at Upper House, a Christian study Center serving the wider University of Wisconsin Madison Community. Dan is the author of two books that I highly recommend to everyone. Two books that I know very, very intimately. In fact, Dan's first book, which was his dissertation, I was one of the professors who worked with him on is Covenant Brothers, evangelical Jews and US Israeli relations. I was really very privileged to be one of the professors Dan wrote this dissertation and researched this dissertation with, it really brings out, at least for me, a deeper understanding of the religious connections between Christians in the United States and a certain group of Jews in Israel, and how that relationship is crucial for understanding U.S. Israeli relationship. I've not seen any other book that does this, so I highly recommend that.
02:07
And then Dan's most recent book is The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How The Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation, shaped the American Nation. It's a brand new book. I just finished reading it and it's extraordinary the detail at which it explains the ideas and faith claims that underpin so much of religion and politics in American society today. Dan writes, in addition to books, major articles you can find in the Washington Post, Christian Today, Religion News Service, as well as more academic venues, Religion and American culture, Church History, and many, many others. Dan, thank you for joining us today.
02:47
It's a pleasure. Good to be with you, Jeremi.
02:49
Thank you, Dan. It's a kind of reunion also. We haven't talked in a little while, so I'm glad we're doing this. Zachary, of course, you have a poem to start us out? Yes? Yes. What's the title of your poem? A Dispensation for the Dispensationalists. Wow. Wow. I'm wrapping my head around that tongue twister. Okay, let's hear it
03:08
We came here on boats, as if hope alone floats, in big cramped quarters, we must have smelled so foul, we landed picked up the trowel and built your automatics. your John Forders, your all sorters. So we might taste this freedom of yours for a bit, boarders, if you will, in the grand boarding House of Liberty, where anything can happen for the right fee.
03:34
Now I'm told, they say, they'd like to see us reach the Jordan, so we might hold the whole of holy land. They say they'd like to watch us build a temple so someday they can burn it all to sand. They say at last they'd like to send me homeward so I can die in some fantastical last stand. But bury me and place the stones on a grave in Kalamazoo, fold my things and lie them there way down in Chattanooga. And when I'm old and tired, please let me die in Honolulu, for I shall never leave this God forsaken land if only for the sake of ruining such a stupid plan.
04:15
You are in the last few weeks, Zachary really becoming quite the satirist, aren't you? Yes. So tell tell us about this poem. What is it about?
04:26
Well, this poem is about me as an American Jew who's often quite dissatisfied at this country, coming to terms with what it means to be a Jew in a country so dominated by Christianity or at least a particular version of Christianity. And at the very least, I think, if I'm perfectly honest, a lot of it comes from living out of spite or living in spite of perceived slights, et cetera. And I think that that's a part of the Judeo-Christian relationship, if you will, that maybe isn't explored enough. But also I think, connects to the ways in which these religious divisions influence our politics and the way that our, not just our worldview, but our ideology takes shape.
05:09
Sure, sure. Very well said. Dan, any reactions?
05:12
Oh, wow. Yeah, many reactions. First, on that last point about the Judeo-Christian tradition, it just reminds me of, I believe his name was Arthur Cohen. He was just a writer in the 1970s on religion in America. And he contested the idea that there was such a thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition because, for most of the last 2000 years, Christians have hated Jews. And that tradition was a construct of the, mostly the mid 20th century and Cold War politics and other things. So Zachary, I think your tension is not only felt by you, I guess, I'd say historically.
05:44
And then I, you know, on the poem itself, the first thing that came to mind was, as we'll get into dispensationalists, are people traditionally who were very heavenly minded. You could say they were focused in their theology on getting to heaven, and that that was really the purpose of being a Christian was to get to heaven. And so the first part of your poem is very earthy and descriptive and I don't think they'd maybe identify with that directly. And then you, you mentioned Kalamazoo and Chattanooga, I think. Is that Chattanooga? Yes. Yeah. And if you read the book, I do have a geographical sort of thrust to the story or an arc to the story that actually starts in the, what I call the Great Lakes Basin, but basically the Midwest, including parts of Canada, which is really where this theology in the 19th century picks up. And then the, one of the more fascinating subplots that was interesting for me to study was how dispensationalism travels southward. And really by today, it would be to the outsider, it would seem like it's a sort of native southern theology. But that's actually really far from the truth. So just thinking of sort of the way that this set of ideas has traveled over the last 150 years, Kalamazoo and Chattanooga are actually pretty good stand-ins for the breadth of the tradition.
07:02
That's really interesting. I didn't know if you, did you intend that, Zachary?
07:06
Not at all. It's very hard to find three city names in the United States that rhyme. I'm not sure I accomplished that still.
07:13
You made them rhyme. You made them rhyme. So, Dan, I think this is a great place to start because, knowing you as I do, I know that you're someone who's a deep believer, but you're also someone who, who's inclusive in the way you view how different religions and different faiths should work. And you're also someone who believes deeply in academic and scholastic study, that comes through in your book, of course. Can you tell us what Upper House is in that context, just to situate how you enact this in your own life?
07:45
Yeah, well first of all, to the listeners, Jeremi, you're really the reason I'm even in Madison, right? So I came in 2010 to study with you and then stayed here until I finished in 2016, and Upper House was actually founded in 2015 here on, just across the street actually from the old history department building, the humanities building. And we're a Christian study center. So we are overtly Christian in our orientation and we are a study center, which means we really value the life of the mind and we value exploring ideas that are related to questions of faith, questions of identity, questions of philosophy, and how academic disciplines explore those ideas. And so we host speakers, we host sort of groups of students that are going through really dense, difficult books. We're trying to give students who identify as Christian on campus, the ability to supplement all the really good learning that's happening at UW with some equally rigorous, we hope, study in the tradition of Christian thought.
08:50
But we also see ourselves as, to borrow an older term, a third space in Madison where people from different backgrounds can come and engage in civic dialogue. And explore the big questions. We call them the questions of meaning, the questions of existence in a way that lets everyone bring their whole selves into the space. So, whether that means you're a Christian or, some other tradition or no tradition at all, we think, a lot of these big questions are relevant to all of us and we really try to steward our reputation and our space as a place where anyone is welcome any time of the year.
09:27
And Dan, do you see that as a mainstream approach? Because to some, myself included, it often appears as if, and, I'm not singling out one group or another, but it often seems as if religion is put against learning and against intellectual life in our world today.
09:43
Yeah, I think your instincts are pretty accurate. We definitely are exist as part of a larger tradition. There's actually a consortium of Christian study centers that are on many large university campuses. But there is, there's many counter pressures or countervailing pressures that push most Christians, many Christians in the US toward polarization, toward, you know, sitting in tribal camps, toward culture wars type ways of framing the university. And I find it a privilege and a joy even in the difficult times to be someone who's trying to articulate a different vision for how faith and religion can engage with the university. That there's actually a mutual benefit that happens, and that the university, UW in particular, is ultimately better if there are thinking religious people engaged, on campus and around campus, at places like Upper House.
10:37
And am I reading your new book correctly to say that or to interpret that, much of what you are implicitly critiquing is part of the story of the rise and fall of Dispensationalism for you?
10:50
Yeah, dispensationalism is a particular theological tradition that has had a lot of purchase in the white evangelical world for the last 150 years or so, and it's really, in my reading, it really has collapsed as an academic ,intellectual project in the last generation, I date it to the nineties, you could quibble and say maybe it was the two thousands. And so we're living in the wake of a sort of collapse in a lot of evangelical thinking and there's a vacuum. And it's not to say that dispensationalism, which we can get into, isn't, it's not necessarily a theology that I would endorse, but it did give a coherent worldview to many Christians, and we're living in the collapse of that worldview, and there have been many things that have filled that vacuum. This is my reading, including a capitulation to a type of consumer, commercial Christianity, and a type of nationalistic politics. And these are even more influential in the evangelical world because there is such a dearth of theological engagement by millions of evangelicals across the country.
12:04
So that's sort of my analysis. And I wrote the book in part because I grew up in this world and I actually wanted to take it seriously, but also because I could, sort of from my vantage point, I was pretty sure that part of the way forward for Evangelicals is to understand this history and to sort of consciously undertake the project of building a new theology that can actually address some of the core issues that are troubling the community today.
12:30
Well, and I think your book really provides a long arc for what you've just described so succinctly. You start with the period right after the Civil War, and that's really where, at least for me, you defined what dispensationalism was or is, what are we talking about here?
12:47
And I think in popular understanding, what most people would know about dispensationalism is that it has a unique teaching called The Rapture or the Any Moment Rapture, which is this idea that at any moment, including during the recording of this very podcast, all true believers, all true Christians would suddenly disappear and be in heaven with Jesus. And that that would set off a timeline of sort of catastrophic events that would ultimately lead to the rise of an anti-Christ dictator and ultimately lead to the battle of Armageddon. And really the whole world is destroyed. And then, remade anew and this set of teachings has been very popular in movie, in Hollywood movies and other things. That's just one part of the dispensational theological system, and it's a system because it touches on sort of all aspects of Christian theology.
13:38
And the key part for the beginning of the story for the post-Civil War era is to understand that dispensationalism offered a very otherworldly understanding of the church, of what it meant to be part of a church. That allowed pastors who adopted the theology to really stay silent on the hot issues of the day. And in the 1860s and 1870s, that was slavery and then reconstruction and racial justice. And for many pastors and I particularly identify pastors who were in states that were in the north, but had a strong southern sympathy. This theory of the church, this way of understanding the church as an entirely heavenly people that should have nothing to do with politics was especially appealing to pastors who were looking for a way to hold their churches together after the Civil War. And that's really the original appeal of the dispensational system.
14:32
It wasn't necessarily about decoding the end times, but once you, once they adopted sort of the church part of the theology over the next generation or so, they also strongly adopted the end times part of the theology and many other parts as well. But that's sort of, that was one of the contributions I tried to make is try to understand why this theology becomes popular in America in the 1860s and 1870s, and not, for example, 20 years before that, or 20 years after that. And I think the answer there has a lot to do with reconstruction and racial politics in the US
15:04
So, how does this belief system become merged or at least connected to a particular set of political beliefs? And in particular, how does this belief system maybe conflict or parallel American's principles or, lack of respect for a principle of separation of church and state? How do those two connect?
15:28
Yeah. Well, any theology has an implicit politics to it. So that there was, you know, this is part of the interesting thing about the 1870s,n is staying silent on reconstruction really was a politics of reconstruction, right? It was a desire to get past reconstruction. It was a desire to reconcile between northern and southern whites. And there were particular reasons why dispensationalist basically wanted that to happen. And a lot of it had to do with engaging with global missions and finding racial politics to be sort of a speed bump on the way to global missions, and so prioritizing that over race. And so there's an implicit racial politics that is in the the theology of dispensationalism.
16:10
And yet at the same time, for most of these early dispensationalists, which is different than later generations, there was a very strong understanding that the church was separate from the state and that really the Christian should not be involved in politics as such. They should not be necessarily politicians. Voting was actually sometimes discouraged because within the theology, the ultimate loyalty of the Christian was to the church. But we see, looking back, and many people understood it at the time, that you can't actually get out of politics. Claiming that you had nothing to say about politics was often a way of endorsing the status quo and over the generations, that's often what Dispensationalist did, particularly when it came to issues of race, is they would endorse the status quo and as largely white Christian community, that would often be a status quo that was beneficial to them. And they weren't, they didn't have a theology or a theory or a sort of social critique that gave them any impetus to be active on working for racial justice or even racial equality.
17:18
One of the really interesting parts of your book for me, and it's interesting because it's a period both you and I have spent a lot of time thinking about, is the period after World War ii. Which in some ways is as interesting as, I think, the period after the Civil War. These might be two of the key fulcrums for so many changes in American politics. And democracy. You write around page 214 about how the dispensational leaders across America, this is just on the eve of Billy Graham's rise, how they do become more politically active in criticizing progressive politics and calling for the United States to remain a dominant world power. What shift is happening after World War ii?
17:58
Yeah, and people like William Bell Reilly, who's a very famous fundamentalist minister in the Minneapolis city area was key to this. And one of the things that is a through line from the post Civil War period to the post World War II period is that Dispensationalist understood their highest calling to be missions, evangelization, converting people into Christians. And this took on a different implications for sort of national and international politics. By the end of World War ii, and the sort of dawn of the Cold War anti-communism becomes a key way that, or the threat of communism becomes a key way that Dispensationalist understand the world, and particularly as a threat to their highest calling, global missions. And so, in some ways, that is the answer to the question is that, Communism becomes such a threat to the mission's enterprise that many fundamentalists and dispensationalist who were sitting on the sidelines in earlier periods decided that this was such a existential threat that they needed to join the fray.
19:03
But someone like Riley, also, William Bell Riley, the person I mentioned before, also is a key to a more, a less defensive or reactive posture, and more of an active posture. In that Riley was also a conspiracy theorist, and a virulent anti-Semite, and someone who, even going back to the 1910s, was looking at the globe and seeing all types of threats and conspiracies that were, in his view, designed to destroy the church. And so he's someone who did not need World War II or even World War I to get politically active. He was someone who embedded a conspiratorial way of seeing the world with his largely apocalyptic theology to basically call Christians to action to combat these conspiracies. And so he was someone who promoted the protocols of the elders of Zion, even though those were widely discredited. He was someone who openly supported Hitler in the 1930s, and then he was someone who was a strong anti-communist in the 1940s before he died, and really embedded that particular set of politics in his theology.
20:13
Reading your section on William Bell Reilly, who I must confess, I did not know very much about until your book, now I know a lot more about him. You describe his hand in hand pairing of theology and politics, which is just the opposite of the separation of church and state that Zachary was just talking about. And you also make a lot out of his use of radio shows, back to the Bible, Radio Bible Class Hour, through the Bible. And it reminded me, Dan, of Father Coughlin. Is there a parallel here?
20:43
There's certainly a parallel in a shared Christian anti Judaism that runs through both of those personalities. I think a bigger and really interesting parallel is the use of media, in that case radio, before that, mass print media, after that television, and ultimately the internet. Dispensationalists have been just masters at adopting the newest form of media to get their message out. And sometimes they've been at the forefront of these particular types of communications media. Later people, like Jerry Falwell who helped found the Christian right, was very early adopter of computers to help rationalize his communications and his sort of mailing lists. But this has been just a consistent theme in the history of dispensationalism. Is that because of their overriding concern for getting the word out, for spreading the gospel as they understand it, they are eager to adopt media and to use media and exploit media in a sort of mass, popular way. And so some of the most popular radio shows in the 1940s and fifties were dispensationalist inspired radio shows. Often they were basically daily bible commentary shows, but were mixed in with commentary on the daily news. And so the merging of scripture and politics was, you know, a daily affair for many of those radio shows.
22:08
And do you see in this period as well, as dispensationalism becomes an increasingly prominent religious belief, if not widespread, politicians trying to appeal to dispensationalist voters or particular kind of social conservatism they display, and how do you think that this movement began to shape American policy as a whole?
22:30
Yeah. In some ways Dispensationalist were unremarkable Conservatives. In some ways, the sort of literal meaning of the word conservative, I mentioned they, often endorsed the status quo. Unlike other Christian traditions that have a very strong social critique or critique of culture, dispensationalist tended not to, and that goes back to that division between the church and the world that is at the heart of the theology. But that's not to say that they didn't have a politics, as we've talked about, and also that they weren't very attractive or appealing as a religious subgroup to American politicians. And you see this later in the 20th century where someone like Ronald Reagan, who is often rumored in news media to actually be a dispensationalist. This is sort of a scandal because of the apocalyptic worldview of dispensationalism. What if our, you know, if our president has that worldview, what does that mean for our foreign policy? I don't really think Reagan was a systematic thinker on these things, but he was very strategic in appealing to some of the more pessimistic ways of sort of the direction of the world that would align with dispensationalist beliefs and at various times also reference theologians or writers from the dispensationalist tradition that would be well known to people in that world. The other major president that is often, was rumored to have links to dispensationalism was George W. Bush. I'm again, pretty dubious that Bush himself held to any particular end times theology. He wasn't a theologian on that front, but he certainly invoked images and rhetoric, including the idea of a crusade, which of course he backtracked on, but still used it and had its effect. That would've aligned with a dispensationalist understanding of what was going on in the world. So I think at the highest levels of state leadership, there's definitely a story to tell there. I think the broader story is how dispensationalism actually adapted to become a viable part of the Christian right, as sort of a grassroots movement that gave a lot of the verve to conservative politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
24:45
And I have to say, Dan, to me, that was one of the most interesting parts of your book. Before you get to Bush, who you talk about in, I think the last chapter, the second to last chapter, you spend a lot of time on Billy Graham, who, for those who don't know Billy Graham, you can't think of a more influential religious figure, I think in American society post-war than than Billy Graham. I think, on personal relations or close personal relations with every president, prominent figure in all kinds of settings. And then Hal Lindsay, who's largely forgotten to history, but as you point out, probably sold more books, the Late Great Planet Earth, than almost any other author of his time. And he is the person who apparently Ronald Reagan was talking about when he talked about dispensationalism at different times. So, how do we understand these figures and their role and their connection to dispensationalism?
25:37
Yeah. One interesting fact about Graham is that he was the successor to William Bell Riley in the sense that when Riley died in 1948, he had handpicked Billy Graham, who at that time was a less well known revivalist who was traveling around the country to be his successor at his college in Minneapolis, Northwestern College. So Graham has a direct connection to Riley in that sense. But Graham became, yeah, the most influential evangelical, maybe most influential religious figure in the late second half of the 20th century, and Graham's relationship to Dispensationalism is that he grew up basically a dispensationalist and his early revivals taught. That there would be a rapture at any moment, and that that was one reason why listeners needed to convert was because you didn't wanna be left behind. And this gave an urgency to, not just individual conversion, but to the Cold War because communist societies wouldn't allow missionaries into them.
26:38
And so we needed to sort of support the downfall of communism in order to allow more missionaries to enter those countries. So that that was certainly part of his, earlier, his early career, we're talking about the 1940s, 1950s. Graham gradually moves away from that theology and he is a major figure. He's like a planet that everyone orbits in the evangelical world. And so for his entire career there were prominent people around him, and in other parts of the many organizations that he ran, that were dispensationalists and held to those views. But you definitely see a shift in the sixties and seventies and eighties where Graham is moving away from that sort of otherworldly theology, and getting much more invested in a, you could say, this worldly understanding of what the Christian's role is. And so by the, you know, by the 1980s, Graham is visiting the Soviet Union. He's visiting Jewish and Christian communities behind the Iron Curtain. He is a calling for a nuclear freeze. He is concerned about the environment and you just have a much different issue set for someone like Graham, as he develops into a major world leader.
27:49
For Hal Lindsay, who's a much different character, largely a media figure, Hal Lindsay went to the key seminary for dispensationalism, Dallas Theological Seminary, right in your neck of the woods, Jeremi.
28:03
That's where your dad, your dad went to school there too, right?
28:05
My dad went to school there. A lot of, it's a very large school, one of the largest seminaries in the country. A lot of people went there. Not everyone who goes there comes out, like any school, believing everything the school teaches, right. But it certainly had been seen as the major intellectual center for dispensationalism and Hal Lindsay went there. He was a tugboat captain turned theologian, and he ended up becoming a campus ministry worker at UCLA where he really honed a message, this is in the sixties, he honed a message to appeal to counterculture students at UCLA and turned that into a book. And he crucially had a co-writer, named Carol Carlson, who really helped him turn, turned his, basically notes of talks into a book and it was called the Late Great Planet Earth. And it basically popularized the very dense, sophisticated, end times theology of dispensationalism into a very accessible vocabulary and presentation. He called the Rapture the ultimate trip. He called the anti-Christ, the future fuhrer, sort of a a pop culture version of the theology.
29:21
And this goes on to be the bestselling non-fiction book of the 1970s. It sells over 10 million copies. It's hitting right at the moment that a lot of other sort of negative or pessimistic books about the future are hitting, including, Alvin Tophler's Future Shock and The Population Bomb came out a few years before, so there's a lot in the air about sort of a pessimism about the future. And Lindsay, in that, in the Late Great Planet Earth, isn't explicitly political. He's very much interested in politics and he's talking about Middle East wars and the Cold War and all that kind of stuff. But his real solution, or his real call for Christians is to be faithful and spread the gospel, because he's still in that sort of, traditional dispensationalist mode.
30:01
He writes another book in 1980, called the 1980s path to Armageddon or something like that, where he basically represents the exact same popularized end times theology. But he has a very strong call to action for Christians that they need to start voting in Christians into office. And they need to be upholding conservative values like traditional family values as he calls them and lower taxation. And he's basically, switching his mode from 1970 to 1980 into one that is very activist and very political, and he ultimately is a big supporter of Ronald Reagan and the nuclear buildup in the early 1980s. And really sets a lot of the terms. He's not the only one for sure, but he's a very popular figure at that time, who's setting a lot of the terms of more broadly conservative politics, in the early 1980s.
31:02
So, is it fair, Dan, with particular attention to Billy Graham and Hal Lindsay and Jerry Falwell, who you've also mentioned, who was a, obviously a pioneering televangelist? Is it fair to associate these figures and, perhaps Dispensationalist influence, with the rise of what historians call the new right? In the 1970s and eighties, the remaking of the Republican Party post Goldwater as a party that's less elitist and quite frankly, more Christian, more explicitly Christian and evangelical in its tone, and in its issues such as prayer in school, the American flag, and all these issues that it brings forth, is this a fair connection?
31:45
It is a fair connection. It's complicated, of course. So dispensationalist aren't the only types of Christians who are active in the 1970s, getting more politically active on conservative politics. But I think there's an unavoidable, inescapable, dispensationalist flavor to the arguments that are being made within the Christian conservative world in the 1970s and eighties. And these largely revolve around the idea, once again, of threats to the Global Missions project and that communism is still on the horizon. And that's a major threat.
32:24
But the other threat that is looming even larger is what, Tim LaHaye, who's one of the major activists at the time, calls secular humanism. And this is an amalgamation of sort of all the bad people. For this group, which include outright secularists, people who reject religion, who they find troublesome. All different types of progressives, and political liberals who they find to be sort of eroding the foundations of American values. It also includes communists, it also includes, you know, Hollywood actors, and others that they would all find as sort of degrading, and LaHaye made extensive lists of everyone who would be involved. Many government officials, the education system. A lot of the things that we would, it's not too far from some rhetoric you can hear today. And so that whole framing of the problem and then the solution being a sort of concerted Christian action, organized action in the political realm. That comes out of a particular theological argument that is rooted in dispensationalism.
33:34
And again, it's not the only argument that Christians are making, but for people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, who I mentioned, and Hal Lindsay, this is the way they decide to try to activate the broader Christian community. And it's so striking that no more than 15 years before that in the 1960s, you can get quotes from people like Jerry Falwell who are making the exact opposite argument when it comes to the civil rights movement, which is that, he has a famous sermon called, what is it called? Ministers and Marchers. And he basically makes the call that no pastor should ever be found in a civil rights march. Because it goes back to that separation of the church and the world. And yet 15 years later, he's making the opposite argument, which is, you better find the pastors in the pro-life march, because of this threat of secular humanism.
34:28
So is it the politics then, which replaces the sort of traditional theology, as you describe it, at this moment in the 1990s, and early two thousands in which your book depicts a a decline in dispensationalism per se?
34:46
Yes. That's one way to think of the decline is that for many millions of evangelicals, what counts as theological engagement becomes largely political engagement and these arguments around politics and culture, and commercialization. That's another strand I follow is just the, the massive commercial appeal of this theology. There's another story about the fall that is probably less interesting to those not in the evangelical world, which is about the collapse of intellectual credibility of dispensationalism within the seminary world. And this is happening at the same time, the 1980s, 1990s, that there's a concerted effort by other evangelicals who aren't dispensationalist, but are still pretty conservative theologically. They find dispensational to be problematic on sort of the merits of the system. And they sort of institutionally and intellectually outmaneuver, dispensationalism to the point that today, popular dispensationalism is very widespread, particularly in the white evangelical world. Many people don't even know the term dispensationalism, but they sort of, if you ask them about their beliefs, they would reflect the influence of dispensationalism. And so you have that, you have that situation while at the very same time in the more, the seminary halls and the sort of lecture halls of Christian colleges. This is a basically dead theological system. And that was a fascinating contrast that I tried to connect and unpack in the book as well.
36:20
Well, and it's fascinating to me too, and I think it's fascinating to our listeners because, in a way, you're saying that the theology loses credibility as its political influence expands considerably right?
36:34
That's right. And there's different levels to think about that. One is that there are decisions being made by particular thinkers, writers, theologians. To basically go popular, or you could even say to sort of sell out to the popularity. And so some of the credibility is lost as scholars who were considered sort of serious scholars end up trying to capitalize on the commercial potential of dispensationalism, in the 1980s and nineties, and actually try to sort of replicate the success of people like Hal Lindsay. And so that's one way that those things are connected. A broader one would be that, I don't want to, I don't wanna overstate a previous era where you might think, you know, oh, evangelicals were just influenced by their theology or something like that's never been the case. But there have definitely been eras where theological arguments have been more influential than others. And what you see over the late 20th century is that a community that was largely structured around theological distinctives, particular beliefs about God or about the world or about the church, becomes more and more shaped and formed by arguments about the culture and about politics.
37:49
And those things can't really, they either have to go together really tightly, or one is gonna lose out to the other. And you see over the late 20th century and into the 21st century that for millions of evangelicals, what defines their evangelicalism is a set of cultural positions in the culture war. Or a set of political positions, and you could even say a voting habit. And that's a significant shift. It's again, not to idealize the previous era, but to show that there is a significant change over a 50 year period on how evangelicals themselves are defining themselves.
38:29
Right. And I think that's what makes, among other things this book so important because I think you explain for a reader like me, who's not anywhere nearly as well read in the theology as you are, you explain two phenomena, right? You explain first of all the ways of thinking that seem to transfer over from one domain to another. At one point in the book you have a couple of pages where you show the overlap in dispensationalist thinking and Q-Anon rhetoric. That's not to say that all dispensationalists or most dispensationalists are Q-Anon followers. But I think you make the point that dispensationalist are overrepresented, among some of these groups. So you explain that, as a sort of a classic intellectual history. Right. Habits of mind. But I think you also, as you just said, you explain a kind of cultural phenomenon too, where, I guess, the word you used earlier in this discussion, a flavor. A flavor of behavior, a flavor of seeing the world, becomes transferred over to what, to me, appear to be unlikely repositories of allegiance like Donald Trump.
39:33
Right, and that can be traced to a broader, if we wanna use that word again, flavor of the way that dispensationalist tend to understand history and time. And largely that it's the longer time passes, the more chaotic and fallen the world will be. Until this immediate rupture point when the end times will occur. And so when Dispensationalists tend to look out on the culture and in politics, they tend to see narratives of decline and in some cases, a sense of faithfulness or hopelessness in what's happening. You see in the Christian right, with the Falwells, and the Tim LaHayes, that they developed a sense that they could do something about it. And that was to get politically active. But that was only gonna be a stop gap anyway. The world was still careening toward chaos until Jesus returned.
40:30
And so in a lot of the rhetoric, you can see today in different pockets of our politics, you can see a same sort of defensive posture and a sense of just assumed worsening of the situation and from that and sort of working out of that position, what one's politics should be. And I think that leads to conspiratorial thinking among other things, being at sort of the core of your politics. And so when I made the connection with Q-Anon, it was not to say at all that there's a easy straight line from some dispensationalist thinker to Q-Anon. It was to show that the pattern of Q-Anon's sort of understanding of history or of what's gonna happen in the future, based on the Q drops, and all the stuff that was being dropped out there, had an interesting resonance to the way that Christian right leaders 40 years before that, were talking about what would happen in American society, and that pattern of thinking develops certain habits of mind and certain predispositions towards politics that I think are the continuity that connects the two.
41:38
Right. Right. And so I think that leads to the final question. You've been very generous with your time and very insightful in articulating and elucidating so many of the points that you deal with in depth and detail in your book. The question we ask every week, of course, is how is this historical framework, how is this historical research relevant for thinking about and renewing democracy today? I know, Dan, you care, care deeply about if, I might use the term, rescuing Christianity from its misuses perhaps, and I feel that way about misuses of Judaism. I'm sure within every tradition there are people who feel that way. What should we do? I struggle because, I find if I try to critique some of these, what appear to me to be misuses, or dangerous uses of religion, that it only reinforces the resistance of those ones talking to on the other side. Right? Because it sounds like you're condescending and maybe I am unintentionally. Right. So, how do we do this? How do we get beyond this? Because this is not a happy ending, where your book ends, for democracy.
42:46
Well, you know, who comes to mind is someone who just passed away this last week, Tim Keller, who was a major figure for a lot of Christians. He was a pastor in New York City, very influential. And he talked a lot about, he was not a dispensationalist by the way. He was a pretty widely respected pastor and figure. He often talked about Christians should follow a third way, what he said in politics. And that was to, attempt to, ground Christian thinking around culture and politics in biblical categories as opposed to categories that might dominate our current political debate. And those categories would often transcend or cut across some of the traditional lines that we draw in our politics. But they would be rooted in a sense of the dignity of each person, and in a sort of faith in the ability for humans to cooperate and reason together. And this got Keller a lot of flack from basically every side. He was considered too liberal by many Christians. He was considered far too conservative on some of his views by many liberals.
44:09
But he had his own following and he influenced people like me to really think critically about the tradition. One, including myself, grew up in, not to discard it in some type of act of just adolescent rebellion or something, but to think about what are the categories that, I inherited, that I grew up with. And how do those categories, you know, what parts of those categories do I affirm and what parts of them do I need to discard, to be at, you know, as I understand it, authentic to my faith, and I think if there can be more encouragement of third ways in our political discourse in our cultural discourse, ways that may not feel if we're very partisan on one side or the other in our polarization. They may not feel comfortable, but they may actually open up space for conversation that doesn't just evolve into the power politics that seem to define most of our, most of our conversations now, but that open up different ways of thinking about the intersection of, faith or transcendent values or religion with our society. And different ways of protecting the shared values that, I think, most Americans have. Including around sort of democratic representation human dignity, and other things that I think most Americans can still affirm. So that's the work we're trying to do here. It's not overtly political work, but it's work about trying to reframe a lot of the conversations that seem so concretized or solid in their polarizations right now. Yeah. And to try to think about new creative ways to engage those debates.
45:59
That's compelling, very compelling, and inspiring. I think, Zachary, in a way, it sounds to me like that resonates with how you and many others of your generation I see approaching this, right? I mean, you care about Judaism, but you don't identify politically with many of the things that the Israeli Right does that the Jewish right does. Right. And so how do you, do you think about a third way? Do you think about a way in which religion and politics can open up space for democracy and inclusion as well as faith in your life?
46:35
I think it's just what Dr. Hummel described, which is an intellectual engagement in questions of religion instead of a dogmatic insistence. And I think in that sense, I hope my generation is more willing to, not to ignore these questions or to simply adhere to one particular set of beliefs, but to interrogate our beliefs and to approach these bigger, broader questions about humanity, from an intellectual perspective. And also think critically about how that worldview should and does influence our politics. And I think that, I hope at least, that there's an opportunity for that. I think this third way, which at least in from my perspective, my third way, if you will, would embrace a sort of diversity of point of view and of background. I think that there's a space in that diversity to have real discussions about religion and the relationship between religion and society, that are much more productive, helpful and quite honestly interesting, than the polemics that we so often are bombarded with.
47:48
It's really not a discussion that we should have of religion versus secularism. It's more a discussion of what are the elements of religion that matter in our lives and how do we reconcile those with our commitments to democracy, broadly engaged. And it's a healthy exercise for democracy, I think, and for us as citizens of a democracy to be asking these bigger questions about humanity and our place in the universe, et cetera., and I think it's not that everyone has to agree, but I do think that there has to be an agreement that those questions are worth answering. Even if your answer is, there is no answer.
48:26
Dan, any final thoughts?
48:29
No, that is, I think Zachary and I are landing here at around, at the same point. I think these big questions and, you know, whether it's, what does it mean to be a human being? Or, you know, what is the point of it all? I mean, that's a common perennial question, right? Right. I mean, these transcend any particular religious tradition. These are questions that possibly every single human who's ever lived has contemplated. And, you know, if we can't talk about those and bring, to go back to what we do here at Upper House, bring our whole selves into those conversations, whatever that means, whatever, commitments, one has. If we can't do that, I'm not excited about where society is going, but it does seem, it does seem like it's harder and harder to do that. And so, that's where I'm holding out hope and, you know, working in my own little way to try to carve out spaces like that. Even in places like a university where that's part of the stated aim of a university is to be an institution like that. I think we need as many spaces as possible to engage in those types of conversations.
49:35
Well, and I think, among the many insights that we've gained from your book and from this discussion today, and topics that I hope our listeners will interrogate further by reading your book and your related writings. You know, one is certainly that we have to hold a mirror up and see what are the ways of thought, habits of mind, assumptions we're bringing to the table, and how over time have we inherited certain assumptions, certain ways of thinking that maybe you're closing off the very conversations we wanna have. And then second, to really echo what you just said, so well, Dan, that we have to lean into and be intentional about creating spaces for conversation. And part of your book is about, it seems to me, how probably well-intentioned men and women of faith acted in ways that actually closed off conversation, didn't open it up, and I think we can learn from that. This is not to criticize them in any way, but it is to say that what history allows us to do is learn from those who came before us and make our own new mistakes in a new way. I think this kind of discussion of religion and politics is what we need to have in our society. It's so rare. Dan, I'm proud to be your friend, and to know that you're doing this kind of work, and I hope that it offers pathways for all of our listeners to think about how they can do this kind of work in their own community, in their own way. Thank you so much Dan, and congratulations on your book once again. The title is, The rise and fall of Dispensationalism. Dan, thank you for joining us.
51:06
It's been a pleasure to be with both of you, thanks
51:08
Zachary, thank you for your poem and your insights as well. Of course. And thank you, most of all, to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of this is Democracy.
Episode 247: Strikes by Autoworkers
00:24
âWelcome to our new episode of "This Is Democracy." This week we are going to discuss the history of unions in the United States, and we're going to look at the current strike by auto workers, in the United States. These are auto workers who belong to one of the oldest and most important unions, but one of many unions in the history of the United States, the United Auto Workers.
00:47
âAnd we are fortunate to be joined by one of the leading historians of workers' unions and race in the United States. This is our friend, Professor William Jones, who is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.
01:02
âHe's the author of, many articles and two really important books. The first, "The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South," and then, more recently, "The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights," a book that puts the March on Washington, which everyone has heard of, especially because of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
01:27
âWill's book puts the March on Washington in the context of labor history as well as civil rights history, which is really important. Will, thank you so much for joining us today.
01:37
âOh, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
01:40
âAnd of course, we have our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? "From the UAW Picket Lines." Wow, we're gonna get an on-the-scenes account from you, Zachary? Or at least an imagining of one, yes. Okay, well let's hear it.
01:59
âSo here we are, waiting on the picket line, for the world to change, for the times to rhyme. They sold us the lie that if we just worked hard the dough would fry and line our pockets with bread.
02:13
âPretty soon we were left the only ones not caught up in the net or dead on a cot. They told us when we asked that they had nothing to say. Forget tomorrow. Clock out today.
02:25
âBut we will not be told that our futures were sold in Washington or in Detroit where the rivers fold, and wash our cars out to sea.
02:35
âWe will not be told to keep standing still, when the steels arrive from the mill, and we have the parts to rebuild the heart of what made this country go. We will not be told to accept our fate, to wait and say nothing forever. If anything yet we're far too late, but better too late than never.
02:55
âHmm. What's your poem about, Zachary? My poem is really about, how, the ravages of the global economy in the past few years have hit at the heart of manufacturing jobs in the United States and have led to a lot of dissatisfaction, with, not just with government but also with big corporations, in Detroit and across the country. And how labor action can hopefully move towards solving those problems or at least, finding a better solution for workers.
03:32
âAnd that's your point about late but still important, right? Exactly.
03:37
âWill, this moment we're living in now that Zachary captures, I think, a bit in his poem, is that how you would frame the current labor action against the automakers? Is that really what it is? Is it about automation or what's really at the root of this?
03:56
âYeah, I mean, I think that there's a number of things involved, and yeah, automation is an important part of it, and the struggle over jobs and the sort of number of jobs and employment. I think there's really three main issues at the heart of this, this current strike.
04:17
âOne is the issue of the two-tier employment system that the Big Three auto workers have adopted, which is a product of concessions that were made by the UAW during the recession in 2009 when the auto companies were really in bad shape. And the UAW agreed to allow them to essentially start hiring workers, new workers under different systems, under lower wages, less, in some cases no benefits, healthcare benefits, pensions. And the idea was that, you know, when the auto companies were in bad shape and needed some help in recovering, the UAW, the workers agreed to take these concessions.
05:14
But now the Big Three are doing very well, and the feeling is that they, you know, the workers should not consider, continue to take these concessions. Some of the issues are around wages, and I think the union has framed that in the broader context of, I think a conversation we've been having over the past several decades about rising levels of economic inequality, the ways in which the wealthy have done well at times when the less wealthy, when the 99% has seen their living standards and their income decline.
05:52
âAnd then the third one I think is this issue of jobs. It's related in part to automation. It's also for the auto industry, particularly related to the transition to electric vehicles, which, you know, are easier to manufacture and so they require less labor and there's a concern about the ways in which that shift to a, you know, a lower labor demand is going to affect the current workers. Right. And they're concerned about that.
06:23
âWill, that's really helpful in framing this, and I wanted to come back to your first point because I think that's one that at least to my reading of the news has received a lot less attention. The fact that the auto workers not only gave up certain benefits to help the automobile companies during the 2008 recession, but also that they actually agreed to create a two-tiered system. Can you just say more about that, how that's worked and what the expectations were when that was negotiated in 2008? Right. Well, I mean the expectations were that this was going to save an industry that was really on the brink of collapse and so that, you know, which, in a sense, that has happened. The way it works though is that you get, you know, something that you hear a lot in interviews with workers on the picket lines is they'll say, you know, like they're standing next to workers who do the same jobs under the same conditions as them who earn, you know, in some cases half of what they earn with no benefits.
07:29
âSo they, you know, there's a sort of a fundamental sense that this is unfair, but there's also a recognition that this is a really dangerous situation when you're trying to build solidarity between workers, and it sort of pits workers against each other. And has the potential to really divide the workforce in a way that I think this strike is aimed at, you know, overcoming and sort of uniting.
07:52
âWell, that point, Will, it seems to me leads really to the bigger historical question, which is what role have unions played? Why does the UAW exist? I get this question from my students all the time. Maybe that's just a function of those students being in Texas. I don't know. But, what you're describing seems to me to actually be an anathema to what unions historically have been about. Is that correct?
08:16
âYeah. I think in some respects, it's certainly anathema to the history of the UAW. And, you know, just as an aside, my students here in Minnesota, where there's a very vibrant labor union, they personally often have very little contact with the labor movement. And so, you know, I'm sure that it's more intense in Texas, but across the United States, people have very little sense of what unions do and where they come from.
08:41
âThe UAW is you know, comes from a particular history of one of the industrial unions of the 1930s. It was one of the founding unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which is, you know, half of the AFL-CIO. The other half, the AFL, is much older, and it actually comes from a tradition that is in some ways based on drawing lines among workers or between workers. I mean, it was a sort of built by skilled workers who really kind of circled the wagons around their own particular skills, and were very exclusive. So many of the AFL unions, you know, they would limit their membership to men. They would, some of them actually explicitly said that you could not be a member of them unless you were white. So they were exclusive, and the idea was to try to draw a very narrow line and control the labor market and the access to skills within a particular labor market. The CIO unions, like the UAW, took exactly the opposite approach. They felt, "If we can organize as many people as possible across as many different lines of skill and status, across lines of race and gender, we can be more powerful if we have everybody in the same union."
10:01
âAnd so that's really, the UAW really exemplifies that history. It emerged in the 1930s, organizing auto plants where the, which were really deeply divided, right? You had very, very highly skilled machinists, working alongside, you know, janitors, alongside, people who were, who had very little experience. You had, you know, people of many different, you know, immigrants from all over the world. People of different races, men and women working in the same factories. And the UAW was one of the first unions to say, "We're going to try to put everybody in the same union." So this idea of the concessions really cuts at the heart of that idea, of the two-tier system, and gets really to the heart of the history of the UAW.
10:50
âZachary? And what has been the recent history of industrial unions in the United States? Where in the sort of long history of American labor do you see this particular strike fitting?
11:09
âYeah. Well, I mean, so since the 1970s, we've seen a really dramatic change in the way in which labor laws have been enforced. We've again seen a weakening of the enforcement mechanisms. We've seen a sort of emboldening of employers to really ignore the labor laws, which are, in some ways sort of inherently weak, as there aren't very many enforcement mechanisms or serious enforcement mechanisms in them. At the same time, we've seen a decline in the number of workers who are employed in the core industries in the United States, partially due to automation, partially due to the globalization of manufacturing, the rise of the service economy.
11:56
âAnd the auto industry has been, you know, at the core of that, right? They've been, we've seen declining numbers of people. It's not so much that the, you know, the cars use fewer workers. It's that a lot of the parts that are used in cars are manufactured overseas. So increasingly, auto plants in the US are really assembly plants. They're, you know, taking things from all over the world and putting them together into a finished product, and that takes fewer workers than if you have to make those products from scratch. And that has really challenged unions like the auto, the UAW. They've responded in a number of ways.
12:37
âOne way they've done, responded is to sort of branch out and organize other workers. I think about 20% of the UAW are actually academic workers. They're graduate students. They're contingent faculty at, mostly in the UC, the University of California system.
12:55
âThey've also made the, you know, they face this problem of, you know, do you sort of make concessions and do you, you know, recognize that you are in a place of weakened you know, clout and respond to that by making concessions? Or do you in as, you know, in the language of the sort of the people who run the union movement now, or the UAW now, do you fight back? And one of the important things about this strike is it occurs after the election of Shawn Fain who ran against a sort of entrenched union bureaucracy that had really been responsible for a lot of these concessions. He ran on a reform slate that was supported by people who have been fighting within the UAW for many years, for decades, to try to push the union toward a more aggressive stance in trying to push back against some of these concessions. So that's a strategic change that, you know, and I think we'll see how it plays out. âI think the strike, you know, raises that. We don't know how the strike's going to end.
14:07
âWill, your discussion of the election of a new UAW leader brings up an important issue. I often hear people say very derogatory things about unions, and I think some of this comes out of the rhetoric of the 1970s and '80s that unions are corrupt and that unions are run only for the leadership. That's obviously not true, but why do you think that's said so often, and what's your response to that?
14:36
âWell, I mean, it's said, it is in part true. I mean, there is a truth to the fact that there has been corruption in unions. I think like any large institution, there's room for corruption. I think it also has gained strength from the position that these big industrial unions have found themselves in, where they, it's been very difficult for them to actually deliver for their members, so there's this, you know, a sense that they don't get much done. You know, they've done an important, they've played important roles in at least holding the ground. But I think, you know, that's something that's very hard for people to see, and so there's a sort of, yes, sense that these are institutions that are on their back, and it's hard to sell them even to their own members.
15:24
âOn the other hand, I think it's important to keep in mind that unions have really been central to any advances that we've had toward economic equality in the United States and in other respects in terms of other forms of equality. So, you know, the UAW came out of the 1930s, but it really, I think, played its central role in the United States in US politics in the 1950s and '60s, the sort of heyday what some historians call the heyday of American liberalism. It was the UAW that pushed for universal, for healthcare programs, for workers, to provide health that employers, this sort of employer-based system that we now have. The UAW actually initially pushed for a universal healthcare program. When the auto companies pushed back vehemently against that, the UAW said, "Well, okay, then employers need to step up and provide healthcare for workers." âThey pushed for, you know, all of the sort of liberal provisions of what we might call the welfare state of the 1950s, was pushed for by industrial unions like the UAW.
16:41
âThe UAW also played a really critical role in the civil rights movement. It was one of the unions that, you know, provided consistent funding for the major campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The UAW sent money to help support the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the March on Washington. The president of the UAW, Walter Reuther, spoke at the March on Washington, you know, just before Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. So this, these are institutions that have really been vital to American democracy and to the sense of sort of creating a more egalitarian United States.
17:25
âI'm so glad you explained that Will, because it is striking and I think undeniable that moments in our history when unions have been stronger, we have seen less economic inequality in moments such as the 1970s and '80s. When we see unions receding in American history we see more inequality. So there's at least a correlation there, as my economist friends would say. That's right. That's, I mean, if you, one chart that I like to show my students is if you chart the level of income inequality in the United States over the past century, and you chart union representation rates, they're in exact reverse correlation, right? That as unions have declined, we've seen wealth inequality grow.
18:10
âWill, do you think that's why it appears that there is at least some kind of renaissance of unions in the United States? You see Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, and various others talking about unions in ways we hadn't seen before. Is that part of the story?
18:27
âI think it is. I mean, one of the really remarkable things that we've seen in the Gallup polls is that, so in 2010, the Gallup poll, you know, Gallup poll every year since the '40s has asked people whether they think unions are good or bad, sort of a basic public, you know, opinion poll of unions. In 2010, that number reached its all-time low. It actually, for the first time, since they started asking it, it dipped below 50%. Wow. Last year, that number reached 70, over 75%. And so in the, you know, since 2010, we've seen the, that public approval of unions go from its historic low to close to an all-time high. And I think, you know, there's a number of reasons for that. I think, you know, there has been growing attention to income inequality. You know, 2010 was around the time that we saw the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. There was this sort of conversation around wealth inequality. There were the big protests in Madison, Wisconsin, that you and I both witnessed. Yes. I think they called attention to the historic importance of unions in a way that we haven't seen in a very long time. Since then, I think we've seen, certainly during the pandemic, I think there were a number of ways in which the pandemic contributed to this growth of unions. One was the sort of outward display of workers who were really, you know, were essential, were critical for the functioning of our society, critical to protecting people from the pandemic and caring for people when they got the pandemic. Those workers were often the lowest paid, the worst treated workers in the economy. Yes. Yes. And that highlighted this contradiction, I think it led to a lot of those workers, going on strike and forming unions.
20:28
âI think the third thing that I'd point to is actually this reform movement within the union movement that, you know, really goes back to the 1970s, but that people have been working within the unions to make them both, you know, to sort of root out corruption, but also to make them more aggressive and to sort of take on some of these concessions. And that, I think we're seeing, you know, all of the leadership of many of the big unions and of the AFL-CIO comes out of these reform movements that started back in the 1970s. So I think we're in some ways seeing the results of those.
21:05
âIn recent weeks, we've seen both the current president of the United States, and his predecessor visit UAW picket lines or at least speak with UAW strikers. How should we understand the role that this strike, will play and is playing in our national politics so close to a presidential election?
21:27
âYeah, that was really fascinating. I thought, you know, in both cases. I mean, I think it's important to point out that Donald Trump did not go to a UAW plant. He went to a non-union plant. He was also invited by the employers who were, who are sort of a vehemently anti-union, parts manufacturers. So I think that's important to keep in mind.
21:51
âBiden, on the other hand, was invited by the president of the UAW, and spoke very powerfully. For the first time in history, a union, a sitting president really took a very strong position, in favor of the union, and I think really, you know, framed his remarks in the tone that the union is saying, that this is about wealth inequality, that the CEOs of the auto manufacturers have done very well, and the workers deserve to do well also. And you know, I think that that signaled that this conversation is going to be, is clearly going to be a really important part of the coming election. And I think for a first time in a very long time, we're seeing, you know, the politics of unionization, and of wealth inequality really being at the heart of the conversation leading into this presidential election.
22:47
âWill, there's a lot of talk and you've been part of this discussion too about working class voters. From, you know, the period of Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt's presidency forward, there was a presumption in part because of the connections between the Democratic Party and some of the major unions that working class voters would be Democratic voters. Then the Trump movement seems to have reversed that, at least in some areas, perhaps particularly in the Midwest. How do you see that issue today? Are working class voters MAGA voters? Are they Trump voters? Are they Democratic voters? What would you say?
23:25
âYeah. I mean, I think it's important to keep in mind who, you know, what we mean when we say working class voters. I mean, there's a very, I think a very small sort of narrow segment of working class voters who are overwhelmingly white and male, they're largely rural, who have, you know, who are, have become Trump voters. Many of those voters have been conservative voters for a very long time. I mean, they were, you know, going back to Reagan, even going back to before that, to Nixon.
23:55
âThe working class is extremely diverse and the working class as a whole still is decidedly Democrat. But if you, if you look at a particular, you know, segments of workers, I thought it was actually interesting that, you know, Trump, spoke, gave his speech when he went to Detroit in Macomb County, which is the sort of classic place where, the sort of origin of the term Reagan Democrats. The sort of long-term Democrats who had turned to the Republican Party with the, in 1980 to vote for Reagan. So I think, you know, I think Trump's politics are often sort of framed in the context of the 1980s. Right. And he seems sort of stuck back there. But I think that was definitely part of his, thinking and going.
24:45
âIs it fair to say that the white male elements of the working class that we associate also with traditional unionism, the traditional people working in Henry Ford's plants and others, is that a smaller and smaller part of what you'd call the working class today?
25:03
âWell, in some respects it's always been a small part of the working class. They've been the working class that has been most visible. I see. But certainly, I mean, in, like, if you look at core industrial jobs, I mean, if you look at the pictures of UAW picket lines, you know, they look very different. It's lots of women, and lots of Black and Latino men. So in that sense, the sort of core sort of UAW, which has always been a racially diverse union, right? But it's become, its sort of core constituency has become more racially and gender diverse. Certainly gender diverse. Right. That makes sense.
25:44
âSo Will, we always like to close our episodes by bringing together the enormous reservoir of information and knowledge that guests like you are sharing with us, and we're fortunate to be able to participate in that and to benefit from your knowledge. We like to bring together this historical knowledge with a forward-looking perspective. Based on this really deep and complex history of unions and workers in the United States that you have such a strong command of, what would you say to a President Biden, or it could be to a Republican presidential candidate, what would you say to them about how one could be both pro-worker and pro-growth? It seems too often we see these as dichotomous positions in our history, that you have to either be for growth or for unions. Of course, many periods of economic growth have been periods of union growth and union prosperity in our society as well. So how can we bring those two together looking forward today?
26:43
âYeah. I mean, as you said, I would point to history. I mean, if you look at the post-war period when the UAW was at its most powerful, that was also the point in which the U.S. economy was growing more rapidly than it ever has, before or since. And so I think that, you know, again, it's correlation. But it raises the question as to whether there is a fundamental sort of tension between growth and, you know, better wages, better working conditions, sort of a more prosperous working class.
27:18
âI think also I'd point to, you know, a lot of that conversation goes around the sort of sense that sort of better wages for auto workers is going to be damaging for consumers, right? That, like, if we raise wages for auto workers, you know, it's gonna raise the cost of a car. We hear this in a lot, you know, if we pay fast food workers too much, it's gonna, you know, shut people out of McDonald's, right? And I think it's important to keep in mind that in each of those cases, the actual cost of labor is just a fraction of the cost of making any product. I think the cost of labor, the labor cost for making a car is around 10 to 15% of the total cost. So there's a lot of other factors going into that.
28:06
âIt has to do with, you know, getting products from overseas and trade policies that affect that. It has to do with, with the compensation that goes to management, and also, more importantly, the compensation that goes to shareholders and out in profit. And I think it's important to, you know, to keep in mind that those all mean that we can actually, in many cases, it's beneficial for the broader economy to make sure that people have better wages. It stimulates consumption. And that there's certainly not a contradiction between improving conditions for workers and promoting a prosperous economy.
28:46
âZachary, you spent the summer in Germany, and of course, Germany's a country with very strong unions. Do you agree with Will that Germany's an example of economic growth and worker protections going hand-in-hand?
29:00
âI think so, and I think one thing about this moment that maybe is a little optimistic is that I think the attention from both parties to the issue of economic equality, albeit from two different perspectives and one often much more about cultural resentment than actual economic policy, I think that should be a positive sign that most Americans or a large number of Americans recognize that the future of our economy is not going to be in the same places and organizations that we've relied on in the last decade or so that we have to look back to the past but also look forward to find new ways of thinking about wealth distribution and economic prosperity in our country.
29:47
âAnd Zachary, for young observers like yourself, are unions part of that story? Do you feel that your generation is giving more attention to unions than maybe the generation just before yours?
30:00
âI think so, and I think quite simply it's one of the places in American politics that is most exciting but also most accessible. I think it's a engaging, exciting, political movement as much as it is a very serious, critique of our economy.
30:18
âSo Will, that was the last question, the really last question I had for you, which was for our listeners, particularly our younger listeners, if they're interested in learning more about unions as scholars and perhaps as activists, what are the best ways to get involved and to become knowledgeable of this subject matter?
30:37
âYeah, well, I think you can, I'll do a plug for taking labor history classes. Sign up for my classes. Go to Minneapolis and sign up for Will's class. That's right. Well, you, you don't have to come here. You can in most universities there are classes, you know, related to labor history and labor studies more broadly.
30:57
âI do think that, you know, Zachary's right in terms of the accessibility. I mean, in a lot of cases young people, you know, learn about unions 'cause they go to work in a place where there's a union drive. And, you know, I've been, there's a Starbucks down the street from my house, and I've had a great time talking to people who are trying to build a union there. And they're, you know, they're all in their 20s, and they have, you know, they haven't been involved in unions before, but they're learning a lot about unions, and they're really interested in it. So that's a way that I think, you know, whether you work in a place like that or you, you know, you go to a business like Starbucks, I think you can talk to the people who work there about their experiences. And, you know, I think depending on where you live, there are a lot of union members who, you know, they don't wear their UAW hat everywhere, but they're, you know, they're around and they have experience with unions. So those are other ways you can learn about unions.
31:56
âIts such a great point. Even in a state like Texas, which traditionally doesn't have the same strong unionization as other parts of the country, teachers are part of a union, right? That's right. What I know your next project is on, Will, public service workers, right? That's right. âMy wife, who's a city council member, she's actually part of AFSCME, which is the public sector union. And so there are actually a lot of people around who work with or are involved with unions. And, as you say, Will, I think that talking to them and getting a sense, positive and negative, of what their experience is, is important in informing ourselves when we're discussing these issues politically. âYeah. I mean, it's true that, you know, if you're in high school, the chances are your teacher is a union member.
32:41
âRight. Right. Well, Will, thank you so much for sharing this excursion, a necessary excursion today into the history of unions and workers in American society. There's obviously much more you could say. You could fill, I think, 500 podcast episodes on this, but you've given us really a wonderful introduction to the topic, and I hope our listeners will dig in for more. So, thank you Professor Will Jones for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. It was great to talk to both of you. And thank you, Zachary, of course, for your, inspiring and really imaginative poem bringing us to the picket lines where we all could learn a lot. And thank you for doing that, Zachary. Thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 249: Race & Opportunity in America
00:25
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Every one of our episodes each week is special, but this one I really feel is super special, if I can say that, because we have on not only someone whom Zachary and I deeply respect, but someone who really has now written a book that tells a story that I think is so moving and so relevant and so uplifting for our time. And I can't think of a moment in our recent history when we've needed an uplifting story more than today.
00:57
We are going to talk today with Dr. Ruth Simmons, who has just published a fantastic book that I recommend to all of our listeners, Up Home: One Girl's Journey. And it is quite the journey that Dr. Simmons has had. She has been a pioneer in so many ways.
01:15
She is the former president of Smith College, then she was president of Brown University, and then after retiring from those two jobs, she came back to her native Texas and was the president at Prairie View A&M University, which is a historically black college and university, Texas's oldest historically black college and university.
01:35
And as I was telling Dr. Simmons before we started the recording, I have a few students in Austin now who were students of hers, and they speak with her with a reverence that is rarely heard for university administrators and leaders. It's really quite, quite extraordinary.
01:52
As we'll discuss, and as Dr. Simmons describes in beautiful detail in her book, she did not start out in an elite position. She did not start out with privilege. She grew up in Grapeland, Texas, the child of sharecroppers, and Dr. Simmons was the 12th child of her parents and grew up in poverty that most of us have never experienced.
02:11
And it's really quite an extraordinary story. Dr. Simmons, thank you for joining us today.
02:15
It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
02:18
We will start, of course, with our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today?
02:25
Well, it's one that's very appropriate for fall, âIf the leaves could speak.â
02:29
You're just rubbing in the fact that you actually get a beautiful fall in New Haven.
02:32
I am, yes. Well, I'm going to be feeling the brunt of winter very soon. I think I have a right to rub it in for a few days.
02:41
Fair enough, fair enough. Well, let's hear your poem, Zachary.
02:45
âI wonder sometimes if the leaves could speak. What they would say of the glory they seek in learning to fly as they fall. If we should ask of them all, what right do you have to hope? If each one would be able to state and not for a minute hesitate. There is no reason or rhyme. I hope only because I remember a time when hope was illegal and wonder a crime. I hope sometimes for the world to freeze so I can ask of each hailstorm and autumn breeze what keeps you alive in the frost and the swift answer tossed. I keep going because I am going to keep the soil I plowed under my own two feet. The fruits of fields I've sown I shall reap. Wonderful is the coldness of this, the steely-eyed whisper that's almost a kiss that sees a truth that is most certainly true, but won't let them rest without paying her due. We are not eternal, but our hope can last and heal our wounds, a wonderful cast. Hold still so the dreams will be real.Hold still so the children can hear. Hold still so the gashes can heal.â
04:04
Wow, Zachary, you're channeling your inner Walt Whitman today.
04:07
Perhaps.
04:09
What's your poem about?
04:10
My poem is about the power of hope and curiosity even in circumstances that not only seem to leave no space for those, but seem to actively try to suppress and undermine hope and curiosity.
04:24
Well, I think that's a perfect place to turn to our distinguished guest, Dr. Simmons.
04:30
I was so moved by how you started your book in describing your experiences as a young child in what sound to me as circumstances that were almost impossible to learn and maybe circumstances where there was reason not to have hope. Can you describe for us how you grew up and how you managed to have hope in these difficult circumstances?
04:52
Well, first, may I just say how much I enjoyed Zachary's poem, and I even took note of some phrases that I want to hold on to for a while. Thank you, Zachary.
05:05
Thank you.
05:06
As you said, I'm the last of 12 children of Ike and Fanny Stubblefield who, like most of their era in the rural South, were consigned to work farms as sharecroppers. So when I was born, we lived on a plantation which had, perhaps, as much as 100 families living on the land and working the fields.
05:44
And the crop, the principal crop, was, of course, cotton. So it was fortuitous that I was the last because, as you might imagine, the oldest children were the heaviest workers. They were consigned to toiling in the fields to bring in crops.
06:06
And since that was the most important thing that they could do, they sacrificed school in order to be able to work the farm. And that meant, frankly, that the older children in my family did not have the opportunity to graduate from school. It was too far away and the work itself called.
06:31
So the younger members of the family were able to go to school because we moved away when I was seven years old. And when we moved away from the farm, we were required to go to school. And that was what saved me, really, that I could get an education.
06:54
So in spite of that, I would say that for all of my childhood up to my graduation from high school, we had a very bare existence as, again, most of that era and of that economic station had. We lived, we moved to Houston in Fifth Ward, and it was really a very poor community at the time with laborers principally and maids occupying the meager opportunities for employment in Houston at the time. So my father became a janitor when he moved to Houston and my mother was a maid.
07:43
Growing up, I understood in the racial environment of that moment that I was not to have the hope for a different kind of life because, as Zachary said, hope was illegal in that era, certainly for blacks. So the aspiration to do something significant with my life simply didn't exist. I was going to follow in the footsteps of all the women I knew who were maids.
08:13
It was only the fact that I was able to go to school and to be inspired by teachers and to love learning that I began to see a way different from what I was supposed to do. And that was through the good graces of teachers who inspired me, who encouraged me, and who did the most miraculous thing, and that is they were able to dream of a different future from the one we lived in at the moment.
08:48
And I often say that had it been up to us, we would never have anticipated that life would change so dramatically, and therefore we wouldn't have worked toward that end. But because they were not mired in that reality, they could dream of a future for us different from what we knew, and it was their dreams that made possible our aspirations.
09:13
That's extraordinary. And one of the many things that moved me in your book that you've just referred to are the heroic women.
09:21
You express in your book a lot of affection for your father, but he's clearly a problematic figure, and I'll leave it to the readers to read that. But your mother, your mother's work ethic, and then if I'm remembering correctly, Dr. Simmons, the teachers you single out are mostly all women. And to what, is that significant to the story? How should we think about women in this journey that you're describing?
09:46
I think the only reason that women are highlighted in the story, I clearly had the benefit of male teachers and role models, but in that moment of crushing need, men were not, and I was a girl, men were not able to put their arms around us and take care of us as parental figures. That would not have been proper, so to speak. And so it was the women who had no barriers.
10:23
They could, as you may have read, they could ask me to come to their house, for example, for dinner. They could put me in their car and take me places that enlarged my perspective about the city that I lived in. They could do, there were no barriers because they were women and really expected, in a sense, in this village, they were expected to do more, to be motherly and so on.
10:54
And so, but they were quite extraordinary. And most extraordinary of all, that I've wrestled with over the years, is the fact that they could be so hopeful. Because after all, these were, in many ways, the worst of times.
11:10
We had, this is before the civil rights gains. This was before Jim Crow was definitively eliminated. This is before really any robust integration.
11:26
So here we are isolated in our community, told that we could not achieve, told that we were worthless and should not expect much of life, and so on. And yet, here are these individuals who are guiding us to a place that's very different and instilling in us aspirations that go far beyond what we understand to be our limitations.
11:52
Where did this hope come from, Dr. Simmons? I mean, why was there not a div[e] into cynicism, which I sense a little bit in your father in some of the ways you describe him at times. How did these women, how did you find hope and keep this hope realistic and make it realistic in what are such difficult circumstances?
12:13
Well, as I say, I think they carried that hope for me for a long period of time before I dared believe it myself. And so, what is a child to do? If you go into a classroom and you meet a teacher who says to you that you are worthy and that you are welcome and that you are important, what is a child to do but to respond to that and to want to be better as a consequence of the positive attitude that the teachers have?
12:54
So in some ways, I think I was more trying to please these wonderful people who seemed so positive in a dark time that I was more focused on what I could do to make sure they knew how much I valued their enthusiasm and their help. And of course, as you know, my mother died when I was 15 and my world absolutely fell apart.
13:24
I was going into the 11th grade at that time and all of a sudden, these teachers rushed in to embrace me, to watch over me, to challenge me, to make sure that I knew I was not alone. It was a magnificent time for the teaching profession because at that moment, blacks had very few professional opportunities. And so, the idea of a brilliant black person who's educated and employed at that moment in the early 60s, let's say, well, there's only one or two professions they can aspire to.
14:12
One is teaching in black schools. And so, we were blessed to have teachers who were supremely well-qualified, very smart, very self-possessed. And we look today for people who are going in, if you look at college students today and you look at their professions, they're thinking about, well, I mean, one wants to be an investment banker, another a lawyer, another a physician and so forth.
14:45
Well, imagine all of that passion and all of that intelligence going into the teaching profession. That's what it was like in those days. And so, we benefited immensely from these spectacular people.
14:58
And I have to say, your book really describes the character of these teachers and some of them seem to me to be larger than life characters. And it's wonderful. It's one of my favorite parts of the book.
15:09
And I also do want to emphasize this was a public school and you're talking about public school teachers.
15:14
Yes, of course.
15:16
Zachary?
15:18
How did this early experience of education shape your experience in higher education through college and graduate school and then later as an academic yourself?
15:29
Well, I've talked a good bit about the environment in the schools and how inspired I was by these teachers.
15:38
But I should also say that I fell in love with learning, the power of learning, because it was the antidote that I needed to remove me from a sordid world. And by that, I mean, by reading, I could escape the Texas of the 40s and 50s. I could read about foreign environments and imagine worlds that were very different from the world that I lived in.
16:15
And learning about the existence of other environments rescued me and allowed me to believe that quite possibly there were other worlds that I could inhabit at some point. So I would say that by the time I was in high school, I was already enthralled with this, the power of education. Because, although, they could tell me that I couldn't go into a department store, or I couldn't go to a particular university or school, or I couldn't enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, they could tell me that, but they could not control what I put in my mind.
17:04
And it occurred to me as a young person that learning was the most powerful thing I could do, because it gave me absolute control over what I could know. And so, in a way, I would say that's what fueled my journey in education.
17:24
The fact that it was so important to me, that it rescued me, that it gave me hope, that it propelled me beyond what I thought I'd ever be able to do. I was absolutely sold on the idea that education was the most powerful thing that we could offer young people, and I wanted to be associated with it for the rest of my life.
17:48
And so it seemed natural for me to continue to study, to advance through graduate school, and to become a professor, because that was a way for me to certainly begin to express to students how vital it was that they care for their minds in the way that they care for others, their possessions; that they feed their minds in the way that they feed their bodies, and so forth. So, I wanted to inspire that same feeling in other young people, because it had done so much for me.
18:28
I could listen to you forever, Dr. Simmons.
18:32
That's mana from heaven, what you're describing. It's, I think, the mission of us as educators, and the power of education, opening up opportunities for people of all different kinds of backgrounds. You describe in your book your time at Dillard University, which is a historically black college and university in New Orleans, and then you begin to describe the transition to Harvard, where you did your PhD.
18:55
How did you make that transition, especially from Dillard to Harvard, going from what had been, through most of your life, largely African-American environments, to a world where there were not many other African-Americans in roles such as yours? How did you make that transition?
19:13
Fortunately, I had some intervening experiences that broadened my world a bit. The first was this conviction that I had that there was another world I needed to know about, and so I got on a Greyhound bus and took off one summer when I was at Dillard to go to Mexico to live with a Mexican family and to study Spanish.
19:40
Now, I didn't tell my family where I was going because they would have been livid and would not have permitted it, of course. But so, that was my first experience, really, being in classes with whites. And then I came back at the end of that summer, and I was able to go to Wellesley College for my junior year. And at Wellesley, of course, there were a handful of black students, maybe, not much more than that.
20:13
And so I had the experience of working and learning and being tested in a very competitive academic environment at Wellesley. But I came back to Dillard for my senior year and then graduated from Dillard, so the experience in Mexico, the experience at Wellesley.
20:32
And then I also had a summer in France at the end of my junior year with the experiment in international living, where, again, I lived with a French family and got to know a different culture. By then, I'm totally convinced that I need to know something about the world and that I need to know how to understand people different from me.
20:57
The one thing I knew I could not ever tolerate was to have the same narrowness of mind that had subjected everybody I loved to the worst possible consequences. And so I didn't want to be a racist. I wanted to be open to differences of all kinds.
21:16
And so, I was practicing this at a very young age and on a quest to test myself to make sure that I could be adaptable in different circumstances, and that I would be willing to reach out to people who were very different from me.
21:34
So by the time I, and then I had a Fulbright after Dillard, and I studied for a year in France. So by the time I got to Harvard, I had, I would say, a variety of experiences that helped me adjust to the circumstances of being a student, a graduate student at Harvard.
21:52
But how did you deal with the racism you most certainly confronted in all kinds of ways then and thereafter? I mean, what's extraordinary to me about your career, and we're going a little bit after the book chronologically now, but what's extraordinary to me about your career is how many times you must have been the only African American in the room.
22:15
Yes. Well, here, my mother's death had such a profound influence on me, and it did something that was very important. It forced me to think about who I was and what I had learned growing up. And as I dealt with her death, I was comforted by the fact that she had taught me many things. She taught me never to think myself superior to other human beings.
22:52
She taught me to be kind and generous because she was the epitome of both. She taught me never to separate myself from my family and from my people. And so really, I think what happened is I became secure in who I was, and I wasn't trying to impress anybody.
23:18
I was trying to be as deeply who I was as possible, and at the same time, be constantly open to learning about others, but never denying who I was. So I think it was being anchored in that way made it possible for me to be unshaken by these cultural experiences when people thought I was unworthy, when they thought I didn't belong, when they thought I wasn't good enough, and so forth.
23:52
That really never touched me in a profound way, but again, because my mother had done her work. She'd left me early, but she'd done her work, and she had taught me how to be strong in who I was and how to respect myself and not bend to the interests and the criticisms of others.
24:20
So I guess that leads to our sort of contemporary question for you, and we always like to close, Dr. Simmons, by sort of taking this history, and you've given us a very inspiring history here, and applying it to contemporary issues, not in a narrow way, but in a broad way.
24:41
I have many students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds into my classrooms, and I obviously can't change their home environment. I can't give them your mother, but many of them struggle.
24:52
What should we be doing? What is the role for educational institutions today? What are the lessons we can take from your story as we think about diversity and opportunity in our institutions today?
24:58
Thank you for that. I often say that I wrote this book actually for my students, because of all the questions I've gotten from them in moments of doubt and distress and disappointment. Because I don't think that young people today who are facing the extraordinary challenges that they are admittedly facing can understand that a life is made up of many peaks and valleys. And one can't always predict the value of everything one encounters, but there are things that you can do that will maximize the possibility that you're going to be okay in the long run.
25:52
And so, I talk to my students a good deal about a mindset that enables them to be hopeful about what they can ultimately do, and that mindset is one that emphasizes the importance of personal commitment to ongoing learning. Not [a] formulaic kind of learning, not a fixed syllabus per se, but an attitude about learning, which is: I am here to learn about who I am in the world and to learn about the rest of the world.
26:28
And that means every opportunity that one is afforded to build the knowledge of what is here in the world should be taken advantage of, even when it seems a minor opportunity, even when it seems that the person who can help you is not a very important person, it doesn't matter. And so what I like to tell them is that most of the time I could not have predicted the people in my life who would have been the most important in assuring my hopefulness and my success.
27:05
I couldn't predict that. I tell them about a woman, who was a maid, who had the most powerful experience on me as a learner and as a human being. I tell them about a man who was Jewish and who was my boss who criticized me so relentlessly to improve my work and he was my greatest mentor because he helped me to grow.
27:34
I tell them about other challenges that I've had that I embraced and because I embraced them, I was able to do something better, learn more and I think be a better person. So I think the most important thing for young people to know is that they cannot predict the way their life will go nor the opportunities they will have. I would never in a million years have said that growing up in Fifth Ward, Houston, being on a sharecropping farm, I would be the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university.
28:15
That would not have been possible, okay? And yet step by step, by learning, by being serious about my purpose, by being open to criticism, I managed to claw my way through a life that really has incredible meaning, I think. And I couldn't be happier today with what I've been able to do because I have tried every day of my life to live it fully and to take advantage of every opportunity to learn.
28:50
Zachary, I know on your campus, like on ours here in Austin, and throughout education, we talk about these issues all the time, but not quite in the way that Dr. Simmons does. What are your thoughts on this, Zachary?
29:04
I think that this is a vital reminder for all students, but also every learner, which I think is every one of us, about the importance of maintaining a love for learning, a curiosity, and also about the importance of education and of educators. I think it's very easy for students to forget that the secret to success is, as we've talked about, curiosity, always being willing to learn, to take new ideas seriously.
29:38
And on the other hand, we also need educators who will help inspire young people to be the best learners that they can be. And so I think those two reminders, the importance of educators and the importance of a love of learning, I think those are so powerful, especially in a moment where, and at a time in our lives when college students like myself, but I think also all of us are sometimes forgetting how much we love and enjoy learning and meeting new people and encountering new ideas.
30:09
It sounds, Zachary, like you're making an argument or applying Dr. Simmons' insights as an argument for the liberal arts, yes?
30:16
It is an argument for the liberal arts, and I think it's also an argument for the importance of good teachers.
30:26
And I hope more of my fellow students will consider, as I have, and as my older sister Natalie, whom many of you will be familiar with, has also considered and will likely pursue a career in which is a career in public service. And I think that this story that Dr. Simmons has kindly shared with us is only a very poignant reminder of how important learning is and how important those early moments of education can be for a child's life.
30:38
Dr. Simmons, this is the last question, I promise. What can our listeners do, in addition to cultivating this curiosity and openness that you display so well, what can they do to help others, to help the other young Ruth Simmons out there? What does allyship mean to you?
30:57
Yes, yes.
31:19
Well, first of all, I think the most important thing for us is to embrace the fact that there is talent and intelligence and potential in every reach of the country, in the poorest communities. And if we don't make it possible for children who are in underserved communities to develop through the interventions of support and education, then we are really missing our crucial function as citizens.
32:00
So I think I often encourage people to do whatever they can do to help children at any age, come into the world of learning. I'm absolutely confident that if we can get students to that point, they'll be fine, okay?
32:24
But we've got to get them to that point, because we're losing too many children who drop out, who cannot sustain any kind of upward trajectory at all, because the problems are too immense, and there's no hope in their lives. And so whatever we can do, join groups that are helping our children like those. There are so many of them.
32:48
There are so many worthwhile efforts underway, and everybody who has a care for these children should sign up to do whatever they can, whether it's working directly in a school, volunteering for a school, or any other organization that is helping.
33:07
I think you've given us very pragmatic marching orders of getting involved, rolling up our sleeves, and you've given us an inspiring, idealistic, but very realistic framework. Dr. Simmons, I want to thank you for sharing your story with us and taking some time to talk to us.
33:26
I want to encourage all of our listeners, who I'm sure are equally inspired by what you've heard, to read the book, because there's so much more in this book. As I'm sure all of you can tell [by] listening, Dr. Simmons is also a very talented writer, as well as a talented thinker and leader. The title of the book is Up Home, One Girl's Journey, and it's available everywhere for purchase, I'm sure.
33:51
Dr. Simmons, thank you again for joining us today.
33:52
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
33:55
Zachary, thank you for your really beautiful poem, your insights. I think you brought together some of the points we were discussing very well and applied them to your own experience as a student. So thank you, Zachary, and thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 251: Middle East in the 1970s and Today
00:25
Welcome to our new episode of this is democracy. This week, we are going to return to the Middle East. We did an episode a few weeks ago with Peter Beinart on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. And today we're going to take an even more historical deep dive. We're going to look at the 1970s, which I think historians have come to agree is a period of major transformation in the region. And we're going to look at what happened in the 1970s and how the experience of that crucial decade had deep influence upon the events that we're seeing today and probably will continue to have deep influence upon where we go from where we are today in the region. This is a case where history is not only part of the past, but really is ever present in our contemporary conflicts and our contemporary efforts to understand the conflicts around us. We're fortunate to be joined by a person who's a close friend and someone who I think is one of the really great scholars of the Middle East from the 1960s to the present. This is Salim Yaqub. He's a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. and director of UCSB Center for Cold War Studies and International History. Salim, it's so good to have you on the podcast.
01:48
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
01:52
Salim Yaqub is the author of three books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. His first book, Containing Arab Nationalism, is really, I think, as close to the definitive work as is possible on the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which was really the first American Cold War Doctrine for major influence, even perhaps for attempted dominance in the region.
02:15
Salim's second book, which is really one of my favorites, "Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and the US Middle East relations in the 1970s". This is a book that looks at events in the Middle East, but also within the United States and the emerging Arab American community, which becomes very important as Salim shows to American politics in the 1970s. It's also a book filled with wonderful anecdotes about Woody Allen. and Henry Kissinger and various other individuals. So I encourage all of our listeners to read it.
02:46
And Salim's most recent book, "Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord". What a great title. The United States since 1945. And that title would certainly apply to the present as well as the entire period from 1945 to the present. Salim has written many important articles and other chapters on U.S. foreign policy, on the Middle East, and on Arab American political activism.
03:11
Before we turn to our conversation with Salim, we have, of course, our scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? "To Israel, a Widow". "To Israel, a Widow". Wow. Let's hear it.
03:27
Isaac Singer once said you were an encounter with the supposedly dead, and I suppose he is right. You're a land of old men and infants held tight and sandy ancient ruined coasts. All of them were always supposed to be ghosts. Few wars can be fought with history, but you have fought them all, have saved a generation from fighting back the fall. Yet, though you have somehow survived on promises that you revived, it must be said you've built yourself a cage. No war should be fought with rage
04:05
The grandchildren of the widower, the children of the hollowed, held in their tunnels underground, are lost and must be found. Your neighbors remain, to say the least, uncharitable, Lips smacking for the feast, break through the garden fence. Can there be any recompense? No, I am convinced all moral questions will remain unanswered. You are alive, and soon you must have peace. If only so, it might be said, all had a chance to count their debt.
04:39
I love the doggerel in there Zachary. What is your poem about?
04:44
My poem? It's hard to explain. I'm not sure I perfectly understand what I was trying to get at either. But. I think it's sort of an attempt to understand the place of Israel today, but also in particular from the perspective of the 1970s, a period when Israel was still led in large part by a generation which was defined by the Holocaust, but it was also beginning to really develop its own sort of distinct Israeli identity that still shaped by that, the sort of last exile to Israel from Europe and other parts of the Middle East, and in some cases from within the territory of Israel.
05:33
And to understand that mindset, but also to apply that to today and how that history informs this moment of violence. between Israel and Hamas and maybe the lessons we can draw from these many decades of conflict.
05:50
I love the arc in your poem, Zachary, from Isaac Bashevik Singer, who sort of represents the early generation of European Ashkenazi Jews who settle Israel. And then, of course, the generational change that I sort of feel in your poem as it goes through to where we are today, which is a Middle East that looks very different, of course, from The world of Isaac Petrovic Singer in the 1950s and 60s, right? Yes, very much so.
06:17
Salim, maybe that's a great point of entry. As I mentioned at the top of the episode, you're one of a number of historians, you're one of the leading historians, making the case that the 1970s, this period about a quarter century after World War II, that the 1970s is a real turning point for the region and also for U.S. policy. How should we begin to understand that?
06:42
Sure. And first I just want to say, thanks for sharing that poem, Zachary. It's very powerful. I'm going to want to go back and read it again, listen to it again and linger over it.
06:52
But, in answer to your question Jeremy, the the seventies really are a very pivotal decade for a lot of reasons and in a lot of places, but certainly for the history of the Middle East and the history of U.S. involvement in that region. I mean, what you see in the 70s is the you know, sort of the last vestiges of European imperialism being removed with the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region in the, in the first couple years of the decade. You know, the French had vacated North Africa in the previous decade and earlier than that. And so what you see then is a new, or maybe the continuation of a previous era in which the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union becoming more and more active in that region.
07:49
It's also, and also, you know, they're bringing the Cold War struggle, you know, to the region in a way that hadn't quite happened previously. Also, I mean, certainly the 1973 war is very key for all sorts of reasons that we'll probably get into. It's, you know, during and shortly after that war that the power of the oil producing Middle Eastern states, and in this case, particularly the Arab states, because they actually mount an embargo against the United States and some Western countries becomes, you know, unavoidable, you know, it becomes impossible to ignore.
08:29
And of course, the lingering after effects of the oil embargo and of the OPEC price increases are gonna last for the remainder of the decade and into the following one. And, you know, also the manner in which the Arab Israeli War of 1973 ends and the kind of diplomacy that comes in its wake sets the agenda for Arab Israeli peacemaking for years and in some cases, you know, arguably decades to come.
09:03
So it's, and then I guess you could, I would just add that, if you fast forward to the closing years of the decade, you start seeing the emergence of political Islam as a really powerful force, primarily with the Iranian revolution of 1978 to 1979. But there also were some pretty important events taking place in the Arab world. The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, you know, right around the same time that the Iranian hostage crisis begins.
09:38
And if, you know, if you want to count, consider the Middle East in its more, in a broader geographical frame, you could look at the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, also right around that time in December 1979 as ushering in a whole new set of issues that will define the last years of the Cold War and set the agenda for the way in which the Cold War ends.
10:05
Certainly you've given us a sense of the density of conflict and change occurring in that, in that decade. Zachary, you had a question? Yeah.
10:14
Why was the 1973 war, which you mentioned, so transformative for Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and also for, for many Americans?
10:24
Yeah, that's a great question. Well certainly it's transformative for Arabs and Israelis because it's sort of place puts the Arab Israeli conflict into a new dimension, you know, the immediately preceding years, you know, between 1967 and 1973 were ones in which the Israelis were occupying the lands that they had taken over in that war. And they sort of felt invincible. They didn't think that they really needed to, take seriously the diplomatic overtures that the Egyptian government under President Sadat had extended to them early, you know, earlier in the decade. They felt that they could really hold out for a much more dramatic set of concessions coming from the Arab side.
11:23
And essentially what happens with the 1973 war, which is on the Arab side, waged by Egypt and Syria primarily, is that it kind of shocks the Israelis out of their complacency and forces them to confront the fact that they actually really are still vulnerable. And that in turn, you know, makes it increasingly clear to them that they have to reach some kind of political accommodation with their Arab neighbors perhaps on terms, you know, not quite as favorable as the ones that they had been holding out for previously. And it's also, it's from the Arab side, it's important because it rekindles a sense of pride or restores a sense of pride that had been very seriously damaged by the debacle of 1967.
12:16
And in fact, I mean, from the standpoint at least of Egypt. It's psychologically very important because Egypt and Sadat feel that they need to show the world, and maybe more particularly the United States and Israel, that they're not total pushovers, that they are, you know, that Egypt is a force to be reckoned with. And having made that case, even though Militarily, the war ends up going quite badly for both Egypt and Syria. Nonetheless, because they do a lot better than they did in 1967, that restores a measure of respect, and maybe more importantly, self respect, and that gives at least Sadat the confidence to move forward and enter into increasingly intimate peace negotiations with Israel, you know, at first brokered by the United States, but eventually face to face.
13:19
I don't want us to jump too quickly to the present. I want us to stay in the seventies, but the question really has to be asked. Many have made an analogy between the October, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the 1973 attack by the Arab states on Israel, do you see an analogy between those two events?
13:43
Well, I mean, there are some similarities, but in the end, I would say they're kind of superficial. I mean, I guess the, you know, one, obviously, it's an attack on Israel. Although in the 1973 case, it's not an attack on Israel per se. It's an attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. But nonetheless, it's an attack that the Israelis are not prepared for. And, is much more damaging to the Israelis than anyone thought possible.
14:16
Of course, the major difference between 1973 and 2023 is that this is, the attack by Hamas is, you know, primarily against civilians. It entails not traditional military methods, but really horrific, and, you know, close up forms of attack that were, of course, recorded in very grisly ways that, and so that the level of shock, I think extends, it's a different kind of shock. It's a much more visceral sort of shock. And I think it is extended, it has extended much more, powerfully around the world then and especially the Western world than the shock of 1973 did, you know, partly because of the nature of the attack, and also because of the nature of media now as opposed to 50 years ago.
15:15
One of the things that's striking about the '73 war to me as a historian, Salim, and I wonder if you react the same way, is how this terrible war, and a war that initially looked like it might lead to the collapse of Israel and then, as you said, turns around relatively quickly with Israel occupying for a short time more territory than it had before the war. Correct. How, this terrible war then leads to a peace process? First of all, do you see a connection between what many call the Camp David process that eventually leads to an agreement between Israel and Egypt brokered in part by the United States? Do you see a strong connection there? And how should we understand that connection?
16:03
Oh yeah, there is a very strong connection. I mean, I would frame it in the following way, that the war and its immediate aftermath opened up a new phase in which it was widely recognized that some sort of diplomatic process between Israel and its Arab neighbors was both possible and necessary. I mean, on that, virtually everyone agreed. The difference was on the scope and nature of that diplomatic process.
16:37
There was, at the end of the war, an emerging international consensus that what really needed to happen was, as some sort of comprehensive settlement, between Israel on the one hand and its Arab neighbors on the other, you know, with the Palestinians playing some kind of role, although that was not clearly understood as yet. And as a result of this process, you know, according to this vision, you would have a full Israeli withdrawal from all of the territories occupied in 1967. That would be the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and in exchange for that withdrawal, the Arab states would extend recognition to Israel and commit to living in peace with Israel, which was something they had not previously done.
17:26
And in most cases continued to refuse to do in the years after 1960 and 1973. So that was the emerging consensus that you start to see in late '73 early 1974. But there's also, there's a contrary scenario and this is the one that is put forward most powerfully and resourcefully by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who does not think that it would be a good idea for the United States to pressure Israel to withdraw from all of the territory occupied in 1967. He thinks that a more stable scenario is one in which Israel is allowed to hold on to significant portions of that occupied territory. Now, we can later talk about why he felt that way, but that's was what he wanted to do. And so what Kissinger sets out to do, and it's really a pretty remarkable diplomatic performance, is he brokers or he encourages the development of a dialogue between Egypt and Israel.
18:39
He quite early intuits that Anwar Sadat of Egypt, although he would much prefer a comprehensive settlement in which Israel withdraws from all of the occupied territory from 1973, nonetheless, I'm talking about Sadat now, would be willing to accept some, a more bilateral arrangement where Egypt gets back the Sinai and the remaining Arab territories are either, you know, either remain under Israeli control or their status is you know, less certain. I mean, the sine qua non for Sadat is getting back the Sinai, and he's willing to take a less hardline view regarding the other occupied territories. Kissinger, you know, very brilliantly senses this. You know, almost immediately after the war ends. So Kissinger, you know, very skillfully cultivates Sadat and, you know, takes advantage of the fact that Sadat is willing to be a lot more conciliatory in negotiations with Israel than other Arab parties, especially, Assad, Hafez al Assad of Syria is prepared to be.
19:54
And so through a series of very complicated and clever diplomatic initiatives, he manages to sideline Syria, although that takes, that process takes a couple of years and it's something that Asad himself is not quite aware is occurring until it's too late for him to stop it. He ends, he brings an end to the Arab oil embargo and he, essentially puts in place a diplomatic process where Egypt withdraws from the confrontation with Israel, and the beauty of that, from Kissinger's perspective, is that it results in the subtraction of Egyptian power from the Arab Israeli equation.
20:42
And once that has been accomplished, the ability of the remaining Arab actors, Syria, Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organization, you know, these, the other parties that have territorial claims, that they want to see satisfied, their ability to get those claims satisfied is sharply diminished in the absence of Egyptian power. And that in a sense makes it impossible for another Arab Israeli war like the one that occurred in 1973 to break out. And indeed, if you look over the history over the last five decades, there's been plenty of really, really horrific strife, but there has been no general Arab Israeli war of that sort.
21:27
And, you know, that achieves Kissinger's objectives of first removing a flashpoint that he fears could spark a superpower confrontation, but it also eases the pressure on Israel. And makes it possible for Israel to take its time about considering withdrawal from any other occupied territories. And you know, as we've seen, the extent to which Israel has relinquished territories after giving up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, that was the big key that Egypt, that was the key gain that Egypt made. And that was realized, not under Kissinger, but under Jimmy Carter a few years later with Camp David.
22:13
Once Egypt has the Sinai Peninsula back, it's out of the war. And then Israel's occupation of the remaining territories is fortified. Now obviously the conflict has taken ups and downs. The diplomacy has gone through ups and downs ever since that time. But I think the key ingredients. The key sort of strategic realities that we need to keep in mind to understand, you know, what kind of diplomatic scenarios have been possible in the years since 1973, we need to keep in mind this achievement of Henry Kissinger of pulling Egypt out of confrontation with Israel and thereby, in his view, making the diplomacy more manageable. Right.
23:03
And this is something many of us have chewed on for a long time, right? How to evaluate Kissinger's diplomatic shuttle diplomacy and his efforts to, as you say, take Egypt out of what had been a coalition of anti Israeli states. One other point I thought I'd add for you to comment on, and then I know Zachary has a question too, is part of what he's also doing is making the United States the most powerful external actor in the region. He's sidelining the Soviet Union, which had been an ally of Egypt, right? And that, of course, has implications for the United States in the region, taking us all the way up to the Iraq war, correct?
23:43
Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, essentially what Camp David accomplishes, and this is often missed because it wasn't something that Jimmy Carter, I think, really was focusing on. I mean, he really, I think Carter genuinely was trying to make peace between Arabs and Israelis. But one byproduct of the Camp David Agreement is that, you know, Egypt is removed from confrontation with Israel. It enters into an alliance with Israel. I mean, with the United States, whereby it starts receiving nearly as much economic and other kinds of aid as Israel does for some years.
24:23
And that's a huge strategic blow to the Soviet Union. And again, that gets masked because the Soviet Union in some ways is more visibly active in the region in the years thereafter. I mean, it really, you know, it flexes its muscles. It, you know, has all kinds of agreements and makes various diplomatic gains on the Arabian peninsula with its relationship with South Yemen and, you know, further to the East, it's invading and occupying Afghanistan. It's cementing its strategic alliance with Syria. It's doing all these things that are on the surface fairly menacing, but that masks the underlying diplomatic reality, which is that the Soviet Union has basically been frozen out of Arab Israeli diplomacy and becoming increasingly irrelevant to it. And then, of course, it's not too much longer after that, that the Soviet Union itself ceases to exist.
25:29
In the United States, even though it had already been flexing its muscles pretty aggressively in the Middle East during the 1980s. And for that reason, I sometimes argue that, the cold war, the post cold war era began a decade earlier, a decade early in the Middle East. Nonetheless, by the time we get to the early nineties, it's unmistakable because the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. And the United States really is now the sole remaining superpower. And its ability to call the shots is made even more unmistakable by the victory in the first Gulf war of 1991.
26:11
Right. Right. Zachary. In this context of bilateral agreements, and a sort of cooling of the conflict during this period, why do these efforts fail to produce a Palestinian state and achieve a two state solution? Was that the point of these efforts or why do the sort of claims to statehood of the Palestinian people during this period fail to be represented at these, in these major agreements?
26:44
Well, that's a great question. I mean, there are lots of different aspects to it. I mean, on one level, you can answer it by pointing out that the gap between, if we're talking first in the early 1970s and in the aftermath of the 1973 war, the gap between Palestinian aspirations and, reality was just unbridgeable. Now that gap narrows in the years ahead, because essentially what happens is the Palestinians. scale back their ambitions in ways that make them at least theoretically compatible with Israel's continued existence. So if, you know, in the early 1970s, the formal position of the Palestine Liberation Organization was the liberation of all of Palestine, essentially the dismantling of the Zionist state and the creation of the so called democratic state.
27:47
Sometimes it's referred to as the secular democratic state, but usually the term secular was not attached to it. It was just, you know, the democratic state in which, at least on the surface, Arabs and Jews, you know, Muslims, Christians and Jews would all have equal rights. If you look closer at the proposal, you could see that it wasn't quite that because there were, there was this expectation that a large portion of the Jewish Israeli population would actually leave. And so it's really not, it's not a very serious proposal. But it's also not serious because it's just, there's just no way that it can be realized militarily.
28:31
Now, what you see happening over the subsequent years, you know, the years after 1973, is that the Palestinian movement, and in particular Yasser Arafat, who is the chairman of the PLO, they start inching towards a compromise where they, you know, the first there's all sorts of qualifications and disclaimers, but, essentially they're moving closer to accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. And essentially, disavowing or at least setting aside their claims to the rest of Palestine. And over the years, this becomes increasingly explicit, you know, it becomes official in the late 1980s where the Palestinian, the PLO basically, you know, disavows its claims to the rest of Palestine and says that it is ready for a two state settlement, in which a Palestinian state will live alongside Israel.
29:35
So because the Palestinians have scaled back their demands, have essentially become more realistic, the international community takes note of this and starts becoming more forceful about pushing this two state settlement. And that's one of the reasons why I believe the 1970s are such a pivotal decade is that it's really during that decade, especially the second half, that the scenario for a two state settlement comes into existence. Now, at first, neither Israel nor the United States embraced this idea. Carter comes pretty close to doing so. I mean, if he, didn't have to think about domestic politics and other, you know, diplomatic obstacles, I think Carter, you know, during his presidency, probably would have. You know, come out in favor of a two state settlement himself, but he lands somewhere short of that because of, the issue from his standpoint just isn't quite ripe yet. But in subsequent years, you get to the point where, you know, even the United States embraces the idea of a two state settlement.
30:49
Well, the Israelis are, I mean, they've talked about the desirability of that, but they're not, they haven't made the same kinds of official undertakings that would bring that into being. And of course, I mean, a major obstacle to that is the continuing colonization of the West Bank, where you do have Israeli settlers increasing their number at a rate and, you know, in various configurations that make a viable Palestinian state harder and harder to imagine, but nonetheless, you know, the idea of a two state settlement gets enshrined, not just in, you know, international politics, but in American diplomacy as well.
31:34
Salim, the PLO, the Palestinian Palestinian Liberation Organization, which is the predecessor to the Palestinian organization led by Mahmoud Abbas today in the 1970s, it's often depicted at least within the United States, accurately or inaccurately as a terrorist organization. First of all, is that accurate? And how do we understand the intersection between concerns about terrorism, airplane hijackings, various other events, and the issues that you've laid out so well for us here?
32:08
Well, I mean, the PLO back then and in subsequent years was a very broad based organization, essentially a confederation of many disparate parties, some of which were committed to acts of terrorism and, you know, some of which actually did commit some pretty gruesome terroristic acts in the 1970s as in subsequent years.
32:39
The position of Yasser Arafat is somewhat ambiguous in that one gets the sense that he's not really crazy about this tendency and he would much prefer to see it ended, but he also feels limited in his ability to oppose some moves taken by Palestinians in the name of liberation, just because these movements have captured the imagination of Palestinian opinion, and to some extent have gained a certain cachet internationally, and there are also, you know, various, you know, more internecine disputes that he's navigating that, you know, from time to time, make it very difficult for him to stand in the way of groups like Black September. That's the organization that conducted the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972 and similar groups. And sometimes he, you know, he goes further and actually pays lip service or, you know, praises groups that have not too long in the past committed acts of terrorism. So his position is definitely compromised. I mean, his hands are not clean in that respect.
33:58
And that of course is a, you know, a terrible political obstacle that he faces. I mean, in one respect, it, you know, his ambiguous stance on terrorism allows him to keep the Palestinian movement united. But it also serves to blacken the name of the PLO and the Palestinian movement in the eyes of many outside observers.
34:26
Is it effective though, Salim? I mean, I'm guessing that leaders of Hamas would look back and say, that the more radical PLO of the early seventies, when, for instance, Yasser Arafat comes to the United Nations and displays a weapon in his holster. And, you know, that image of radicalism and violence was more effective at getting attention than the scaling back of ambitions, as you put it before.
34:53
It's really hard to say. I mean, my overall inclination is to be, you know, very strongly opposed to the use of violence, especially terrorist violence, as a, you know, that's of course a more like a normative or moral stand. You know, when it comes to looking at it analytically and trying to assess, you know, in as detached a way as possible, you know, to what extent this move towards violence or these moves towards violence helped to put the Palestinian issue on the map I think there definitely there is a sense in which that kind of activity drew attention to the Palestinian cause and gave it a kind of visibility and stature that it might not otherwise have gained. But at the same time, it's also, as I said, blackened the name of the movement. So I would, I guess, you know, if I had my druthers and if I could wave a wand and change history, none of this, of these at least none of the really heinous forms of violence would have taken place.
36:10
I mean, obviously resisting occupation, you know, when you're confronting armed occupiers, that's a whole different ball game. So I would, I definitely, I very much regret that this move towards violence has occurred and has been embraced by so many. And of course, you know, even to, especially today, seeing, you know, what it's leading to makes me all the more firm in that conviction now, even today, though, there you're going to get arguments and they won't necessarily be completely off base that the October 7th attacks revived the Palestinian issue in a way that perhaps few other events could have done.
36:58
You know, because if you think about where things were, just, you know, in the weeks and days leading up to the attack with, Jake Sullivan, you know, kind of gloating that, oh, we've got the Middle East under control. Now we're moving towards normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbors and Arab countries further afield like Saudi Arabia. And the implication of all of that was, We're not going to be so hung up on the Palestinian issue that, you know, the Arab states will make peace with Israel and they will not condition their willingness to make peace on serious movement on the Palestine issue. I mean, there may be some fig leaf that they demand, but seriously, you know, fundamentally, they're not letting the Palestine issue stand in their way.
37:50
So there was the scenario that was coming into view of Israel normalizing relations with a whole bunch of Arab countries, especially very prosperous ones, developing all kinds of lucrative trade relations and joint ventures, you know, with these wealthy Arab states and essentially being able to continue colonizing the West Bank. And, you know, I was very depressed by that scenario. I didn't see any way of breaking out of it. Now I am utterly aghast at what's happened on October 7th. And I don't by any means favor breaking out of the impasse by those means, but that is what has happened. And the Palestine issue is on the map and on the diplomatic agenda in ways that it wasn't two months ago. So, you know, so that's the kind of logic that people will invoke. To make the case that there is a place for this kind of violence, even though I very firmly reject that argument.
38:59
I appreciate, Salim, the care and thoughtfulness in the way you said that, and I think it's a very reasonable position you've adopted. Zachary?
39:08
How should we understand the legacy of these sort of failed, but also to a certain extent successful peace agreements in the 1970s, and then also, of course, the war in '73, the developments that we've been discussing, how should we understand the legacies of these events today? I'm thinking in particular, of their legacy, in regards to the creation of Hamas and the situation pre-October 7th, which precipitated the current conflict.
39:38
Yeah, that's a really, uh, good question. A difficult one, but a good one. I mean, the way I think about what was achieved in the 1970s is that it, there's a scenario in which the moves towards greater cooperation between, let's say, Egypt and Israel, in that decade, could have led to broader peace settlements, but they did not. And essentially, that was what I think Jimmy Carter, and I think it was what, Anwar Sadat hoped for, but in a curious way. Anwar Sadat ultimately proved less adamant about linking peace with Israel between, you know, a bilateral peace between Egypt and Israel to a broader set of agreements between Israel and its other Arab neighbors, and especially, some arrangement for the Palestinians.
40:38
So there was kind of this. curious situation where Jimmy Carter, you know, he really wanted the bilateral agreement that he was brokering between Egypt and Israel to be a stepping stone to broader agreements between Israel and other Arab countries and between Israel and the Palestinians. But because of the kind of agreement that Carter was ultimately obliged to accept and because I know, frankly, the very hard line and determined stance that Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister at the time took. And because of, you know, Carter had other issues on his plate that were becoming more pressing, especially the Iranian revolution. You have to think, you just, when you think about the chronology, you really get a sense of how these issues fit together.
41:41
You know, the Camp David Agreement, the first agreement, the one you actually forged at Camp David, was in September 1978. The Iranian Revolution erupts in the weeks and months right after that. By the time the actual formal agreement, the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that was kind of blocked out in general terms at Camp David is achieved. That's March 1979. So that's a couple months after the Shah has fled and the new Islamist government has taken over in Iran. And you know, it's not too long after that, that the American hostages in Tehran get taken. So Carter's attention is increasingly sucked into this black hole of misery that, you know, ultimately, you know, arguably ends his presidency.
42:39
So you know, Carter really wasn't in a position to build on the peace agreement that he had brokered at Camp David in, in the way that he hoped. And in fact, there's some poignant statements by Carter, private statements that he makes around this time and, you know, the summer of 1979 or so where he says, wow, you know, if I end up leaving office without really making a dent in the Palestinian issue, people will rightly say that I was a failure. And, you know, sadly, that was his legacy. At least as far as the Israel Palestine issue is concerned.
43:22
Salim, it strikes me that one of the legacies that's unavoidable is the continued lack of Palestinian statehood, that the two state solution that you described so well doesn't come into being. And looking back over this period over the 1970s, one might have thought that things might have gone that way.
43:47
The Arab states, as you say, in 1973 are united and they show that they are not as weak as they had been in 67. The Saudis and the other oil rich states are able to use oil as a weapon in many ways to bring down the American economy or to cause enormous pain in the United States, both at the beginning of the 1970s period, and then also at the end of the decade. So there's rising Arab power.
44:16
Israel also seems to recognize, as you said, that it has to make some kind of deal with its neighbors. So why do the Palestinians continue to be victimized? Why is that one of the overriding legacies from this period?
44:33
Well, I mean, there are lots of complexities to that question, but you can also answer it in a very simple way. Which is, I would say, because of the Camp David Agreement. It pulled Egypt out of confrontation for good. I mean, Egypt was already drifting away from its prior commitments to the other Arab countries, but it, you know, it formalized it. It formalized Egypt's removal from the conflict, you know, transformed Egypt into an ally of the United States, and that really did make it a lot easier for Israel to withstand international calls for some kind of accommodation with the Palestinians.
45:17
And again, you've got, you know, I was just talking about poignant statements by Carter. There's another one that he makes in 1985, in a book that he wrote called The Blood of Abraham. Mm-Hmm. in which he very starkly and in a kind of self-incriminating way, says that. What the Camp David Agreement did was subtract Egyptian power from the Arab Israeli equation, and that made it easier for Israel to continue dominating its neighbors and continuing to occupy the West Bank. He just says that very starkly. And I think that's true.
45:55
There are, you can go a little bit further into the 20th century and look, for example, at the Oslo peace process, where there was kind of a second chance that the parties had to really come to grips with the Israel Palestine dispute. And you do have, I mean, a major transformation occurs in the sense that the United States recognizes the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Israelis, you know, get into dialogue with the PLO and with Yasser Arafat, you have, you actually do have the, you know, establishment of the Palestinian Authority. So there is some, there's like a physical presence. There's a, like a beachhead that the Palestinian movement is able to establish in both the West Bank and Gaza. And it, at least on the surface, it appears that there's an opportunity to build on that nucleus and transform it into a two state settlement.
46:59
But what happens is that the Israelis are able to continue expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the way the agreements are drafted are such that, you know, the Israelis are able to invoke certain loopholes and the Palestinians complain, but they don't have sufficient leverage with the United States to get the Americans to take that seriously.
47:27
And of course that gets complicated by the fact that you do have Palestinian militants who reject the Oslo Accords and try to sabotage them by engaging in increasingly grisly terrorist attacks against not just settlers in the West Bank, but, you know, against civilians inside Israel, and that of course gives Israel justification to conduct, you know, massive retaliatory raids against the Palestinians.
47:59
And so essentially what happens is the, you know, the settler population during the very decade in which the Oslo peace process is unfolding doubles. And so that, you know, from the standpoint of ordinary Palestinians, this is really antithetical to any notion that a two state settlement is on the horizon. And because, you know, the way in which the Palestinians react against this creeping annexation often takes violent forms, the Israelis respond in, you know, with their own forms of violence and the, you know, you get this kind of vicious cycle where each side becomes more and more entrenched in its rejection of the other.
48:51
I mean, I, you know, these issues are never simple, but, I do wish that the Clinton administration had come to grips with this settlements issue in a much more serious and thorough going way. When it had the opportunity to do so, because the, I think the consequences of that failure are very much with us today.
49:17
Right. Just one follow up question on this, because I think your explanation is so thoughtful and balanced. So many Israelis that you and I know, and Zachary knows, and others know want peace. Why, in your narrative, has it been so hard for Israel to pursue peace? In your narrative, in your description, Israel is in some ways using its alliance with Egypt to avoid hard decisions with the Palestinians. Why do you think that's the case?
49:57
Well, because it's also using its alliance with the United States to avoid hard decisions regarding the Palestinians. And this is something that I think the United States really bears some responsibility for and needs to correct if we're going to see any serious movement on this issue.
50:16
I mean, I think it's understandable that within the context of Israeli politics, you see a move to the right, you know, over the last couple of decades, and that it's politically very difficult for groups or politicians advocating compromise with the Palestinians to gain popular support, just because it's so easy to point to acts of really horrific violence coming from the Palestinian side and to make the case that there is no suitable partner for the Israelis to make peace with.
50:54
I think, I mean, again, these are very complicated issues and I don't, you know, want to sound, you know, glib you'd just be sitting back and pontificating and saying that it's easy to reverse course or change the direction. Nonetheless, I think fundamentally what needs to happen is for the United States to start to become a lot firmer with the Israelis and to set clearer limits on what the United States will tolerate. In that context, that would, in my view, create political space for forces within Israel that wish to take a more conciliatory stance towards the Paelstinians. Because essentially the only limits against which Israel is brushing up, the only limits it encounters are the limits imposed by its immediate adversaries.
51:55
There aren't really significant diplomatic constraints or other kinds of constraints being imposed by the United States. I'll give you an example of an instance where that occurred and was promising and, you know, make the case that that kind of thing needs to happen again. Back in the early 90s, there, when Yitzhak Shamir was the prime minister, you know, he wanted a loan guarantee from the First Bush administration, and President Bush refused to extend that guarantee or refused to sign off on it, unless he could get a commitment from Shamir that there would be a cessation of settlement building in the occupied territories. This created a huge diplomatic crisis between the United States and Israel, and there was enormous pressure on Bush to back down. And he didn't. He stuck to his guns and eventually that resulted in a change of government inside Israel because figures on the more dovish labor side were able to say, look, this is what happens when we follow the approach of Likud and figures like Shamir. We get into a confrontation with the one country whose help we cannot afford to lose. So if you follow our approach, the more dovish Labor Party approach, we will restore our good relationship with the United States, and that will be better for Israel's security.
53:34
And that worked, and it resulted in the election of Yitzhak Rabin in place of Shamir. Now, there are ways in which Bush subsequently dropped the ball that caused the victory that he had achieved on the settlements issue to be a Pyrrhic one, which I can go into if you wish, but I don't think that's important. But what it shows is the ability of the United States, if it flexes some diplomatic muscle, to affect change inside Israel.
54:09
And I think in the, when those sorts of things start to happen on the Israeli side, I think that also empowers Moderate forces on the Palestinian side in situations like the one we're in now with situations of polarization that tends to strengthen hardliners on each side. I mean, it's more complicated in Israel now because Netanyahu was so unbelievably unpopular but in absent those complicating political issues, the general dynamic is one in which the more polarization, the more violence you get.
54:45
The stronger hardliners on each side become. So I think in a situation in which the United States is exercising greater leverage that's nudging the Israelis toward a more conciliatory position, that will make it easier for moderate form of forces on the Palestinian side to assert themselves. And this certainly won't happen overnight, but I think you could start a process that ultimately results in the political, diminution of Hamas. I mean, we're far from that now, but we, that's where we need to start heading.
55:25
Right. Which is the opposite of full scale siege warfare in Gaza. Exactly. Exactly
55:33
Zachary, I want to turn to you now. Salim has given us a tour de force here. He's in 30 to 5 minutes, 40 minutes, he's provided a really thoughtful, balanced, rigorous overview of an entire decade and its legacies for today, many of its legacies for today. And I know you have been deeply involved in debates about these policy issues on campus with other students. We discussed this in our prior episode. How do you react to Salim's historical framing for what you're debating today among students and others regarding this region of the world?
56:16
I think it's very helpful, certainly, in pointing to places, lost opportunities, and hopefully, lays out a series of of mistakes that that cannot be made again. I worry, though, about the, I think that maybe one of the things it points to as well is a sort of dilemma that sort of maybe contradictory forces that are shaping the problem today, which is that in order for there to be a sort of viable, moderate Palestinian force with which Israel can make peace, there has to be a moderate sort of political force in Israel willing to make peace.
57:03
But in order for that to occur, there has to be a sort of cessation of radical Palestinian violence that enables those on the far right in Israel. And so, and I think, one of the key lessons that at least I will take from Professor Yaqub's, very, Yaqub's very helpful analysis and history for us is the importance of the role of the United States in maybe catalyzing that process in, at the very least, putting our thumb on the scales to sort of break out of that cycle and of that, sort of constant, sort of lost opportunity, if you will.
57:48
Yeah, no, I think one of the real strengths, one of the many strengths of Salim's account and his scholarship is that it doesn't make the United States all powerful, far from it, but it does show how the United States might be the one actor that can play a role at certain moments in bringing the different sides together or pushing them apart. I think there, Salim's account gives us evidence of both of those things. As a final word, Salim, if you had a few seconds with President Biden, then what would you say as a historian that he should be thinking about?
58:28
Yeah. I mean, I think it would be the point that I made most recently, just about the need to show some greater firmness and to really attend to the details, particularly regarding what's happening on the West bank. I think, you know, one, when I said that George H. W. Bush eventually dropped the ball. He allowed the, you know, the next president, Yitzhak Rabin, to essentially use a form of words to get around the settlement issue. What Yitzhak Rabin said was, you're right, President Bush, there should be no more additional Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I will seize the building of new settlements. But what he then promptly did was start expanding existing settlements. And, you know, Bush accepted that distinction. But, you know, from the standpoint of the Palestinians, it really was not a difference at all. So I would say that you just, you need to pay really close attention to the details of what's taking place and, you know, to think about their impact on all of the parties to this dispute.
59:46
And I think Salim, that's a perfect place for us to not really close, but sort of, no, but bring this discussion to a point. I think what your scholarship displays and what you have provided today are two lessons for us above all. You know, one is that close attention to the history really matters. The events that we're living with today, reflect long developing, many long developing historical trajectories, and we can't really understand them. And we certainly shouldn't take sides before we understand this history. We have to pause and spend some time to look at where we've come from.
1:00:29
And that second to that one can speak for the interests, as I think you have, the historical interests of Palestinians, without in any way embracing the most extreme forms of violence, which you have clearly renounced and also argued are ineffective, in fact. And, I think that's really important. One doesn't have to give up on the Palestinian cause or the Israeli cause because the more extreme voices and extreme actors are the ones that are getting the most attention. Absolutely. So, Salim, thank you for educating us, for providing us a really valuable and missing background for most of our discussions. I hope our listeners will take what you say, read more, and think deeply before they jump to conclusions one way or another in this conflict. Salim, it's really been a pleasure and an honor to have you on our podcast. Thank you for joining us.
1:01:29
Jeremy and Zachary. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to have this conversation
1:01:33
And Zachary, thank you for your poem that I think resonates with some of the themes and thank you for your questions and thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of this is democracy.
Episode 256: Humanitarian Intervention
00:23
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about US humanitarian assistance and other foreign assistance in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is, of course, a major contemporary and historical topic, and we are very fortunate to be joined today with a really superb historian who has written what is the book on the topic now, and so we get to talk about this topic with someone who has spent, I think, about a decade examining how the United States developed the foreign intervention capabilities for humanitarian assistance, what they look like, why the United States does this, and what the legacies are for today. Our guest is Professor Julia Irwin. Julia, thanks for joining us today.
01:11
It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.
01:14
We are too. Professor Julia Irwin is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. She is, as I said, a leading scholar of humanitarian assistance and US foreign policy, as well as other issues in international history. She's the author of two wonderful books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. Her first book is really the history of the Red Cross and its role in humanitarian interventions. It's titled Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation's Humanitarian Awakening. Her new book that we're going to focus on today has a wonderful title, Catastrophic Diplomacy, which Julia, I thought could be read in many different ways, yes?
01:58
Yes, I was hoping for the double or at least triple entendre.
01:58
Yes, how clever you are, Professor Irwin. The new book is titled Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century. I also wanted to mention that among the many other articles and activities that Julia is a part of, she's also the co-editor of a journal, the Journal of Disaster Studies, and again, that's a formidable title, isn't it?
02:29
Yes, it's well, hopefully there's more about how to resolve disasters than there is about the disasters themselves, but yeah, we'll be publishing our first issue in June this year.
02:39
Fantastic. So, I hope everyone will look up Professor Irwin's work, and particularly her new book, Catastrophic Diplomacy. Before we get into our discussion with Professor Irwin, of course, we have Mr. Zachary's scene-setting poem. What's the title of your poem today, Zachary? ("The Old Colossus.") "The Old Colossus." It better not be about me. All right, go ahead. Zachary.
03:03
The world can shake, does often stand not still moves mountains just because it can And wants that we should see its sneers and hear its taunts Like raindrops beating on a window sill The world has hungers we can never fill Is gaseous, spews its steam from fiery fonts Remakes anew our mossy forest haunts, and never ceases maiming Waits to kill. Still, when one shouts from ruined city blocks Still are there others shouting in the dust Still do the voices echo off the rocks And help we shall for listening we must Build up the streets and salvage sunken docks Still Lady Liberty does shine in rust
03:51
Wow, that that last line, Zachary, really hits a point that does Lady Liberty shine in rust. What do you mean by that line in particular?
04:00
I think the larger thesis of the poem is that an American commitment to, sort of, openness and liberty embodied by "The New Colossus," which is obviously Emma Lazarus' poem on the Statue of Liberty, that that spirit is part of what motivates our desire to help countries suffering from natural disasters, and the idea that even when this idea of liberty, or even when our country itself suffers from the effects of time, of weather, of change, of political stagnation, that we can find a way to help others who are in need and whom we are capable of helping.
04:44
So you see an altruistic spirit. (Yes, maybe.) "Maybe," haha. Julia, your book wonderfully complicates that. I read in your book just what Zachary's talking about, a certain benevolence, but many other things at work as well. Why does the United States get so involved in international disaster resistance, particularly in the early 20th century when you really start your story?
05:07
Yeah. And, well, let me just thank Zachary for that really poignant and beautiful poem to start us off. You know, it's one of the things I've been studying humanitarianism for about 20 years now, since I started graduate school, and it's, one of the things that interests me most about it, is it's the multiple motivations I think that go into any humanitarian relief operation. Certainly, for the US actors I'm talking about, many of them are motivated by altruism, by a desire to help suffering and reduce suffering. But at the same time that can can and does coexist with political calculations, strategic motivations, economic motivations. So, the desire to sort of assist other countries is for the interests of people who are suffering, but also in the United States' own national interests, and I think the sort of dual internationalist and nationalist, sort of, set of motivations is what makes humanitarian assistance so fascinating to study.
06:05
And one of the elements that I think you bring out beautifully in your book that I really didn't appreciate was how in the early 20th century, particularly with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and a series of disasters around the United States, and farther away in Martinique, in Japan, and elsewhere, the United States developed new capabilities. What did that mean for the United States in the early 20th century?
06:32
Yeah, so, as I write about in the book, the 19th century saw the United States not doing much in terms of official foreign disaster assistance operations, there were a few, a few and far between, but starting in the early 20th century, we start to really see this burst of responses to foreign catastrophes, and I argue in the book that it's for a few different reasons. First of all, the United States has, in the last couple of decades, before that, really become a world power. It wants to sort of burnish its image on the world stage in positive ways, so this is one of its motivations, but it also has new capabilities. The acquisition of US territories in places like Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone, the Philippines means that you have US troops stationed in these places, and they can and do respond to disasters in other countries, so the sort of geography has shifted. You have a lot more diplomats and consuls in the world who happen to be on the scene and sort of able to both report and assist when disasters happen. They often work with American missionaries who have a large presence in the world as well, and American business interests. So simply the sort of growth and the growing footprint of the United States on the world stage gives it both motivations and capabilities to deliver relief in ways that it couldn't in the 19th century.
07:50
Fantastic. Zachary?
07:53
How unique is the United States in seeing disaster response as a core part of its diplomatic work during this?
08:02
Yeah, that's a great question. And it's really, you know, this is becoming more and more, I think, what we might call an international norm. So you see a lot of other countries, especially kind of powerful, you know, great powers doing similar things. Sometimes, you know, there's an earthquake, for instance, in Messina, in southern Italy, in 1908 and you see the navies of several European powers, as well as the United States, coming to the scene to respond. There's sort of this is the growing willingness of states to provide cross-border aid. By the time you get to the 1920s we actually have some of the first international organizations, both non-governmental and governmental, that are devoted to coordinating international relief efforts, they kind of have their hit and miss in what they can do, but we start to see by the 1920s and into the 30s the evolution of an international humanitarian system that is concerned with disaster relief as well, so the United States is sort of part of this broader trend, for sure.
09:03
And one of the other really interesting parts of your book is you not only show the United States as part of an international fabric, including the British Navy and other actors, but also how within the United States there are what you call three pillars. What are the three pillars, and what is the significance of that for understanding the nature of American responses?
09:25
Yeah, so when I started writing this book, I think I kind of thought there would be two pillars, so we'll get into that, but the first is really the State Department and its staff, so diplomats, consuls, people who work within Washington and the State Department who are planning the United States, sort of, foreign policy agenda and activities. The second is the American voluntary sector. By this I mean organizations like the American Red Cross, which I wrote about in my first book, which really is the kind of humanitarian auxiliary of the United States for much of the first half of the. 20th century, but also other NGOs, especially later on groups like Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services, CARE, which not only sort of provide aid themselves but partner with the United States government in really kind of powerful ways. So these two organizations are these two sort of pillars, the State Department and its agents, the voluntary sector that partners with the US, were part of it.
10:26
And then, as I started researching the book more and more, I realized what a significant role the US military would play. When I started this book, I sort of understood that the military today plays a major role in humanitarian operations, but I assumed this was a later 20th century development, sort of a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War effort to reinvent the military, but in fact, as early as the early 20th century, you start to see the US Navy, especially, but also the Army Marines, depending on if they're on the scene, responding to a lot of catastrophes, the War and Navy Department committing rations, tents, their supplies to help disaster victims, so these three together, the military, the State Department, and their partners in the voluntary sector, are really responsible for cooperating to carry out disaster relief operations.
11:15
And who's driving the bus? I mean, it seemed to me, as I read through the book, that at different moments, different parts of the pillars, or a different pillar is stronger than others. Is that true? And how does that dynamic work?
11:29
Yeah, you know, I think if I had to sort of... it's the State Department that is a lot of ways kind of controlling the decision. The State Department is kind of making these decisions about whether to offer assistance to other countries, whether it is needed, and honestly, and using their own sort of words, whether it is in the United States' national interests to respond. They're certainly encouraged to do so, and are collaborating with the American Red Cross, especially early on, which is playing a major role in collecting funds and kind of generating support. As time goes on, the government plays a heavier and heavier role, has a heavier hand in making these decisions. So, especially as you get to the aftermath of World War II, for instance, you see a lot more of the kind of impetus coming from from government officials and not simply from from the American Red Cross. But the, I would sort of say that is where you're seeing a lot of the the decision to to respond lies within within these groups.
12:31
How do these countries that are provided with American disaster response respond to American help? Is it always welcomed during this period, or are there sometimes tensions?
12:44
Yes. Well, there are definitely tensions. And coming back to the title of Catastrophic Diplomacy, I think this is one of the places we see this. You know, one of the things that I think is interesting about disaster relief, and I, is most of these aid operations are undertaken with the invitation or sort of approval of the government of another country, so the United States sort of extends an offer of assistance, and if that government liked to accept it, it does. In general, especially in the early days, a lot of these responses are really major disasters, and kind of the governments and people in general are welcoming whatever aid they can get. I mean, this is these moments of really extreme upheaval, but that doesn't mean that people are simply immediately grateful and desiring American aid, and especially as time goes by, in a lot of cases tensions really start to mount. A lot of the American relief workers I write about act with the best of intentions, and some of them are quite sort of culturally sensitive and aware. Others are not acting with the best of intentions. Some of them are arrogant, some of them are chauvinistic, some of them express pretty significant racial and cultural prejudices to the very people they're supposed to be assisting. So these can and really did breed breed tensions at times.
14:04
There were also a few examples in the book where the United States really didn't get permission to extend the aid that it wanted to. There was a famous case in Jamaica in 1907 in which US Navy commander, sort of due to some miscommunications, landed several hundred armed US sailors in Jamaica, which was a British territory, without having the proper consent. This led to this diplomatic uproar. Later on, in the 20th century, there were attempts or considerations, even by the US government, to force aid into countries like China, after the revolution, as well as Cuba, after its revolution, attempting to show people living under communist governments that the United States cared about them through aid, so these very political motivations, these offers were refused by those governments, but you sort of see these, the ability for diplomatic tensions to arise over the issue of aid and unwanted aid, especially.
15:06
And that raises one of the key questions I had reading through this. You set up your narrative as if there are a lot of continuities, and you point to some of these continuities, particularly at the end of the book, but there also does seem to be a break after World War II, particularly with the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the creation of USAID in 1961 but even before that, you show that the Eisenhower administration is really interested in centralizing this process of aid and also pursuing development goals. What's the shift that's occurring there?
15:43
Yeah, so as I spoke about, sort of at the beginning of our conversation, in the early 20th century, the United States really kind of burst onto the scene as a world power expands its territories overseas as well. In the aftermath of World War II, or sort of during and after World War II, we see this other sea change in American power as the United States goes from being a world power to a superpower. It comes out of the war with the nation, or the world's largest military. It has access, or it has bases, or access to bases in some 2,000 different places, it means it has airplanes and ships stationed all over the world, as well as service personnel, as well as diplomats and consuls, and a lot of money.
16:31
With all of this, the United States begins to respond to far more disasters than it had during the early 20th century, far more regularly on a routine basis. It's at the same time that the kind of interest in international development is really coming, becoming a central concern of policymakers. Disaster relief becomes tied in with questions of international development in really interesting ways, not only in the 1960s under USAID, but under its predecessor organizations, things like the Point Four Program started by Truman, the International Cooperation Administration, that started under Eisenhower. So, you do have this growing interest by by both state and military officials in the problems of both disasters and development, and how kind of government power can be harnessed to respond to them.
17:25
And to what extent, Julia, do you see that as part of an altruistic, benevolent goal of improving and helping these societies, helping suffering people, maybe even guilt at not having done as much earlier, and to what extent do you see this as an instrumental way of pursuing an anti-communist agenda?
17:48
Yeah, and I would say that it is very much both at once. Again, you do have a lot of really well-meaning, you know, aid workers who are really concerned with the people they're assisting, who want to cooperate, collaborate, who want to kind of do things the right way, and to really improve people's lives, because they care about that as a value that they hold dear, but they're working with a lot of people whose primary goal is to defeat, you know, defeat global communism, to maintain US stability and power in the world, there's a lot of sort of private state department memos and correspondence, which are now fortunately declassified for us historians, where they really talk very explicitly about using aid to to counter communist propaganda or to really show the United States good side, the State Department takes a lot of notes on how much aid the Soviet Union is giving to other countries and makes sure that the United States is giving more in as many cases as possible. So, these political calculations are going on at the same time, and sometimes it leads to disagreements, there's fights, sometimes internal infighting between those people who really see aid as an international project and those who see it more as in line with national interests. So, I think that those kind of contests and competitions over the meaning and significance of aid are important to the story too.
19:17
I wanted to ask, how does the American public view foreign aid? It seems like during this period that the question of foreign aid becomes much more of a topic of public discussion with the creation of the Peace Corps, etc. How do the American, how does the American public during this period think of American foreign aid assistance?
19:38
Yeah, it's a, you know, one of the interesting things about sort of the sudden disasters that I'm really writing about in this book, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, a lot of times they're really perceived within American culture, I think kind of in popular culture more broadly, as these these events that are often considered acts of God, they're they're not the fault of anyone. There are sort of people who are blameless victims for their own suffering. For those reasons, there tends to be less, sort of, less public opposition in a lot of cases to giving at least some immediate aid to to survivors of these types of disasters than there are to other types of assistance. So it's an interesting kind of, there can often be more bipartisan support. That being said, it is certainly not universal.
20:28
One of the fun sources for this book was actually reading letters that people would write to, sometimes their congress people, sometimes to the state department, sometimes to the president himself, expressing their opinions about whether the United States should or should not give aid to a certain country, and people are very kind of clear about sometimes pushing for it, sometimes because it's the right thing to do, sometimes because it's a way to show American compassion, other times calling on their elected officials or their representatives to not give aid, because there are problems at home, though there are more important things to kind of focus on domestically, or maybe this country is an enemy of the United States and doesn't deserve, in their words, American aid. So some of these same debates that I think we see today, right, in the 21st century, over questions of a foreign, either humanitarian or even military assistance, really play out throughout the 20th century in the wake of a lot of these catastrophes.
21:25
So that leads me to ask a question I know you've thought a lot about, about where your book ends in the 60s and 70s is a period, and it's not unique to this period, but I think it becomes more common, that critics of the United States at home and abroad contend that foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, the Peace Corps, USAID - these are all arms of American imperialism, business interests, strategic interests being promoted in ways that are disguisingly looking like they're about good-natured activities, but really designed to put American influence and dominance in place. What's your response to that?
22:08
Yeah, and there is certainly some evidence of that too. For one of the, I think, most kind of clearest examples of this is the US Food for Peace program, which was started in 1954 under Eisenhower, it actually had a few predecessors, but this is really the major legislation establishing what became known as Food for Peace is in 1954. That organization was designed to provide surplus commodities to other countries, much of it sold, but on easy credit terms. Some of it donated for disaster relief and other famine relief things like this. That aid, though, was not simply, you know, that the food was not just, you know, kind of created out of thin air. It was these surpluses had arisen in domestic attempts to solve an American farm problem by subsidizing American agriculture. Long story, but it results in a lot of surpluses. Essentially, food aid becomes a way to help other nations while also helping American farmers and reducing these, kind of, what had become, by this point, embarrassing surpluses of food that were kind of going to waste, so this is one way that I think we see both American and international interests being served at the same time. There are a lot of companies that are involved and are promoting their products and getting government contracts to get their products out there. Some pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are donating types of supplies, food companies as well. So there certainly are these links between the, kind of, supply chain, the humanitarian supply chain, and the US government that make it, there are material reasons, I think, for some of these critiques.
23:53
But do you also think that American assistance in many cases has helped people? I mean, it's a very broad question. It's hard to pin it down, but sometimes it seems to me, at least, Julia, that the discussions of American imperialism, although legitimate and helpful, can deny the reality of sometimes this assistance really providing crucial benefits to people on the ground.
24:17
And one of the ways I like to sort of answer that question is that it is also just as political not to give assistance. The decision not to provide aid to a certain place or a certain group of people, or after a certain group amount of time has passed, is a political decision in its own right. So I think this kind of decision to give aid, to help, to assist, to make that part of United States foreign affairs identity, it's might even call it its brand, right? There's not necessarily something that is fully nefarious about this, right? And I think again, coming back to one of the points I made earlier, that that complex nature of this, that it can be at once altruistic and benevolent as well as strategic, and kind of calculating that these two things can coexist, is I think really interesting. So, yeah, no, I think that there is, if we had a world, if you, if we imagined a 20th century or 21st century without any American aid, or other humanitarian aid, for that matter, international aid, other nations aid, that world would look a lot different too, and maybe that's not really the world that we want to live in.
25:23
Right, well, I think that brings us to the question we always like to close on when we have the opportunity to talk to a historian about the development of a process and a set of activities over time. We now come to the present, and of course, these debates, these issues are with us. The Ukraine War has a whole disaster quality to it. We've seen recent earthquakes in various parts of the world where the United States has been called upon and sometimes has responded with a great deal of foreign assistance, sometimes it hasn't. What are the lessons we take from your book? What would you say to someone who's interested in these issues today, as I know you are, what should we be thinking about when the next disaster occurs?
26:07
Yeah, you know, what I try to do in the book is to highlight both, well, one of my grad school advisors called it the "warts and all" approach to history, it's really the good and the bad, and I, you know, rather than sort of painting this this black or white picture, I think there are moments where some of the, the aid workers, the diplomats in my book acted with, you know, ethical integrity, and, you know, did, you know, worked and cooperated with the people they're talking to, and managed to have a fairly effective and ethical response to a major crisis that really did help people. There are others who didn't. They acted for political reasons. They acted paternalistically. So, I think one of the lessons to hopefully take away is that, you know, thinking about this history and what went wrong, what went right, can can help us hopefully learn from those those times it went wrong, and then make it more right, kind of, in the future.
26:58
And does that mean the United States should be doing more, that it should be targeting fewer places? I mean, one of the narrative elements is that over time the United States gets involved in more and more places, and you, you imply, you're not, you're certainly not the first to imply, that oftentimes we're getting into places where we have very little understanding.
27:16
Yeah, you know, I think some of it comes back to, you know, if we want to kind of be effective, right, aid should not simply be given for political calculations, but we should prioritize the humanitarian considerations first. You know, where are the places that actually have the real need, the people's basic needs, for food, for shelter, for clothing, for and then promoting their dignity, right, should be create prioritized as opposed to making the decisions primarily out of either national interests or political interests, so if we can figure out a way to center humanitarian needs above all, I think that would be one of the best ways to go about it. Not quite sure that we will see that anytime soon, but it would be nice if we can imagine a world that way.
28:06
Yeah. Well said, very well said. Zachary. What do you think? I mean, is is foreign assistance, is humanitarian aid, is it something that interests young people who think about international affairs, or people of your generation too cynical about this?
28:21
I think, and people are very interested in disaster response, disaster aid, as I think they always have been, but obviously it's going to become even more relevant with climate change and the intense weather events that it will bring. I also think it's a great way to understand this "warts and all" approach to history. I think the topic of international disaster response from the United States is obviously one of a very mixed record, and it's important to be able to sit with those complexities, and I think studying this history offers young people practice doing that, but also a key example of where American presence isn't inherently good, isn't inherently altruistic, but can make a difference, and could make a difference.
29:06
Right, and you think, ([unintelligible]) sorry, gradually, sorry? (I said "very nicely put," Zachary) Ah. And Zachary, you think that that idealism is still burning in the hearts of young people? (I think so. I think so.) That's great, that's great. So, our final question, Julia, you've written this book on almost a century of US responses to foreign disasters. I'm just curious, if you think that this is something, this is the story is actually also relevant for thinking about domestic disasters?
29:44
Yeah, I mean that's a very good question. And in writing this book, I did sort of have to draw some lines. There's a lot of differences between those domestic and international disaster response, but legal differences, bureaucratic differences, but I think a lot of the same, sort of, broader lessons can can still apply. Why do we? Why do people choose to give? Why does the government prioritize certain states, certain disasters over others? Why do we often prioritize disaster response over prevention or mitigation or risk reduction activities, which could reduce suffering in the first place? These sorts of questions that I think are, come up a lot of, in the book, thinking about international questions apply domestically as well, and apply to a lot of disaster scenarios. So that would be, I think, kind of one way to think about it. There's a lot of really great books out there on US domestic disaster aid as well, so I have some wonderful colleagues working on some of these questions too.
30:42
And your answer just highlights why this is so central to our democracy. It's central to the way we think about our place in the world and our foreign policy. But also how we handle our own internal issues and our own internal challenging and, echoing Zachary, in a world of climate change where weather events seem to be more common, how we handle and help people who are suffering in different parts of our country.
31:05
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and who we, again, include as citizens as people who are, you know, have the right to aid in assistance in times of crisis, too.
31:16
Well, Julia, you've given us really a lot to think about. You've written a wonderful book, and I think your discussion here should only wet the appetite of our listeners for more. I encourage everyone to read Professor Julia Irwin's book Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century. Julia, thank you so much for joining us today.
31:41
Thank you so much for the terrific conversation, I really enjoyed speaking with both of you, and thanks again Zachary for that wonderful poem to start us off.
31:49
Yes, Zachary. Zachary, thank you so much, we're going to be thinking about your poem until our next episode of course. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This is Democracy.
Episode 264: Free Trade and Peace
00:24
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to discuss a term that is thrown around almost every day in newspapers and political discussion, but a term that is rarely defined or historicized, and that term is free trade. The United States calls itself a free trade nation. Whether that's true or not is something we'll discuss, but more significantly we'll discuss what free trade really means, and how a group of thinkers, pioneering thinkers and political activists and policy makers in the 19th century pioneered a new way of pursuing free trade with certain ideals of peace attached to it.
01:07
We'll understand and talk about what it was that they meant and what it means for us today as we understand our own world. We're fortunate to be joined by a friend and really wonderful scholar, Marc Palen. Marc is a historian at the University of Exeter, and his new book that we're going to talk about is called Pax Economica: Left Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. It was just published in early 2024 by Princeton University Press. It's already been featured in the New Yorker magazine, one of my favorite magazines, as one of the best new books out in the last year. Marc has written on this topic before, his dissertation that he wrote at the University of Texas at Austin. And his first book is called The "Conspiracy" of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle for Empire and Economic Globalization. Marc also writes frequently for major newspapers and magazine, including Le Monde in France, Time Magazine, the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Australian Eye. So he covers at least three continents, if not more, in his writing.
02:12
And as I, as I said before, Marc has a connection to the University of Texas. He was a graduate student here. And so we're very proud of the work that he's done. Marc, thanks so much for joining us today.
02:24
Thank you so much for having me. Much appreciated.
02:27
I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Before we get into our discussion of Marc's book and free trade, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary's scene setting poem. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? A World at Sail. A World at Sail. Okay, well, let's sail into it.
02:45
Sometimes I am awakened in the middle of the night by the fear my imaginings won't turn out right. I toss and turn and think of nothing more than a coffee in the morning and the rain that starts to pour. Sometimes I am startled at the way the earth can turn, yet everything is standing still as ashes in an urn. I watch the time that passes by and wonder at its speed, knowing each who dies was but a planted seed.
03:16
Sometimes when the sun is setting, I wonder if a hope is nothing more than mud to scrub away with soap. I watch the darkness coming with its ominous smile, and the birds no longer humming are erased in single file. And yet each morning when it comes at last, I see a new world rising and it's rising fast. A world of peace that isn't stale, a world at sea, a world at sail. We are chasing Earth's still spinning tail, like birds who sing at every dawn. The hate has flown, the fear is gone, I spy your ports, you spot my shores, you sell my treasures in your stores. Each setting sun is now a kind of hoping that tomorrow will be in the harbours roping.
04:07
I love the imagery, Zachary, and I love the evocations of peace and peacemaking. What is your poem about?
04:17
My poem is about the ways in which, even in the points in our lives, and in our politics when we are the most cynical. That trade, and sort of physical connection across the vast seas of the world, can offer a real opportunity for peace and real hope, even when things seem sort of impossible abysmal around us. Right.
04:50
Marc, I think that's a great place to really dive into your book. So much of your book, especially the first 2 to 3 chapters is about the efforts of certain activists, seems to me, to escape what they see is the imperialism and economic nationalism and cruelty of of the 19th century of the world of empire that we all know a fair amount about. Why did these activists, Richard Cobden is one of them who stands out, why did they turn to free trade as a source of peace and anti imperialism, as you call it?
05:21
I mean, this is, you know, it gets this sort of Enlightenment era ideas that this is building off of, but it's also, I think, building off of something new that's developing in the mid 19th century was, which is, a truly global economic system in a, in ways that we, you know, understand it today and global food systems and so forth. And pushing back against the mercantilist system that had dominated the imperial order up until the mid 19th century, a mercantilist system of protectionism, of closed imperial markets and seemingly constant war, and geopolitical conflict.
06:02
And so when this free trade movement that Richard Cobden in Britain spearheads, this middle class pressure group, the anti corn law league, it's beyond just lowering Britain's trade walls and allowing for cheap goods and cheap food to flow in. He actually sees this direct connection between those domestic reforms and reforming the international order. Something that if we, I guess in international relations scholarship, we would think we call capitalist peace theory or interdependence theory, the idea that the more countries trade with one another, the less likely they are to go to war. This is kind of when this is really starting to take root, at the left of center into the political spectrum in remarkable ways. And so yeah, go ahead.
06:51
Yeah. And it's striking to me in your book that, and it's in your subtitle, right? These are left wing visions. These are progressive, self defined progressives in many ways. The figures who you include go from Richard Cobden to Jane Addams, Norman Angle, so many of these people we associate with progressive anti war, anti imperial stands. Many listeners today, though, might think about free trade as benefiting large corporations and benefiting the rich, allowing the rich to get richer. We think about that with the movement of capital and investments and hedge funds and things like that today. Obviously, your progressive figures have a different vision of what free trade is about. How do they connect it, as you describe in the book, to domestic reform?
07:36
Yeah, great point. And I mean, yeah, this does, you know, challenge in a certain sense, associations that we commonly have now, the champions of the free market as right wing in their leanings. And, so yeah, this is about how those left of center, the anti imperialist, the peace activists, the abolitionists, the women's suffragists, so many of these things that we would think of left of center politically, even now, were coming together in really remarkable ways from the 1840s onwards. And one of the ways they were doing it is, you have to understand that kind of the way that the global order was still essentially being run, who were the people in charge? In the context of mid 19th century Britain, for example, this is an era in which the aristocratic elites still are running the show.
08:27
And who are the aristocratic elites? They are the landed elites. They are the ones who are making all the money off of these protective tariffs on foreign grain, even though it means people in these industrializing cities in Britain are starving. And so it, by going after the economic power of landed elites, you can then, minimize their power politically as well.
08:52
And this allows for greater democratization. It also means that if you democratize foreign policy and you minimize the power of these militant aristocratic elites on foreign policymaking, then you can create a more peaceful foreign policy system that doesn't require large standing armies and navies, which means you can lower taxes and thus, make things even more affordable to a mass majority of people. So that's the kind of in a nutshell, how they connect that domestic element with the foreign policy.
09:23
Gotcha. Zachary?
09:23
And how did this movement for free trade, the successful movement for free trade, in England, how did it change politics? Did it make political institutions more egalitarian in the direction that these groups hoped?
09:39
Oh, that's an interesting one. Yeah. I, to an extent, yes. I mean, male franchise, certainly, you know, universal male franchise certainly was something that became more viable after this. It also was closely associated with what would become first wave feminism, this desire for women's suffrage.
09:59
There's actually some really interesting figures that are, what we might not consider first wave feminists who are working within this free trade movement in Britain, who are also connecting this with, expanding women's rights to vote and equality for women. You can even see this within the abolitionist movement, which in many ways is seen as sort of the flip side of the free trade coin at this time. Freeing men and freeing trade, seeing as kind of mutually reinforcing. So you have the Garrisonian Abolitionists, as they were called, the really radical wing of the abolitionist movement that William Lloyd Garrison of Boston was leading, that was trying to allow more women's voices into the abolitionist movement. And of course, he's also a free trader, during this time, becomes associated with this, what they call a Cognite moment
10:47
And so if you think about that in the short term, in the near term, you see the kind of greater enfranchisement, you do see something of a greater empowerment of the liberal party in these reforms that they're undertaking in Britain happening. And then if you take a longer view and thinking about how, you know, 50, 60 years later, this is going to culminate in women's suffrage as well. And in many ways, these two, as I try to show in the book, these two movements kind of work in tandem throughout most of these decades, that you can see that connection there, I think.
11:18
One of the striking elements of your book to me, and this also echoes a point you made in your prior book. So it's one of the Palen contributions to understanding these issues, is that the United States, for all of its claims about free trade, was not a free trading nation in the late 19th and early 20th century, and in some ways was the enemy of these free traders. Can you say more about that, Marc?
11:42
Yeah, and it's really mainly the Republican Party. So the Republican Party, when it's founded in the 1850s, it is, of course, the party of anti slavery. But once slavery officially comes to an end at least and, with the end of the Civil War, 1865, the Republican party refashioned itself as the party of protectionism.
12:04
And so with their dominance of American politics throughout most of the decades that follow up, until the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you have this republican style protectionist policy. It's a very anglophobic one. Fear, hatred of the British is a common political tact that's taken to reinforce these protectionist demands, but it's also, you know, the American industries were certainly less developed than those of the British, and so they saw this as a way to catch up to and rival, the more industrially advanced British, who had recently adopted free trade.
12:41
So this seemed like a nice counterbalance to it, and also led to all sorts of geopolitical conflicts with America's neighbors, especially the British colony to the north, Canada. And then when the United States becomes a proper, formal empire in its own right under Republican auspices in 1898 after the Spanish American war, it's a protectionist economic nationalist empire that comes into being here that the Republicans oversee. And, you know, pushing back against that common understanding that we, I think we tend to make of this late 19th, early 20th century, those decades leading up to the first world war as some sort of Gilded Age era of free markets and laissez faire run amok. One of the things I've been trying to push back against is to say that, that's actually, it was quite the opposite.
13:30
And this is exactly how these left wing free traders saw the world system, as a world system dominated by empires who lean towards economic nationalism, at home and abroad. And I think without understanding that protectionist makeup of the American people, American empire, as well as other rival empires, like the French, the Russians, the Italians, the Ottomans, the Japanese, and so forth, that you get, it really would be impossible to understand why this broad left wing internationalist subscription to free trade existed.
13:59
So, Marc, one of the really interesting parts of your book is your reinterpretation of the late 19th and early 20th century, just along the lines we've been discussing. Traditionally, people have argued that, this is a period of, growing trade, growing interdependence between countries, and that actually causes violence and imperialism. You see this the opposite way, right? And tell us more about that.
14:30
Yeah. And I mean, this gets into a lot of kind of historiographical minefields about, you know, why the late 19th, early 20th century is tended, tends to be portrayed as an area of free trade and laissez faire, you know, run amok, as I described. But in reality, this is aside from the British who embraced free trade from the 1840s until the 1930s, one rival empire, the British after another, led by the United States and its growing empire, turned to economic nationalism and imperial expansion across the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And this is exacerbated with the onset of a global depression in 1873. Something we can probably relate to nowadays, which is, during times of economic crises, nations tend to look inwards, tend to retreat from the international system, as we've seen so clearly, in the wake of the great recession and then the pandemic.
15:25
And so this is what's happening in the late 19th, early 20th century. Yes, ties are still growing, but that's because of these new tools of globalization, transportation costs are drastically falling, steamships and transcontinental railways and so forth. And so you can still have an increase in integration, even though you're seeing a growth of economic nationalism. And of course, that imperial expansion that the United States and other rival empires are practicing is globalizing the world in a certain sense too, through the forceful incorporation of colonies into the kind of Anglo-European sphere that they're developing here.
16:03
But again, it's through these restrictive economic nationalist empires that we're seeing coming to us. And it's this growth. And if you want to take the kind of Marxist approach, the growth of the divvying up of the world amongst these rival protectionist empires that culminates in the first world war.
16:19
And just to underline a point before we get to the First World War, you make this clear in your book that the free traders criticize the United States in particular for building a closed empire, a closed-to-external-trade empire that benefited U.S. trade in the Philippines, for example. That this was not a free trade empire, as some have argued, but in fact, what the United States was doing was building an economically nationalist empire, correct?
16:46
Correct. That's correct. And if, and yeah, and one of the things that I tease out here is how it needs these former Spanish colonies that become American colonies in the context of Puerto Rico, say, or the Philippines, or informally with Cuba. Yeah, you start to see this even from the anti colonial nationalists themselves. Who are demanding free trade with the United States, who are poverty stricken from years of internal conflict, fighting the Spanish and so forth, and who are suddenly unable to afford food, afford clothes because of these new protected tariffs that are placed upon them by the protectionist Republican empire builders back in Washington.
17:23
And so, yeah, so even from the colonies themselves, you can start to see this protectionist makeup of the American empire project. And it's this American system idea. This is what it was called, right? This, this protectionist ideology that kind of grew in many ways in the United States across the 19th century that became the American system of protectionism. It's this ideology that's actually going to shape at least more shape that Imperial order amongst Britain's rivals than free trade Britain itself will.
17:55
Zachary
17:56
You mentioned in your previous answer that there's a connection between this sort of divvying up of the world's resources, and the beginnings of World War One. Could you maybe explain that in more detail? And also, maybe talk a little bit about, you mentioned as well that many leftists have taken this interpretation in particular to make a point about free trade. Could you talk about how that's been interpreted as well?
18:24
Sure, yeah, and this is a critique that's made by what we call kind of center left critics like J.A. Hobson, this famous British critic of imperialism, liberal radical critic of imperialism, writing around the turn of the 20th century. This is then going to be built upon from an even farther left framework, by V. I. Lenin, imperialism in the highest stage of capitalism, writing amidst the first world war, trying to understand and make sense of how the world had become a world in conflict, how these rival empires turn against one another. And, you know, that's one of the fascinating things about this, if you actually look at this and of course, from the, from the left wing internationalist free trade perspective in general, this is exactly what they've been saying from the get go. And that is that it's this expansion of the protectionist empires, you end up with, and yeah, so what are they trying to do? They're trying to expand empires because according to this critique, at least, you know, protectionism creates monopolies, monopolies create inefficient markets at home. This leads to the apparent necessity to search for new markets, to export surplus capital abroad and to exploit raw materials from these newfound colonies to then be used by these industrializing powers back at home.
19:38
This is how people from across the left wing spectrum are explaining the growth of imperial expansion across the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And in the case of V.I. Lenin and trying to explain the outbreak of the first world war itself. Once these empires, these expanding empires have run out of new colonies to exploit for exporting surplus capital for exploiting raw materials, they finally turn on one another. And so you can actually see these really fascinating connections and commonalities by capitalist critics of the imperial system and Marxist critics of the imperial system. Indeed, in the context of Hobson and Lenin, this is even called the Hobson-Lenin Thesis, because Lenin is explicitly drawing on these capitalist theories of imperialism to make his own, even more extreme critiques of the system.
20:32
So as I understand it, Marc, you have a real resuscitation of Norman Angle in your book. Norman Angle, as you point out, was this incredibly popular writer in the early 20th century who predicted that countries that trade together will not go to war together. And of course, those countries did go to war in World War I and realists, those who have dominated international relations scholarship really in the last 70 years, kind of use Norman Angle as a whipping boy, right? They say, you see these liberal internationalists, these left wing thinkers who believe that if you create a world of cooperation, you won't have war. See how wrong they are, and the world is filled with inevitable conflict and war. That's the realist argument, of course. You're bringing Norman Angle back, though you're saying he was actually more correct than realists have given him credit for. Do I understand that right?
21:24
Yeah. You know, he's often seen as an early 20th century, Edwardian disciple of Cobdenism. He puts forward this more pragmatic appeal to a businessman's pocketbook with his book, as you point out, the very, very famous and influential, The Great Illusion that gets published in 1910. And that takes the kind of Euro American Left by storm. Norman Angle clubs are getting started all over the place. So he really does pick on a moment here. But if you actually, you know, he spent much of his life actually pushing back against the misunderstandings of it. He intimately understood the growth of political nationalism that was growing across the early 1900s, as well as the economic nationalism of the early 19th century. His, The Great Illusion was not a optimistic call saying that, global, the global, the degree of globalization now means that no wars can happen, it was actually a pessimistic appeal to say that even the winners of a war would lose because the world is so integrated. And I think that's the thing that gets lost along the way, as you point out, by international relations theorists drawing on these early 20th century ideas, boiling him down to a single sentence, it actually has lost the main point, the main thrust of what he was saying.
22:42
He was trying to warn business and then he was trying to warn, you know, the political right really that this continued nationalism, this continued economic nationalism would leave few if any winners, even those who supposedly would win a war at that point.
23:00
So why was it, Marc, that Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, his Secretary of State, who often gets forgotten, but gets a lot of attention in your book, why is it that they came to agree with Norman Angle?Why did they buy into this free trade argument in the ways in which their predecessors had not? And why did they buy into it after a world war and during the Great Depression, when you would have expected them to be more economically nationalist as Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt's predecessor certainly was, what led Roosevelt and Hull to shift in the direction of Cobden and others during the great depression?
23:40
Hmm. Yeah, and I mean you can see, you know, one of the things I try to do especially with the first book is that the earliest origins of this and in the late 19th century, so you do see this start to show itself a bit with the two non consecutive administrations of Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century 1885 to 89, 1893 to 97, where you see a noticeable pushback against the Republican empire project. Attempts, failed attempts to create a freer trade system in the United States. Woodrow Wilson goes somewhat in that direction when it comes to free trade. He is a self described disciple of the Manchester school, which is another term for Cobdenism. Although it's not necessarily something that is demonstrated by his foreign policy in, say, the Caribbean region. So yeah, it's really going to be when, when FDR appoints Cordell Hull as secretary of state. And I think it's important again to understand someone like Cordell Hull who got his political start as a 17 year old stump speaker for Grover Cleveland in 1888 amid the great debate over whether the United States would take a free trade path or a protectionist one.
24:50
And of course the protectionists would win that one. And then of course, Cordell holds lessons that he learned from the first world war really firmly ingrained the fact that he connects free trade with anti imperialism and peace, and he sees the first world war clearly as one that was begun by these economic conflicts, these trade wars that led up to the outbreak of the First World War.
25:15
So that, those are lessons he takes, but the question is then, how do FDR and Cordell Hull succeed where their predecessors had failed? And I think you put your finger on it there with Herbert Hoover. The Republican protectionist project that began in the 1860s finally loses the support that it was able to maintain from American laborers through these kind of political debates that dominated the scene for so long. And that's because of the infamous Hawley Smoot, or Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930. That is this protective tariff that Hoover's administration passes just on the heels of the outbreak of the Great Depression. And it's clear to everybody by 1932, and the presidential elections that this protective tariff had exacerbated and made worse the great depression that had created these trade tensions, shrunk international trade when it needed to be increased. And so FDR and Cordell Hull are able to build on this shift happening within the American body politic to start turning it towards a freer trade direction.
26:27
And that's exactly what they're going to do. With the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, and then, of course, with the creation of what we now associate with, sort of, post 1945 Bretton Woods system, that comes into being in the late 1940s
26:41
Right. And this, as you describe it, becomes a kind of true golden age for free trade, if we might call it that, from the end of World War II until, I don't know, late 1960s, early 1970s, is that correct?
26:54
Or at least it could have been. It, was really, actually, when I first started thinking about this way back, you know, 10 or so years ago, that is how I kind of thought that the story was going to progress or at least in that nice, neat way. What I ended up finding, the more I dug into the, around, I guess, right after the end of the Second World War is that, yeah, it does seem from 1945 until 1950, especially, things seem to be going their way. That these supranational organizations are, are able to kind of clamp down a bit at least on nations' predilections for, for protectionism. We have a new, better, stronger supranational structure under the United Nations than they had with the League of Nations. And the left wing free traders that I'm tracing actually have, they actually have a direct line to the State Department. There's a remarkable relationship that develops between Cordell Hull and these left wing free traders.
27:54
The Young Women's Christian Association is really big on this. But it brings in a broad umbrella of these free trade advocates to support the Roosevelt administration's free trade reforms. And so this is going to lead to, yes, these Bretton Wood, you know, structures, the IMF and so forth, but even more important here is the creation of the general agreement on tariffs and trade in 1947, which Hull is broadly considered to have created. And of course this will become the world trade organization in 1995. So at least the structures of what we associate with multilaterals and with free trade had come into being in the late 1940s and the left wing free traders, you know, I think to a certain extent, plausibly pat themselves on the back for helping to bring it about.
28:41
But of course the Cold War decolonization, the growth of a right wing free trade tradition that we touched on at the very beginning of this discussion, all of these things are going to start muddying the waters, so to speak, and make the, what seemed like a new freer trade system, much less easy to maintain.
29:01
And to me, that's one of the more interesting parts of your overall very interesting book is when you get to neoliberalism and you get to the 1970s and 80s and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, many would see them as free traders and maybe even as inheritors of Richard Cobden's ideas, you say, no. You draw a distinction between neoliberals and free trade peace activists. What is the distinction there?
29:30
Well, from the left wing free traders perspective, there's an evolution that happens. So maybe it's a generational evolution that's happening here too. They're much more sympathetic by the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s of the decolonizing world, of what we might call the global South, the G77, these demands for temporary protectionism by these recently decolonized States.
29:55
There's a great deal of sympathy for this, leads to all sorts of new left wing internationalist movements like the fair trade movement, who are similarly advocating these things and have that similar sympathy for demands from labor, demands from the decolonizing world. So this is going to be different from how these free traders on the right are going to respond to these, international issues, and activists.
30:22
And so that's one of the big differences here. So, yes, you have Thatcher in the seventies coming onto the political scene in Britain, who's going to slam down a book by Hayek as soon as she walks in and says, you know, this is what we believe. Frederick Hayek, one of the intellectual founding fathers of neoliberalism. And in a similar way, Reagan is going to surround himself with, you know, neoliberal, right wing economists who are extremely distrustful of anti colonial nationalist demands for protectionism. They're increasingly dis trustful of democracy itself, of course of the welfare state, of trade unions, there's really quite key differences here, but I think the two biggest are where these neoliberals are willing to do at the foreign policy realm and, and how they associate free trade with democracy.
31:17
So the free, the left wing free traders of the book, the main actors in the story closely associate free trade with democratization. And a foreign policy of non interventionism, right? You don't force free trade onto another state unwillingly. This is something that neoliberals 1980s onwards are going to deviate from drastically, even though in many ways they're drawing from the same intellectual wellspring. And so this is where we have the neoliberals who are gonna you know, support Pinochet's Chile, this, you know, dictatorship in Chile and apartheid South Africa, and who are increasingly gonna see democracies, especially democracies from the left, as a threat. An impediment to free trade rather than as an accompaniment to free trade. And so using military interventionism and being suspicious of democratic movements, in the name of free trade, this shows them to be something quite different from the free trade internationalist tradition that I was tracing in previous chapters.
32:24
And you make the, you make the argument that neoliberalism, as you say, this is from your book, page 218, that neoliberals have effectively co opted free trade as a neo colonial tool. So you are clearly making the case, there's a different version of free trade that's not neo-colonial, that's not mercantilist. As you call the, the moment from 2016 on. What would that be? I mean, one of the real goals of our podcast each week is to try to use history to help uncover alternative pathways. Things we could do today that would be hopeful. So what is the hopeful alternative to the world of US-China market rivalry that often seems to disempower smaller countries and smaller cultures. What's the alternative pathway from the left wing free trade vision that you've excavated so well here, Marc?
33:23
Yeah, great. Really, really, that's a really difficult, but really important question. And maybe we can end it on a positive note if I do this correctly. Yeah, I, so we have these multilateral institutions that, It comes into being precisely to create a more peaceful and interdependent world in the late 1940s. But they increasingly become controlled, taken over by this more right leaning, internationalism of the neoliberals and of multinational corporations within the kind of context of the Milton Cold War. And so this is, I think, the beginning of it. And so because of that too, you also see a lot less of a strict adherence to free trade internationalism, especially once Cordell Hull is no longer in the State Department.
34:13
And so you still start to see, kind of the hangover of this imperialism of economic nationalism that had dictated American foreign policy for so many decades leading up to the Second World War. And you see this most visibly even today with the Cuban embargo, something done under Democratic auspices, but continued under both parties.
34:34
And so in an interesting way, the legacy of the imperialism of economic nationalism in the United States, it's still very, was very much with us even before 2016, even before we ended up electing. an avowedly protectionist Republican president. You know, it was one of those things in 2016 that I was not surprised by at all. And of course, you could point back to most of the history of the Republican party as a party of protectionism, that Trump was by no means an anomaly, but a return to the status quo, from this longer viewpoint. But it was interesting to see how the Democrats from 2020, started just borrowing from and echoing Trump's protectionist platform to the point now that we're going to have, it looks like, a Republican protectionist running for president, and we're going to have a Democratic protectionist running for president in the 2024 elections. And like you say, in the context of trade wars and steel tariffs against the EU, and geopolitical conflict that's being drawn from that, sanctions against a variety of states as well, food embargoes and blockades, and then of course the Cuban embargo itself is still very much a thing.
35:47
And so what remains of the left wing free trade movement has been still fighting this fight. We still have a variety of left wing peace organizations that have been and remain very critical of, say, the U. S. Cuban embargo. We still have organizations like the Fair Trade Movement, which was created in Oxford in 1968 with the Hasselmeyer Declaration, but which was an alternative form of globalization and an alternative form of, ethical free trade as they put it and there's something I'm sure we're all listening here are familiar to a certain extent. But you know, we see the fair trade stamped on our bars of chocolate or our coffee bags, but it actually has a history, that I argue at least, that goes back to the 1840s. And it's also putting forward this idea that we can, you know, can pay a bit more if it means making sure that the things we're buying are not using exploited labor, that people are getting paid a fair wage.
36:47
And so this alternative globalization, alter globalization, from the left, is still around. It's still prominent, but it is very much on the outs because of all these kind of transformations of the global system we've been touching on. The growing power of neoliberal policies at the top and, the lack of influence that left wing internationals now have over policymaking.
37:12
But I think maybe one way to think about it, and one thing you can draw from this book as a way of going forward here is how the left wingers, the liberal radicals, the socialists, the women's suffragists, the Christian pacifists, they all, by the early 1900s, by around the time of the First World War, came together and were working together in ways that would probably surprise us, especially with our Cold War lenses on, the idea that Marxist internationalists were working alongside capitalists to try to create a more interdependent, peaceful order. That is still a possibility, and maybe that is the only way to revitalize this if you do see the world in a way that these left wing internationals see it. It's through a new coalition form of like minded, dare we say globalists who see the kind of, inward looking, turn towards autarky and trade wars that have become so commonplace now as something that they want to oppose. It was an interesting lesson to be drawn from this book where actually, in surprising ways, there was a really broad left wing coalition that was in many ways successful in working together to overturn the protectionist system.
38:22
I just have to ask before we turn to Zachary's thoughts on this, isn't that really what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were trying to do? You criticize them actually in the book, but wouldn't they identify with the alternative vision you just articulated?
38:39
Certainly more so than their Republican counterparts, certainly more so. I, you know, I do try to make the point though, that even still their foreign policy credentials when it comes to military interventionism. In the case of, say, Haiti or, in the context of Clinton, for example, his sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, these are, you know, these are limiting trait. These are things that the leftwing free traders, the non-interventionists would've been vocally opposed to. But I think it, to a certain extent, they're still there. You can certainly see it in the rhetoric of Clinton, and I think with Obama, perhaps even more so in the policy practices that he was operating under, his attempts to support the Trans Pacific Partnership, despite the critiques from the alt left, that were still critical of too much of an influence for the multinational corporations. And some elements of this certainly still at play within democratic internationalism of Clinton and Obama. I think that's fair.
39:44
Zachary, what are your thoughts on this as someone who cares deeply about international trade and international connections? You're participating in this podcast from Leipzig, Germany, where you're doing some research of your own now, I mean, does Marx history resonate with a vision for where democracy and international affairs can go today?
40:07
I think it does. I think it's also the last question in particular, last answer, was a really important reminder that oftentimes the questions that need to be asked or are not necessarily, like, ones of ideology, but of whose interests certain policies are serving. I think the sort of description of how the, at least the ages of free trade, was overtaken by neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s is a really important lesson about the importance of keeping in mind whose interests our policies serve, because, looking at it on paper, it can seem that the neoliberal policies are of the same tradition, but, in reality they were serving very different interests. And I think also this vision of left wing free trade is something that we should all take very seriously, especially at a moment when our, when the sort of liberal international institutions, which this movement created or the descendants of this movement created after World War II seem most threatened. And certainly when our, when the sort of free trade world order that developed after the end of the Cold War seems most threatened as well.
41:20
Yes, I think that's really well said, Zachary. And one thing, Marc, I've been thinking about as I was re-reading your book, and as I've been listening to your really thoughtful and inspiring comments today, you know, we are entering a moment where it does seem that protectionism is the main valence of politics. As you say, both presidential candidates in the U.S. this year will be running as protectionists, as advocates of industrial policy of one kind or another. Certainly, that's the way China operates. The E.U. has been moving more in that in that direction, and of course, we're witnessing wars, economic nationalist wars across the world from the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia.
42:00
But as all that's happening, there is a desire to move beyond this moment in a search for an alternative. And especially in a world that's torn by inequalities and warfare, this vision of interdependence, of trade, of openness, of, building prosperity, shared prosperity through open connections that are not militarized and mediated by international institutions. That actually might become a more compelling vision. Much of the discussion around the International Criminal Court is in many ways a discussion about this. And so we might be on the cusp, just as we were in the late 1920s, we might be on the cusp again of another free trade international peace activist moment. That would seem to be the hopeful democratic message in much of this. Do you agree with that Marc?
42:55
You both put it so, so well as far as what might be possible hereafter. And of course, if I were to take maybe even a more cynical approach at looking back to the successes, not just of the FDR and 1930s, but, you know, why it was that the free traders succeeded in Britain in the 1840s. And, you know, for them it connected to peace and, but I think the prosperity element, I think, is the other important thing here too. And I think for maybe a lot more people, the connection between interdependence and peace is going to be less important than what it means for their pocketbooks.
43:32
And so, you know, the increase of prices that is becoming, it's hurting the poorest among us even more than anybody else. You know, I wonder if that prosperity argument that often comes with free trade, lower prices for goods, potentially something really important to a lot of the actors in my book, especially the women's suffragists ending world hunger by the equitable distribution of trade, of food through, through a free trade system, that also I think might resonate or perhaps might resonate with the even larger group.
44:02
Yes, I think that's very well said, Marc, and a very nice connection to one of the central issues of our world today, which is the inequalities in food and nutritional access across, within countries and across countries. Of course, this brings us full circle, as always, to, in some ways, the inspiration for our podcast, which is Franklin Roosevelt. We started this podcast with his inspiration for how each generation writes a new chapter in the book of democracy. And, as always, the new chapters build on old chapters. Chapters that might have been forgotten before. Marc, you have in your book, Pax Economica, that I recommend to all of our listeners, you have reminded us of such an important chapter in the evolution of Anglo American and international democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries. A chapter that seems more relevant than ever in this neo mercantilist age, as you call it. Thank you so much for joining us this week, Marc, and sharing your insights with us.
45:00
Thank you so much again for having me and for this great conversation. It's a pleasure.
45:04
And Zachary, thank you for your poem. Your image of us sailing is still very prominent in my mind throughout our conversation. And thank you, of course, most of all, to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 279: Hubert Humphrey & Civil Rights
00:24
Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week, we are going to talk about a figure who played a major role in American history and the history of civil rights writ large, but a figure who's somewhat forgotten in many of our contemporary discussions. This is Hubert Humphrey, who was the mayor of Minneapolis and one of the most prominent members of the U.S. Senate for the second half of the 20th century. He was vice president and in 1968, a presidential candidate. We are fortunate today to be joined by a leading author and journalist and friend who has written a phenomenal book. It's a book that in some ways is a love letter to Hubert Humphrey and a wonderful explication of his life and a wonderful analysis of civil rights, of African American and Jewish relations in the United States.
01:19
The author and friend and guest today is Samuel G. Freedman and his book that I highly recommend to all of our listeners, a book I will probably assign to my students in the spring, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. Sam is the author of many other books, including Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church, Jew versus Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. I believe his most recent book before this one, Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football that Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights. We'll see if UT can change the game this year, being number one in the country. Sam is a former columnist for the New York Times and he's a current professor of journalism at Columbia University. So, Professor Friedman, thank you for joining us.
02:13
Professor Suri, great to be with you.
02:16
Before we get into our discussion with Sam Freedman and our discussion of Hubert Humphrey, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today?
02:28
The Old Days.
02:30
The old days. Are you referring to the days before you left our house for college?
02:35
Uh, no, definitely not.
02:37
Older days than those.
02:38
Maybe the days when you left your house.
02:40
Oh, okay, okay. Very good. What you would call ancient history, huh?
02:43
So, this is a cave painting then.
02:45
It's a cave! (Laughs) Exactly. All right, Zachary, let's hear it.
02:51
At times it's easy to miss the old days, when good men walked and spoke of true ideals, when all that they would ask for was a raise, perhaps a pair of presidential seals. At times it's easy to miss that sweet age, when only honest men were put in charge, when lies provoked a strong and public rage, and every single heart was twice as large. At times it can be easy to miss that place, where all was silent and all were at peace, where no one shouted or spit in our face, and we all drove fast cars on long-term lease. So it was never. Such a place t'was not. Each problem we face is an ancient rot.
03:40
What's your poem about, Zachary?
03:42
My poem is about the temptation to become nostalgic for the politicians and the politics of the past, about maybe the kind of truth or at least representation of what we'd like to see in our politics that we can often find in looking back, but also the danger of believing that politics was ever easy, simple, honest, or good.
04:06
Yeah, I think there's a point in that, right? It's an age-old struggle, isnât it?
04:10
Yes.
04:11
Sam, you've spent so much time studying Hubert Humphrey and thinking about civil rights and thinking about relations between religious groups in the United States and racial groups in the United States. Why do you think Hubert Humphrey, who we're going to talk about a lot in this episode, why is he largely forgotten? Why is he someone my undergrads don't know?
04:31
I think one simple reason is that we're very focused on who becomes president, and Hubert Humphrey was never able to fulfill his dream of being elected president. He loses to Richard Nixon very narrowly in 1968. He runs a kind of a pathetic campaign as the establishment candidate against George McGovern, the peace candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1972.
04:58
And by 76, Humphrey is so ill with the cancer that'll kill him that he decides not to make one more try. And so he's not on that list of presidents. And I think even to the people who remember him, he suffers in the historical collective consciousness because the recollections of him are about the reviled latter part of his public life, when he's Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and they both support the escalation in Vietnam.
05:31
When he gets the Democratic nomination in 1968, without having competed in any primaries, the party establishment hands it to him, and he receives it literally simultaneous to the Chicago police force attack on unarmed journalists and anti-war demonstrators. And the aforementioned runs the establishment old guard candidate in 1972. And when people remember that part of Humphrey, none of thatâs incorrect, and the critical analysis is right.
06:00
And Humphrey himself said that supporting the Vietnam War was the biggest mistake of his life. But all this completely effaces this valiant part, earlier part of his political career, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, going through the Senate, and really his first one or two years as LBJ's vice president, when he was essential to the passage of these key, and in fact, landmark civil rights laws in 64 through 66.
06:30
Right. I mean, he's central to the story of civil rights in post-war America, though largely forgotten. Your book focuses almost exclusively on that, taking us really from Humphrey's birth in the early 20th century through 1948, through the Democratic Convention in 1948, which is really your crescendo, Humphrey's speech at the convention calling for civil rights. How does a young man like Humphrey, who's born in South Dakota, has a very difficult early life that I knew very little about until I read your book. You talk about how he had to leave college during the Great Depression because he couldn't afford to stay at the University of Minnesota. He then goes back as an older undergraduate. How did he come to be a proponent of civil rights from a rural South Dakota background?
07:21
That's a really important question because Humphrey grew up in Dolan, South Dakota, population 500, very homogeneous, Protestant, Northern European, Scandinavian, German, very conservative Republican, very conservative theologically. And he has the advantage of a father who's an iconoclast. His father's also a little bit of a con artist in running his drug store, but that's another story.
07:52
But HH, as the father was called, was a liberal Democrat in a town with hardly any. He was a self-proclaimed freethinker agnostic in a town where everybody went to church. And he brought up Humphrey imbuing those kids with stories of Woodrow Wilson's internationalism and the better parts of William Jennings Bryan's prairie populism.
08:22
HH was also brave enough to be a supporter of Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated by a major party for the presidency. And so Humphrey saw an example of political independent thinking in his father. And his father even would talk about meeting people across the bounds of difference, whether it was economic class or race or religion.
08:43
And he would always tell young Hubert, 'if you treat people like dogs, you shouldn't be surprised if you get bitten.' And there's one amazing moment I write about in the book, almost mythological to me, when Humphrey is 11 years old and he meets black people for the first time, because there are no black people within 40 miles of Dolan, South Dakota. And even that 40-mile-away community is very small. And this black road-graveling crew shows up to lay down the first gravel road outside of town. And it tells you something about Humphrey's essential temperament, that he goes out to introduce himself to the road workers. And they're only in town for a couple of weeks. But Humphrey always remembers this. So that's a part of his essential constitution. I think also the theological part of who Humphrey is, is really important because then, as now, there was a pitched battle within the Protestant faith in America over what form that faith would take.
09:42
And the dominant Protestant voice, and it was the voice that went into prohibition and immigration restriction and so on, was a fairly suspicious and parochial and insular one. Sometimes it came with also a commitment to economic fairness, which is where you get William Jennings Bryan. But it was also very small-minded and very bigoted in most ways.
10:09
And Humphrey connected through his Methodist minister of his childhood to what was called the social gospel movement, which is a form of Protestant belief that, by the way, they're as fundamentalist as the other Protestants. A lot of the social gospel Protestants believed that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. They believed in temperance. They believed in personal purity. But the big difference is, for them, the consummate act of a believing good Protestant was to create what they called, and they used this exact term, the kingdom of God on earth. And making the kingdom of God on earth meant for them working with organized labor, crossing religious lines, crossing racial lines. And Humphrey drew on that wellspring of social gospel theology throughout his entire life. So that's another piece. And then the really formative, other two formative moments are, number one, the Dakotas fall into an economic depression almost a decade before the rest of the country. And Humphrey drew on that wellspring of social gospel theology throughout his entire life. So that's another piece.
11:04
And then the really formative, other two formative moments are, number one, the Dakotas fall into an economic depression almost a decade before the rest of the country. It hits them in the early 1920s when crop prices plummet, and Humphrey's family loses their home, their store goes deeply into debt. And at that point, before there's a new deal, Hubert Humphrey becomes a new dealer, because that's where he realizes that what he's heard in church, which is that financial hardship is the result of bad morals or foolish decisions or falling for get-rich-quick schemes, he realizes, no, that when the banks are closing in their little town, and people are losing their homes, and farmers are not even sending their crops to market because they'll make less money than it costs to plant them, you need government to step in. So by the time FDR becomes president in 1932, Hubert Humphrey, then 21, is already prepared to be a New Dealer.
12:04
The final piece is when Hubert Humphrey in 1939 goes to graduate school. As you said before, he had to drop out of college for many years to help his family move to a different town and set up a different drugstore, and he doesn't go back to finish his bachelor's, still he's in his late 20s. And when he goes to graduate school, he needs to go wherever he can get a good paying graduate assistantship, because he's married and has the first of his four kids, and that place happens to be Louisiana State University. And going there means that he lives in a Jim Crow society for the first time.
12:38
And it also very interestingly prepares him after grad school to go back to Minneapolis, which is actually at this time a flagrantly racist and anti-Semitic city. And because of these elements of his pre-existing personality that I described before, seeing Jim Crow in action just profoundly offends something in him. And suddenly, he is able to see what's been hiding in plain sight all along during his college years, which is that this city, you could say, up south, has plenty of racial problems of its own that need solving.
13:14
One of the strengths of your book, Sam, for me as a reader, were your vivid descriptions of what it was like for Hubert Humphrey to travel by bus to LSU for the first time, to cross the Mason-Dixon line, and then, as you say, to go home, to go back to Minneapolis. And, you know, the adage is true, you can't go home again, right? He sees his old home differently after living in the South, right?
13:39
Exactly. Because in the South, not only does he live in Jim Crow and sees it really intimately, because he and Muriel and their baby daughter Nancy live on the edge of downtown Baton Rouge, about a mile and a half from the LSU campus, and in between is the major Black neighborhood of Baton Rouge. So he's going back and forth through that neighborhood multiple times a day. And it's not just that he's affected by the things we associate with Jim Crow, the back of the bus, the separate water fountains. What he remembers indelibly are these moments of personal degradation of individual Black men and women. That's what really haunts him.
14:19
The other thing that's much less expected in Baton Rouge is that that's where he makes Jewish friends for the first time, and also falls under the influence of this amazing Professor Rudolf Heberle, who's an exiled anti-Nazi, one-eighth Jewish professor, whose whole project as a scholar was to explore, how is it that democratic societies become totalitarian? And Humphrey is very, very affected by Heberle's instruction. And when Humphrey gives certain speeches later in his public life, as I saw, he's using phrases and formulations that come right out of Rudolf Heberle.
14:58
And all that means that when he goes back North, instead of doing what you might expect a Northern New Dealer to do, which is to say, phew, I'm so glad I'm out of the benighted South and back in the enlightened North again, Humphrey feels none of that moral superiority. He suddenly sees all the warts in Minneapolis.
15:16
Wow. Wow. Zachary?
15:18
I want to ask, what drew you to Humphrey in the first place? What made you want to write a book about these sort of formative moments in his political career? What do you find so fascinating about him as a political figure?
15:30
The truth is that I didn't go searching for a book about Hubert Humphrey. A part of my brain for the last 25 years was looking for a book about America immediately after World War II, deciding what kind of country it wanted to be. Because having spent all this blood and treasure to defeat fascism, America had a huge unfinished agenda with the discrimination on its home front.
15:53
And I just was never able to find the right vehicle for that story. And through actually a comment at a book talk given by a friend of mine, Julian Zelizer of Princeton, Humphrey and this amazing civil rights speech he gives at the 1948 Democratic Convention came up. And I knew about that speech and I knew about its importance, but something about Julian saying it really hammered it home to me.
16:17
And I very quickly realized a couple of things that the book could do. Number one, it could fill this biographical gap about Humphrey because if people knew about him, as I said earlier, it was only the later part. And number two, it could fill a historical gap in the civil rights movement historiography, or at least collective memory, because we Americans tend to situate the start of that mass movement in the mid-50s with Brown versus Board of Ed in 1954, with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.
16:49
But there was this incredible decade of civil rights activism in the 40s led by people who don't get nearly their due these days, like A. Philip Randolph and Walter White, and really catalyzed by the sacrifice of the Black GIs who went off to war and had this phrase they called Double V, victory over fascism abroad and then victory over Jim Crow at home. And what Humphrey did during the 40s is very importantly against the backdrop of the global war against fascism and against Double V and against a kind of a parallel mindset, though, without, as Pythia phrased, that Jewish GIs had. And I just felt that whole chunk of civil rights history got way less attention than later decades did.
17:32
I think one of the many contributions of your book, Sam, is, as I think Julian anticipated when raising this with you, right, is bringing our historiography of the civil rights movement, our understanding of it back to an earlier period. Another contribution that I think reflects you as lifetime scholar is how much of it is about the Jewish American experience as well. Throughout the book, you have long descriptions. I learned more about Jews in Minneapolis than I had ever read before from this book. Tell us about the connections in your mind between civil rights, African American communities, Jewish American communities.
18:11
Here's another example of the conventional wisdom not being quite right, that when people talk about or even rhapsodize about and sometimes even overly romanticize the Black Jewish Alliance, they think of it as being a product of that mid-1950s to mid-1960s civil rights movement. They think about Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great rabbi, marching next to Dr. King in Selma. They think about Cheney and Schwerner and Goodman becoming martyrs together in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
18:44
But I trace the origin story of the Black Jewish Alliance to the rise of Hitler in Germany and to the parallels that Black Americans and Jewish Americans saw between the persecution of Jews in Germany and the persecution of Blacks in the United States. There was a real awareness, a mutual awareness of this as being one battle. And it's also a period of time when Jews, with the exception of instance like the Leo Frank lynching, aren't likely to end up actually lynched the way Black Americans were during these decades of the teens and 20s and 30s. But they were subject to what we would call structural discrimination. For Blacks, it was structural racism. In this case, it was structural anti-Semitism.
19:32
It was laws and deeply entrenched practices that impeded their advancement, that penned them into certain neighborhoods. It was, as it was with Blacks, a toxic kind of popular culture that trafficked in stereotypes and caricatures of them. And in Minneapolis, a city that had a horrible track record of both anti-Semitism and racism, and very small, very numerically vulnerable Black and Jewish communities that collectively made up about 5% of the population and lived in side-by-side slums on the north side of the city, it became very natural that they should become political allies.
20:16
And I think that, that was reflected in many other parts of the country as well. If you read the Black newspapers from the 1930s and early 40s, they're commenting a lot about Hitler's rise in Germany and about Kristallnacht, about the early concentration camps. And they're both drawing parallels to the Black experience, but expressing great minority group to minority group empathy with the Jews.
20:43
And you have to also remember, Black Christianity is, you know, steeped in the Hebrew Bible. A typical Black Christian knows the Hebrew Bible better than a typical American Jew does. So that was another source of the affinity. And similarly, if you would read the Jewish newspapers of that time, they're talking about the Scottsboro Boys case. They're talking about white riots against Black people. They're talking about different forms of racial discrimination. And so some of this is enlightened self-interest. Blacks and Jews realize they need each other, they can help each other. But some of it, I think, bonds at a deeper level than just expediency.
21:26
Fascinating. Zachary?
21:27
You mentioned that the impetus for this book was to try and rewrite or at least capture the historical moment after World War II when Americans were faced with the decision about what a post-war United States would look like. How do you think this story about Minneapolis, about Hubert Humphrey, should change our view, our understanding of that immediate post-war period?
21:52
One way I hope it will change us is to realize that the civil rights activity of the 40s, which culminates with Humphrey and A. Philip Randolph, kind of Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, successfully pressuring the Democratic Party to explicitly endorse civil rights, which leads to the exile of the Southern segregationists, the so-called Dixiecrats, and which is followed by Harry Truman desegregating the military and the federal workforce by executive order and then winning election in 1948 because of a surge in the Black vote, that that's the fruition of this question of what kind of country are we going to be. That's an answer to that, up until that point, unresolved question of are we going to revert back and be complacent or are we going to realize that we can't have practices in this country that we just went to global war against in other countries. There's also something heartbreaking and poignant about the fact that with the rise of the Cold War, this moment is going to end very, very quickly.
23:06
One of the reasons that Harry Truman, having won election as a civil rights candidate in 1948, wasn't able to convert that into legislation, some of the legislation he'd been proposing as far back as 1946, is that in the climate of the Cold War, when in the snap of the fingers, the idea that America's existential enemy is fascism and its remnant and fascism and its home front apologists, anyone who's listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast, Ultra, knows this very well. She's done excellent work on that.
23:44
All of a sudden, now the Soviet Union and global Marxist-Leninism is seen as the enemy. It's not that the Cold War competition with Stalinism wasn't real, but that it had an effect on domestic issues of shoving civil rights to the side, of shoving a lot of elements of liberalism to the side. That's part of the reason why it's not until 1963 and 64 that the process of legislating for civil rights that began in 48 can be picked up by Lyndon Johnson as president, by Dr. King in the mass movement, and by Hubert Humphrey then in the Senate.
24:27
That context is really helpful in understanding Humphrey's contributions as you see them. Toward the end of the book, you describe in a lot of detail Humphrey's efforts, first as mayor of Minneapolis, then within the Democratic Party, where you call him a kind of inside agitator, his efforts to get the party to embrace civil rights, with a president in Harry Truman who's ambivalent at best, right? You do talk about Truman's own experiences and how he's changed from the Missouri politician he was, but even there, there's a bit of uncertainty about where Truman stands, and it turns out that Truman does, as you say, in 1948, embrace a civil rights plank, the minority report in the Democratic Party, and he runs on that. He desegregates the armed forces. He's also the president who recognizes the state of Israel. How does this happen?
25:19
Well, Truman blows hot and cold in a way that reminds me a lot of Lyndon Johnson. People compare LBJ to Franklin Roosevelt, and I think that's an apt comparison on the domestic agenda of the Great Society legislation, but on civil rights, Johnson reminds me a lot more of Truman. They're both from border states. They both, in their public life, had been perfectly fine with segregation for a long period of time, but they both had some kind of deep reservoir of personal decency that was offended. As we know from Robert Carroll's magisterial work and also people like Robert Dallek and Nick Kotz, when young Lyndon Johnson teaches at a Mexican-American school in the Rio Grande Valley, he's appalled at just a primordial level by the poverty and the racism he sees.
26:08
It's not a theoretical response, it's a visceral response, and that remains in him up to the point he breaks cover as a civil rights supporter as president. With Truman, who is descended from Confederate soldiers and from slaveholders, what gets to his heart is a series of attacks on returning Black GIs, because the second V in Double V doesn't come through. The Black GIs come home, and instead of being rewarded with the national movement against segregation, there are multitudes of incidents of Black GIs in the uniform of their country being beaten, being killed, being denied service, and in the case of this particular army sergeant named Isaac Woodard, being yanked off an interstate bus, thrown in South Carolina jail, and having his eyes gouged out by the sheriff. And Walter White of the NAACP, who did incredible, brave work investigating white terrorism, brings this case to Truman's attention, and Truman cannot bear the idea of people who serve the country being assaulted this way.
27:17
And that moves Truman immediately into way ahead of his past, way ahead of the time for white folks in this country, civil rights proposals. Then it gets close to the 48th Convention, and it's as if he forgets he ever said those things. And what he wants to revert to is what was also the worst element of FDR. Valiant as FDR was in wartime, the great conciliator and innovator during the Depression, he also was the man who made this almost literal devil's bargain with the South that basically said, I'll give you Jim Crow, and you'll give me your votes and your support in Congress. And Truman, heading into the 48th election, is ready to go right back to that. And what Hubert Humphrey and A. Philip Randolph and others did was basically force Truman to own what had been his own civil rights program to begin with.
28:10
And by the way, Jeremi, you talked about Truman so quickly endorsing the State of Israel, and that's also a personal visceral thing. He had this friendship back in his days in Kansas City with a Jewish clothing store owner. I think Max Jacobson was his name, if I remember correctly. And it was knowing this Jewish guy who Harry Truman sort of did some business with that had sensitized him to something about the Jewish plight in the world at that time.
28:39
It's interesting how important these personal experiences are. The same could be said for Ulysses Grant, whose experiences during the Civil War with African American soldiers transform him. It was startling to me when I was writing about this in a recent book I wrote. I mean, how much you see this in Grant's correspondence, these personal experiences coming out to shape political viewpoint. It's also interesting, Sam, how politics pushes against that at times. What you're describing in the 1948 Democratic Convention is pretty similar to the 1964 Convention, where Johnson refuses to seat the Mississippi Free Democrats. How does Humphrey push through? How does he get through the resistance that's obviously there?
29:19
In 1948, Humphrey, first of all, as I've said a couple of times, benefited from the interplay between insurgents within the party, literally inside the convention hall, and A. Philip Randolph outside. A. Philip Randolph, for several years by that time, had been running a campaign asking young black men to refuse to register for the draft, to refuse to serve if called up, until Harry Truman desegregated the military. Especially in the wake of World War II and this incredibly high esteem for the American Armed Forces, Randolph understood that desegregating the military was the linchpin to civil rights, even more than anti-lynching legislation was.
29:58
So you have Randolph on the outside, you have Humphrey on the inside. The reason he's able to succeed on the inside is because of the kind of coalition that he helps to create. One thing your listeners have to remember is that at this time, you had roughly 1,200 delegates with votes, not counting alternates, at the Democratic Convention. Ten of them were black. There wasn't a block of black voters or black delegates in that convention who were going to successfully push this issue. There weren't many women. There were probably no Hispanics, no other minorities. I don't know even how many Jewish delegates there might have been.
30:40
So to use some current language to indulge in terrible presentism for a moment, what Humphrey had to do was to convince a bunch of white Protestant delegates to give up some of their white Protestant privilege. And one of the ways he was able to do that is marshalling all the young liberal insurgents like himself and people like Paul Douglas from Illinois, Walter Ruther from the United Auto Workers, Eleanor Roosevelt. The other important Caucasians who were really pushing civil rights. But there were also a group of not-so-liberal big-city political bosses who knew how to count votes. So people like Ed Flynn in the Bronx, Jacob Arvey in Chicago, David Lawrence in Pittsburgh. These big-city bosses had seen thousands upon thousands of blacks from the South come North in what we now call the Great Migration. And they knew that black voters had not been able to vote in the South, but they would be in the North, that if they voted like blacks who had already been in the North, they would lean to the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, the party of emancipation. And these Democratic big-city bosses realized we have to give them some reason to vote Democratic. And supporting civil rights could be that reason.
32:00
And so in the conventions of this era, a big boss like an Arvey or a Lawrence or Flynn or Ed Haig from Jersey City, New Jersey, could basically tell their whole delegation, we're all going to vote for this item. And one of these items was the civil rights plank. And so Humphrey's able to put together just enough votes to have his plank passed by uniting the liberals and these, again, fairly centrist big-city machines.
32:30
It's an extraordinary story. And it also builds on To Secure These Rights, which is a report that Truman had commissioned in response to criticisms from Philip Randolph and others after the war, a report that's produced in 1947 that comes out of the White House and actually encourages civil rights reforms. For today, Sam, you close the book talking about Charlottesville and George Floyd and connecting this story to today. We always like to close our episodes by showing how this history that we love to indulge in and understand, how this history can inform our world today. What are your takeaways for our world today?
33:13
One of the key lessons, there are a couple of key lessons. One is that the battle for equality, for the more perfect union is never won permanently. And there's a temptation, if you're a pessimist, to look at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, to look at the murder of George Floyd and say, if we're still seeing episodes like this, then we've made no progress. But I really resist that kind of pessimism. But I think what it does say is that American history is certainly post-Civil War to the present, is a repeating cycle of oppression, resistance, emancipation, progress, and then inevitably backlash. And you have to expect the backlash is going to happen. You have to be prepared to push back against the backlash, to go back to the barricades one more time, not because you've gained no ground, but to try to hold the ground you've already won and push forward a little bit. And that's an important takeaway.
34:14
And I think also Humphrey's model of being, in a term that he borrowed from Al Smith, one of my other political heroes, a happy warrior is an important model. Humphrey was a bullion. He was energetic. He frankly could be corny at times in that Midwestern small town way. And that's the happy part. But the warrior part is that he knew that he was going to need with joy on his face and optimism in his heart to go back into these battles. And he knew that I think that the joy and the optimism would be assets in winning those battles.
34:53
How do we maintain optimism without becoming Pollyannish? What is the appropriate level of optimism? I'm often criticized for being too optimistic by my son, by Zachary and by others. How do we find that right balance? Because empty hopefulness can become hopeless as well, right?
35:13
Right. You can't be Pollyanna. You can't be Panglossian about this. You have to know that joy is accompanied by struggle, but that is part of the energy you have to struggle forward. A lot of people talked about Hubert Humphrey's phrase, the politics of joy at the time of the democratic convention. And it was both ironic and fitting that that was brought up.
35:40
Ironic because when Humphrey used that phrase, it was right when he announced his candidacy in 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the midst of the horrible Vietnam War, and it sounded totally tone deaf. It was one of the times when Humphrey badly misread the mood of the country. And yet his idea that politics should have a joyful element is maybe now being redeemed because coming out of a period of time that has felt so bleak for a lot of us, so at times such despair and real dangers to democracy, that the idea that there could be something positive and exalting about the work of protecting democracy is really appealing to people. And this goes to other examples we've seen of leadership, of whether it was Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York during the depression, reading the funnies over the radio mic, or whether it was FDR's great orations about nothing to fear, but fear itself. These were people speaking into bleak times, but also saying that there was reason to see something positive on the horizon.
37:00
Zachary, does that resonate with you? Because your poem kind of went in a different direction, right? Your poem was about the recurring challenges we have, which is, of course, what Sam is talking about as well. But do you see figures like Hubert Humphrey providing us some useful lessons, or even a roadmap in how one can be a joyful warrior? And do you find that compelling for your generation today?
37:26
Certainly. I think the point of the poem was not that we've never had political heroes, or that we've never had a politics of joy that's successful. The point was that all of those political heroes and all of the politics of joy required hard work and met with stiff opposition. I think the point of the poem was that politics is always messy and always difficult. It's more about how we approach it than about waiting for political tides to change and waiting for either abstract notions of polarization or partisanship to fix themselves. It's about actually getting involved.
38:00
I completely agree with you, Zachary. And we really have to resist this idea of romanticizing some imagined political past. If you're talking about polarization, for instance, what about a period when one huge faction of the Democratic Party supported white supremacy and racial inequality as a matter of policy, not this is what they thought privately or the way they acted in individual encounters with black Americans. This is what they wanted policy to be. How could that coexist with the rest of a New Deal coalition?
38:36
They were, the Dixiecrats were so serious about that, that they broke from the Democratic Party. And another example, if we think back to the 2020 attempted coup, and what was the goal of getting Mike Pence to refuse to accept the results? The goal, which fortunately he did not do, the goal would have been to throw the election into the House of Representatives. We've seen that play before. We've seen that movie before. In 1948, that was the intent of the Dixiecrats. They felt if they could win several states in the South, then neither Harry Truman nor Thomas Dewey would get 270 votes for an electoral college majority. The choice then goes to the House of Representatives, and each state's delegation gets one vote. And the Southern segregationists dominated the delegations of about a dozen states, and it was going to let them be the kingmakers. They were going to make Harry Truman and Tom Dewey come to them on bent knee and promise to preserve Jim Crow in order to get the Southern states votes. So there was nothing so wonderful and sentimental and old Norman Rockwell-y about politics at that time.
39:50
Not at all. Not at all. And certainly someone who's my hero, Franklin Roosevelt, as you alluded to before, refused to sign anti-lynching legislation. So the compromises, the dirty compromises of politics have a long history, unfortunately. Sam, I wanted to close us out by asking you one final question. And I think it speaks to our moment and it speaks to your scholarship, and it's something that I struggle with. I know Zachary struggles with. I know many of our listeners struggle with. You're someone who's deeply concerned and committed to combating antisemitism. It's in your scholarship. It's in your journalism. It's how I first encountered your work, actually.
40:30
Oh, thank you.
40:31
And you're someone, obviously, deeply committed to civil rights, telling the story of civil rights. How do you think about these issues today with this historical vision, with the challenges we face? How do you, as someone concerned about antisemitism and racism, approach our current world?
40:51
Well, first of all, I'm almost 69. And so I've been through many periods before when there's been a discourse out there saying that the Black-Jewish alliance is all over and that Jews on the whore are going to be turning much more conservative. And this was trotted out during the first attempt to go after affirmative action with the Mario Dufounis and Alan Bakke court cases. And it came up again when Ronald Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter. And the argument was Jimmy Carter had been too pro-Palestinian. And it's happened again now.
41:26
But at the end of the day, in almost every presidential election, you know, going back into the 70s, except for the Carter-Reagan one, the Jewish vote for the Democratic Party has been the most emphatically solid vote of white Americans. It's the closest to the way Black Americans vote for the party. At the end of the day, they're voting similarly, Black Americans and Jewish Americans.
41:55
On the other hand, there are real tensions and the war in Gaza is exercising them. And especially having spent a lot of time around Black church for one book and the world of HBCUs for others, it's not a surprise to me at all that many, many Black Americans look at the West Bank and Gaza and see the Jim Crow South. And they're not anti-Semitic and they're not against the existence of Israel. And they're, as I said before, steeped in the Hebrew Bible. But there is a deep empathy for the Palestinian experience that they feel.
42:29
And I, just at a personal level, just yearn for some resolution to the war because I have despaired just individually about the strains the war has put on not only the Black-Jewish alliance, but on what I felt was really important Black and Muslim-American alliance in domestic politics. And all of these groups would be losers if those alliances get blasted apart.
42:59
Well, I think that's the subject for another show. But I also deeply appreciate, Sam, you're reflecting on that and you're displaying what I think is essential to being a serious historian and writer, which is to take the past on its own terms, but also think about the past in light of the present. That's not anachronistic. That's actually why every generation rewrites the history of what came before. Sam, thank you so much for being with us today.
43:28
Well, Jeremi and Zachary, thank you. It's been such an honor to be with you and such a pleasure to talk about these issues that I care so much about.
43:36
I want to encourage all of our listeners to get a copy or two copies of Sam's book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. Zachary, thank you for your poem and your insights today.
43:49
Thank you.
43:52
And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and our loyal subscribers to our Substack for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.
Episode 283: Barbara Jordan
00:25
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we are joined by an author, professor, scholar of Barbara Jordan's life. Barbara Jordan, as we'll discuss, was a pioneering legislator and pioneering politician and civil rights activist in the United States. She left an incredible legacy, and we're fortunate today to have an opportunity to talk about Barbara Jordan and her legacy, and what that legacy means in the tumultuous world we live in now.
00:58
We're going to discuss Barbara Jordan's life and legacy with Professor Mary Ellen Curtin. Mary Ellen Curtin is an associate professor in the Department of Critical Race, Gender and Culture studies and director of American Studies at American University in Washington, DC, which has a beautiful campus. It's a university I always enjoy visiting.
01:18
Mary Ellen is the author of two books, the book she wrote a number of years ago Black Prisoners and Their World Alabama, 1865-1900 really a pioneering book looking at convict labor and the use of convict labor in the justice and political system in Alabama and much of the South during the second half of the 19th century, and most recently, the book we're going to discuss today, the book I hope everyone will purchase and read, is called She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics. It's hot off the presses, and as soon as it came out, I grabbed a copy and made sure to read it. And it's really an extraordinary book about Barbara Jordan and her life. Mary Ellen, thank you for joining us.
02:03
Oh, thank you for having me. Jeremi, it's such a pleasure to be here.
02:07
Before we get into our discussion of Barbara Jordan with Mary Ellen Curtin, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary Suri's scene setting poem. What's the title of your poem today, Zachary?
02:19
"Trailblazer."
02:20
Let's hear it.
02:22
The one who breaks the ceiling, the one who's first to cross the line, they must make their own rhythm. They must beat to their own time. They find themselves quite often alone or in the dust. They find themselves quite often lest to wallow or to rust. And so they must know more than anyone else to take their own story right off of the shelf. The one who breaks the ceiling as glass shattered in their eyes, the one who makes the first move must break through all the lies. They find themselves quite often defeated or ignored. They find themselves quite often hated and abhorred. And so they must fight, more than anything still to make their way over the widening hill. And sometimes they fail, and sometimes they will, but always, they face it with a radical grin.
03:16
I love that closing line. Radical grin. Mary Ellen, I saw you reacting to the poem. What do you think?
03:22
Beautiful, beautiful. And I think you capture the complexities, the nuances, the contradictions of being the first. It's not all glory, for sure. Thank you so much.
03:35
Thank you. Thank you.
03:37
What's your poem about, Zachary?
03:39
My poem is about, as she just said, the contradictions and the nuances of having to be the first and not just the personal toll it takes on someone, but sort of almost impossible expectations that one has to (yes, yes) the level of resiliency and hope that one has to display.
03:59
Yes, well said. Well said. Mary Ellen, why did you write this book about Barbara Jordan and all the things she did as the first?
04:07
Well, that's a good question. So I had just been finishing my first book, and I'm glad I wrote, even though the the topics are quite different in a way, where they come together is that I'm a historian of the African American, Black experience, and so in my first book, I really try and elevate the voices and experience of people who were incarcerated. And that was, you know, rather than just looking at the system from the top down, which, of course, you have to understand, but to do everything I could to try and recover those voices, the letters, the pardon papers, anything that could really shed light on how the men and women themselves who were incarcerated were experiencing forced labor, and their resiliency, and how they tried to overcome and surpass such a living in such a terrible system.
04:59
And so I was finishing that, and Barbara Jordan had just died, actually, and something in me just really stirred, because I remembered her from when I was a teenager in the 1970s. And I just thought, Oh, my goodness, you know what happened to her? I knew, of course, about her, but you know, I hadn't heard about her for, you know, a while, and it seemed to me, in retrospect, that she was just kind of out there by herself. Here I was in graduate, had been in graduate school, had been studying Black history, civil rights, and she was barely mentioned, you know, just kind of a footnote as just a first, but nothing else.
05:43
And I just thought, there has to be some connection here between this amazing woman and all these other movements of the time. But I just didn't know what it was. I didn't know how she fit into the broader struggle for Black freedom and for women's rights. And so I thought, you know, I want to find that out. So that really stirred a question in me.
06:03
And when I was researching this, really my training in Black history pushed me to look at the whole context of her community and to raise up those Black voices that I think had been left out if we just look at her as an individual, right, rather than the product of a community, a place, a time. So that's one of the things I try and capture in the book, is that context.
06:27
I think you do an extraordinary job with that. I learned so much about Houston and so much about what it was like to be a lawyer, as Barbara Jordan was from 1959 until the mid 1960s and then what it was like to run races in Houston and to lose races, as she did her first few times through. There's so many things in which she was the first, (correct) just as Zachary indicated in his poem, she was one of only three Black women, you say, who became a lawyer in Texas in 1959, one of only three Black women. Then she was the first African American woman in the Texas Senate, in the state legislature, and then the first African American woman from the South in the US Congress. And that's when she was elected in 1972 when I was born. It's not that long ago. (No, no, it isn't. It is not.) What What made this moment that she was in such a moment of change?
07:23
That's a great question. Well, I think it was a sort of a long time coming, and that's why half of the book is really about Houston and getting to that point of being elected to the Texas Legislature. You know, I really think it's important, as you say, Jeremi, to sort of go back and think about where we were in 1960 when it comes to electoral politics. There were no African Americans in the South who were serving in any state legislature, none. So we're really starting from zero, you know, at that point, and also the Democratic Party in the South was still largely a party run by conservatives. It's a party that does not welcome Black participation.
08:03
And Houston, however, is a bit of an outlier. This is why I think she was uniquely poised to make this stand and to succeed. It's because Houston had been a hotbed of activism for Black voting, and this goes back to the 1940s and I described this movement that was led by her Minister, the Reverend Albert Lucas, who worked with Thurgood Marshall. Reverend Lucas was head of the statewide NAACP, and he and Marshall, together really forged not just a court case, but a social movement behind what the case that became, Smith V. Allwright, and so Lucas was one of the first civil rights leaders who used the church to educate ordinary Black people about political issues and to use the pulpit as a means of political education and political mobilization.
08:55
And we're going to see this later, of course, in the what we think of as Civil Rights Movement. But he was doing this in the 1940s and it had an impact. And so after this case, which got rid of one of the most egregious forms of disfranchisement, the White primary, Black citizens in Houston were then able to participate in those primary elections from the mid 40s through, you know, the 50s and the 60s, and they very gradually, are having an impact on that party politics. And they join in with, eventually in the Kennedy campaign, which extraordinary. Kennedy won Texas in 1960 so (just barely) yes, just barely.
09:40
But voter registration among, and Barbara Jordan was a big part of that, in as a young lawyer coming back to Houston and being part of a voter registration campaign. So she's very proud of her role in that, and then continues to work with this alliance of liberals, late White liberals and labor leaders they call themselves the Democratic coalition in Houston. It's the Harris County Democrats, and they are the liberals who are opposed to the conservative control of the Democratic Party.
10:08
So as you can see, it's a kind of constellation of forces. She's an extraordinary individual. But there's a movement among, now, you have Black voters joining forces with liberals and labor to try and create a coalition to elect more liberal Democrats. It's a one party state, after all, (right, right) into office. So when Jordan is running now, okay, the obstacle of the White primary has been removed. But the there are other obstacles to voting. There are other forms of disfranchisement that still exist: the poll tax, for example. But the most terrible one for her, from her perspective, was malapportionment. This is before the Voting Rights Act, and so you have a terribly malapportioned Texas State Legislature. And in her case, the Senate was an institution where all of Houston with a million people had one senator, and then you had rural districts with only a few 1000 people, had a senator too.
11:12
And so because of a series of court cases, beginning with Baker V. Carr, liberals and other activists brought lawsuits that challenge the malapportionment and forced a redistricting of the Texas Senate, and eventually the House, but that comes later. So when Jordan is running in '62 she loses. She loses again in '64. And really this is a result of not just so much losing votes, but also a reluctance of people, of Whites, to vote for a Black woman candidate, and then not having an appropriate district to run in. When she gets that district in 1966, finally Houston has four senators now. So this is new. And the way the lines are drawn, the way it was explained to me, it was, it was not drawn with her in mind. That suit was brought to bring greater power to labor and to urban populations, but the way the district was drawn, it was just simply that it was slightly a Black majority, just not quite even, I would say, a Black majority, but it was favorable to her.
12:19
She still had run in a primary race against a White liberal male who actually, you know, said some very terrible things about her, and it was a real struggle for her to win that race against somebody who should have been in her corner. So there's many layers of disfranchisement here (yes) and racism, as Zachary pointed out, that she faced when she triumphed in '66 and the biggest thing was at the end was, will you accept a Black woman as your leader? Will you accept a Black woman as a political leader and candidate? And she really had to push that issue. No one handed that to her. She had to struggle for everything.
13:01
Wow, wow. She was a trailblazer. (she certainly was, yes) Zachary?
13:06
What was her experience like in the state legislature in the 1960s, coming in on the heels of this historic civil rights moment? What was the Texas State Legislature like for a Black woman in the late 1960s?
13:21
Oh, my goodness, Zachary, you ask the best questions. All right. Those, as she put it, those men did not want her there, okay, however, the Texas Legislature is a small institution. Has 31 people. On one hand, you could say she did have allies because of this redistricting. There were other liberals that she had worked with as part of this coalition who were there with her. So in theory, you have a group of about 11 who could perhaps block terrible legislation and even find some way to promote good legislation, you know, progressive legislation, especially around the issue of taxation, fairer taxation. This had been, long been, a liberal goal in Texas, right?
14:12
But she faced all kinds of what we would call microaggressions. Now we use the term microaggressions. At the time it would just be, you know, people saying racist things to her unthinkingly, right? So part of this is that she is accepted. She knows many of the liberals in her coalition, and so among them, she's accepted. And yet there is, if you look at the journalism of the time, there's clearly a lot of very racist things that are said about her, either behind her back, and she is also placed in very, unlike Hughes, very sort of uncomfortable social situations where she's forced to kind of socialize with with people who are not used to dealing with a Black woman as an equal or a peer.
14:59
She brings out her guitar quite often, and she uses this as a kind of armor and and icebreaker, because people all know, you know, there's a Texas culture of songs, and this is one way she kind of establishes relationships with people. Jordan is a person who wants to establish relationships, and with friends and foes. She understands that to be effective, she has to learn the rules of the Senate and build relationships with people in the Senate, and so I think it's a, it's an important learning experience for her. She's trying to forge her own way. She understands that she wants to gain the respect of these men, both because she feels that is the way forward to efficacy.
15:42
At the same time, there's a lot of pressure on the outside from other liberals who say, if you adopt this approach, that means you are selling out. That means you're not enough of a liberal. And I think you know, she doesn't see that as an especially productive way to be. So she does forge her own way, which is about building relationships. But I don't think, from looking at all the evidence, that she ever sacrificed an issue, that she ever caved in on an issue, I think she's feeling her way and trying to figure out the best way that she can be effective, and I think she is effective to a certain extent.
16:24
She does also suffer some pretty bad failures, and one I describe has to do with a corporate profits tax which almost passes and then fails by one vote, which was not her vote, by the way. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions about her time here in the Texas Senate that emphasize sort of her as part of a system. But what I try and do is draw out the nuance of saying no, I think she's just trying to find her way and also is effective and does make some important stands while she's a legislator and continues to be part of a larger struggle for Black freedom. She's involved in all sorts of issues outside of Texas at this time.
17:05
It's interesting because one of the points you make so well in the book, and you make it repeatedly, is that there's a civil rights agenda that involves working in and through the system. That those who are marching in the streets, who Barbara Jordan certainly sympathizes with and sometimes joins, that's one approach, and a valuable and necessary approach. But your argument is that getting into the system and working through the system is absolutely crucial. Do you want to say more about that?
17:30
I do. I do. Thank you, Jeremi. Yeah, this is, and I don't think it's just her, like, this is when the movement is moving from the streets to the State House. This is Bayard Rustin's vision, right? From protest to politics. How can we be effective in making the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement real? And this was her quest, (yes) you know, this was really her goal, (yes) to do that. And no one knew how to do it, right? It hadn't been done before. (yes) And this is, you know, Rustin is good, like in theory, all of this coalition should work, but as we see over time, coalitions are complicated and messy, and everyone has their own agenda. How do you get people to work together who don't really have a long history and sometimes their goals clash, so people have to give and take, (right, right) and it's a hard thing. And, so, but this, I do think that she, and many others, Julian Bond, for example, we forget about him running and succeeding in the Georgia State Legislature in 1965. (right, right)
18:31
There's, this was part of thinking about the future. Where do we go from here? And you can't mandate interracial democracy. You know, the Voting Rights Act can make things, can correct, you know, the malapportionment, can correct the history of disfranchisement, but it can't mandate elections of Black politicians. That has to come from the ground up, and it really takes people with guts and ambition to do that.
18:55
So, well said, so well said. So, what makes Barbara Jordan famous is her election to Congress, of course, in 1972, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the entire South. And then, of course, during the Watergate Hearings, which you describe in here, are her extraordinary speech about the ideals of the Constitution and why presidents need to be held to the law, which is, you know, a little relevant for today, as well, explain that evolution in Barbara Jordan, to me, it's a fascinating part of this book.
19:28
Thank you so much. Well, I think again, we know her for this speech. I also think she played an important role behind the scenes in the Judiciary Committee. Again, this was sort of the Texas Senate. Now, in this committee, she's one of 37 as opposed to one of 31. And the goal here, again, working with her chair, Peter Rodino, is to create a consensus, bipartisan consensus. So again, this means being willing to talk with people who disagree with you, and trying to persuade them, or at least stop the negative effects of others, like, I think she's always trying to neutralize Charles Wiggins from California, who was a big Nixon defender, and she's always trying to intervene and neutralize his influence among the more concerned, you know, the men in the middle. They were called the men in the middle.
20:20
So there's that going on for months and months behind closed doors and then and finally, you know, the public has no idea what's been going on behind closed doors of the Judiciary Committee. And so you have the Summer of '74 when finally the committee is going to lay out its argument for impeachment and decide how to frame their articles for impeachment, given what John Doerr has laid out. John Doerr laid out 38 enormous number of possibilities, but they only, but they ended up concentrating on just a few. And these had to do with, as you said, the abuse of power. And I think, you know, there's a reason why she hones in on that. And I think the way that she frames the speech, however, is extremely important.
21:04
We all know that part where she says, 'My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total.' "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." But what we don't remember is what she said before that line where she says, 'when this document was completed in 1787, I was not included, but now through the process...' And then she lays out all the ways that the Constitution can be amended to, right, Because through that process of judicial review, right, and additions, I am now included in "We the People." And here she's talking specifically about the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act. So now I am included in the protection of this great document, and that is why it is so important that I fight for it, and that is why I believe in it so completely.
22:15
So that first part often gets left out, as though she is just, you know, blindly following some, you know, great American Dream, which she does believe in, by the way, but she also understands America's history of racism and and how important it has been to change and amend that Constitution to protect the rights of Black people. This is what gives her a great stake in this document. And this is why she's so angry at how Richard Nixon has defiled the Constitution.
22:48
You know, the combination, Mary Ellen, of faith in the system, articulateness, the way she speaks, that voice, as you call it, right, that deep, resonant voice with the high minded articulation. It reminds me so much, as I think about it, of someone else we talked to a few months ago, Ruth Simmons, who also comes from this part of Texas, grew up in the Fifth Ward of Houston, in part after her family moved from a rural sharecropping area. And Ruth kind of sounds like like Barbara Jordan, tell us about the voice, about the way of carrying oneself? Your book is wonderful on that.
23:29
Thank you so much. Well, they went to the same high school. They both went to Phyllis Wheatley High School. I think for Barbara Jordan, this is very much, her voice is a Black voice. (totally) I mean, it comes from her family, the institutions of this, of her training as a debater, to be sure, the church that she grew up listening to as a young girl, Reverend Lucas. But it even goes back further than that, because everyone around her said 'she always talked like that.' And I think her grandfather, who was the first person in her life, her Grandpa Patten, as she called him, who made her recite for him. And in one interview, somebody said, well, her first, one of her first biographers said, 'How did you learn to talk like that?' and she said, 'at my grandfather's knee.'
24:22
And he is a very interesting figure, a very much a self-taught person who had a very tragic life, who had been incarcerated, but who came back from that incarceration and really embraced her as a sort of protege. And so as a very young child, when she said, 'other people weren't really paying much attention to me, I was the youngest of three girls.' He really took a lot of time to be with her, talk to her, inspire her, and he made her recite to him. And then after that, her father wants to start his own church and realizes her talent as a young girl, as a speaker, and so with her, one of her sisters, she is also singing. I think a lot of the power of her voice comes from learning how to sing and and to perform before an audience and bring in an audience, tell a story through song, and also reciting for her father's church. So by the time she gets to high school, she is already quite comfortable with this kind of use of her voice, and then she gets involved in speech and debate and develops it even further. But it's through these Black institutions and her Black family that the value, her value as a speaker, as a speaker is acknowledged and recognized and supported.
25:45
It's such an important part of the Civil Rights Movement, if you think of again the high diction of Martin Luther King Jr, and you think about even Malcolm X in his own way, right? I mean, there's a way in which these activists are taking the English language, sort of as Churchill says, and sending it to war for them, right? (Mh-hm) Using it to articulate and persuade and motivate people, yes?
26:08
Absolutely they are. And for her, especially, this is what she brings to the nation, you know, a way she's able to crystallize what does the Democratic Party stand for? (yes) Which she does in the '76 speech at Madison Square Garden. Why should Richard Nixon be impeached? She has a real gift for distilling complicated ideas into a nutshell (yes) and to make them accessible to a wide audience. And I think she that is from the Black church. You know, that is what a minister is supposed to do, a good one.
26:36
And also, you have to make sure that people are responding to you. You're very aware of your audience, and she is always very aware of her audience. Giving a speech is not the same as reading out a lecture. It's a relationship. And that is something that has to be, if you don't realize that from early on, it's not going to come natural to you. And this is why you know at that convention, you know, John Glenn, if you're just reading a speech, (yes) you're not thinking of the audience as something that you are building a relationship with over time. It's just not going to fall right. It's not going to feel the same. And she really has that sense of what public speaking is truly about. (Zachary?)
27:17
How was Barbara Jordan viewed at the time? How is she perceived, in particular, by White political actors and and White politicians? You spoke about her oratory and the way in which she was able to articulate the Democratic Party position on Nixon, but how was she seen by White voters around the country. How was she perceived as a politician?
27:44
Right, that's, that's such a great question. Well, I think on one hand, there's always many hands. On one hand, she is admired, greatly admired and lauded. So when you have these polls like, what woman could you see as president? For example, she's at the top of those polls (Really? Really? Wow) by Red Book magazine. What could you see on the Supreme Court? She's at the top of those polls. And many people, kind of, you know, they it, she just makes it sort of look easy, like, oh, this is the next step, you know, in terms of women's progress in politics and Black women's progress in politics. I think on one, on one hand, she's greatly admired.
28:21
On the other hand, I think there are a lot of tensions, lingering tensions and resentments out of Houston and out of Austin, liberals who are never really trusting of her. They see her still as someone who is dealing with the enemy, you know, making deals with the other side. They don't understand some of her tactics, and she isn't really good on explaining to people like, okay, I'm gonna, this is, this is how I'm operating. Because politicians just don't do that. I think that, how can I put this that she has learned some skills as a politician that are hard to explain to people who are not in those shoes. So you don't always say what you think. (yeah) Now, you're a poker player. I mean, there's, she played poker. I mean, this is the way you do it. You, you do have to make agreements.
29:16
So, for example, with Robert Byrd, she introduces him at a party convention, at a mini convention (powerful senator from West Virginia) correct, who is going to play a very important role in the Voting Rights Act extension, she develops a kind of not, it's not a quid pro quo. It's never that bald, you know, but it's an understanding (yes) that, hey, here's somebody who represents the growing Black vote. This is the other thing that Jordan is never just about herself. A lot of her power, the perception of her power, comes from what she represents, which is with the Voting Rights Act, more and more Black people are registering to vote, and they're participating in primaries. And this is a new thing that Democratic, White Democratic politicians have to now take account of and Jordan is somebody who can explain this to them. (yes, yes) So, in terms of how she's perceived, I think it's quite mixed, actually, on one hand, the public perceives her very positively. On the other hand, people within Houston are still, and Austin, are still quite perhaps puzzled about how she was able to go so far so fast, and they are suspicious of her relationship with the power structure.
30:28
Yeah. Your book makes the case so well that she's not only a trailblazer, but that she actually provides some of the tools that those who come after her will use that people like AOC and various others will draw on from her. For today, for this moment we're in today, which is such a difficult time, especially for the ideals of Barbara Jordan, what does she offer us today?
30:55
Hmm. Well, she always acknowledged, and you can see this in her testimony against Robert Bork, for example. She always acknowledged the importance of court cases and protection of Black voting for the success of Black politicians. This was one reason she was so against Robert Bork's confirmation (Yes) to the Supreme Court (Yes) because he had said he had opposed those cases. He didn't think Baker v. Carr had been properly decided, et cetera. And she, that just appalled her (Mm-hmm) because she said, 'Well, if, if his way of thinking had persisted, I would not be here.' Right. 'I would never have been able to run and to win.'
31:21
And so she, she just said the Supreme Court has to protect individual rights, has to protect this right to privacy, has to protect Black voting rights. And so that, I think, is an important thing to remember and to understand. As much as we applaud her as a great individual, and even other Black politicians that we applaud as great individuals, to understand that they stood on the shoulders of those really important Supreme Court decisions and the movement to make those, that made those decisions part of our national fabric.
32:03
And now we're suffering a pushback against those decisions, and there's gonna be some, uh, uh, consequences to that, that extraordinary people are gonna, you know, even, like, you can have a lot of Black voting, but if the vote is not made meaningful, right, (Yes) through fair districting and other methods that were used to move things along after the Civil Rights Movement, there's terrible political consequences for our system.
32:31
I also think, though, that she believed in coalition politics. And, now we're hearing all kinds of criticisms about the party and, and perhaps, you know, there is gonna be a realignment, and a reckoning about what it means to be in a coalition. I think this is something that she and Shirley Chisholm and many others were always grappling with, and you can never really resolve, but it has to be faced head-on. So I think that's one thing she would say, too.
33:02
Do you think she would tell the Democratic Party today that they need to reach out to different voters in different ways?
33:08
Probably. I mean, I think she is a realist in that she would say it's very important to look at, you know, the evidence. From my mind, thinking about this, again, I don't know how you overcome, though, these Supreme Court decisions that have weakened the Voting Rights Act (yeah) and have really led to a very strange phenomena where you have places like North Carolina voting for a Democratic governor, but then they're so, but then you have overwhelmingly conservative representation in Congress, right? (Yes, yes.) Because of redistricting. How do you fix, I don't know how you fix that. I don't know. I mean, I just don't know. But I think those are the kinds of things that we really need to look closely at: how can we overcome that weakness in (right, right) in the power structure? (Right.)
33:59
What's so wonderful about your book, among many things, Mary Ellen, is that you deal with both the structural factors and the role of an individual. And you show that Barbara Jordan was an extraordinary speaker, thinker, coalition builder, a larger than life personality that allowed her to transform our politics, but she did it by strategically taking advantage of changes in her time. And I think that's the lesson, isn't it?
34:24
It is the lesson. And I would add one thing, again, that makes her extraordinary, is that not only could she mobilize Black voters and people who agreed with her, she was also really good at talking to people who had not experienced oppression (yes) and making them understand it. So she could speak to conservative White audiences, as she did time and time again in Texas, editors, White elites, and persuade them that it was in their interest to support change.
34:51
That's extraordinary. That's extraordinary. Zachary, as we close, do you think Barbara Jordan's legacy, can be inspiring for your generation?
35:01
I think so. I think certainly the legacy of someone who used the political system to fight for change, who used real politics to fight for change, should be an inspiration for us. In particular, in a moment when it seems like a lot of us have lost hope in politics. I think it's important to remember that, sort of, the dirty business of legislative politics is where so much change can happen with real leadership.
35:31
(Well said) I think that's spot on. Well said, Zachary. Thank you, Mary Ellen, for joining us today. I want to encourage all of our listeners to read Mary Ellen's really wonderful, entertaining, insightful book, She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics. It's really worth a read, and I will soon be assigning it to my students, so they won't have much choice.
35:54
Wow. Thank you, Jeremi. It's been a pleasure. And thank you, Zachary.
35:57
Zachary, thank you for your moving poem, "Trailblazer." And, uh, thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and our loyal readers of our Substack for joining us this week for This Is Democracy.
Episode 295: Broadcasting Democracy
00:23
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we are going to talk about the role of radio communications during the Cold War and our contemporary, uh, international space, the ways in which radio communications from the United States, broadcasting, information, news, updates on the world, and tracking events around the world, the way that has been so central to American policy and intellectual development over the last half-century, and the challenges that we face today, challenges to the continued use of radios, the continued broadcasting of information, and the spread of factual, objective, or near objective news in a world so filled with misinformation and disinformation. We are joined by a good friend, leading scholar, and quite frankly, I think the best person in the world to talk about this topic, Dr. Mark Pomar. Mark is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, and he has written extensively on this issue and worked extensively on this issue. Mark, thank you so much for being with us.
01:34
Well, I'm just delighted to be here.
01:36
Mark, has had such a central role in our topic today. After teaching Russian studies at the University of Vermont for seven years, he joined Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and he was director of their Russian service in Munich, as well as director of the Soviet division of Voice of America, and the executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting, which was a federal agency overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. From 1994 to 2008, he was the senior executive and president of IREX, which was one of the largest nonprofit organizations funding research in Russia and research about Russia. I was one of many recipients of IREX funding, so it was instrumental in my own research. And from 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and president of the US-Russia Foundation, which was a private US foundation that supported educational programs, exchanges, and most importantly, bringing knowledge across boundaries between these societies. For all of you listening today, I encourage you also to read Mark's most recent book, which is really fantastic. It's very readable. It's based on state-of-the-art research, and it tells the story of Cold War Radio. That's the title. It's a wonderful title. Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, published in 2022 and available at every major bookstore. Right, Mark?
03:05
It certainly is. There are actually available audiobooks as well.
03:09
Fantastic. So before we get into our discussion of the role of these important institutions and the role of broadcasting information during the Cold War and in the decades after the Cold War and its importance today, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? ("Radio Liberty.") I think that's an appropriate title, don't you? (Yes.) Let's hear it.
03:34
Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.
04:09
What's your poem about, Zachary?
04:11
My poem is about the sort of power of radio and of listening to the voices of Americans and American reporters and journalists and all these American-supported programs across the many sort of political social boundaries that separate our world. In particular, it's a sort of imagining of what it might be like today if one were able to, in Russia or in somewhere in one of the sort of totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe, to listen to a sort of American radio program sort of, like, right on the border, and how it's a sort of, like, bastion or breath of one world in another.
04:54
Yes. Yes. Mark, what do you think?
04:56
Well, I am very impressed by the poem, and I think you've captured one of the most important symbols, and that is the crossing of the barbed wire that the radios were really created to do, to break down that Iron Curtain that Churchill so properly said had descended. And I will tell you an interesting story that kind of actualizes your poem, if I can. When the Cold War ended in 1989, when Hungary was among the first to really bring down the barbed wire, they gave all of us a piece of the barbed wire embedded in a kind of plastic that you could put on your bookshelf, memorializing the fact that the radios had helped bring down the barbed wire, the actual barbed wire itself. And I have that at home, and I will happily bring it and show it to you. (Wow.) And it's from Hungary, given to all of us as a personal gift.
05:59
Wow. Wow. Mark, take us back to the founding of these organizations. Voice of America, I think, is the oldest of them. Maybe tell us a little bit about that, and then how Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty grew out of that or how they emerged as well.
06:15
Sure. Well, you know, in the 1930s, by the 1930s, every country had an external broadcaster, big or small, whether it was Radio Moscow, whether it was Radio France, whether it was Nazi Germany, whether it was Radio Canada. Everyone had a broadcaster except the United States, and advisors came to President Roosevelt and said, 'You know, we, we need to set something up.' And he hesitated because there's actually pressure from private broadcasters who wanted to dominate the shortwave broadcasting on, you know, space. But once World War II started, once United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor, those plans were actualized very quickly. And, of course, VOA was brought in as part of the war effort to tell our story. And I think what's very important to keep in mind is the first words of VOA spoken in German were 'We will tell you the news, whether it's good or whether it's bad. You will hear factual information,' something along those lines. Very nicely done.
07:25
And what distinguished VOA was precisely that it would talk about military losses, which was then considered quite unheard of. It was really, I mean, we could go on and on about VOA in the early days, but it was really headed by a wonderful American playwright called Robert Sherwood, who was one of Roosevelt's speechwriters. Actually, I think the author of The Arsenal of Democracy (I think that's right) that Roosevelt did. I believe Sherwood was the one who wrote that, and he really molded VOA into a liberal broadcaster in a very, very... and, so we're skipping a little bit ahead, but VOA was very much attacked by McCarthy under McCarthyism as harboring all these dangerous Europeans and foreigners with all kinds of potentially leftist views (Oh?) and so forth. But there's some wonderful stories about VOA in the beginning. Yul Brynner, the actor Yul Brynner, worked for VOA. (Wow.) So did many of the correspondents who then went on to work for CBS and NBC. They got their start at VOA during the war. So I think the story of VOA really needs to be known much more.
08:40
Yes. Yes. And how did it provide that, shall we say, more objective reporting at a time of war when there must have been a lot of pressure to tell only one side of the story?
08:42
Well, it got itself into a certain amount of trouble because it sometimes broadcast things that neither the Roosevelt administration nor certainly the military wanted to have on the air. So there was always tension. And by the way, that tension continued all the way through VOA's history, that what it would put out was not always what either the White House or the Pentagon or whatever other entity wanted to be on the air.
09:17
And why was it allowed to do that? It, as you say, it was attacked, Voice of America was at times by McCarthy. It was attacked in the late '60s, sometimes by Richard Nixon and others. But yet it, it survived at least until recently. How did it survive providing news that was not always in the interest of government, even though it was funded by government?
09:36
It had bipartisan support for the most part. In Congress, which is very important. And also in the mid-1970s President Ford signed sort of the charter and the law that embodied the fact that the VOA was the voice of the American nation, not of the administration. (Mm-hmm.) And I think that's very important to emphasize, so that of course every administration had its time in the sun, as it were, and they would, their views would be presented. But the law incorporated what they called "responsible discussion" of those policies, and that would mean that other voices would be presented, so that when the president gave the State of the Union, the party out of power would always have its voice reflected in VOA broadcasts about the State of the Union. That was embedded. When Watergate, and this is very important, when Watergate broke, and I know this from many Soviet listeners who were very, very much impressed by this, VOA covered the Watergate no differently than did any of the (Interesting) news organizations. And to listeners at that time in the Soviet Union, to see the VOA broadcasting about the president and the scandal and what was going on no differently, having their correspondent on Capitol Hill following the testimony. (Yeah.)
11:08
And I can skip ahead. The two impeachment trials that took place in the first Trump administration were covered by VOA in Russian. (Oh.) I happened to sit and listen to them in my home. And they broadcast the testimony, the hearings, the voting. It was presented absolutely straight even though at that time Trump was in the White House. So I think this is a tradition that goes way back. Uh, it has been supported at critical times.
11:43
I'll give you another very vivid example of VOA. Those may be listening who are older may recall that President Reagan made quite a blunder in 1984 when he thought that the microphone that he was testing his voice was dead, but it actually turned out to be a live microphone, and he said, 'I've just canceled the Soviet Union. We're about to begin bombing in an hour.' That made news everywhere in the United States, on every channel (I remember) and we broadcast it in Russian on VOA just like everybody else, and I know that because the director, I was then the head of the USSR division at VOA, and my news chief called me up at home and says, 'What do we do?' I mean, this is, I mean, in Russian to the Soviet Union. (Hahahah) And I said, 'You know, we have to do it. It's the law.' I did call the director of VOA to inform him that this was... and he says, 'Absolutely this is what we need to do. Now, don't play it 100 times necessarily, but it has to go on the air.' (Yes, yes. Zachary?)
12:54
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like people abroad, and particularly in Europe, have a very strong impression of American media like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. But could you explain for our American audience that maybe doesn't have the same sense of its importance what Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have meant for people in these countries?
13:20
Yes, thank you. I think that the creation of VOA was to really be the voice throughout the world of US society, of music, of culture, of politics and so forth. Radio Free Europe has a different sort of charge. It was really created with the start of the Cold War, interwoven with the Cold War as part of our effort to confront the Soviet Union, and it was addressed, and its origins really start, and it's very important to understand this, with the millions of people from Eastern, Central Europe, Soviet Union, who fled to the West during and after World War II. They were living in displaced persons camps throughout sort of the American sector in Germany. And George Kennan, who was really instrumental in creating both RFE and RL, and others as well, but he was more instrumental, and said, 'You know, these are people we could put to use. They are eager to do something.' They have a lot of connections. Some, in the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had been in the governments before, and in the Baltic states before World War II. And so RFE started first as a voice of Poland outside of Poland, so the idea being that you're in Munich, Germany, but you're creating a Polish broadcaster as if you were sitting in downtown Warsaw, and the same would be true for Czechoslovakia, for Hungary, for Bulgaria, for Romania. That was the beginning of Radio Free Europe. That same model was used three years later to create Radio Liberty for the Soviet Union, and very important to note, not just in Russian, but in the different (Mm-hmm) languages of the Soviet Union.
15:10
You know, I like to remind my British friends that, you know, the BBC only broadcast in Russian, whereas RFE/RL, or RL in this case, Radio Liberty broadcasts in Ukrainian, in Estonian, in Latvian, in Lithuanian, in Georgian, (Amazing) Armenian, (Amazing) Kazakh, Tatar Bashkir. (Wow.) You know, I'll tell you, I was in Kazan, which is the capital of Tatarstan. This was obviously in the '90s, and I was introduced at this very important gathering that I had worked at Radio Liberty, and this man comes up to me and he says, 'My parents listened to Tatar Bashkir. We didn't even know that Americans knew we existed' (Wow.) let alone to be able to broadcast in that language. (That's quite a story.) And I think it... and by the way, that has a whole very important tie to the whole decolonizing of the Soviet Union because what Radio Liberty did in particular was gave Ukrainians a voice, Belarusians a voice, Georgians, Armenians, that they would not have at a time when there was Russification throughout the Soviet Union. (Sure.) They kept alive a voice that otherwise would've been muffled.
16:24
In some ways they became a substitute radio station for societies that couldn't have their own radio stations.
16:29
Exactly. They were, used the term surrogate, which kinda has a harsh tone to me, but it was called surrogate radio. And the idea being, again, that you were presenting a lineup of news as if you were in that city. And by the way, let me give you an example from yesterday. Now we're jumping ahead. We're jumping ahead, I grant you, but Radio Liberty, VOA have all been closed. There's no money coming in. Radio Liberty and RFE broadcasters are, they're in Prague, and there's a good story as to (Hmm) why they're in Prague, which we should get to. And they're working for free, and they're putting out only a website. There's no nothing other than a website, and I looked at their news (Yeah) and their news is what you would expect news to be in Moscow. Uh, I mean in free (In a freer Moscow) freer Moscow. (So they're reporting on the Ukraine war, for example.) So they had who was arrested for protesting the (Yeah) Ukrainian war in Russia, but they also had a whole thing on Alexander Ovechkin winning that. That was one of the lead stories. (Sure, sure. They had- Passing Wayne Gretzky for goals, yes.) Yeah. They had a piece, very straightforward, totally objective on the latest Trump discussions, with any, uh, over tariffs. In other words, they had a lineup of things that a Russian would want to see. (Yeah.) And that's really the core of it.
17:57
(And why are they in Prague?) They are in Prague... It's an interesting story to start with. In 1992, '93 with the Clinton administration coming into power, there was a lot of discussion of 'do we need the radios in general because the Cold War's ended, and life is wonderful, and who needs this very important tool of the Cold War?' And the Clinton administration was quite ready to zero them out, and it was Václav Havel and Lech WaÅÄsa who really pleaded with Clinton that we need these radios for a while. (That's so interesting, that's so interesting.) And Havel said, 'Here is a gift to the American people, a building in downtown Prague to commemorate sort of your contribution to our freedom. We're giving it to the Americans for free.' That won the day. And by the way, I can say that the bipartisan support led by Senator Joseph Biden, (Hmm) by the way, Biden was critical in bringing together the Republicans and the Democrats to support the continuation of the radios, but with the proviso that as countries graduated to free media, those services would close. So the Polish service closed, the Czech service closed. In time, the Romanians, Estonians, Latvians, and it was... idea behind it was that through analyzing and understanding the evolution, that when those countries no longer needed an outside domestic voice, then of course that would be the end of it. (Right.) While they needed it, RFE/RL would continue to provide that. That was the understanding, and that's the way it has always been developed.
19:52
And just to clarify for our listeners, as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were doing their work in various places, Voice of America continues to broadcast at this time everywhere, basically.
20:03
It does, but to, in the case of the Russians, they put together something called "Current Time," which is a joint sort of radio... because the budgets were cut so much, that to sort of capitalize, each side did part of the program. (I see.) So you had a Current Time in Russian where the Prague office would tap into much more of what was happening in Europe, what was happening in Russia. And by the way, from 1991 to 2022, Radio Liberty had an office in Moscow. A functioning news bureau doing interviews, running a normal news bureau as you would expect. It, of course, was closed with the war against Ukraine. But the coverage, of course, continued. The war in Ukraine was one of the big, big stories for the radios that you, both in Ukrainian, and in Russian.
21:02
So it's quite clear, and you've certainly described this in great detail in your book, the ways in which the radios, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America, provided information to people in information-starved societies, places where they were restricted in their own media for what they could cover, how many people listened to it as a kind of samizdat, as a kind of secret way of getting around their own censors. Zachary refers to this in his poem. After the Cold War, when the radios continued to operate in different form in Russia, in Kazakhstan, and various places like that, and continued to be used in new places. As I understand it, there was a Radio Cambodia (Yeah) Radio Free Marti for Cuba, right?
21:47
And also for Iran. I think one of the things that we have to note is that the young people of Iran are listening to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Farsi. (That's so interesting.) That's a very, very important part of...
22:01
And that's my question. How do we measure their effect after the Cold War? How would you describe their influence?
22:07
Well, you could always do surveys, of course. The surveys became open, and as we did surveys in general, you could see that the listenership was greater than we had anticipated during the Cold War when you couldn't do surveys. I think nowadays all media is niche media. (Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.) I mean, there's very little that is gigantic in covering. But Radio Liberty, just to take that as an example since I know it better, has always appealed to a certain urban, educated listener. Because a lot of what Radio Liberty put on would be programs on history, religion, culture, arts, music. So it sort of was oriented toward a urban educated listener.
23:00
But you mentioned something, Jeremi, that I think is very important to stress, and that, and, and Zachary mentions that in, of course, in his poem, and that is the sort of human rights dimension of it. (Yes, yes.) And I want to come back to that because (Please) there's a great book. I'm giving a plug for Benjamin Nathans's book on the Soviet human rights movement. (It's a wonderful book.) And what he describes is what I would call the "virtuous circle," and by that I mean human rights activists in their small Moscow apartments would put together petitions, pleas, they would have accounts of who had been arrested. Western correspondents would either broadcast or write about that in the West or, or more often bring the documents, the samizdat self-published documents out of the Soviet Union. They would go to Radio Liberty, VOA, BBC, and they would be rebroadcast back into the country. So what was being discussed in a Moscow apartment all of a sudden was available throughout the entire country. Which would then stimulate others in different republics to respond. (Sure.) And when arrests were made, when people were incarcerated, that information no longer was able to go broadly. Sakharov was known primarily because he was on Radio Liberty one way or another every day.
24:30
Right. So it's Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet scientist and dissident.
24:33
So I mean, it was that "virtuous circle." Now, I will also say that, and, and this is something I'm working on another book, and I have a whole sort of chapter on that part, is the important role that Radio Liberty did for the Jewish emigration. (Yes, yes.) It was instrumental in sort of, what was then called refuseniks, Jews who had wanted to emigrate to Israel or the West. They were denied the emigration visa, which you needed, but they also were fired from work, so they were in this no man's land in the Soviet Union. And that story is very much part of the Radio Liberty broadcast.
25:10
That's fantastic. I mean, so in essence, the radios are providing a distribution network (Exactly) for things that you couldn't distribute in these closed societies. Zachary?
25:20
What is the state of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America today? I know they're increasingly under threat. What does that look like? What are they able to do now? What are they not able to do?
25:33
I would say the tragedy is they've been shuttered. If you go on the VOA website, as I did this morning, the last entry is March 15th. There is nothing after March 15th. It is dead. People are either placed on leave, many have been fired. There is no VOA today. (First time since 1942) Since, first time since 1942. In the case of Radio Liberty, they won an injunction in court, a temporary restraining order, with the judge saying that they should be able to receive their funding. They have not received it. As my understanding is, today's news that I looked at was done by people doing it for free. In other words (Right) dedicated journalists. (What you saw on the, what you described) Yeah (a few minutes ago, yeah.) So that's it. We don't have a voice. We have basically, today, disarmed for nothing. We have, mind you, VOA combined. VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East broadcasters, there's several entities to this, basically have about 400 million weekly viewers, listeners. 400 million. A lot in Africa, a lot in Asia, (Sure, sure) a lot in America. That's gone. (Yeah.) We have left the entire global information space to China, to Russia, in the Middle East to Iran. That's it.
28:04
I like to say that the entire budget of all the radios, and they're not really radios, they're media platforms (Yeah) because they do podcasts, they do websites and so forth, the media platforms, the entire of everybody is about a quarter of the University of Texas Austin budget. (Wow.) They are under $1 billion for everything. (Wow.) So we are talking about literally pennies in terms of the US budget. Why they've been attacked is of course part of a much bigger question as to why the Trump administration is closing the Wilson Center, why it's closing other institutions. So it's part of a broad attack on, well, bipartisan national institutions, I think. And in the case of the radios, I call them the radios, but really the media, I think their whole premise is that they are nonpartisan, or they are bipartisan, but preferably nonpartisan. And I think that is something that this administration, which is a topic that gets us onto other issues, is really not accepting and trying to destroy.
29:08
There was a really interesting article in The New York Times a day or two ago, I'm sure you saw it, Mark, and I'm sure Zachary saw it as well, about the country of Cambodia. (Exactly.) And how the radios from the US were basically the only source of news, and with those gone now, local journalists have no way to operate. We were not only providing information, we were providing a space for journalists to operate in a society that otherwise would not allow them to do that. And it's really quite extraordinary. Why, Mark, do you think there has been this attack of this magnitude on the radios? As you referred to earlier, it's not the first time. Joseph McCarthy attacked the radios, and as I referred to, Richard Nixon and others attacked them at times. Why now this degree of effort to close these entities which, mind you, are pennies in the national budget? There's no real savings. Why?
29:16
So you don't think they're opposed to the media platforms, they're opposed to media platforms that aren't their media platforms?
29:22
Exactly. And, but, rather than trying to change it, they just want to close it.
29:29
Yeah, that's the surprising thing to me, that they don't do what most authoritarians do which is stack the existing institutions. I mean, you're a scholar of Russia as I am. (Yeah.) This has been the great achievement of Vladimir Putin, which is to take existing institutions (Yeah) and populate them with his cronies.
29:47
But that's a lot of work, and that would also, in the case of Voice of America, which is embedded in law to present all sides, you would run into essentially violating. I think that closing it is denying the Voice of America belongs to all of us. (Yes.) BBC, it's like BBC, and I oftentimes told Americans, 'Go on the website, listen to VOA. It's your' (Yeah) 'it's your station.' (Yeah.) 'You should take pride in it.' It belongs to all of us, and I think to close it down is not just a tragedy, it's a crime. It's a type of treason to deny our presence in the global information space.
30:33
Hmm. Zachary, are young people, especially those like you who care about politics but also are interested in the media, you're a journalist yourself, Zachary, writing for the Yale Daily News, and involved obviously with this podcast and elsewhere. Do young people who are in this space, do they pay attention to this? Is this an important issue today for your generation?
30:56
I think so. I do think that certainly the question of media bias and what are important sort of reliable sources of news matters, but I also think that so many young people aren't aware of this history of the important role of VOA and RFE and all of the sort of important American media outlets around the world. And I think the challenge is to inform people about all the important work that's being done and all the holes that are being left now in media coverage around the world.
31:29
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've oftentimes, partly because during the shortwave radio broadcast years, of course, VOA was very hard to listen to in the United States, and it was not intended for Americans. (Right, right.) It was intended overseas. Of course, once technology took over and you could watch it, listen to it, I really encouraged people to do it because it's calm, it's normal. The surveys I have seen of media, fact-based, very close to the center, VOA always came out (Yeah) pretty much next to AP. I mean, those (Yeah) were sort of the...
32:06
Right, the Associated Press. Yeah, no, I've done probably hundreds of interviews with VOA reporters, and I always found them actually very middle of the road, very attentive to facts over opinions (Yeah, actually.) Mark, we always like to close with a question about how this history that, that you've elucidated so well for us today, how this history, can help us to think about actions we take today. What can we do to make this history not just part of our knowledge base, but part of our citizenship, part of what we do on a day-to-day basis? For those of our listeners who care about having an open, fact-based broadcasting of news to the world and see that as one of the roles of a democracy, especially a large democracy like ours, what can they do to help bring that back or protect that or promote that at a time when it's under attack?
33:02
Well, I think first of all, supporting and knowing about these entities, media entities, and they're much more than just RFE/RL and VOA. It also is Radio Free Asia. It's also Middle East Broadcasting. Middle East Broadcasting being extremely important given what's going on in the Middle East. You definitely want to have an American, you know, presence there rather than Al Jazeera and others, I think, supporting it. But in a broader sense, I am encouraging people, and I'm actually writing another book to encourage even more people, to study the radios as part of American and world history. It is so rich in terms of scholarship. It so invites people to look and examine how we function, good or bad, mistakes or no mistakes, but really it's part of it. Fortunately, the Hoover Institution has the entire RFE/RL archive, which would take several lifetimes to go through, but it's there. It's available. It's open. The Open Society Archives in Budapest have tens and tens of thousands of broadcasts that you can dial up from your home and listen to in whatever language you happen to know. So I think it's there to be studied, there to be incorporated into our understanding of world history, American history, and that may lead to a greater appreciation for what has been done and what needs to be done.
34:34
Yes. I mean, what always inspires me, I've spent time, as you know, Mark, originally in the archive when it was in Budapest before it was moved to the Hoover Institution. I've worked in it at Hoover, and I've listened to many of the broadcasts, especially from key moments in the Cold War. And it's inspiring, I think, to hear, particularly for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the various emigres covering news in their society, bringing a passion and a commitment to it, and innovating new ways to tell the stories of what's happening in their society. And I think for young journalists like Zachary and so many of our listeners, there's a lot we can learn from this, and there's a lot we can do, even within the constraints we face, to try to tell those stories and use the stories of the past to help inspire us to tell the stories today, we were talking about this earlier, Mark, you and I, before we came on, about what's really happening in Ukraine, for example.
35:29
Very important. And the radios covered the war so extensively. I would always look at them every day as part of my daily sort of check on what's happening in the world because they covered the front, they covered... And of course, Ukrainians would be able to, in Russian, explain very easily what they were doing. So I got it fresh from the front. So I think it's very important. But looking ahead, I think right now it's saving institutions because they are disappearing right before our eyes, along with many other institutions, but they are among the victims of this administration.
36:05
So that's a call to action, and I think it's a call to action not based on politics. What I respect so much about what you do, Mark, I really do respect this, is that you try to tell the story of the radios in a way that is historical and fact-based. You're not trying to promote one policy or another. You're promoting the most essential element of democracy, which is the fair distribution of information so people can make better decisions. You want an informed citizenry in the US, and in Russia, and in Ukraine, and elsewhere. And the United States has played a crucial role, as you've shown and discussed today, over about 80 years encouraging and promoting and supporting the spread of real information, fact-based information, to audiences that were information deprived. And if we get out of that business today, democracy is poorer at home (Absolutely) and poorer abroad. (Absolutely.) And so all of us need to stand up for this, I think.
37:01
Yes, and I think, coming back to Zachary's poem, it is freedom. It is the ability to express your views, and one of the things that I've emphasized in my work on the radios is that it values the individual freedom of every individual, the right to be, express your views, the right to explore, the right to have a say in your country's governance.
37:26
Zachary, I think 'cause we're closing on that note, this might be one of those special episodes where we read your poem a second time. Could you close us out with your poem, Zachary?
37:35
Sure. Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.
38:05
Mm-hmm. Zachary, thank you for that moving poem that I think encapsulates so much of Mark's lifetime of work and contributions and the role of international broadcasting. Mark Pomar, thank you so much for joining us. I encourage our listeners to learn more about Mark and his work, especially reading his book, Cold War Radio. And I want to thank most of all our loyal listeners and subscribers to our Substack for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.
Episode 299: Southern Politics: Past and Present
00:21
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about Southern politics. Not just in their contemporary valence, which we will get to, but historically. What have been the natural issues that have divided Southern politics through the last century and a half? What are the areas of difference, the areas of conflict? How have these areas of conflict and difference over time evolved? And how does the long history of Southern politics affect the way we think about democracy? About race? About justice? About power in our democracy today?
01:02
We're very fortunate to have a friend and distinguished colleague joining us this week. This is Professor Bryan Jones from the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Bryan, thank you for joining us.
01:16
It's a real pleasure, Jeremi.
01:19
I hope many of you know Professor Jones's work. Bryan Jones holds the J.J. Jake Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies. And as I said, he's a professor in the Department of Government.
01:30
He's one of the leading scholars of decision-making organizations and politics in American democratic politics. He's written a number of important articles and books. I cannot name them all or that would take up the entire time of the podcast, but I will name a few.
01:47
A few of my favorites. A book that Bryan wrote in 1994, Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics. Another book in 2001, Politics and the Architecture of Choice. And then most recently, the book that we will focus on today, hot off the presses, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History. And I encourage all of our listeners to read this book. It has so much to say about the history of our democracy in the South and of our contemporary issues as well.
02:24
Before we get into the discussion of Bryan Jones's new book, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what's the title of your poem today?
02:36
At Mr. Evers' Home.
02:38
And Mr. Evers here is Medgar Evers, am I correct?
02:41
Yes.
02:42
You want to just tell everyone before you read the poem who Medgar Evers was?
02:46
Medgar Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. He was a very prominent activist in the late 50s and early 60s in Mississippi, particularly around school integration and university integration. And he was shot, assassinated by a member of the KKK at his house in Jackson, Mississippi, which we visited a couple of years ago.
03:10
Right, right. And if I remember, Zachary, his house is still in a very poor, disheveled part of Jackson, Mississippi, is that correct?
03:18
That's correct, yes.
03:20
Okay, let's hear it.
03:22
The summer is here too at Mr. Evers' home, the cicadas bringing it in on their tapping feet, the soft sun shattering on the asphalt, and the blue sky almost making his blue house disappear. I wonder in that half beat of a moment when he turned his back on the magnolia, if he could see the same faint outlines in the driveway of dark shadows and a blood soil taking one last gasp of his shoes. And if he perhaps might have seen the gleam of the barrel as it glared him through the iron grating that winds its way like wisteria, or like the inner workings of a human heart blown half open in a June breeze. Or if I too had a chance to see that glint in the guns of prejudice flickering at me so young, if I too would still have stood in line at the county building with my back turned, or pose for that photograph with the Oxford pioneer, smiling with my back to the world. If I too would still have turned my back and held the door handle unflinchingly as mercury flew down from the Mississippi sun to swing me up on the wings of his shoes.
04:35
It's a sad poem, Zachary, isn't it?
04:38
Yes, I think it's really about the sort of seeming sense of inevitability in that kind of racial violence in the South and how it almost seems to become part of the landscape, even as like the humanity of someone like Medgar Evers becomes so real when you're at their house. It also, the violence sometimes seems to come out of the landscape.
05:05
Right, right. Bryan, I think Zachary's given a terrific opening for your book. You also lived through this. This is actually when you enter your book, this exact period of Medgar Evers and George Wallace. I'm curious your reactions to the poem and the relationship to your book.
05:22
Well, I think it's a great poem, Zachary. It touched me. And the one thing you said in that poem I want to stress, and that is this stuff becomes background.
05:33
I puzzled how people could put up with Jim Crow for so long in a situation that was so unjust. Friends of mine, my parents and others, and it's background. They don't think about it anymore.
05:46
Black's the same way. It's a terrible thing to be stuck into, but it doesn't change without a push. And the book's about some of those pushes over time and how my parents or my ancestors experienced them and viewed them as much as I could show that.
06:04
But it's really a book on history and politics. And I think your poem has a little bit of that too in both cases.
06:13
Thank you.
06:13
Bryan, one of the big arguments you make in your book, which is also a political science as well as a history argument, is about party cleavages. And you make the case throughout the book that there are two kinds of Alabama, and in that sense, two kinds of South, right?
06:30
There's an upland and a lowland. And if you would articulate for us what the differences are and why that's so important.
06:38
It's very important. We get used to thinking of the South as a bunch of mansions and slaves and slaveholders and the organization being very hierarchical because of that. It's an oligarchy in parts of the South where cotton grew, but it wasn't in uplands and to some extent near the coast where poor farmers dwelled.
07:04
They were Democrats, little d, big D too for that matter, and they really opposed many of the policies of the planters because it was a class interest that separated these two groups. But the game of the planters, the oligarchs, was to try to make a single South, a single South in which they ruled and the planters ruled and the hillbillies in the hills were quiet. Go take care of your cheap farm.
07:37
And you can read lots of editorials and writing about that from the black belt newspapers. Just get in line. You're above the blacks, just be satisfied with that.
07:49
But they weren't always satisfied. And some of my ancestors were not satisfied and they participated in the populist revolution. And let's not think of populism the way it's talked about today.
08:01
Back then it was an alliance between those upland poor farmer whites and the blacks who had just been freed and were allowed to vote for a few years before Jim Crow closed down in about 1900. So I try to tell that story and what happened afterwards.
08:21
It's beautifully told and it's so powerful that you do it as a scholar and also as a family member and it's a very personal story that you tell. Zachary?
08:33
Yeah, I wanted to ask if this system was so clearly designed not to benefit the average white southerner but instead the sort of very top of the planter class, why do you think, as you began your answer to the previous question, why do you think so many poor whites in the south did buy into this system of racial inequality? Why did it become second nature to so many?
09:01
That's a question that's relevant back then and today too because we see over and over again people in the lower reaches of the class structure as voting against what we would think or others would think were their self-interest. They will support in many cases the oligarchs and what they stand for. I try to make the distinction, I do make the distinction in the book between class politics in which a struggle goes on for the distribution of resources, are we to spend the collective goods on more investment funds for the planters or making life better for the poor farmers and poor laborers later on as time went on or are we to fall for the status politics situation in which I feel better than somebody else and that's all that matters. So you see that in racism. Racism was about, and white supremacy in particular, that form of racism in which the whites benefit and the blacks don't from the status allocations, not just class, it's status.
10:14
I'm better than you are and that's all that matters to me. So much of the struggles we have in the south and elsewhere is about whether we're going to adhere to status politics or class politics. The way the planters in the black belt regions of the south, the cotton growing regions of the south, pull this off was threefold.
10:38
One, try to get people to think of themselves in a hierarchical system. Two, to make sure that the poorer whites understood they were better than blacks. And three, that if needed, there would be massive voter cheating on the part of the planters.
11:00
It took all three to put down this populist revolution where the populist party put out the word to the poor farmers that, look, you're being used here. Let's ally with the newly enfranchised blacks and try to overturn the planter oligarchy. And that's what my ancestors participated in up there in North Alabama.
11:23
I tried to, in the book, compare these two structures of society in the south because it had a planter ancestor and some populist ancestors. They didn't compete with each other because they were in different parts of the state but they joined different factions. One, a part of the oligarchy, small-time oligarchy, but still part of the planter and slaveholding oligarchy.
11:48
The other free farmers, craftsmen, and much more willing to enter in democracy in the northern part of the state. There's a vigorous democracy there in North Alabama and western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia. These parts of the south where the Appalachians are dominant.
12:08
I have to say, Bryan, that one of my favorite parts of the book was where you talked about that vibrant democracy in those areas of northern Alabama, western Carolina, et cetera, and how vibrant it truly was. As a historian, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know that. I didn't really appreciate that. Could you give us some examples, give us some color of what that vibrant democracy looked like in those upland areas?
12:34
Yeah, so we're taught in so many situations that they were hillbillies. We still think about that, of the hillbillies sitting on his front porch and drinking homemade bourbon and playing his banjo. That's kind of the woven thing of the Appalachians, isn't it?
12:51
All by himself up there, his family around. But at least in parts of this time, especially in the populist era, there were just vast meetings, political meetings, church meetings. But the amount of religious zeal during the period of the whole 19th century, or much of it, was so important.
13:15
And Jacksonian democracy and the second great awakening, which is this great religious awakening that took place in the United States, they go together. So we have this explosion of Jacksonian democracy, these preachers going around all over the South to talk to people, and that spilled over into politics. So some of my ancestors did have preachers wandering around the South, having them in and having the neighbors over.
13:42
So there was much more of this group politics that took place in the supposedly lonely hollows of Appalachia in North Alabama than we think of. And we can trace some of that too. It's just underappreciated in much of history right now. Although there are scholars breaking this through, and I hope I'll be one of them.
14:07
Yes, you are. I mean, I have to say again, your book is one of the most vivid accounts of this that I've read, certainly. To what extent were there interracial alliances in these populist movements?
14:20
It was fundamental to the populist movement. They needed the Black to all Republicans, then, for obvious reasons. So the alliance was cross-party too.
14:31
A populist party joined up with Black Republicans as an attempt to overthrow the hierarchies. But there were precursors of that. In many cases, there are agricultural movements all over the place, the grains being the first and most important, but it was non-partisan.
14:50
The grains established both, they were not integrated sets of people that were dealing in these grains collectives, which is what it was, collectives, getting together and buying fertilizer and tools at a lower price. But they learned from each other. There were Black collectives and there were white collectives, but they worked together in the sense of having to cooperate or wanting to cooperate and learn from each other.
15:24
As time went on, these groups became more political, and in the end, being a populist party in which the populist began to fuse with the Republicans, and there were plenty of upland Republicans in places like Georgia and Alabama too. And they fused to make this sort of a collective good in politics for these two groups. Unfortunately, in the story, it was sad because the planters counted out all the votes, cheated the Blacks mostly out of their votes as time went on, and the upland whites were left alone.
16:09
Part of it, certainly the populist collection of people put together to do this kind of politics was broken up by politics, but there was plenty of racism too. And so the planters operated on both racism and cheating Blacks out of their votes. The populist called this bourbon rule.
16:39
And by bourbon rule, they meant, well, it's kind of like the French trying to put the bourbon back on their throne again. That's what the planters wanted to do. They wanted to restore slavery or tenant farming and those kinds of things that looked like slavery.
16:54
And so they called them bourbons. And they were the bourbon faction of the Democratic Party and the populist faction of the Democratic Party that struggled for a long period of time. In fact, did so throughout the history of the South up until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
17:11
Those two factions struggle with each other. But the populist faction, or what they call the liberal labor faction, always lost because of the lack of votes by Blacks. They were outlawed in many of the Southern states as people outlawed.
17:30
So this connects to a theme I've written about and others. Is part of the problem that in the decades after the Civil War, the planter class had too much control over the franchise, over voting, and also over the use of violence.
17:49
Yes, I, by the way, enjoyed your book very much.
17:51
Oh, thank you.
17:52
The post-Civil War period. It's brilliant. And I appreciate it very much. I learned from it. I wasn't able to use it much in this book because you wrote it too late. You should have written a few years before. Yeah, it's true.
18:08
But the possibility of an integrated society Van Woodward, the historian Van Woodward, and others, VLK, the political scientist, thought that that was possible. They thought that that could have emerged earlier had there not been the massive cheating. And the violence was there, but Blacks were intimidated by it.
18:31
But not as much as these guys were tough. They wanted to be Democrats, and they wanted to participate in society. And this idea that the slaves wanted to just hang around and be tenant farmers afterwards, I got much truth in it.
18:45
I find the Blacks, they were as dynamic in their group formations as the upland whites. I just haven't studied that. At any rate, there was certainly a desire after the period called Redemption, in which the Black planters took back the governments in the southern states to try to suppress Black votes.
19:13
And to a great degree, they were successful. But hundreds of thousands of Black voters still took part in the elections around 1900. So they were not gone. They were tough. And the alliance could have worked had they not been counted out in Alabama and in North Carolina and other places by the planter class. And I show that one of my own ancestors was a vote cheater.
19:41
Yes. That was very courageous for you to put that in the book, Bryan.
19:48
Well, look, I'm not responsible for somebody who lived before me. That was his stupidity, his fault. But that was the way it was done. By the way, if anybody follows up on this and does another book trying to integrate history, and there have been several, history and their family lines, don't tell, don't feel guilty for what your ancestors did. You feel guilty what you did. And you can make up for it somehow if you want to, but that's your fault.
20:22
That's well said. Bryan, one of the one of the key moments in your book is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It's an important part of what you talk about toward the end of the book. First of all, why was the Voting Rights Act so important?
20:40
Well, the Blacks being denied the vote, the vote was rampant in the South up until that time, although in areas of the South, they began to break up already because of the action of Blacks and allied whites to break this up through legal and other means, including marches and so forth. But that was a marking point where you really, the Black Belt Blacks could vote. In some parts of Alabama, in the North part of the state, Blacks could vote by then.
21:23
And they could vote by then, even though they had still had to do all these, going through all these hoops that white voters had to also. But things like the poll tax disfranchised both a lot of Blacks and a lot of white farmers. As a matter of fact, some studies have shown in 1940 that there are more whites disfranchised by the poll tax than there were Blacks, just because there are more whites in Alabama than Blacks.
21:52
So the Voting Rights Act made a marker of when Jim Crow ended. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made sure that the South could no longer use laws to segregate Blacks from whites, to keep Blacks from having the same rights as whites. So these laws are just enormously important.
22:16
And unfortunately, much of the Voting Rights Act has been struck down by the Roberts Court, taking away some of the mechanisms that were used to break out white monopolies in the voting rights. So you're finding that over since 19, or 2011, is that right? With the Shelby County decision in Alabama again, that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, there has been another fall off in Black voting because of the actions of whites passing laws and ordinances that gets in the way of Black voting. So then...
23:03
Like ID laws, right? Like laws that require certain forms of identification, for example.
23:08
Well, yeah, the ID laws, that's not the worst thing, but most of the problems are in registration. You file up your registration form or something like that, or you move and people forget to... There's a lot of what some of my colleagues call bureaucratic burdens, administrative burdens that are put in the way that affect Blacks more than they do whites.
23:32
And that's the key to this. Zachary?
23:36
Yeah, I wanted to ask that, do you think... Is part of the point of your book then that we should think of the development of Jim Crow and the racial restrictions on voting and participation in civil society as not just a system designed to keep a certain race down, but also a certain class as a way of embedding the planter oligarchy into the fabric of the South?
24:04
Oh, that's absolutely right. Exactly. I mean, what you do is you use the two techniques.
24:10
If you're in the planter class, you want people to stay in their place, whether they're Black or white. Because if you get challenged by the less fortunate classes, you get class politics. If, in the worst extent, if there are Black and white or minorities plus white voters unified on the class issue, then you're going to have to fight class politics, and oligarchs don't like to do that because they generally lose.
24:42
So what you do is you try to keep this oligarchy together through these status-based systems, the bourbon rule, as the populists call it. So you're absolutely right. This is absolutely deeply about that form of government and how Jim Crow kept that in place legally for 75 years, at the end of the period of populist revolution to 1965.
25:12
And we know a lot about the Civil Rights Movement and how that got broken up, and I write about that in the book. We know very little about the populist period in which we almost broke it up. We almost got an interracial political class division back then in which the oligarchs had to contend with both whites and Blacks.
25:37
They scared the crap out of them too, by the way. They immediately called constitutional conventions and legislative sessions to try to figure out ways to keep Blacks out of politics. And in the Alabama Constitution, they said, look, we've been doing it illegally through violence and through vote cheating.
25:57
We want to pass laws that make sure we get it done legally. The whole Jim Crow system was built on putting together oppression in a legal manner, where it was between the Civil War and the populist era, it was done through illegal means. Whether they're enforced or not, it's a different matter.
26:19
But this book is fundamentally about this kind of, or much about this kind of bourbon rule that just caused the South to be a backwater for so long.
26:31
And Bryan, one of the fascinating parts of the book for me, and it's maybe another take on Zachary's excellent question, is then what happens with the Voting Rights Act, where you enter the book very, very directly. As you say, the Voting Rights Act is this breakthrough that doesn't quite happen with populist politics. But now African Americans in Alabama and elsewhere are able to vote.
26:56
We see a rise in their voting back to numbers that we saw in the decade after the Civil War. But then it doesn't all go the way that you expected it would at the time. I wanted to read a passage that I underlined as I was going through your book, just because it spoke to me.
27:15
You talk about George Wallace, Governor George Wallace, who is a populist and himself a Democrat, but becomes someone who defends, obviously, segregation. And you talk about this moment in March 1966 at the University of Alabama, where you were a student. Foster Auditorium, I think, is where this occurs, where both George Wallace and Robert Kennedy come.
27:40
And you say you skipped George Wallace's speech, his keynote speech, but then you attended RFKs. I just wanted to read this section. The auditorium was filled with RFK enthusiasts, including me, including you.
27:54
When Kennedy said that Negroes must be as free as other Americans, not because it is economically advantageous, not because the law says so, but because it is right, we, and I think you mean all the students who were there at the University of Alabama, we cheered lustily. As he left the auditorium, students reached out to grasp his hand. I did so as well. It really felt like a chapter was closing in Alabama, with the state joining the nation in unity. Boy, was I wrong. Why were you wrong then?
28:27
It's called backlash. We're all familiar with it now, but what looked like a problem solved ended up being a stimulus for George Wallace and his ilk. And I helped in a campaign of a decent man running against Wallace.
28:45
And I covered this in the book. I was sent by his campaign managers to talk as a substitute in a football stadium. And I was selling, as my candidate was, moderation.
29:06
We can do this moderately. It'll work. If there is any reason for us not to play what I would call today class politics and make everybody's life better, collective good, as others would call it.
29:23
And I got a smattering of applause. And then up comes George Wallace's spokesperson, and he says a few things, same old racist crap in code words. And the audience goes crazy, half full football stadium.
29:41
And I said, we are dead ducks. And sure enough, we were because there was more white backlash than black voters. And that's what happened in Alabama.
29:52
The white south became more unified, unlike the dual south I wrote about through most of the history. It became unified around the race issue at George Wallace did.
30:04
And why? Why didn't the populist civil rights coalition of poorer people, poorer white people and African Americans, why didn't it hold together?
30:16
Yeah, this is the question that so many of us are trying to answer and can't really come to conclusion. Why did status politics went out over class politics so thoroughly in the Appalachian regions? And why didn't it come up before if it was there? And frankly, we just don't have an answer to that.
30:38
There are lots of partial answers like the resentment politics that some have written about Kerry Merritt, for example, in the South. The resentment politics has led to more difficulties than we had imagined. And it stuck with us today because the resentment politics is spread all over the country, starting with George Wallace, who may have been president had he not been shot.
31:04
But Trump plays the same sort of bourbon politics that George Wallace played, except he's not nearly as good the demagogue as George Wallace was, because George Wallace never felt sorry for himself. And sulked. And he didn't. He was out there dynamically talking and stuff that most of us wouldn't agree with to listen to this podcast. I certainly don't. That cracked up class politics and put it, jammed it back in the status politics area. It's a white supremacist presidency we have right now. And George Wallace was a white supremacist. And unfortunately, that seems to work, at least in the short run.
31:47
So you see our current moment as part of a long backlash that, in a sense, began in Alabama and elsewhere in the late 1960s.
31:55
I think you can put it that way. But maybe we ought to think of it as something that dwells within all of us. And it could be brought out or not. The religion of Manicheanism talks about there's the devil and the good in all of us. And sometimes the right leader or the wrong leader lets out that worst part of us. And people like George Wallace and other demagogues in the South, and people and presidents like Donald Trump, allows us to feel sorry for ourselves rather than look forward to a better future.
32:35
And the resentment comes out. And who is the resentment directed at? These days, it's blacks, browns, immigrants in particular. We find somebody to hate. And George Wallace found that. And other demagogues in the South, George Wallace spread it nationally. And I think that was the start of our troubles. But we have to remember there's more people who these days, not like Alabama in 1966, but these days, I think there are more people that object to that system than support it. But the coalition, the interracial coalition that failed in the populist period that we thought won in 1965, we just have to be honest with ourselves and say we didn't. But if it doesn't get organized again, we're stuck with that kind of white supremacist regime for a while. And I don't want that to happen.
33:32
So your remedy, in a sense, is more organization by the interracial alliance of various people who are not oligarchs.
33:43
Absolutely. That's absolutely right. And I think because of the way in which our electoral college and the Senate system works, we tend to cater more to the white working class, not because they're not important. They are. But we kind of forget the basis of support of that interracial regime was not just those white working class folks, but blacks in the black belt. And we have to appeal to an interracial situation. I think we're in much better shape to do that now than before.
34:23
But again, we had some splitting off of racial groups because of the status politics issue that I've been talking about, and especially in the last election. I suspect we'll have more class politics, but not if we don't get better organized on this and show just how I think Trump is pure bourbon rule. He wants the white working class to have hate and racism, and he wants the immigrants and minorities to have nothing because they've got to be the people you're directing hate at.
34:59
And it's a white supremacist set of ideas that are spewing out of his mouth and more and more over time. Just take a look at the South Africans that just showed up on our shores. So that's what we're looking at. And if you look back in the past, like I hope I did in my book, you can see those elements of it back then. And if you bring it forward, you can think about American politics much broader than I think most people have before.
35:26
I think you succeed wonderfully with that, Bryan. Zachary, does this resonate with you as you think about politics, particularly as a younger voter today, that it's a problem of resentment and status in the way, in the long history that Bryan has given us here?
35:41
Yeah, I think so. I think it's particularly helpful in trying to think about what it means to create a politics that, or to create a political movement or a political message that can be interracial and can cut across class lines. I think a lot of our political polarization is driven these days either by racial or class distinctions, and it's really hard to break through one or the other. I think that this provides a vision of what a sort of interracial class solidarity politics can look like, and also maybe provides a more nuanced way of thinking about the politics of racism and of hate as a manifestation of deeper structural inequality, as opposed to a sort of hatred that one is born with, or a sort of natural quality of the American South as it's convenient for people who don't live in the South often to think as racist or as inherently more concerned with race.
36:48
But do you see in your generation, Zachary, do you see in your generation alliances forming in this, in the way Bryan describes in earlier periods between those who are university educated and those who are not university educated, those who have different racial and cultural backgrounds, or do you see more fragmentation?
37:09
I think I see more fragmentation. I think that's why this is a particularly important history to look at now.
37:18
One of the interesting things that's happening today, and we see it at the University of Texas, is just how diverse of a student body we have now that wasn't that diverse even 15 years ago. And the white, black, brown coalitions are people just talking to each other on campus. They don't seem to be race structured particularly.
37:45
And I find that more and more as I observe over time. I had a student from the LBJ school who came from the University of Alabama, did her undergraduate work there, and she just commented herself, and she's of Asian background, that it was so much easier here, the interracial kind of communications and so forth, it was so much easier here than back in Alabama where we're still pretty segregated groups got together that way. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but that's what I'm seeing right now. And I think that that bodes well for our future. But we can't let them do it on their own.
38:31
Right. I think that's very well said, Bryan, and I agree 100%. I think that also explains why Trump and others like George Wallace are attacking DEI and attacking institutions like the University of Texas that do just what you said, right? This is threatening to the oligarchs, correct?
38:49
And that's one of the things I have spent some time on in my other self, studying information processing in political institutions. And there's no doubt that democracies, we know diversity, diverse decision groups make better decisions. And the reason is clear. They point out different aspects of problems that those of us that have different characteristics might not see. We do better problem definition when we are diverse. My other work shows that pretty clearly. But the same thing that happens is we build institutions that help find those problems. And they're diverse institutions through ideas and backgrounds and so forth. And congressional committees and how they work is an example of that. You don't find that in autocratic regimes. We make fun of congressional committees, but enormous amounts of information and understanding come out of those things.
39:50
And other areas in which there's these diversities built into our very structure of doing things, political institutions, of economic institutions. So the DEI approach could have been a little overly excessive and formalistic in some ways, but it was critical to building that kind of interracial democracy. And to see it cut off hurts my heart and hurts my head, too, because I think better decisions would be made in that kind of a situation. Our military would be much worse off with the guys that are running it now all white. Than with a mixed leadership.
40:33
Well, it's wonderful you closed on that point, Bryan. And you know this, and many of our listeners do. Ulysses Grant himself came to that conclusion at the end of the Civil War, that actually the 125,000 former slaves, former enslaved people who joined the Union Army were a huge plus to the Union Army, not just in numbers, but in what they brought in skill sets. And that's always the case.
40:57
I would like to close with, and it's a funny thing to close on, I was taught growing up this lost cause stuff that I write about in the book, a bunch of myths that were just wrong, one of which was that the Yankees deserted in ways that the Southerners didn't. Absolutely wrong. Who would you think from listening to this talk tonight, who deserted more? Well, of course, it was the uplanders. They weren't going to fight for those planters any more than they had to. And when they realized what they were doing, they went home. So the great desertions occurred from the mountains in Alabama and Georgia and North Carolina and so forth, not among the Midwestern farmers in Kentucky and Indiana and Ohio.
41:45
I think this discussion, Bryan, has brought out so much that it's colorful, insightful, and deeply relevant, maybe urgent relevant in your long history and your really vivid history of the Southern Fault Line. That's the title of your book, and it's a title that's spot on. I encourage all of our listeners to pick up a copy, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History. It's a model for using a family history to paint a broader picture of political change and political stagnation at the same time over time. Thank you, Bryan, so much for joining us.
42:28
I've enjoyed it tremendously. And thank you so much, Jeremi, and you too, Zachary, for your points and poem.
42:34
Thank you.
42:35
Yes, Zachary, thank you. Thank you, Zachary, for your insightful comments and your thoughtful poem as always. Thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and loyal subscribers to our Substack for joining us for this, our 299th episode of This Is Democracy. We will join you with a special 300th episode soon. But for now, thank you for joining us for This Is Democracy.
Episode 302: Freedom Season 1963
00:20
Welcome to our latest episode of This is Democracy. I'm Zachary Suri. I'm hosting this week. We're mixing things up a little bit.
00:26
We often think about history in terms of pivotal years, 1776, 1848, 1989, and 1968 is often an entry in this list, identified by many historians as the key turning point in our democracy and democracies around the world in the 1960s. But our next guest, his new book makes the case for a different year, 1963.
00:50
Dr. Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, and he joins us now. Thank you for joining us, Peniel.
01:05
Thank you for having me, Zachary and Jeremi.
01:08
In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution, Professor Joseph argues that 1963 marked the first critical successes and several important but tragic losses of the civil rights movement that would transform American democracy. 1963 was, he writes in the book, quote, "the defining year of the black freedom struggle." And because of the importance of this year and one of the documents it produced, a letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of a poem this week, we will be hearing Dr. King read a section of that speech and he will read what is perhaps one of the most famous sections.
01:50
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
02:27
So, Professor Joseph, Birmingham and this letter play a central role in the story that you tell. It's the site of some of the most brutal televised police crackdowns on peaceful protesters in 1963. It's where MLK is arrested and writes this letter, of course. Why Birmingham? Why were the events there in the spring of 1963 so critical to the cause of civil rights and to the history of our democracy?
02:52
Well, Birmingham is very interesting because, as I show in Freedom Season, there were other hot spots and sites that might have become Birmingham, including Greenwood, Mississippi and Jackson, Mississippi.
03:05
But Birmingham becomes such a huge global site of struggle for dignity and citizenship in 1963, primarily because of the brutality that is experienced by peaceful demonstrators and over time by really thousands of young Black students who were called Negro students in the context of 1963, unless Malcolm X was speaking about them. And what's so interesting, Zachary and Jeremi, about Birmingham is that so Birmingham is a dying steel town. It's the citadel of the old Confederacy.
03:45
And what's interesting about 1963 with Birmingham, there's two competing governments by May of 1963 in Birmingham. Birmingham is shifting to a mayoral system from a three-person commissioner system. And one of those commissioners is Eugene Bull Connor, who's the rabid, not only racist, but anti-communist, who's a former radio sports broadcaster who gets his nickname for his expertise at shooting the bull, Eugene Bull Connor.
04:22
And what's so interesting about Bull Connor's Birmingham is that there's going to be an election. There's going to be a new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who's really sort of an elegant segregationist. But for a while, like during the first Reconstruction period, there's going to be two competing governments in the city of Birmingham who are both claiming that they are the official government.
04:47
But what Bull Connor does as city commissioner, not police commissioner, but city commissioner who has authority over law enforcement, is that he unleashes fire hoses through the fire department that are powerful enough to strip the bark off of trees. And they also unleash canine units and German shepherds that route peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham in April and in May of 1963. So really, Birmingham, even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, attracts global attention.
05:27
And even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, and even more so than the Meredith admission to Ole Miss University of Mississippi in September of 1962, because that's a concentrated episode. It's over three, four days. There's going to be a couple of people who are dead.
05:47
Meredith is going to be escorted by over 500 federal marshals. But there's also going to be National Guard and others deployed. In the spring of 1963, it's a slow rolling crisis that continues to build and build.
06:04
We start to get hundreds of reporters in Birmingham, including reporters from as far away as Sweden and France and other places who are reporting. And we start to see Birmingham become front page news in The New York Times, especially when children as young as seven, eight and nine years old are arrested in Birmingham.
06:27
And in your book, Peniel, you have a really wonderful chapter. It's the beginning of your spring section where you talk about a lot of these events in Birmingham. And two of the main characters of your book really come out in this chapter, I think, beautifully, John F.
06:46
Kennedy and in particular, his brother, Robert Kennedy and and James Baldwin, Jimmy Baldwin, as you call him. Why is this such an important moment for the Kennedys and for Baldwin?
06:57
For the Kennedys, one of the things I wanted to show in the book, Jeremi, was the evolution of Bobby and Jack Kennedy on race matters. And it's not always a complete evolution. It's not always a linear evolution, but both of them really have their finest moments vis-a-vis civil rights in 63 during that, the course of that year.
07:21
And so for the Kennedys, who are very reticent about not allowing civil rights to upend the administration and especially the administration's legislative agenda, which is the state of the union, as I show early, they want a tax cut. They want a big tax cut so that they can get portions of what become the Great Society past, including Medicare. That's what they want.
07:44
And they don't want the the coalition that they need, which includes Southern segregationists or Dixiecrats, to be so concerned about civil rights that they block the president's agenda. And Bobby Kennedy, who really serves as a kind of domestic and international prime minister, certainly the the second most powerful politician in the country to President Kennedy, is very wary of anything that might taint his brother's presidency. And what we're going to see over the course of the spring is the Kennedy brothers collectively, almost symbiotically coming to the conclusion that they have to lead in the context of this crisis and not just lead from behind, but to take some risks.
08:36
And Jimmy Baldwin, James Baldwin, the writer, is a big part of this. Jimmy Baldwin is an extraordinary figure in the book, but also just in American history. Born in Harlem in 1924, one of nine children, young, gay, Black writer born in poverty who flees to France in November of 1948 and really unleashes his literary genius in a series of novels and books.
09:10
Go Tell It on the Mountain is his first novel, and then Giovanni's Room and Another Country. And his nonfiction is really regarded now in the 21st century as he's the best essayist that I think America has ever produced, irrespective of race. Notes of a Native Son.
09:30
And what we get published on January 31st, 1963, is a book called The Fire Next Time, which is really this extraordinary book that is comprised of two essays. The shorter essay is called My Dungeon Shook, which was a letter to his nephew in commemoration of the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which comes out in the December issue of The Progressive, which is coming out of Wisconsin and Madison and Fighting Bob LaFollette, founded in 1909. And the second longer essay, which is the really even more well-known essay, is an essay called Down at the Cross, which was published in the November 1962 issue of The New Yorker as, under the title, A Letter from a Region in My Mind.
10:21
And that's a 21,000 word essay about race, democracy, slavery, memory, love, citizenship, dignity. Really the best essay ever written about race in many ways, I think. And The Fire Next Time becomes an immediate bestseller, and it really catapults Jimmy, who's already famous for Another Country.
10:47
Another Country is a massive bestseller. It's a novel about interracial relationships and romance, suicide, queerness. It's really his blockbuster novel in terms of its popularity, sells more than a million copies.
11:06
It is major. And sometimes we forget about that. And so when we think about Jimmy Baldwin in 1963, he is the most well-known writer, irrespective of race, in the United States and globally.
11:22
His books are selling in London, in France. He's in Istanbul, Paris. And the Kennedys come to know Jimmy Baldwin.
11:33
Bobby Kennedy had met him in 1962, already at a White House function. And throughout 1963, Jimmy is on tour, not just for his new books, but also for the Congress of Racial Equality. And he's going to historically white colleges and Black colleges, speaking about the need for civil rights.
11:57
And he's really calling for a reckoning, a confrontation over America's original sin of racial slavery. But Baldwin also wants us to really wrestle with the lies and the cover up. He talks about a crime has been committed, but what's worse for him is the cover up, the lies vis-a-vis American exceptionalism and the lies that everything is fine, we're all good.
12:25
There's nothing for us to wrestle with around racial segregation, around violence and terror and inequality and injustice in the United States. And so Baldwin really hammers at the Kennedys. He says he admires the Kennedys, but he's deeply disappointed in the Kennedys.
12:47
And what's interesting, Jeremi, about Jim Baldwin is that what Jimmy is, he's the incubator and a conduit. Everyone is talking and approaching his ideas and debating. That's William F.
13:01
Buckley, that's Norman Poderitz, it's the Kennedys, it's Black leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry. So he becomes the key figure and the key thought leader that politicians and literary salons and the New York Times and Mademoiselle magazine and the New Yorker and the progressive, but Black nationalists and Pan-Africanist and Marxist and Republicans and Democrats, they're all wrestling with Jimmy Baldwin, which is extraordinary. And that's going to inspire Bobby Kennedy as the spring progresses to actually want to meet Jimmy Baldwin and to hear him and listen to him.
13:49
So you're seeing these writers become political figures who are connecting high politics with the quotidian.
13:58
I think that's a very helpful overview, and obviously so much of your book focuses on these literary circles and literary figures. It's very much a sort of intellectual history as well.
14:10
I wanted to ask the moment that I think, at least for most Americans, we remember most from 1963 is probably the March on Washington, that moment. We all know the images from the Lincoln Memorial of people gathered listening to speeches from sort of great leaders of the civil rights movement. What made that moment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial so impactful? And how do you see that moment fitting into the larger story of 1963?
14:38
Well, the March on Washington is an unbelievable high point, and I think the longest chapter in Freedom Season is the chapter 11 called The Language of Human Joy. Which really does an in-depth examination of the March on Washington, but it tries to look at it from different perspectives of people like Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Howard Zinn, a very, very famous professor and author of A People's History of the United States.
15:09
But one of the key adult advisors, young adult, 41 years old to SNCC activists, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a mentor to somebody like Marian Wright Edelman, Spelman College professor, really extraordinary figure. I would say the March on Washington is a high point because of the previous seven months, seven and a half months, almost eight months of activism and debates and conflicts and deaths, but also triumphs that occur. So the start of the year, Jimmy Baldwin flies to Mississippi to meet with James Meredith, who's the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and he meets with Medgar Evers.
15:55
And really through the first half of the book, Medgar Evers is alive. He's the field representative, field secretary of the Jackson, Mississippi NAACP, a former military veteran with the Red Ball Express and providing supplies to our American soldiers in Normandy during the invasion, a football hero, a married father of three to Murley Evers. He's got three children, a nine-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son.
16:28
Jack Van Dyke and Rena Denise is his daughter, and Darrell Kenyatta is his oldest born, middle name Kenyatta, named after Jomo Kenyatta, who becomes the first leader of Kenya December 12th, 13th that year in 1963. So Medgar Evers is this extraordinarily courageous and heroic and upright figure who I think we all know in popular culture because of his assassination. And I wanted us to see Medgar Evers in Mississippi, to hear him deliver speeches, to see the organizing that he's doing in Jackson, Mississippi, and also the constraints he's under because Roy Wilkins, who's executive director of the NAACP, is a very cautious, pragmatic civil rights leader.
17:16
He's a civil rights leader who's very competitive with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., constantly feels the NAACP is losing credit to competitors that don't put as much skin in the game, financially at least, as the NAACP does. And Medgar Evers is really at the center of these concentric circles, which include Roy Wilkins, which includes Martin Luther King, Jr., who's a friend of Medgar Evers, which includes young student activists who are connected to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who want the NAACP to be a much more direct action centered civil rights organization, getting arrested, boycotting, being in the scrum. And we see Medgar Evers as somebody who's under the constant threat of death. I show the way in which there are white activists like Joan Trumpauer, who's still alive, who's getting arrested alongside of Medgar Evers at sit-ins.
18:15
John Salter is the half Native American, half white professor at Tougaloo, who's getting arrested and beaten and brutalized alongside Medgar Evers. And so what's going on in Jackson, Mississippi, I also look at what's going on in Greenwood, Mississippi in April of that year, where people like Bob Moses are being brutalized and arrested. Somebody tries to assassinate Bob Moses in April of 1963.
18:41
And Bob Moses is the Hamilton College graduate, philosophy major, mathematician, who later is a MacArthur Genius Award winner and author of the book Radical Equations, who is really one of the single most influential student activists of the 1960s. He goes to Macomb, Mississippi and influences and inspires people like Tom Hayden, who follows him into Macomb. And Moses writes that famous letter from a prison in Macomb, Mississippi, about SNCC activists being in the middle of the iceberg.
19:18
And the iceberg is a metaphor for the racial subjugation and the white supremacy that they're under. And Moses vows to resist nonviolently, to resist. And he becomes this figure who attracts really hundreds and then thousands of students.
19:37
And Moses, of course, wears the sharecropper overalls of local people in the Mississippi Delta. And that becomes SNCC's de facto uniform of blending in. And Moses does it in a completely ego free manner.
19:53
He's one of the most humblest people you could ever meet. He's since passed away. But with such deep humility, Greenwood for a while is on the front pages of The New York Times because of the brutality that's going on.
20:07
So when we look at the March on Washington, the March on Washington is a culmination of one, a very brutal winter where civil rights activists are hoping against hope and organizing that the federal government is going to be on their side and that President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy will lead. They are very disappointed, perhaps none so as much as James Baldwin. But by the spring, Birmingham and the crisis in Birmingham gives civil rights activists an entree into compelling, coercing, shaming the administration into taking a moral stance.
20:50
Jimmy Baldwin sends the Kennedys a public telegram saying what's happening in Birmingham. It's their responsibility. This is a human rights movement, a human rights campaign.
21:04
And over the course of that spring, especially after the Mother's Day bombing in Birmingham, which is an assassination attempt on Martin Luther King Jr. at the A.G. Gaston Motel, you start to see the Kennedys respond and do more. And Malcolm X, who's in Washington, D.C., uses Birmingham as an entree to really become in 1963 a national figure. It's very interesting to watch all these different stories unfold, but they intersect, which makes them so even more interesting.
21:40
That makes a lot of sense. Of course, 1963 was also defined by two other tragedies in September of 1963, the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls and the assassination of JFK in November of that year. What affected these tragedies? Also, obviously, public televised, what effect did they have on the movement and how in particular did the JFK assassination help change public sentiment around around civil rights?
22:08
Well, I think I want to stick for a second, Zachary, with the March on Washington just to talk about what happens that day, August 28th. I think 250,000 people come to Washington, D.C. and what's so powerful is the coalitions we're seeing of labor, labor movements, different social justice movements, political, religious movements. You've got Jewish and Christian organizations and secular organizations that come together. But you also have the left that gets in there, too. There are people who are socialist and Marxist and feminist at the march.
22:48
And so the march is really extraordinary in showing a kind of solidarity publicly in front of a global audience, including the Kennedys. The Kennedys invite the march leaders to the White House afterwards and they spend 75 minutes there. And what's so extraordinary about the March on Washington is that it's a generational march.
23:13
We see A. Philip Randolph, who is 74 years old and the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is the titular head of that march. We see Bayard Rustin, who is his lieutenant, former member of the Young Communist League, a socialist, a socialist and a social democrat who spends years in prison in Louisbourg as a conscientious objector, around the same time that Elijah Muhammad is in prison as a conscientious objector.
23:46
You see all these different stories coming together. Ossie Davis, who's a friend of Malcolm X's, is the master of ceremonies. And we, of course, remember Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech. And it's a 17 minute speech. We remember it as I have a dream speech. But he begins that speech with the words, now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.
24:11
And in that speech, he talks about reparations. He says, we come here to cash a check, a check that has been stamped insufficient funds, but we refuse to believe that the Bank of American Justice is bankrupt. So it's an extraordinary day.
24:25
And I want us to remember the electricity that's in the air that day, but that entire year. And in Freedom Season, I have John F. Kennedy telling his favorite White House staffer, who's part of his personal staff, his butler, Bruce, how he wishes he could be out there.
24:45
John F. Kennedy is telling the activists after they come in and these leaders, you know, that he's proud of them. LBJ is there as well.
24:55
So it's really an extraordinary day and moment, not just for the movement, but for really the idea of multiracial democracy in that sense. And that's important because it's a real high point that year because, Zachary, by the time Birmingham happens, the second act of Birmingham, which is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th. And there's four girls who are murdered that day.
25:30
And their names are Carol Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley, who are all 14 years old. And then Denise McNair, who's just 11, are all killed in that blast. And two other Black children are also killed that day.
25:46
One is a 13-year-old who's riding his bike named Virgil Peanut Ware, who was shot by two white Eagle Scouts who tell the police and the authorities later that they wanted to see what would happen if they shot a Negro. And he's shot and murdered. One of the boys serves six months in juvenile detention and is released, and the other boy is let go and released.
26:11
And there's a 20-year-old, Johnny Robinson, who's shot and killed in the back by Birmingham police in the aftermath of a melee where people are protesting against the bombing that has just happened at the 16th Street Baptist Church. So those six deaths really impact James Baldwin. And I show, as we continue the narrative, how Baldwin is leading demonstrations and efforts at a Christmas boycott and a real searing critique of what kind of country are we that allows these six children to die.
26:51
And, you know, John F. Kennedy doesn't go to any of the funerals. And he's implored by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House to attend. And we have the tapes and he doesn't go to the funerals. So it's really an extraordinarily disappointing moment as well. Right.
27:08
And so the interregnum between the 16th Street Baptist church bombing, September 15th, and the Kennedy assassination, November 22nd, you see folks like James Baldwin who are getting a lot angrier and a lot more bitter about, and realizing what the stakes are, right? Real, real criticism. And so by the time of the Kennedy assassination, the Kennedy assassination provides a context for mourning, but it also provides the context to, and Merle Evers does this, James Baldwin King does it too, is to place Kennedy as one of the martyrs, like the martyrs of this movement.
27:55
So it's, and Baldwin says this at Howard University, November 30th, 1963, he says, we mourned separately the deaths of Medgar Evers and the children of Birmingham, and now we're collectively mourning JFK because Black Americans were bereft at the Kennedy assassination because they were his most enthusiastic supporters as that administration went on. So it becomes really interesting. JFK becomes part and the most well-known martyr of America's second reconstruction, but for much of the year, it doesn't seem as if we're ever going to mourn collectively any of the fallen heroes in this struggle for citizenship and dignity.
28:48
Peniel, at the end of your wonderful book, you connect, of course, the moment you've just described to the rise of Lyndon Johnson and how in this terrible, violent, chaotic moment, Lyndon Johnson, who was a largely ignored vice president by the Kennedys, comes into office and is able to create, as you say, a more powerful bully pulpit than any president had really had before, at least not in recent memory. And is the progress that's made, particularly in 64 and 65, the Civil Rights Act of 64, the Voting Rights Act of 65, where so many of us focus our attention, was that a necessary outcome of Kennedy's death? Would another vice president ascending to the presidency have done the same thing, or was there something particular about Lyndon Johnson?
29:36
Oh, I think that Lyndon Johnson is really the right person who steps into history at that moment. I don't know if another vice president would have been able to take command in the same way. I think that trying to make Kennedy's assassination and his death, trying to leverage that for the passage of legislation, I think most people would have tried to do.
30:04
And I think it's important for us to remember in the context of the time of 63, 64, 65, LBJ needs Black votes where he can get them. And we're thinking about states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and of course, not the South. And he needs to hold on to a coalition that now has venerated the slain President Kennedy, and who's now this very, very iconic figure.
30:35
So in a lot of ways, being pro-civil rights was also pragmatic. There was no way to hold on to that coalition through cautious deliberation in the immediate aftermath of the president's assassination. So his instincts are correct.
30:51
LBJ had great instincts. And I think what's interesting about LBJ in 63 is that even months before the assassination with his Gettysburg address, his Tufts University commencement speech, him receiving an award by the National Association of Black or Negro Journalists. They're giving him an award.
31:12
LBJ had really, really stepped up on civil rights in very public ways, to the point where he became at least a part of some of the Kennedy private deliberations on civil rights, and was speaking to Ted Sorensen. The tension with Bobby Kennedy is always there, and with the assassination only amplifies. But he's in the White House on June 22nd, when Dr. King has both a private meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Burke Marshall, and then the very famous private walk through the Rose Garden with Jack Kennedy, and then being surrounded by the 28 or 30 civil rights leaders. LBJ is there, and he's speaking, and he's upright. He's there when they meet after the March on Washington. But he's also telling Ted Sorensen, and he mentions James Baldwin, that President Kennedy should use the presidency as a bully pulpit.
32:07
He admires Kennedy's June 11th speech, which I get in depth in, in Freedom Season, in the chapter, Kennedy's Finest Moment, but feels Kennedy should constantly use that bully pulpit. So he was much more willing to use, and much more understanding about the way in which the presidency, in and of itself, it provides a kind of ballast for whatever political situation you're in, because people are really looking towards the president, especially, I think, at this time period, 1963, than Kennedy. So I think Kennedy, and you could see it in hearing some of the White House tapes, Jeremi, with the ADA, Americans for Democratic Action, Kennedy's saying, and Arthur Schlesinger's in the meetings with him, saying, well, FDR's fire chats, he never gave more than four a year, and I don't have FDR's velvet voice.
33:08
So there's a kind of lack of confidence that Kennedy has, that really the polling disputes, right? He's a very, very popular president. I mean, really, in 63, at his lowest, I mean, he's still in the 60s, can you imagine, right, in terms of popularity?
33:25
And people want to see people want to listen to Kennedy. So there's a kind of underestimation of what he's capable of doing through the bully pulpit in a way that LBJ really embraces in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.
33:44
Yeah. One of the things I love about your book, Peniel, is you show a variety of figures, larger than life characters. We've talked about some of them, but certainly not all of them.
33:54
James Baldwin, the Kennedys, but also Malcolm X, a variety, Medgar Evers, all kinds of figures you touch on. And even though they have a lot of differences, they all one way or another are seeking to grapple with the problem of civil rights. And they're trying in one way or another from their own views to advance the country.
34:18
What do we take for today? I mean, this is where we always like to close the podcast. What do we learn for today at a time when our political leaders seem so unwilling to engage these issues?
34:31
And even those who care about these issues are afraid to engage these issues. University leaders are afraid to engage these issues. What do we take from this story that's useful for us today as we think about what you called in your prior book, The Third Reconstruction?
34:49
Well, I think there's three lessons to take from the book, at least three. One is this idea that really becomes universal in 1963, is that America must strive to be a multiracial democracy. And I think you see that throughout the course of the year in 1963.
35:10
And what's so important is that by 1963, in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination, we get a rough consensus by the aftermath of JFK's death, led by Lyndon Baines Johnson, that multiracial democracy has to be the beating heart of the republic. That's very, very important. And I think for at least the next 50 years until the Supreme Court's decision, Shelby v. Holder, 5-4
35:38
We had a 50-year racial justice consensus that was imperfect, but provided the most opportunities for historically marginalized groups to have access to building wealth, to becoming elected officials, to being educated at some of the best universities in the country, to being in corporate America, so on and so forth. And that means African Americans, but it also means women. It means South Asians. It means people who are Latino, just the whole gamut, which is extraordinary.
36:12
So I think that idea of multiracial democracy is really important, and the idea of building consensus around that. It's not unanimity. There's going to be disagreement of how we get to it, but consensus around the idea of multiracial democracy. The other lesson is about coalitions and coalition building. So I think throughout freedom season, you see the way in which civil rights leaders from the grassroots all the way to those who could have the privilege of meeting with President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and meeting with governors and leaders really were interested in coalitions.
36:52
They were interested in listening and learning from, but also debating with people who held different views than they did, but they were all interested in good faith advancing the country. So this idea of coalitions is very, very important. And then finally, I would say this idea of ideas and actions mattering.
37:18
So what's so interesting about 1963 is the way in which words and rhetoric and their ability to persuade people mattered. I think Martin Luther King Jr. is who we always look at, but it's Malcolm X, it's Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry, and then certainly it's Jimmy Baldwin, where Baldwin's words are so extraordinarily profound. You've got the right wing, the left wing, the middle of the country all trying to grapple with him.
37:48
William F. Buckley calls him an eloquent menace, and others say, no, he's this prophetic figure. Izzy Stone, I.F. Stone says he speaks with the passion of a Hebrew prophet. And so ideas matter, words and rhetoric matter, and I think we can see that right now in 2025, because I think there was a feeling before our current situation that if you had presidents who rhetorically supported civil rights, that that wasn't enough. And I understand that that isn't enough, but just the act of saying it actually was a much more positive thing for the country than somebody who's saying the exact opposite and belittling people and discriminating against people. So words really matter, and ideas matter, and placing those words and ideas into action matters.
38:48
So there's an intellectual praxis that happens in 1963 that is massive and national and monumental, and it's really global in scope, because there are students who are part of the Peace Corps and Crossroads who are going into Africa, who are going into Latin America, and those countries are also looking at the United States, and people are trying to walk the talk. They're trying to live up to their social, political, cultural, moral, religious ideals, which is really extraordinary to see. They don't always succeed, but the very fact that in good faith they're trying to live up to those ideas, it's really important to see.
39:28
And that impacts the kind of civic nationalism that really comes to a high point in 63, really the most important year of America's second Reconstruction, if we look at those years as 1954 to 1968 as the high points, 63 is the turning point, and it takes all those, not just deaths, I mean, there's also these triumphant moments. So I hope it's a hopeful story as well, because I got a lot of hope from being with Baldwin and being with all these folks, and I got a lot of hope from having a presidency and administration that, even with their flaws, really wanted to do the right thing, and at times actually did.
40:13
Yes, I think you've provided us today with a wonderfully hopeful story, although realistic, one that I think makes the case for 1963 as a critical year, not only in the history of our democracy, but of global democracy, which, of course, is the topic of our podcast every week. The new book is called Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution. We highly encourage all our listeners to get a copy and read it.
40:42
Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Joseph.
40:45
Hey, thank you, Zachary. I really enjoyed it. And Jeremi, this is wonderful. And thank you for both of you for the work that you continue to do in these challenging times.
40:55
Yes, thank you, Jeremi, as well. And thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy. See you next time.
Episode 73: Congress and War Powers
00:20
Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy, our first new episode of 2020 of the new decade. And we are so fortunate this morning, we are discussing Congress and war powers, an issue that's been in the news really for 240 years in American history, and an issue that's certainly at the center of American attention today. And we have with us, probably the person who's studying these issues most deeply as a historian, Clay Katsky. Clay, welcome.
00:53
Thank you. Glad to be here.
00:54
Nice to have you on with us. Clay is finishing his PhD here at the University of Texas, and he's writing his dissertation on Congress's role in managing and dealing with presidential war powers, particularly in the 1970s and 80s. And so we're so fortunate to have him here. He knows more about this subject than anyone else. He's also a fantastic teacher. And so we're delighted to have you here, Clay. Before we turn to our discussion with our expert, with Clay, we have our scene-setting poem. I haven't had a chance to say that in a little while, our scene-setting poem with Zachary Suri. What's the title of your poem today?
01:32
An adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California for a Nation on the Brink of War.
01:38
My gosh. So you've taken an Allen Ginsberg, who I know is one of your favorite poets, and you have adapted one of his poems for our discussion today. Is that correct?
01:46
That's correct.
01:47
Okay. So we have the merger of Zachary Suri and Allen Ginsberg. Let's hear it.
01:51
What thoughts I find of you these days, Frank Church, for we huddled in the bedrooms listening to our radios with a headache, self-conscious, looking at the end of the world. In our nightmarish haze and shopping for semblances, we all crawled into the neon fruit supermarket with you, dreaming of the broken ghost. What nuclear bombs and what assassinations, whole battalions shopping at night, aisles full of shell-shocked soldiers, ghostly Donald Rumsfeld and the avocados, Reagan and the tomatoes, and you, Lyndon Johnson, what were you doing down by the hot dog buns? I saw you, Uncle Sam, disheveled, lonely old optimist, fumbling with the paper towel rolls and eyeing the peanut butter with a blank stare. I heard you asking questions of each, whom did I really kill today? What price for world peace? Are you James Madison? I wandered in and out of the brilliant star-spangled stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the ghost of Montesquieu and Lafayette.
02:49
We strolled down the open corridors together in our solitary remembrance, tasting empire, possessing every forbidden delicacy, and never passing the eye of the cashier's congressional oversight. Where are we going, you lost Democrat? The doors close in an hour. Which way do your reluctant guns point tonight? Maybe in some future time I will touch the founding document in my pocket and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd. Will we walk through a war among the distant highways and software engineers, the trees add shame to shame, lights out in the houses, awaiting air raid signals that still seem so inevitable? Will we stroll dreaming of the lost democracy we left in a pickle jar behind the old folks' home back to our silent cottage, maybe Lincoln's mausoleum? Ah, dear father, tip your hat, lonely old vagrant, you can lose the false individualism with me. For what America did we truly have when we handed Sharon the coin and we got out on a sinking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the blackwaters of the Potomac?
03:51
Wow. Nice. I love the imagery there, Zachary. So why did you choose this Ginsberg poem and why did you adapt it in the way you did?
04:03
Well, this poem, Supermarket in California, which was written in 1955, in it Ginsberg chases Walt Whitman through a supermarket and he's really critiquing how materialism and commercialism has undermined democracy in his view. And I am critiquing the ways that imperialism and war has undermined democracy in the U.S. today. And I think though they seem very far apart, I think both moments are very similar in the sort of aching for a more perfect union.
04:38
I think that's a perfect spot to turn to Clay. This is something the founders thought about, right? About the question of how you can maintain a democracy and still fight wars when necessary for the national defense. This is something the founders thought about, right? About the question of how you can maintain a democracy and still fight wars when necessary for the national defense. Yes. How did the framers think about this?
04:53
Well, in terms of what the framers were looking for in war making, they were looking for somewhat of a shared power between the president and Congress. And in fact, this was a major breakthrough at the time. In order to share power with the presidency was a huge break from when monarchs controlled all aspects of war.The framers didn't want to give the president authority to go to war unilaterally.
05:24
Right. And so they gave Congress particular powers. What are the constitutional powers that Congress has?
05:30
So the main power that Congress has, granted by Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, is that Congress shall have the power to declare war. And we've seen over time this sort of power can be useful, but has eroded. The declared wars include War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. But Korea starts this trend of undeclared wars. So the power to declare war has somewhat diminished over time.
06:02
There are other powers, though, important powers that Congress has. The rest of that clause talks about the to raise and support armies. It's interesting. It says to raise and support armies, but it also says, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for longer period than two years. So already Congress, in the Constitution, you have Congress trying to limit, or you have the framers trying to limit, the president's ability to have long, drawn-out conflicts. Even limit Congress's ability at that point.
06:34
Right. Forcing a vote at least every two years on the money for the conflict.
06:37
Yes. To revisit the issue, and so that we're not just stuck in endless wars.
06:41
Wow.
06:42
The third important power in that section is to provide and maintain a Navy, which obviously has been extended to the Air Force, and maybe in the future to a Space Force, or something like that. And then the final important power in that clause is to make rules for government and regulation of the land and naval forces. So to some extent, Congress does have control over the naval and land forces, making rules, making laws governing their conduct and such. The final thing, also, that's not exactly related, but is a part of the Congress's war powers in the Constitution, is the Senate's ability to approve and reject international agreements.
07:26
Right. Right. Right. And it's actually a two-thirds vote, isn't it?
07:29
Yes. So this is a high bar. And this has caused issues that we could even see recently, something like the Iran deal, which wasn't given to Congress because the bar couldn't be met. So here's an instance of the President going around Congress because Congress wasn't going to be able to give the President what he needed. And that's an example of the power that the President has over Congress. And I think it's fair to say, right, that from the beginning, from Washington's time, there was already tension.
08:04
Yes.
08:04
That Presidents have a tendency to want to have more of a free hand, particularly when it comes to military affairs.
08:10
How has that story evolved over time?
08:12
Well, really what you see is you see Presidents slowly taking liberties over time with Congress. As you mentioned, starting with Washington, there are issues with England and there's pressure to go to war. And Washington is able to sway Congress in his direction not to go to war by sending diplomatic people out to talk to diplomats in England. So he's sort of so Congress at that point is pushing for war and he's sort of pulling them back. He's showing his his teeth. He's showing that he can do this.
08:45
In fact, the House requests documents related to these negotiations and he refuses based on executive privilege, which is the first instance of executive privilege being used. Going forward, you know, you have Thomas Jefferson imposing embargo acts and doing things that Congress was not completely on board with, but was within the president's power. The I'd say the first real instance of the president overstepping his bounds in the war making really comes during the Mexican-American war with with James Polk. Polk, there is not enough support in Congress for war and Polk sends troops down to the border of Mexico intending to incite a war and intending for Congress to jump on board with that war.
09:39
One of the things that we see over and over again is that it's very difficult for Congress to pull back once hostilities have been engaged. And, you know, we know that it's very difficult. I mean, Congress has control of appropriations, but it's very difficult to cut off funds for troops in the field. So and this continues to unfold as each war comes, as the country becomes more involved with the outside world, you know, following the Spanish-American war and territorial conquest. Our butting up against outside powers means that the president is gaining power in in this sort of arena.
10:19
The president has what some would call an agenda setting power, right? He can send American forces. He can do something and then, in a sense, almost threaten Congress that if they don't support that, that they'll be abandoning American forces overseas. Right. And so he really gets the first move in a sense. Why have presidents been able to do this more effectively and why, as you already said earlier on, Clay, have Congress's day to day powers over the military and over military and war decisions, why have they diminished so precipitously in the 20th century and early 21st century?
10:55
Well, for one, you know, you look at the threat of national security and the Cold War coming from the Cold War. The threat of national security has been used by the executive to push the idea that only the president can protect the nation. There is some concern that a body like Congress that has endless debates and an endless number of ideas cannot come together quickly enough in order to protect the country in a proper way. A lot of people would say that too many voices are being heard and that you need a single person to make a decision. That said, in the 20th century, Congress has not necessarily used all of its powers to its best advantage. So I'd say one of the things that is not directly talked about in the Constitution, but is a constitutional power that Congress has that relates to war, is their investigatory powers and their powers of oversight.
11:54
Yes, yes. And so how do those powers work? What power does that give Congress?
11:58
So it says in the Constitution that all legislative powers herein granted shall be used by the Congress of the United States. And that's basically a general term that where the framers intended Congress to seek out information when crafting or reviewing legislation. George Mason himself said members are not only legislators, but they possess inquisitorial powers. They must meet frequently to inspect the conduct of public office. So over and their oversight powers include subpoena and contempt powers. And those, I think, are the major powers that haven't been used enough in the 20th century.
12:33
And when you think about the times that Congress has been most effective inserting itself into foreign policy in the 1920s, in the 1970s, somewhat in the 1980s, it's when Congress has embarked on ambitious investigations into the president's making of war.
12:49
Right. And oftentimes, until recently, at least, historians and journalists would criticize those moments. I mean, one of the critiques of the 1920s is of American isolationism and in particular of Congress's excessive efforts to limit presidential power after World War One with the Nye Committee, for example, which alleged that war profiteers were driving American policy. Even future President Harry Truman was involved with these hearings. You have a different view, right? On what? You have a different view in the sense that you don't see these hearings as as undermining the Constitution and undermining American power. You see them as actually crucial, correct?
13:29
Absolutely crucial. And, you know, even founders who did believe in a strong executive like Hamilton still believed that it would be utterly improper and unsafe to give the president full control over foreign policy. So the idea is that the founders wanted to make it difficult to enter war. They wanted to make they were expecting congressional debate to restrain the country from going to war.
13:58
Why have they not enforced that more than why? Why since, as you said, since World War Two, have we continually been at war? And why has Congress either done nothing or, as in the current situation, authorized military force in 2001, 2002? That's the current legislation that's used by many presidents through this current president. Why have they allowed that to go on? Why have they allowed presidents to stretch the legislation or operate without legislation at all?
14:26
Well, I'd say that the why is, you know, somewhat of a psychological factor of the threat of nuclear war that comes, you know, directly after the end with the Cold War, directly after World War Two. The country is afraid. People are afraid that of possible annihilation of possible World War III. There is a sense that there are, as I said before, too many voices in Congress that that you need one single strong person to push forward. You know, the president is tasked with defending the nation. And one thing that really comes clear in the atomic age is that the nation needs defending.
15:02
Before that, you know, an attack on Pearl Harbor is the first major attack in over 100 years. And the idea that the United States has once again been vulnerable, that this fortress America no longer exists, the seas are no longer protecting us because these missiles can be coming. It really pushed Congress and the American people into giving the president a lot of leeway in terms of war making powers, in terms of foreign policy and in what I study in terms of intelligence gathering and intelligence work.
15:37
So the Congress, even liberal members of Congress, were very, very were very, very easy or quick to give the president green lights on all sorts of covert operations and on assassinations and things like that. It was to some extent you see Congress putting their heads in the stand and allowing the president to defend the nation in whatever in whatever way is necessary. So in part, it's that members of Congress don't want political responsibility for yes.
16:10
And, you know, one thing is that, you know, Congress, they have to especially in the House, you know, they're constantly running for reelection and Congress itself is constantly running for reelection. The president only has to get reelected once. Congress is hoping to get reelected again and again and again. And so for them, their political livelihoods are at stake. And if the country, if a war is popular in the country and it's not and it's popular in your district, chances are as a as a congressperson, you're going to support that.
16:38
Right. Right. Zachary, you had a question.
16:40
Yeah. How do we get to the current legislation that we're supposed to be operating under the War Powers Act of 1973? How do we get to that? And how does that how is that contributed and played out in the past few decades?
16:50
Yeah. Really good question. I mean, so, you know, War Powers Act comes at an amazing time in American history because this act probably could never have been passed at any other time other than in 1973. Nixon is completely on his heels after Watergate. People are still fuming over the Vietnam War. Nixon, Nixon actually. So and the thing that's most remarkable is that Nixon vetoes the the amendment and then it's the the act and then it's overwritten. So from the beginning, this is a major departure that that the president is against going forward. Some presidents see it as unconstitutional and completely ignore it.
17:30
So far, there's been little to no impact on the decisions of presidents due to the War Powers Act. It hasn't really restrained them from doing anything. Some. And as I said, some administrations straight up refused to recognize its constitutionality. But in 1975, Ford did submit a report to Congress as a result of his order to send troops to retake the Miagas, an operation to rescue some American hostages. He the troops were recalled within the 60 days, so it didn't actually have an effect. But he did report to Congress if the troops had remained overseas for 60 days, it would have triggered the War Powers Act.
18:09
In 1979, Carter failed to notify Congress of the operation to rescue the hostages. That's less about the War Powers Act and more about clandestine operation reporting. But it is sort of similar.
18:23
In 1981, Reagan sends Marines to Lebanon when he reported this to Congress. And and after the Marines were attacked, Congress does authorize the Marines to stay in country for 18 months. So that's really the first example of a president state adhering to the War Powers Act or at least stating that reporting to Congress and then accepting Congress's proposal for how to deal with the troops. At the time, Reagan knew that 18 months was a really long time and they probably weren't going to be there for that long anyway. He pulled them out in much less time.
18:58
If I remember, he did report to Congress, but he said he didn't believe he had a constitutional duty.
19:04
And that would his administration and Bush and Cheney, who gives a dissent to the Iran Contra report, would say that all any effort to infringe on the president's war making powers would be unconstitutional. In 1990, Bush agreed. Bush said that he didn't need congressional authorization to carry out U.N. resolutions in Iraq, but he did report to Congress and ask for congressional support for operations in the Persian Gulf. Clinton authorized airstrikes in various places pursuant to U.N. Security Council resolutions without regards to the War Powers Act, which some in Congress objected to. So the history of the War Powers Act is pretty much that it has done nothing so far. I think that at the time there was a concern.
19:58
The War Powers Act was almost written to prevent Vietnam from continuing or to prevent a continuation of what was going on in Vietnam, of leaving troops overseas for an extended time.
20:09
Yeah. So how have presidents reconciled clandestine operations with the sort of constitutional balance of powers between Congress and the executive? Because like particularly in the Reagan years, we see this giant growth of clandestine operations.
20:23
Yeah.
20:24
So and this is your book, Clay.
20:26
Yes. So the so presidents don't like the idea of Congress being involved in clandestine operations at all, starting with, you know, in the early days of the CIA, the way that Congress and the president would converse on these things would be on intelligence operations, covert operations would be done in very informal meetings, you know, in the back offices of these guys with smoke and smoke filled rooms and backs offices, you know, just lunch meetings, things like that. It wasn't until the over drinks, over drinks, mostly.
21:01
It wasn't until the 1970s that Congress really struck out and tried to solidify a way that it would be included in the intelligence process. And so what that meant was the creation of the intelligence committees that you see in the news now, these days, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the committee that Adam Schiff chairs.
21:18
This is the committee that Adam Schiff chairs.
21:20
The yes, that Adam Schiff shares in the counterpart in the Senate, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence created in the 1970s as a way to check up on presidents who, as I said, did not want to share intelligence with Congress and who did not want Congress involved in that sort of decision making process.
21:40
The main way that Congress is brought into these into these decisions is comes from the reporting requirements that says before any covert action is carried out, the president must sign a document called a finding that says that the operation is in furtherance of the national security. And this document before the operation takes place needs to be given to the intelligence committees. And the intelligence committees have no veto power over these over this. The president is basically notifying them that he's going to do something.
22:14
But what it does is it gives the chance for an exchange of ideas that that the committee will hold hearings, closed doors, hearings over this, get the insights of their members and, you know, send reports back to the president on what they think of this. You know, if the president says that he's going to, you know, take out a general of another country and and Congress says, you know, we're going to be up in arms if you do this, maybe the president then thinks twice.
22:41
Yeah. So you said, Clay, and I think the consensus among historians would agree that the War Powers Act of 1973 did not really limit presidential war making. Have these reforms of the 1970s, the reforms that include the creation of House and Senate committees, the findings requirement, the executive order that's signed after pressure from Congress to prohibit assassinations, signed by Gerald Ford, I believe. Have these efforts by Congress to limit or at least create consultation for covert activities? Have they worked?
23:13
It's hard to say definitively, but I think that anecdotally, when you look at the years before these agreements were made in the subsequent years after that, they did have a big impact. You know, the the number of clandestine operations actually lowers in as the years go after the 1970s. There's less efforts to overthrow of other governments through military organized coups. There for a while, there's no assassinations.
23:46
And, you know, these things change a little bit, as Zach mentioned, in the 1980s with with the Reagan who actually weakens the executive order for against assassinations in order to carry out strikes in Libya against the palace, which are not technically assassinations against Gaddafi, but could definitely be seen as such.
24:08
So those provisions on assassinations get weakened in the 1980s. And today, those those provisions against assassinations have been completely muddied by drone warfare and drone strikes. The taking the strikes against terrorist leaders, strikes against specific individuals who are seen as propaganda masters, these sort of things seem somewhat to follow fall under the category of assassination.
24:38
Right. And certainly a a sovereign leader of Iran, someone who's someone who's responsible for the military in Iran.
24:46
Yeah. I mean, a sovereign leader. But I think that in this case, you know, someone with a high position in the government carrying out Iranian foreign policy and leading their military. That's what this is.This isn't a terrorist group. This is a legitimately recognized country.
25:06
So it seems to me that that this rises more to a level of an assassination than than the taking out of the terrorist leaders, which I mean, and think about it in American terms. You know, one of the arguments that they're making is that, you know, he was a terrorist because he worked with these terrorist groups, you know.
25:25
But what if it was on the flip side? What if there is a an American working with pro-democracy groups in a communist country and that person is taken out? Is that not assassination?
25:38
Well, back to your discussion of Ronald Reagan, one of the things Reagan did that many people praise him for was support the Mujahideen against the Soviet military in Afghanistan. The Soviets called the Mujahideen a terrorist organization. We certainly didn't believe that justified their assassinating our president. The Soviets called the Mujahideen a terrorist organization. We certainly didn't believe that justified their assassinating our president. And thankfully, they didn't. Right. So your point is very well taken to simply say that a sovereign leader is working with people that we don't think is legitimate, doesn't justify assassinations, at least under the 1975 order.
26:08
And then, you know, when it comes to the reporting requirements, the president's required to tell Congress about covert actions beforehand. And this was in the 1980s what sparked the Iran-Contra that not only did the president not notify Congress about the covert actions, but Congress had already passed laws against these sort of covert actions. And the Boland amendments were completely violated. And so here you see an executive that doesn't really believe in being restrained by Congress, completely bulldozing over Congress and, you know, isn't in the end held very accountable.
26:48
So I think what your scholarship, Clay, and this really thoughtful analysis you've given us shows is that there's an inherent tension between Congress and the president. And perhaps the founders wanted that. Legal scholars call it an invitation to struggle. An invitation to struggle. And maybe there's something productive about that, if that's the case.
27:08
And here's where we turn to the sort of positive looking forward part of what's so crucial to our discussions each week here on This is Democracy. What are the ways that understanding this 200 years, 240 years of struggle as you do so well, what are the ways in which that understanding can help inform us going forward? What are what are the opportunities we have going forward from this moment today to have Congress more involved, more effectively, not in preventing presidents from from defending the country, but helping presidents to do a better job and still protect our democracy in the process?
27:40
Yeah, I think that, you know, there are, as I mentioned before, certain decades you can look at where this where this worked. You know, the 1920s being a really good example where a block of progressives in the Senate, especially known as the peace progressives, were able to prevent the country from going down another war path. Now, and this is significant because there were efforts by Congress to arrange conventions, to limit the arms races, to outlaw war. These were actual there were bills put forth to outlaw war. There were efforts.
28:16
Kellogg-Briand Pact, for example.
28:17
Kellogg-Briand Pact. There's efforts to prevent major efforts in Congress to prevent war.
28:22
And, you know, then if you look at the 1930s, you know, even though there's problems, of course, with the Nye Commission, this is a real effort by Congress to prevent the president from sucking the country into war. And it's, you know, somewhat successful until it shouldn't have been.
28:37
So and then, you know, you look at the 1970s and actually starting in the late 1960s. And in fact, that's something I think that it's really important to mention is the Fulbright Vietnam hearings. So holding hearings, the 1970s, you know, the uproar against Vietnam and the War Powers Act didn't just come out of nowhere in the 1970s. It came because of these public sized hearings and because of the Pentagon Papers and because of things like that, where Congress was doing investigations, you know, overseeing the executive branch as it should be.
29:11
Today, we have things like we have ridiculous investigations, not normal investigations. We have Benghazi investigations, things that are not really rooted in the restraining of executive power. Here we have recently this expose by The Washington Post about these Afghanistan papers about what really had been going on in Afghanistan. Yet there's no effort to have congressional hearings to look into this. What Congress needs to do is they need to hold hearings. They need to use their subpoena power. They need to use the power of contempt when people won't meet the subpoenas. And, you know, have public debates over these things.
29:50
How do they do that when you have a president now, and he might not be the last president to do this, who says, "I'm not going to follow. Washington said he wouldn't turn over the negotiation papers with the British. I'm not going to let people in my office and even when someone like my former National Security Adviser, John Bolton says he's willing to testify, I'm going to invoke executive privilege." What should Congress do?
30:14
I think they have to keep going hard. They have to keep the investigations going. If the president wants to block people from testifying, let him block them, find someone else. It looks bad for the president to block people. Continue to put the president in that position, continue to make it seem that there's no transparency. If you continually investigate someone who's not giving you anything, it becomes clear that they're hiding something.
30:31
What about the use of the power of the purse? One of the things where we started this conversation and where I'd like us to come to a conclusion is around the role Congress has clearly in the Constitution as the place that appropriates the money.
30:53
Yes
30:54
How can Congress more effectively make sure that it has control over money? We have fought wars since 9/11 actually off budget. Where we go to war without actually money even being appropriated by Congress and the president assumes that Congress will then follow on in the program.
31:08
Yeah. A lot of this has to do with the authorizations of force from the early 2000s, that the president points to and says, "This allows us to do this and you'll have to give us the money." Now, Johnson made a similar argument during the Vietnam War where he said, "You guys keep giving us the money. If you wanted the war to end, you could just stop giving us the money." The appropriations issue is difficult because as I said before, you have troops in the field. You have people who need this money. I think that the only thing that Congress can really do is plan ahead with scheduled decreases.
31:46
The idea that Congress is going to tell the president that you're going to get this much money for the next year's budget for this war and then the next year it's going to be less. There has to be some agreement of where the trend is going. Otherwise, the president is going to keep doing what he wants and ask Congress to pay for it later and if Congress doesn't pay for it, they're the ones who look bad.
32:07
Congress could also pass legislation saying money shall not be used for fighting a war in Iran or something like that.
32:13
Absolutely. That is the kind of thing that they should be doing there.
32:16
Gotcha. Zachary, for a long time, Americans have not really liked paying attention to Congress. Most Americans don't like Congress.
32:27
Very low approval.
32:28
Very low approval ratings, I think almost lower than dentists in some respect.
32:32
And Trump even.
32:34
Lower than the president. Americans tend to vote for their incumbent congressional representatives to go back to office but still say they hate Congress, they don't pay attention. It's not sexy to read about Congress than the way it is to read about the executive. Do you think, Zachary, that young people will start to pay more attention to these issues?
32:53
Yeah, I really think that especially in a moment where we're very dissatisfied with the trend that our politics are taking. I think Americans are paying much closer attention to what goes on in Congress and what goes on in this amazing legislative body.
33:12
I think also it's really important to remember that dissent in Congress and in other forums is really important that we need to have these discussions and have these debates. Even wars that--that history looks on favorably, they were very vehement debates. Going back all the way to World War I and Bob La Follette in the Senate, I think it's really important to remember that these debates, these public forums to discuss our country's role abroad are very important. I think that's something that younger people and all Americans are paying much closer attention to today.
33:44
I think that's very well said. Certainly, I think we've been educated in the last 20-30 years on the importance of having debates over the use of war power. I think one of the points Clay made so well is that during the Cold War, there was a premium placed on acting fast and delegating authority because of the concerns that if we acted too slow, we would be the subject of a nuclear attack or some sort of communist expansion.
34:08
Then after September 11th, concerns about terrorist activity and the need for an executive to act quickly there. I think we've learned in the last 20-30 years, Democrats and Republicans in our society, that we need more debate around these issues. I think that's such a strong and important moment for our democracy because it reminds people that we need branches of government like Congress to be standing up and offering serious debates. Part of what you're talking about, Clay, seems to me is that these investigations offer a forum for a public discussion of American politics.
34:39
Absolutely. You nailed exactly that what we should really have going on right now is public discussions about policies. Policies that are set forth should have hearings, they should have public hearings. They should be all discussed in the open for people to hear. Congress is the people's representatives. They're the closest representatives to the people, so they really are our voices. You mentioned that we keep voting in the incumbents and people who maybe are getting further away from our voices.
35:06
In the 1970s after Watergate, a new class of legislators were elected, that new young class, and major changes were made in the 1970s. Human rights was incorporated into American foreign policy. Major restraints were put against covert action. Huge secrets came out that the government had been trying to keep from people. So it can happen if people get together and they elect the right people in Congress. If there is a new class ready to go, there could be major changes. Presidents come and go and it's very difficult to steer the ship, but a new class in Congress can actually have a pretty significant impact in just a few years.
35:48
We have seen that happen in 2018.
35:51
Yes
35:52
The change whether one approves of it or not is quite significant. What we've seen with the House of Representatives is a completely different approach to efforts at holding the president accountable, whether one agrees with it or not. One can expect that the 2020 election might produce another class of members of Congress like those in the 1970s like the 2018 class that will be very intent on investigating and discussing policies surrounding a variety of American foreign and domestic issues.
36:22
That more than anything else is why citizens need to pay attention, vote and elect members of Congress who care about these issues, less about whether they're from your party or not and more about whether they have the requisite knowledge, integrity, and commitment to address these issues as Clay and Zachary have laid them out so well. I think today we've learned so much about the role of Congress and how crucial Congress is to questions of war and peace in our society. Clay, thank you so much for sharing your research with us.
36:50
Thank you, guys.
36:51
Zachary, thank you for your as always stunning poem.
36:54
Budding Beatnik.
36:55
Yes, Zachary, he's a budding Beatnik in the 21st century. So much fun and thank you all for joining us on This is Democracy.