The war continues after the battle then.
This is something that's hard for Americans to understand.
Our system is built with the presumption
when war is over, when we sign a piece of paper,
everyone can go home.
It's not what happens.
The following is a conversation with Jeremy Surrey,
a historian at UT Austin.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Jeremy Surrey.
What is the main idea?
The main case that you make in your new book,
Civil War by Other Means,
America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy.
So our democratic institutions in the United States,
they are filled with many virtues
and many elements in their design
that improve our society and allow for innovation,
but they also have many flaws in them
as any institutions created by human beings have.
And the flaws in our institutions go back
to a number of judgments and perspectives
that people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries had.
And those flaws have been built into our institutions
and they continue to hinder innovation
and growth in our society.
Three of the flaws that I emphasize in this book
are flaws of exclusion,
the ways our institutions exclude people,
not just African-Americans, many different groups.
The ways our institutions also give power
to certain people who have position,
rather than skill or intelligence or quality.
And third and most of all,
the ways our institutions embed certain myths in our society,
myths that prevent us from gaining the knowledge
we need to improve our world.
In all of these ways, our democracy is hindered
by the false reverence for institutions
that actually need to be reformed
just as we need to highlight the good elements of them.
That's really what my book is about.
And then the myth, the false reverence,
what are we talking about there?
So there's a way in which we believe
that if we love our country,
it's somehow wrong to criticize our institutions.
I believe if you love your country,
you wanna encourage your institutions
to get better and better.
I love my university where I work,
but I want it to be better.
We have many flaws.
I love my family, but I'm constantly telling family members
how they can be better.
That's what true knowledge leadership is about,
not just cheerleading.
What's the counterpoint to that?
Because the other extreme is a deep,
all-encompassing cynicism towards institutions.
So for me, I like the idea of loving America,
which seems to be sometimes a politicized statement
these days that you believe in the ideals of this country.
That seems to be either a naive
or a political statement the way it's interpreted.
So the flip side of that,
having a healthy skepticism of institutions is good,
but having a complete paralyzing cynicism seems to be bad.
Absolutely, both are ahistorical positions.
What I try to do as a historian
is work in between those spaces.
The virtue is in the middle ground for better or for worse.
And what we have to recognize
is that our institutions are necessary.
There's a reason government exists.
There's a reason our union was created.
That's what Abraham Lincoln was heroically fighting for.
So we have to believe in our union.
We have to believe in our government.
And we as business people as intellectuals,
we have to be part of the solution, not the problem.
But that doesn't mean just ignoring
the deep flaws in our institutions,
even if we find personally ways to get around them.
What really worries me is that there are a lot
of very intelligent, well-intentioned people in our society
who have figured out how to live with the flaws
in our institutions,
rather than how to use their skills
to correct the flaws in our institutions.
There's folks like somebody who lives next door,
to me, Mike Amalus is an anarchist, philosophically,
maybe more than practically,
just sort of argues for that position.
It's an interesting thought experiment, I would say.
And so if you have these flaws as institutions,
one thing to do, as the communists did
at the beginning of the 20th century,
is to burn the thing down and start anew.
And the other is to fix from within,
one slow step at a time.
What's the case for both, from a history perspective?
Sure, so historically, there has always been an urge
to burn down the institutions and start again,
start with a blank slate.
The historical record is that almost never works.
Because what happens when you destroy the institutions,
you gave the example of the Bolshevik Revolution.
When you destroy the institutions,
all you do is in the jungle that's left behind,
you give advantages to those who are the most powerful.
Institutions always place certain limits
upon the most powerful in the jungle.
If you go back to the jungle,
the most powerful are actually going
to have the most influence and most control.
So the revolutionaries who are usually the vulnerable
turn out to then be the victims of the revolution.
And this is exactly what we saw
with the French Revolution, with the Russian Revolution.
So the record for that is not a great record.
There still might be times to do that.
But I think we should be very cautious about that.
The record for working through institutions
is a much better record.
Now, what we have to be careful about
is as we're working through institutions,
not to become bought into them,
not to become of those institutions.
So what I've written about in this book
and in other books, my book on Henry Kissinger, for example,
is how it's important when in an institution
to still bring an outsider perspective.
I believe in being an inside outsider.
And I think most of your listeners are inside outsiders.
They're people who care about what's going on inside,
but they're bringing some new ideas from the outside.
I think the correct statement to say
is most of the listeners, most people aspire
to be inside or outsiders.
But we human nature is such
that we easily become insider insiders.
So like we like that idea, but the reality is,
and I've been very fortunate
because of this podcast to talk to certain folks
that live in certain bubbles.
And it's very hard to know when you're in a bubble
that you should get out of the bubble of thought.
And that's a really tricky thing because like, yeah,
when you're, whether it's politics, whether it's science,
whether it's any pursuits in life,
because everybody around you, all your friends,
you have like a little rat race
and you're competing with each other
and then you get promotion, you get excited
and you can see how you can get more and more power.
It's not like a dark cynical rat race.
It's fun.
That's the process of life.
And then you forget that you just collectively have created
a set of rules for the game that you're playing.
You forget that this game doesn't have to have these rules.
You can break them.
This happens in Wall Street.
Like the financial system,
everybody starts to like collectively agree
on a set of rules that they play
and they don't realize like,
we don't have to be playing this game.
It's tough, it's really tough.
It takes a special kind of human being
as opposed to being anti-establishment on everything,
which also gets a lot of attention,
but being just enough anti-establishment
to figure out ideas how to improve the establishment.
That's such a tricky place to operate.
I agree.
I like the word iconoclastic.
I think it's important to be an iconoclast,
which is to say, you love ideas,
you're serious about ideas,
but you're never comfortable with consensus.
And I write about that in this book.
I've written about that actually a lot
in the New York Times too.
I think consensus is overstated.
As someone who's half Jewish and half Hindu,
I don't wanna live in a society where everyone agrees
because my guess is they're gonna come
after people like me.
I wanna live in a society that's pluralistic.
This is what Abraham Lincoln was really fighting for
in the Civil War.
It's what the Civil War is really about.
I want my books about,
which is that we need a society
where institutions encourage, as you say,
different modes of thought
and respect different modes of thought
and work through disagreement.
So a society should not be a society where everyone agrees.
A democratic society should be a society
where people disagree but can still work together.
That's the Lincoln vision.
And how do you get there?
I think you get there
by having a historical perspective,
always knowing that no matter what moment you're in
and no matter what room you're in with really smart people,
there are always things they're missing.
We know that as historians.
No one is clairvoyant.
And the iconoclast is looking for the things
that have been forgotten, the silences in the room.
And also, I wonder what kind of skill,
what kind of processes are required for the iconoclast
to reveal what is missing to the rest of the room.
Because it's not just shouting with a megaphone
that something is missing
because nobody will listen to you.
You have to convince them.
Right.
It's honestly where I have trouble myself
because I often find myself in that iconoclastic role
and people don't like to hear it.
I like to believe that people are acting out of goodwill,
which I think they usually are,
and that people are open to new ideas.
But you find very quickly,
even those who you think are open-minded,
once they've committed themselves and put their money
and their reputation on the line,
they don't want to hear otherwise.
So in a sense, what you say is bigger
than even being an iconoclast,
it's being able to persuade and work with people
who are afraid of your ideas.
Yeah, I think the key is like in conversations
is to get people out of a defensive position.
Like make them realize we're on the same side
or brothers and sisters and from that place,
I think you just raise the question.
It's like a little, it's a little thought that just lands.
And then I've noticed this time and time again,
just a little subtle thing.
And then months later, it percolates somewhere in the mind.
It's like, all right, that little doubt.
Because I also realized in these battles
when, especially political battles,
people often don't have folks on their side,
like that they can really trust as a fellow human being
to challenge them.
That's a very difficult role to be in.
And because in these battles,
you kind of have a tribe and you have a set of ideas
and there's another tribe and you have a set of ideas.
And when somebody says something counter to your viewpoint,
you almost always want to put them in the other tribe
as opposed to having truly listening to another person.
That takes skill.
But ultimately, I think that's the way to bridge these divides
is having these kinds of conversations.
That's why I'm actually, again, optimistically believe
in the power of social media to do that,
if you design it well.
But currently, the battle rages on on Twitter.
Well, I think what you're getting at,
which is so important is storytelling.
And all the great leaders that I've studied,
some of whom are in this book, some of whom are not,
right, whether they're politicians,
social activists, technologists.
It's the story that gets people in.
People don't respond to an argument.
We're trained, at least in the United States,
we're often trained to argue.
You're told in a class, okay,
this part of the room take this position.
This part of the room take this position.
And that's helpful because it forces you to see different
sides of the argument.
But in fact, those on one side never convinced those
on the other side through argument.
It's through a story that people can identify with.
It's when you bring your argument to life in human terms.
And someone again, like Abraham Lincoln,
was a master at that.
He told stories.
He found ways to disarm people and to move them
without their even realizing they were being moved.
Yeah, not make it a debate, make it tell a story.
That's fascinating.
Because yes, one of some of the most convincing politicians,
I don't feel like they're arguing a point.
They're just telling a story.
And it gets in there, right?
That's right.
That's right.
I mean, when we look at what Zelinsky has done in Ukraine
in response to the Russian invasion,
and I know you were there on the front lines yourself,
it's not that he's arguing a position that persuaded us.
We already believe what we believed about Russia.
But he's bringing the story of Ukrainian suffering to life
and making us see the behavior of the Russians
that is moving opinion around the world.
Well, the interesting stuff,
sometimes it's not actually the story told by the person,
but the story told about the person.
And some of that could be propaganda.
Some of that could be legitimate stories,
which is the fascinating thing.
The power of story is the very power
that's leveraged by propaganda to convince the populace.
But the idea, one of the most powerful ideas
when I traveled in Ukraine,
and in general, to me personally,
the idea that President Zelensky stayed in Kiev
in the early days of war on everybody,
from his inner circle to the United States,
everybody in the West, the NATO, everybody was telling him.
And even on the Russian side,
I assumed they thought he would leave, he would escape.
And he didn't.
From foolishness or from heroism, I don't know.
But if that's a story that I think united a country,
and it's such a small thing, but it's powerful.
It's the most basic of all human stories,
the story of human courage.
A courage.
And I remember watching his social media feed on that,
and he was standing outside, not even in a bunker,
standing outside in Kiev, right?
As the Russian forces are attacking and saying,
I'm here, and this minister is here,
and this minister is here, we're not corrupt,
we're not stooges of the Americans who told us to leave.
We're staying because we care about Ukraine.
And the story of courage, I mean, that's the story
that babies grow up seeing their parents as courageous, right?
It's the most natural of all stories.
And that's also the stories for better awards
that are told throughout history.
Yeah.
Because stories of courage and stories of evil,
those are the two extremes are the ones that are kind of,
it's a nice mechanism to tell the stories of wars,
of conflicts, of struggles, all of it.
Yeah, the tension between those two.
And the reason I believe studying history
and writing about history is so essential
is because it gives us more stories.
The problem with much of our world, I think,
is that we're confronted by data,
we're confronted by information, and of course, it's valuable,
but it's easy to manipulate or misuse information.
It's the stories that give us a structure,
it's the stories where we find morality,
it's the stories where we find political value.
And what do you get from studying history?
You learn more stories about more people.
Yeah, I'm a sucker for courage, for stories of courage.
Like I've been in too many rooms,
I've often seen too many people sort of in subtle ways
sacrificed their integrity and did nothing.
And people that step up when the opinion is unpopular
and they do something where they really put themselves
on the line, where there's their money,
where their well-being, I don't know,
that gives me hope about humanity.
And of course, during the war like Ukraine,
you see that more and more.
Now, other people have a very cynical perspective of it
that saying, oh, those are just narratives
that are constructed for propaganda purposes and so on,
but I've seen it with my own eyes.
There's heroes out there, both small and big.
So just regular citizens and leaders.
One set of heroes I learned about writing this book
that I didn't know about that I should have
are more than 100,000 former slaves
who become Union soldiers during the Civil War.
It's an extraordinary story.
We think of it as North versus South,
white Northern troops versus white Southern troops.
There are, as I said, more than 100,000 slaves,
no education, never anything other than slaves
who flee their plantations, join the Union army.
And what I found in the research
and other historians have written about this too
is they become some of the most courageous soldiers
because they know what they're fighting for,
but there's something more to it than that.
It seems in their stories that there is a humanity,
a human desire for freedom
and a human desire to improve oneself,
even for those who have been denied
even the most basic rights for all their lives.
And I think that story should be inspiring
to all of us as a story of courage
because we all deal with difficulties,
but none of us are starting from slavery.
That's really powerful that that flame,
the longing for freedom can't be extinguished
through the generations of slavery.
So that's something you talk about.
There's some deep sense in which
while the war was in part about slavery,
it's not, the slaves themselves fought for their freedom
and they won their freedom.
I don't think it's a war about slavery.
I think it's a war about freedom
because if you say it's a war about slavery,
then it sounds like it's an argument
between the slave masters
and the other white guys who didn't want slavery to exist.
And of course that argument did exist,
but it wasn't, it was a war over freedom,
especially after 1863 into the second year of the war
when Lincoln, because of war pressures,
signs Emancipation Proclamation,
which therefore says that the contraband,
the property of Southerners, i.e. their slaves,
will now be freed and brought into the Union Army.
That makes it about freedom.
Already the slaves were leaving the plantations.
They knew what was going on
and they were gonna get out of slavery as soon as they could.
But now it becomes a war over-freeing them,
over-opening that opportunity for them.
And that's how the war ends.
That's really important, right?
And that's where we are in our politics today.
It's the same debate.
It's why I wrote this book.
The challenge of our time is to understand
how do we make our society open
to more freedom for more people?
So let's go to the beginning.
How did the American Civil War start and why?
So the American Civil War starts
because of our flawed institutions.
The founders had mixed views of slavery,
but they wanted a system that would eventually
work its way toward opening for more people of more kinds.
Not necessarily equality,
but they wanted a more open democratic system.
But our institutions were designed in ways
that gave disproportionate power to slave holders
in particular states in the union.
Through the Senate, through the electoral college,
through many of the institutions we talk about
in our politics today.
Therefore, that part of the country
was in the words of Abraham Lincoln,
holding the rest of the country hostage.
For a poor white man like Abraham Lincoln,
born in Kentucky, who makes his way in Illinois,
slavery was an evil, not just for moral reasons.
It was an evil because it denied him democratic opportunity.
Why would anyone hire poor Abe to do something
if they could get a slave to do it for free?
And the economy of opportunity for him
had to be an economy that was open
and that did not have slavery,
particularly in the new states
that were coming into the union.
Lincoln was one of the creators of the Republican Party,
which was a party dedicated to making sure
all new territory was open to anyone who was willing to work
any male figure who would be paid for their work,
free labor, free soil, free men, basic capitalism.
Southerners, Southern plantation owners
were an aristocracy that did not want that.
They wanted to use slavery and expand slavery
into the new territories.
What caused the Civil War, the clash,
and our institutions that were unable to adapt
and continued to give disproportionate power
to these Southern plantation slave owners.
The Supreme Court was dominated by them.
Senate was dominated by them.
And so the Republican Party came into power
as a critique of that.
And Southerners unwilling to accept,
Southern Confederates unwilling to accept that change
went to war with the union.
So who was on each side?
The union Confederates, what are we talking about?
What are the states, how many people?
What's like the demographics and the dynamics of each side?
The union side is much, much larger, right?
In terms of population, I think about 22 million people.
And it is what we would today recognize
as all the states basically north of Virginia.
The south is the states in the south
of the Mason-Dixon line.
So Virginia and they're on south west through Tennessee.
So Texas, for example, is in the Confederacy.
Tennessee's in the Confederacy.
But other states like Missouri are border states.
And the Confederacy is a much smaller entity.
It's made up of about 9 million people
plus about 4 million slaves.
And it is a agricultural economy.
Whereas the Northern economy
is a more industrializing economy.
Interestingly enough, the Confederate states
are in some ways more international than the Northern states
because they are exporters of cotton, exporters of tobacco.
So they actually have very strong
international economic ties, very strong ties to Great Britain.
The United States was the largest source of cotton
to the world before the Civil War.
Egypt replaces that a little bit during the Civil War.
But all the English textiles were American cotton
from the south.
And so it is the southern half of what we would call
the eastern part of the United States today
with far fewer people.
It's made up, the Confederacy is, of landed families.
Wealth in the Confederacy was land and slaves.
The Northern United States is made up predominantly
of small business owners
and then larger financial interests
such as the banks in New York.
And what about the military?
Who are the people that picked out guns?
What are the numbers there?
So the union also outnumbered the Confederacy.
By far, but it is a really interesting question
because there's no conscription in the constitution.
Unlike most other countries,
our democracy is formed on the presumption
that human beings should not be forced
to go into the military if they don't want to.
Most democracies in the world today actually still
require military service.
The United States is very rarely in its history.
Done that is not in our constitution.
So during the Civil War
and the first months and years of the Civil War,
Abraham Lincoln has to go to the different states
of the governors and ask the governors for volunteers.
So the men who take up arms,
especially in the first months of the war,
are volunteers in the North.
In the South, they're actually conscripted.
And then as the war goes on,
the union will pass the conscription acts of 1862 and 1863,
which for the first time,
and this is really important
because it creates new presidential powers.
For the first time,
Lincoln will have presidential power to force men into the army,
which is what leads to all kinds of draft riots
in New York and elsewhere.
But suffice it to say,
the Union Army throughout the war is often three times
the size of the Confederate army.
What's the relationship between this no conscription
and people standing up to fight for ideas
and the Second Amendment?
A well-regulated militia being necessary
to the security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed.
Or in Texas.
Yes, so what's the role of that in this story?
The American population is already armed before the war.
And so even though the Union and the Confederate armies
will manufacture and purchase arms,
it is already an armed population.
So the American presumption going into the war
is that citizens will not be forced to serve,
but they will serve in militias to protect their own property.
And so the Second Amendment,
the key part of the Second Amendment for me as a historian
is the well-regulated militia part.
The presumption that citizens,
as part of their civic duty,
do not have a duty to join a national army, Prussian style,
but are supposed to be involved
in defending their communities.
And that's the reality, it's also a bit of a myth.
And so Americans have throughout their history
been gun owners, not AK-47 owners, but gun owners.
And gun ownership has been for the purpose
of community self-defense.
The question coming out of that is,
what does that mean in terms of,
do you have access to everything?
Antonin Scalia even himself asked this question
on the Supreme Court, he said,
in one of the gun cases,
you have the right to defend yourself,
but you don't have the right to own an Uzi.
You don't have the right to have a tank.
I don't think they'd let you park a tank,
Lex, in your parking spot, right?
I looked into this.
I think there's a gray area around tanks, actually.
I think you're legit allowed to own a tank.
Oh, you really?
I think there's, well, somebody look into this,
somebody told me, but I could see like that,
because it's very difficult for that to get out of hand.
Right, right.
Okay, I mean, there may be one guy in a tank,
that you could be breaking laws in terms of the width
of the vehicle that you're using to operate.
Anyway, that's a hilarious discussion.
But certain to make the case,
speaking of AK-47s and rifles,
and back to Ukraine for a second,
one of the fascinating social experiments
that happened in Ukraine at the beginning of the war,
is they handed out guns to everybody, rifles,
and crime went down, which I think is really interesting.
I hope somebody does a kind of psychological data collection
analysis effort here to try to understand why.
Because it's not obvious to me that in a time of war,
if you give guns to the entire populace,
anyone who wants a gun, it's not going to,
especially in a country who has historically suffered
from corruption, not result in robberies,
and assaults, and all that kind of stuff,
there's a deep lesson there.
Now, I don't know if you can extend that lesson
beyond war time though.
Right, that's the question, what happens after the war?
I mean, my inclination would be to say,
that can work during war,
but you have to take the guns back after the war.
But they might be very upset when you try to take the gun.
That's the problem.
No, that's precisely the problem.
That's actually part of the story here.
I mean, what happens after the Civil War,
after Appomattox in 1865,
is that many Southern soldiers go home with their guns
and they misuse their weapons to, quite frankly,
shoot and intimidate former slaves who are now citizens.
And this is a big problem.
I talk about this in the book in Memphis in 1866.
It is former Confederate soldiers and police officers
and judges who are responsible for hundreds of rapes
within a two day period and destroying
an entire community of African Americans.
And they're able to do that
because they brought their guns home.
But underneath the issue of guns there
is just the fundamental issue of hatred
and inability to see other humans in this world
as having equal value as another human being.
What was the election of 1860 like
that brought Lincoln to power?
So the election of 1860 was a very divisive election.
We have divisive contested elections from 1860,
really, until 1896.
The 1860 election is the first election
where a Republican is elected president,
that is Lincoln, but he's elected president
with less than 40% of the vote
because you have two sets of Democrats running,
Democrats who are out to defend the Confederacy
and everything, and then Democrats who want to compromise,
but still keep slavery.
Most famous, Stephen Douglas, who argues for basically
allowing each state to make its own decisions,
popular sovereignty, as he called it.
And then you still have traditional wigs who are running.
That was the party that preceded the Republican Party.
So you have four candidates, Lincoln wins a plurality.
Lincoln is elected largely because the states
that are anti-slavery or anti-expansion of slavery
are not a majority, but they're a plurality.
And the other states have basically a factionalized.
And so they're unable to ever united front against him.
Was the main topic at hand slavery?
I think the main topic at hand at that time
was the expansion of slavery into new territories.
Into new territories.
It was not, whether to abolish slavery or not,
Lincoln is very careful and his correspondence is clear.
He wants no one on his side during the election
to say that he's arguing for abolitionism,
even though he personally supported that.
What he wants to say is the Republican Party
is for no new slave territories.
Did he make it clear that he was for abolition?
No, he was intentionally unclear about that.
What do you think he was throughout his life?
Was there a deep, because that takes quite a vision.
Like you look at society today and it takes quite a man
to see that there's something deeply broken
where a lot of people take for granted.
I mean, into modern day, you could see factory farming.
That's one of those things that in 100 years
we might see is like the torture,
the mass torture of animals could be seen as evil.
But just to look around and wake up to that,
especially in a leadership position.
Yeah, was he able to see that?
In some ways, yes, in some ways, no.
I mean, the premise of your question is really important
that to us, it's obvious that slavery is a horror.
But to those who had grown up with it,
who had grown up seeing that,
it was hard to imagine a different world.
So you're right, Lincoln's imagination,
like everyone else's was limited by his time.
I don't think Lincoln imagined a world
of equality between the races,
but he had come to see that slavery was horrible.
And historians have differed in how he came to this.
Part of it is that he had a father who treated him
like a slave and you can see in his early correspondence,
how much he hates that his father, who was a struggling farmer,
was basically trying to control Lincoln's life.
And he came to understand personally,
I think how horrible it is to have someone else
tell you what you should do with your labor,
not giving you your own choices.
But Lincoln was also a pragmatist.
This is what made him a great politician.
He wanted to work through institutions,
not to burn them down.
And he famously said that if he could preserve the union
and stop the spread of slavery
by allowing slavery to stay in the South, he would.
If he could do it by eliminating slavery in the South,
he would, if he could do it by buying the slaves
and sending them somewhere else, he would.
His main goal, what he ran on,
was that the new territories west of Illinois,
that they would be areas for free poor white men like him,
not slavery.
What do you learn about human nature?
If we step back and look at the big picture of it,
that slavery has been a part of human civilization
for thousands of years,
that this American slavery is not a new phenomenon.
I think history teaches us a very pessimistic
and a very optimistic lesson.
The pessimistic lesson is that human beings are capable
of doing enormous harm and brutality
to their fellow man and woman.
And we see that with genocide in our world today.
That human beings are capable with the right stimuli,
the right incentives of enslaving others.
I mean, genocide is in the same category, right?
The optimistic side is that human beings are also capable
with proper leadership and governance
of resisting those urges,
of putting those energies into productive uses
for other people.
But I don't think that comes naturally.
I think that's where leadership and institutions matter.
But leadership and institutions contain us.
We contain, we can civilize ourselves.
For a long time, we stopped using that verb to civilize.
I believe in civilization.
I believe there's a civilizing role.
Lincoln spoke of that, right?
So did Franklin Roosevelt,
the civilizing role that government plays.
Education is only a part of that.
It's creating laws, minimal laws,
but laws nonetheless that incentivize
and penalize us for going to the dark side.
But if we allow that to happen,
or we have leaders who encourage us to go to the dark side,
we can very quickly go down a deep, dark tunnel.
See, I believe that most people want to do good.
And the power of institutions, if done well,
they encourage and protect you if you want to do good.
So if you're just in the jungle,
from a game theoretic perspective,
you get punished for doing good.
So being extremely self-centered and greedy
and even violent and manipulative
can have, from a game theory perspective, benefits.
But I don't think that's what most humans want.
Institutions allow you to do what you actually want,
which is to do good for the world, do good for others.
And actually in so doing, do good for yourself.
Institutions protect that natural human instinct, I think.
And what you just articulated,
which I think the historical record is very strong on,
is the classic liberal position.
That's what liberalism means in a 19th century sense, right?
That you believe in civilizing human beings
through institutions that begins with education.
Kindergarten is an institution.
Laws, and just basic habits that are enforced by society.
How do you think people thought about the idea?
How do they square the idea of all men are created equal?
Those very powerful words at the founding of this nation.
How do they square that with slavery?
For many Americans saying all men were created equal
required slavery because it meant that the equality
of white people was dependent upon others
doing the work for us.
In the way some people view animal labor today.
And maybe in 50 years, we'll see that as a contradiction.
But the notion among many Americans in the 17th, 18th century,
and this would also be true for those in other societies,
was that equality for white men
meant that you had access to the labor of others.
That would allow you to equalize other differences.
So you could produce enough food
so your family could live equally well nourished
as other families because you had slaves on the land
doing the farming for you.
This is Thomas Jefferson's world.
So it's like animal farm, all animals are equal
but some are more equal than others.
That's right.
And I think that's still the way people view things.
Yeah.
Right?
I don't know if that's a liberal position
or it's just a human position
that all humans have equal value
just on the basic level of humanity.
But do we really believe that?
We want to, I don't know if our society
really believes that yet.
And I don't know exactly.
I mean, it's super complicated, of course,
when you realize the amount of suffering
that's going on in the world
where there's children dying from starvation in Africa
and to say that all humans are equal
while a few dollars can save their life.
And instead we buy a Starbucks coffee
and are willing to pay 10, 50, $100,000 to save a child,
our child, like somebody from our family
and don't want to spend $2 to save a child over in Africa.
So there's, and I think Sam Harris or others
have talked about like, well, I don't want to live
in a world where we'd rather send $2 to Africa.
There's something deeply human about saving those
that are really close to you, the ones we love.
So that like hypocrisy that seems to go attention
with the basic ethics of alleviating suffering
in the world, that's also really human.
That's also part of this ideal of all men are created equal.
It's a complicated, messy world, ethically.
It is, but I mean, I think,
at least the way I think about it is,
so what are the things even within our own society
where we choose to do something with our resources
that actually doesn't help the lives of many people?
So we invest in all kinds of things
that are often because someone is lobbying for them.
This happens on both sides of the aisle.
This is not a political statement, right?
Rather than saying, you know, if we invested
a little more of our money, really a little more,
we can make sure every child in this country
had decent healthcare.
We can make sure every child in this country
had what they needed to start life healthy.
And that would not require us to sacrifice a lot,
but it would require us to sacrifice a few things.
Yeah, there's a balance there.
And I also noticed the passive-aggressive statement
you're making about how I'm spending my money.
And it'll be too spending it a little more wisely.
I, you know, I like to eat the nice meals
at nice restaurants.
So I'm as guilty of this as you are.
I got a couch and that couch serves no purpose.
It looks nice though.
No, it's a nice looking couch.
It's a nice looking couch.
It's actually very clean.
I got it for occasional Instagram photos
to look like an adult.
Okay.
Cause everything else in my life is a giant mess.
What role did the ideas that the founding documents
of this country play in this war,
the war between the union and the Confederate States
and the founding ideas that were supposed to be
unifying to this country?
Is there, is there interesting tensions there?
Well, there were certainly tensions
because built into the founding documents,
of course, is slavery and inequality
and women's exclusion from voting and things of that sort.
But the real brilliance of Abraham Lincoln
is to build on the brilliance of the founders
and turn the union position
into the defense of the core ideas of the country.
So the Confederacy is defending one idea,
the idea of slavery.
Lincoln takes the basket of all the deeper ideas
and puts them together.
Three things the war is about for Lincoln
and this is why his speech is still resonate with us today.
You know, every time I'm in Washington,
I go to the Lincoln Memorial.
It's the best memorial, best monument,
I think in the world actually.
And there are always people there reading,
Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural.
Lincoln had two years of education,
yet he found the words to describe
what our country was about better than anyone.
And it's because he went back to these founding values,
three values, we already talked about one, freedom.
That, and freedom is actually complex,
but it's also simple.
The simple Lincoln definition is that freedom
is the right of each person to work for himself or herself.
Which is to say, it doesn't mean you own your own company.
It means you control your labor.
And no one can tell you you have to work for a certain wage.
You might not have a job, but you decide.
You decide, right?
You can see where that comes from
his own background as a poor man, right?
So freedom is the control of your own labor.
Second, democracy, government of the people
by the people for the people.
The government is to serve the people,
so come from the people.
And then the third point, justice
and helping all human beings.
He, at the end of his life, as the Civil War is ending,
he never declares that the South should be punished.
His argument is that we shouldn't apologize
for their misdeeds,
but that all should be part of this future.
He's not arguing for consensus.
He's arguing for a society
where everyone has a stake going forward.
So justice, democracy, freedom.
Those are the gifts.
I talked about the flaws in our system.
Those are the virtues in our system
that our founders, coming out of the Enlightenment, planted.
And Lincoln carries them forward.
He gives us the 2.0 version of them.
So a few tangent questions about each of those.
So one, on democracy,
people often bring up that the United States
is not a democracy.
It's a republic that is representative.
Is there some interesting tensions there in terminology?
Or is, yeah, can you maybe kind of expand
on the different versions of democracy?
So the philosophy of democracy,
but also the practical implementations of it.
Sure, the founders intended for us to be a democracy.
This argument that they wanted us to be a republic
instead of a democracy is one of these made up myths.
They believed that fundamentally what they were creating
was a society, very few of which had existed before,
a society where the government would be of the people,
by the people, for the people.
That's what they expected, right?
That's what it meant.
So the legitimacy of our government was not gonna be
that the person in charge was of royal blood.
That's the way the Europeans did it.
Or that the person in charge had killed enough people,
a la Genghis Khan,
or that the person in charge
was serving a particular class.
It was that the person in charge,
the institutions were to serve the people.
They adopted republican tools to get there
because they were fearful appropriately
of simply throwing every issue up to the masses.
Democracy is not mob rule.
Democracy is where you create procedures
to assess the public will
and to act in ways that serve the public
without harming other elements of the public
that are not in the majority.
That's why we have a constitution and a bill of rights.
And for their time, the founders did not believe
that women should be part of this discussion,
that they were not capable.
They were wrong about that.
In their time, that's how they thought.
We've of course changed that.
They believed you had to have property to have a stake.
We don't believe that anymore.
So we can argue over the details
and those 50 years from now will criticize us
for the way we think about these things.
But it was fundamentally about,
this is the radicalism of the American experiment
that government should serve the people, all people.
So democracy means of the people,
by the people, for the people.
And then it doesn't actually give any details
of how you implement that.
Because you could implement all kinds of voice.
And I think what we've learned as historians,
I think what the founders knew,
because they were very well read
in the history of Rome and Greece,
was that democracy will always have unique characteristics
for the culture that it's in.
If coming out of the war against Russia,
Ukraine is able to build a better democracy
than it had before.
It's never gonna look like the United States.
I'm not saying it's gonna be worse or better.
A culture matters.
The particular history of societies matters.
Japan is a vibrant democracy.
I've been there many times.
It does not look at all like the American democracy.
So democracy is a set of values.
The implementation of those values
is a set of practical institutional decisions
one makes based in one's cultural position.
So just to link on that topic,
is there, if you do representative,
you said like, democracy should not,
one failure mode is mob rule.
So it should not descend into that.
Not every issue should be up to everybody.
Correct.
Okay, so you have representation,
but Stalin similarly felt
that he could represent the interests of the public.
He was also helping represent the interests of the public.
So that's a failure mode too.
If the people representing the public
become more and more powerful,
they start becoming detached
from actually being able to represent
or having just a basic human sense
of what the public wants.
I think being of the people,
by the people, for the people
means you are in some way accountable to the people.
And the problem with the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union,
this was already evident before Stalin came into power,
is the same problem the Communist Party of China has today,
which is that you have leadership that's not accountable.
Well, let me go then to one of the other three principles
of freedom, because one of the ways
to keep government accountable
is the freedom of the press.
So there's the internet and on the internet,
there's social networks and one of them is called Twitter.
I think you have an account there.
People should follow you.
And recently people have been throwing around recently
for a while the words of freedom of speech.
Just out of curiosity, for tangent upon a tangent,
what do you think of freedom of speech?
Is it as today and as it was at that time
during the Civil War after the Civil War
and throughout the history of America?
So freedom of speech has always been
one of the core tenants of American democracy.
And I'm near absolutist on it
because I think that people should have the right to speak.
What makes our democracy function
is that there is always room for,
quite frankly, people like you and me
who like to disagree and have reasons to disagree.
So I am against almost all forms of censorship.
The only time I believe in censorship
is if somehow an individual or a newspaper
has stolen the Ukrainian plans
for their next military movements in the next week.
You should not be able to publish that right now,
maybe after they act.
But criticism, opinion, interpretation
should be wide open.
Now, that doesn't mean though
that you have the right to come to my classroom
and start shouting and saying whatever you want.
You have the right on the street corner to do that.
But my classroom is a classroom for my students
with a particular purpose.
It's sorry about that from last week.
I'll never do it again.
I apologize.
Really sorry.
It's okay.
Never happened.
I get drunk.
So the people who don't know you're a professor
at UT Austin and it's just nearby.
So sometimes I get a little drunk and wander in there.
I apologize.
You're not the only one.
Was that you?
I didn't even know it was you.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
So the point is that free speech is not licensed
to invade someone else's space.
And I also believe in private enterprise.
So I think that if I owned a social media network,
I don't, it would be up to me to decide
who gets to speak on that network and who doesn't.
And then people could decide not to use it
if they don't want to use it.
But there's a, so yes,
that's one of the founding principles.
So oftentimes when you talk about censorship,
that's government censorship.
So social media, if you run a social media company,
you should be able to decide from a technical perspective
of what freedom of speech means.
But there's some deeper ethical, philosophical sense
of how do you create a world where every voice is heard
of the people, by the people, for the people?
That's not a, that's a complicated technical problem.
When you have a public square,
how do you have a productive conversation
where critics aren't silenced, but at the same time,
whoever has the bigger megaphone
is not going to crowd out everybody else?
So I think it's very important to create rules of the game
that give everyone a chance to get started
and that allow for guideposts to be created
from the will of the community, which is to say
that we as a community can say,
we can't stop people from speaking,
but we as a community can say that in certain forms,
we're going to create certain rules
for who gets to speak and who doesn't, under what terms,
but they can still have somewhere else to go.
So I believe in opening space for everyone,
but creating certain spaces within those spaces
that are designed for certain purposes.
That's what a school does.
So I will not bring someone to speak to my students
who is unqualified.
It's not a political judgment.
The rules at a university,
or we're an educational institution,
you need to have the educational credentials
to come speak about artificial intelligence.
I'm not going to bring some bum off the street
to do that, right?
We have certain rules,
but that bum on the street can still,
in his own space or her own space,
can still say what he or she wants to say
about artificial intelligence.
This is how newspapers work.
When I write for the New York Times,
they have an editorial team.
The editorial team makes certain decisions.
They check facts and there's certain points of view.
They don't allow anti-submitted comments, right?
You're not going to be able to publish
an anti-submitted screed,
whether you think it's true or not true
in the New York Times,
but that doesn't prevent you from finding somewhere else.
So we allow entities to create certain rules of the game.
We make transparent what those rules are,
and then we as citizens know where to go
to get our information.
What's been a problem the last few decades, I think,
is it hasn't been clear what the rules are
in different places
and what are the legitimate places
to get information and what are not.
Yeah, the transparency seems to be very critical there.
Even from the New York Times,
I think there's a lot of skepticism
about which way the editorial processes lean.
I mean, there's a public perception
that it's, especially for opinions,
it's going to be very left-leaning in the New York Times.
And without transparency
about what the process is like about the people involved,
all you do, like conspiracy theories
and the general public opinion about that
is going to go wild.
And I think that's okay for the New York Times.
People can, in a collective way, figure stuff out.
Like they could say, okay, New York Times,
73% of the time is going to lean left.
And they're going to have a loose estimation or whatever.
But for a platform like Twitter,
it seems like it's more complicated.
Of course, there should be rules of the game,
but I think there's,
maybe I want to say a responsibility
to also create incentives for people
to do high-effort empathetic debate
versus throwing poop at each other.
Yeah, I think those are two slightly different things,
though I agree.
I think that my view is that the failure of Facebook
and Twitter and others in recent years
has been that they have been completely
untransparent about their rules.
So what I would think would advance us
is if they had a set of rules that were clear,
that were consistently followed
and we understood what they were,
that would also tell us as consumers
how much, what the biases are,
how to understand what's going on.
It seems, if I might say,
that since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter,
it's been arbitrary and who's thrown off
and who's not thrown off.
And that's a real problem.
Arbitrariness is in some ways the opposite of democracy.
But there's also a hidden arbitrariness
in interpretation of the rules.
So for example, what comment incites violence?
That's really, really difficult to figure out to me.
Like there's a gray area.
Obviously there's very clear versions of that.
But if I know anything about people
that try to incite violence,
they're usually not coming out and clearly saying it.
They're usually kind of dog whistling it.
And same with racism and anti-Semitism, all of that.
That's usually dog whistles.
So like, and they usually have fun
playing with the rules, playing around the rules.
So it's a gray area.
Same with June COVID, misinformation.
What's misinformation, right?
I agree.
And some of these are age-old problems.
Our legal system, common law has been struggling
with what is incitement to violence
since the first Supreme Court decisions
in the 18th century, right?
So you're absolutely right.
But I will say this.
There are certain things
that are clearly incitement to violence.
I'll give you very clear examples.
Just make it personal, right?
My wife is an elected official here in Austin.
There have been people who put things up on Twitter
calling for her to be hanged
or calling for her to be attacked.
That's incitement to violence.
When you specifically call for violence against someone.
I agree, there's a lot of other stuff where it's a gray area,
but we could start if we're applying these rules
by getting that material off of these sites.
So some of that is a problem of scale too,
but the gray area is still a forever problem
that we may never be able to solve.
And maybe the tension within the gray area
is the very process of democracy,
but saying like we need to take our country back.
Is that incitement to violence?
I don't think that.
I think we need to take our country back, just that?
No.
But then, you know-
Because I might say that.
I might say we need to take our-
I say that all the time.
Again, I walk around drunk just screaming at everybody.
I thought you wanted us to take you back.
Exactly.
I was very confused.
My messaging needs to work.
But let's go to the January 6th example, right?
To say, hang Mike Pence, that's incitement to violence.
Yeah.
To say, go get Nancy, that's incitement to violence.
Yeah, it's very clear.
Again, I don't think that's the big problem.
The big problem is the gray area, but yeah.
And the other problem is just how to get-
how to technically find the large scale of comments
and posts and so on that are doing this kind of clear-
Yeah, but it's something for you to solve.
You're the-
I understand, I understand.
I mean, don't ask me those questions.
Well, I have to say, some of that is motivation,
some of that is vision, and some of that is execution.
So for example, just to go briefly on a dark topic,
something I've recently became aware of is,
Facebook and Twitter and so on.
People post violence on there, like videos of violence,
child porn, some of the darkest things in this world.
And to find them at scale is a difficult problem.
And to act on it aggressively is a difficult problem.
But that, I think part of this motivation,
like saying, this is a big problem.
We need to take this on.
We need to find all the darkest aspects of human nature
that rise and appear on our platform and remove them
so that we can create a place like for humanity to flourish
through the process of conversation.
But it's just hard.
It's just really hard.
When you look at like millions of posts,
trillions of interactions,
it's wild with like the amount of data.
But where we are now with social media seemed wild
and impossible five years ago, right?
Yes.
I actually, what frustrates me is I think
there are people who have politicized this issue
in unnecessary ways.
Everyone, regardless of their politics,
should support what you just said.
Investing our money, maybe grants from the federal government
in AI skilled people like you,
figuring out ways to get violent videos off of there.
That shouldn't be political.
Well, some of that also requires being transparent
from a social media company perspective
and transparent in a way that really resists being political.
To be able to be transparent about your fight
against these evils while still not succumbing
to the sort of the political narratives of it.
That's tricky, but you have to do that kind of,
and walk calmly through the fire.
Because that's what Twitter feels like
if you're being political.
It's like a firing squad from every side.
And as a leader, you have to kind of walk calmly.
And that is where we need a new generation
of people who will have diverse politics
but will stand up against that, right?
I mean, that's the lesson from after the Civil War
is where progress is made.
The war doesn't solve problems of hate.
Where progress is made is where you have local leaders
and others who stand up and say, we can differ,
but we're not going, we're going to stop calling people
from certain backgrounds, monkeys,
which was a common thing to do.
At that time, Jews are still called monkeys
in certain places, right?
People have to stand up while still maintaining
their political differences.
Several hundred thousand people died.
What made this war such a deadly war?
It's extraordinary how many people died,
more than half a million.
And this was without a single automatic rifle,
without a single bomb.
It was mostly in hand-to-hand combat,
which is to say that these 600,000 or so people who died,
they died where the person who killed them
was standing within a few feet of them.
And that's really hard.
Most of the killing that happens in wars today
is actually from a distance.
It's by a drone, it's by a bomb, it's by a rocket,
or by an automatic weapon.
And just to make this even more focused,
to this day, the deadliest day in American history
was during the Civil War.
September 1862 in Antietam, more than 22,000 Americans
killed one another hand-to-hand.
There hasn't been a day that deadly in American history
since then, that's amazing considering
the technological changes.
What was in the mind of those soldiers on each side?
Was their conviction for ideas,
was it, did they hate the other side?
I think actually they were fighting out of fear.
What we know from reading their letters,
what we know from the accounts,
is that yes, they're ideas that are promoted to them
to get them to the battlefield,
they believe in what they're doing,
but here it's the same as World War I,
and I think the Civil War and World War I
are very similar as wars.
You are in these horrible conditions,
you're attacked, and you have the chance
to either kill the other side and live or die.
And you fight to live,
and you fight to save the people next to you.
What is true about war,
what is both good and dangerous about it,
is you form an almost unparalleled bond
with those on your side.
This is the men under arms scenario, right?
And that's where the killing goes,
and it's a civil war which means
sometimes it's brother against brother, quite literally.
And what it teaches us is how human beings
can be put into fighting and will commit enormous damage.
And that's why this happens, it goes on for four years.
In just the extensive research you've done on this war
for this book, what are some of the worst
and some of the best aspects of human nature that you found?
Like you said, brother against brother,
that's pretty powerful.
They're both, right?
So the level of violence that human beings are capable of,
how long they're able to sustain it.
The South should not have,
the Confederacy should not have lasted in this war
as long as it did.
By the end, I mean, they're starving and they keep fighting.
So the resilience in war of societies
and the power of hate to move people.
What are the bright sides?
You see in Lincoln and Grant,
who I talk about a lot in the book as well, Ulysses Grant,
you see the ability of empathetic figures
to still rise above this in spite of all the horror.
Lincoln went to visit more soldiers in war
than any president ever has.
Often at personal peril,
because he was close to the lines and he connected.
It wasn't propaganda.
There weren't always reporters following him.
He was able to build empathy in this context.
And I think, as I said, war is horrible as it is,
often gives opportunities to certain groups.
So African-Americans, former slaves
are able to prove themselves as citizens.
Jews did this an enormous number in World War II.
Henry Kissinger, who I wrote about before,
he really only gets recognized as an American.
He's a German Jewish immigrant.
He's seen as an American
because of his service in World War II.
So the bright side of this
is that often in the case of war, on your own side,
you will let go of some of your prejudices.
Ulysses Grant has a total transformation.
He goes into the civil war, an anti-Semite and a racist.
He comes out with actually very enlightened views
because he sees what Jewish soldiers
and what African-American soldiers did.
What's Ulysses Grant's story?
What do you learn from him?
Was he a hero or a villain of this war?
I think he's a hero, though he's a flawed hero,
as all heroes are.
He's a man from Ohio and Illinois
who was really a failed businessman, time and again,
and had an ability to command people in war.
Where did this come from?
He was a clear communicator and an empathetic figure.
He tended to drink too much,
but he was the kind of person people wanted to follow.
They trusted him.
And so in battle, that became very important.
And the second thing is he did his homework.
He had a sense of the terrain,
he had a sense of the environment he was operating in,
and he was ruthless in pursuing what he had studied.
So he turns out at battles like Vicksburg and elsewhere
to actually undertake some pretty revolutionary maneuvers.
And then he figures out
that the advantage now is on his side in numbers
and he just pounds him to death.
Similar to what the United States does
at the end of World War II with Germany and Japan.
He comes out of the war grant, does.
He's a believer in union.
He wants to protect former slaves and other groups.
And he tries to use the military for that purpose.
He's limited.
And then as president, he tries to do that as well.
Right now, we still use many of the laws
that were passed during Grant's presidency
to prosecute insurrectionists.
So the 900 or so people who have been prosecuted
for breaking into the Capitol
and attacking police on January 6th,
those insurrectionists,
they've been prosecuted under the 1871
anti-Cluckluck clan law.
So that's a big accomplishment by Grant
and we still benefit from it.
The problem is Grant was not a great politician.
Unlike Lincoln, he didn't give good speeches.
He wasn't a persuasive figure in a political space.
And so he had trouble building support
for what he was doing,
even though he was trying to do what in the end,
I think, with the right things.
What was the role of the KKK at that time?
So the Ku Klux Klan is formed at the end of the Civil War
by Confederate veterans, first in Tennessee
in Pulaski, Tennessee, and then it spreads elsewhere.
And there are other groups that are similar,
the red shirts and various others.
These are veterans of the Confederate army
who come home and are committed to continuing the war.
They are gonna use their power at home
and their weapons to intimidate
and if necessary kill people who challenge their authority,
not just African Americans, Jews, Catholics,
various others,
they are going to basically protect
the continued rule of the same families
who owned the slaves before in post-slavery,
Tennessee and post-slavery, South Carolina.
And when we get to voting,
they're often the groups that are preventing people
from voting.
The white sheets and the ritual around that
was all an effort to provide a certain
ritualistic legitimacy and hide identity,
though everyone knew who they were.
Oh, so that whole brand, that whole practice
was there from the very beginning.
Have you studied the KKK's history a little bit?
I have and there are a number of other historians
who have too, so I've used their research as well.
I'm kind of curious.
I have to admit that my knowledge of it
is very kind of caricature knowledge.
I'm sure there's interesting stories and threads
because I think there's different competing organizations
or something like that within the United States.
And I feel like through that lens,
you can tell a story of the United States also
of these different...
There are often business associations.
I mean, there's a lot of work showing
that actually people joined the KKK
for the reasons I just laid out,
but also because it was networking for your business.
You gain legitimacy in the area
that you were in.
So these were community groups that were formed
to help white business people.
They helped white sheriffs get elected.
What we have to understand today
is when we're debating policing,
this history matters enormously, right?
I have nothing against police.
My cousin, one of my closest relatives
just retired from 25 years
in the New York Police Department.
Thank God he survived.
I have deep respect.
He's one of the best public servants I know.
But what we also have to recognize
as we respect police officers
is that for many communities in our country,
they know this history.
And the KKK in the 1870s and in the 1930s,
you look at any KKK organization
as I have in my research and you find the police chiefs
or the KKK members,
the local police officers, local judges,
because it was how you became police chief.
So these groups infiltrated
some of the main institutions in our nation.
I don't even think they infiltrated.
I think they were part of those institutions.
The deeper question today in the 21st century
is one, how much of that is still there
and how much of the history of that
reverberates through the institutions.
And I'm making the latter point
that it's not there that much now,
but people remember it.
Well, as some people would even say,
it's not there at all.
That there is not institutional racism or policing.
But if that's the case,
then you can also say that
if there is not direct institutional racism there,
what is it?
The echoes of history still have effects.
Of course.
And that's really important
and that we have to take that seriously.
That's not an excuse for people then saying
nasty things about the police.
But it is what we have to recognize.
Look, I'm Jewish and there are certain elements
of Russian behavior today I see in Ukraine
that reverberate with the history
of how my grandparents dealt with pogroms in Russia, right?
Even though what Putin is doing in Ukraine
might not technically be a pogrom,
that history matters in how I view these issues.
And that's a reality.
Yeah, I had, I went to 7-Eleven recently
and what did I eat?
I ate one of their salads.
I'm sorry, I love 7-Eleven.
I'm sorry, I ate one of the salads
and got like terrible food poisoning.
I was suffering for like four days.
And now I can't, I love 7-Eleven.
I love going to 7-Eleven late at night in sweatpants
and just I escaped the world.
I'm listening to an audio book
and now every time I pass that salad,
for the rest of my life, I would have hate for that salad.
So history matters.
Even if the salad is no longer have any bad stuff in it,
it's probably the lettuce or something, whatever.
Mostly for humor's sake,
but I'm also giving a kind of metaphor
that history can have an individual
and a large-scale society effect on human interactions,
both the good and the bad.
If you actually recommend to me offline books on the KKK,
they'll be really-
I'm happy to.
There were a few mentioned in the footnotes
of my book here.
And also in part,
because I also want to understand the white nationalism,
white supremacists, Christians supremacists
or Christian nationalism,
all those different subgroups in the United States
and elsewhere in the world.
A bit, my mind has been focused
on some of the better aspects of human nature,
that it's nice to also understand some of the darker aspects.
Let me ask you sort of a personal question for me.
Do you think it's possible,
do you think it's useful to do a podcast conversation
with somebody like David Duke?
Or somebody,
this was somebody that everybody knows.
So it's not like you're giving a platform
to somebody that's a hidden member of the KKK
or like a,
it's sort of putting a pretty face on some dark ideas,
but everybody knows.
And so now you're just exploring,
you're sitting across the table,
maybe not in his case,
maybe somebody who's an active KKK member,
sitting across from a person that literally hates me, Lex.
I think that's fascinating to explore them.
I think so long as what you are doing
is not boosting someone,
so taking an obscure figure
and making that figure now famous,
but if it's someone who's already infamous,
and it helps us to understand them,
and as so long as your effort
is to ask them tough questions,
which you do, right?
You don't give them all the questions in advance,
you don't have limitations on what you can ask,
so long as it is a real interview, not pablum,
then I'm for it.
What I'm against is a softball interview
that allows someone to sound reasonable when they're not.
But the way I've seen you do this,
when you've had figures like that,
I won't name who I have in mind,
but what I've seen that is,
I think that's useful because honestly,
the historian in me and the citizen in me
wants to understand.
My Jewish grandfather always was the first
to be against any effort to suppress anti-Semites
because his view was he wanted to know who they were,
and he wanted to know what they thought
so he could be prepared.
And I also see, perhaps as a historian,
you may be able to appreciate this kind of thing,
that's probably how you see the world,
but there's several ways to see it, a human being,
like Vladimir Putin is an example.
One is a political figure that's currently
doing actions on the world, geopolitics internally,
the politics of Russia,
but there's also that human being in a historical context.
And collecting information about that person
in the historical context is also very valuable.
So you could see interviews with Hitler in 39, 40, 41,
as being very bad and detrimental
to all that is good in the world.
But at the same time,
it's important to understand that human mind,
how it, how power affects that mind,
how power corrupts it, how they see the world.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I would be all in favor and maybe he will
if Vladimir Putin would sit down with you.
Absolutely.
I don't think you're boosting someone like that
when you ask them tough questions.
In fact, I think that's what we need to do.
Those sorts of figures tend to insulate themselves
from tough questions.
So just to restate, I am for the Lex Fridman interview
of those sorts of figures.
I am not for the puff piece on Fox and Friends,
where they just come on and they're asked,
oh, isn't it, tell us what you think of this.
Tell us what you think of that.
So there's a balance there because a lot of people
that interviews somebody like Vladimir Putin,
all they do is hard-hitting questions.
They often demonstrate a lack of knowledge
of the perspective of the Russian people and the president.
There's not an empathy to understanding
that this is a popularly elected.
You can criticize that notion,
but this is still there that represents
the beliefs of a large number of people
and they have their own life story.
They see the world, they believe they're doing good
for the world and that idea seems to not permeate
the questions and the thoughts that people say
because they're afraid of being attacked
by the people back home, fellow journalists,
for not being hard enough.
Well, maybe.
I think that's probably true.
I think in my experience with interviewers
is that a lot of them are really lazy.
You're not, which is why I like talking to them.
Can I just say, okay, this is not you saying it.
Can I just rant?
If you're sitting across from Xi Jinping
or from Vladimir Putin,
you should be fired if you have not read
like at least several books on the guy.
The surprising lack of research that people do
leading up to it.
So you need to be a historian or a biographer.
You need to be the kind of person
that writes biographies or histories
before you sit in front of the person.
Not a low effort journalist.
And it's so surprising to me
that I think they're probably really busy
and it's probably not part of the culture
of the people that do interviews
to do deep, deep like investigative.
You need to be the kind of person that lives that idea.
Like see it as a documentary that you work on
for three years kind of thing.
Anyway, of course some journalists do do that
and they do that masterfully
and that's the best of journalism.
But I think a lot of the times when the questions
are as you said out of touch with the society
that person is leading,
it's because the interviewer hasn't taken the time.
And I understand you can't be an expert on every subject
but you can do what you do, right?
You read my book to prepare for this.
You look things up.
You had a sense of the person you're talking to
and you put the time in to do that.
This is what I always tell my students, right?
The secret to success in anything
is outworking other people.
Be more prepared, right?
What you show is like an iceberg.
It's the tip of the iceberg, right?
Is what people see.
It's all the work that goes on below the surface.
And if you work hard enough, which I aspire to do,
at the end of the day, just like an animal farm,
you'll be like the horse boxer
and slaughtered unjustly
by those that are much more powerful than you.
But you'll be happy when you're slaughtered.
You have lived for the right ideal
and history will remember you fondly.
Okay, what about Robert Lee?
So he's the confederate generally that you mentioned.
Was he a hero or a villain?
To me, he's a villain.
Many people treat Robert Lee as a hero.
And one of the points I make in the book
is we have to rethink that.
And it's very important for our society
because Robert Lee pops up all over our society,
names of schools, names of streets.
And he also embeds and justifies certain behaviors
that I think are really bad.
Lee was a tremendous general.
He had the weaker side
and he managed to use maneuver, secrecy and circumstance
to give himself so many advantages
and win so many battles he should have lost.
So in terms of the technical generalship,
he's a great general.
But Lee at the end of the war
never wants to really acknowledge defeat.
What he acknowledges at Appomattox
is that his soldiers will have to leave the battlefield
because they have not won on the battlefield.
But he refuses to do what Grant asks him,
which is to help sell his side
on the fact that we're going into a post-war moment
where they don't have to see themselves as losers,
but they have to get on board with change.
Real leadership is convincing people who follow you
that they have to change when they don't want to change.
Lee refuses to do that.
He says to Grant, I quote this in the book,
he says to Grant at Appomattox,
if you want to change the South,
you have to run your army over the South three or four times.
He's not going to do anything.
He's not going to help.
And he becomes a figure who people rally around
in the rest of his life and even after he dies.
So it is as if at the end of World War II,
Hitler had been allowed to just retire
and he didn't go back into politics,
but yet he was there
and he continued to have meetings with former Nazis
and people would rally around the idea
of bringing back or going back to Hitler's ideas.
Think of how harmful that would be.
Lee played that kind of role after the war.
And I think it's one of the problems we have now.
I don't think we should continue to revere him
because it justifies too much
of what the Confederates stood for.
And that's the difference that you highlight
between World War II and the Civil War
that in the case of Hitler,
there was an end to that war.
There's a very distinctive clear end to that war.
And you also make the case that World War II
is not a good example,
not a good model of a war to help us analyze history.
It's given Americans the wrong idea of what war is
because World War II ends as most wars don't end.
World War II ends with a complete defeat
of the German army and the German society
and the near complete defeat of Japan.
And we're both sides in different ways, except defeat.
What I'm pointing out in the book
is that most wars don't end with one side,
don't end with one side accepting defeat.
And generally the war continues after the battles end.
This is something that's hard for Americans to understand.
Our system is built with the presumption of war is over
when we sign a piece of paper,
everyone can go home.
It's not what happens.
I mean, civil war is a special case.
It's especially strong case of that
because the people that fought the war
are still living in that land.
That's exactly right.
And in this case, some of them are leaders also.
Many of them become the leaders of the very areas
that they were leading before.
And I think that's another lesson here too,
that we did undertake after World War II,
though in a flawed way.
We had a Nuremberg system.
We did prohibit at least Nazi leaders
from coming back into power.
We made an exception for the emperor in Japan,
but we generally followed the same rule in Japan.
Whereas in the United States, as I point out,
many of the leaders of the Confederacy,
first of all, don't surrender.
They flee to Mexico.
Then they come back after they lose in Mexico a second time.
They come back to the United States
and they get elected to office.
The guy who writes the election laws in Texas,
Alexander Watkins Terrell.
Most people don't know this even in Texas.
He was a Confederate general, fled to Mexico.
So he committed treason by joining the army
of Maximilian emperor of Mexico,
who was put in power by Louis Napoleon.
After Maximilian's defeated,
Alexander Watkins Terrell comes back to Texas,
runs for the state legislature,
and then writes the election laws.
It's crazy.
Can you make the case for that,
that that's a feature of the American system, not a bug,
that that is an implementation of justice,
that you forgive,
that you don't persecute everybody
on the other side of the war?
Maybe, and I think that's a good feature in terms
of lower level individuals,
but I think a bad feature of our system
is we do allow elite figures who have committed wrongdoing.
We give them many ways to get out of punishment.
You are more likely to be punished in the society
if you do something wrong
and you're not an elite figure
than if you are an elite figure.
There should be a proportional,
like forgiveness should be equally distributed across.
And it's not.
But we could change that.
We could fix that.
How do we fix that?
How do we fix that?
What I think was argued at the end,
this is one of the really important things
about studying history.
You learn about ideas that were not pursued
that could be pursued today.
At the end of this war,
there was an effort to ban anyone
who was in a leadership position in the Confederacy
from ever serving in federal office again.
That's the third element of the 14th Amendment.
It's in the 14th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment, clause three,
says that if you took an oath of office,
meaning you were elected to office,
you're an elite figure,
and you violated that oath,
you can still live in the country.
You can still get rich,
but you can't run for elected office again.
And that, we've never really implemented that.
Is it obvious that everybody
who was in a leadership position on the Confederate side
is a bad person for the future of the United States?
Or is that just a safe thing
to assume for the future of the nation?
I think it's the latter.
Maybe people do things for all kinds of reasons,
and sometimes they have regrets.
That's also why we have the pardoning capability.
You could pardon someone individually
if they show you that they've changed.
And it would only create fairness,
because right now, let's say Lex,
you take out a huge, huge loan,
and you don't pay your loan back,
that will go on your credit,
and you won't get a big loan again.
You don't get to say, just give me another chance.
You're gonna have to prove.
I think about holding public office in the same way.
If you've violated your credit rating on that,
you should have a much higher road to go
to prove to us that you should be back in office.
How did the war end?
In quotes, what was the,
so you said, and you make this case in the book,
that in some sense, the elements,
the tensions behind the civil continue to this day,
but officially, how did the war end?
So officially, the war ends at Appomattox
in the early spring of 1865,
when Grant has pretty much smashed Robert E. Lee's army.
Appomattox Courthouse is a small town in Virginia,
and the two men meet,
and their portraits of this
is a painting of what we have in the book.
And Grant and Lee sign a paper,
which basically allows Lee's soldiers
to leave the battlefield
and leave with their sidearms to go back home.
That's pretty much the end.
Jefferson Davis was the president
of the Confederacy goes into hiding.
He's later captured and then not convicted,
but there's no formal settlement
in the way there is at the end of World War II,
where they meet in Yokohama Bay,
the U.S. and Japanese leaders inside there.
This is not that.
So what stands out to you as brilliant ideas
during this time and actions of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln?
So I mentioned that his values,
I think a number of the things that he does
that are quite extraordinary.
First, in emancipating the slaves.
Now, the slaves were freeing themselves,
but Lincoln recognizes that he needs more labor
in the Union army.
And he recognizes that there's still a lot of resistance.
And what he does is he makes the case
for freeing the slaves based on the argument,
not just of the moral value of that,
but based on how that will benefit the North.
He's able to convince non-abolitionists
to pursue abolitionist policies
that by serving their own interests.
What he's basically saying by 1863 or 64 is
I can ask for more white soldiers
or I can bring in former slaves.
Would you like me to take your son
or would you like me to put in?
It's the same thing Franklin Roosevelt does
during World War II.
He says, we need to build more planes
and more tanks.
And I'm sending all the soldiers off to Europe.
I've got this African-American population in the South.
Wouldn't you like me to move them up to Chicago
so we can win this war and build things in the factories?
So Lincoln uses the war to move the country forward morally,
even if at times he's convincing people
by using other reasons.
And I think that's great politics.
I guess that's one of the components of great leadership
is do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Publicly sounding wrong reasons, yeah.
Find ways to move people.
What we talked about before,
different stories move different people.
So you can tell different stories.
He tells one set of stories
to the religious leaders or abolitionists
and a different set of stories to the New York bankers.
And that's leadership.
You tell different kinds of stories
to move people to a new position.
The other thing Lincoln is really brilliant at
is managing the international side of this.
So one of the real dangers for the Union
is that the British will come in on the side of the Confederacy.
The Confederates expected the British would,
because again, the Confederates
were selling while they're cotton to Britain.
And they knew that the British leadership, first of all,
was very happy to work with slaveholding societies,
even though they didn't have slaves.
And number two, that they believed the Union
was getting too strong
and threatening the British in Canada.
So there were many reasons the British
might have gone in with the Confederates.
Lincoln mixes sticks and carrots with the British.
He threatens them.
And when the British actually try to send diplomats
to negotiate with Southerners, he interdicts that.
He basically initiates a quarantine of the South.
On the other hand, he reaches out to them
and tries to show that he wants better relations
and makes the argument that they will actually benefit more
from having the industrial capability
of the Union on their side.
So he's a very good diplomat.
He is considered to be one of the great presidents
in the history of the United States.
Are there ways that he failed?
Is there things he could have done better?
So he failed in the ways that most great leaders fail,
which is that he had a terrible succession plan.
His vice president, who I spend a lot of time on
in the book, Andrew Johnson,
who is probably our worst president ever.
Andrew Johnson had no business being anywhere
near the presidency.
Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator
who did not secede.
And so even though he was a Democrat, Lincoln wanted
to show that he was creating a unity ticket
when he ran for reelection in 1864.
This happens today, right?
So he put someone on as vice president,
who he didn't even like,
but who he thought was politically useful.
Problem is, when Lincoln was assassinated,
this guy took over.
Andrew Johnson was drunk at his own inauguration.
The guy was a true drunkard.
He was not prepared to lead in any sense,
intellectually, politically,
and he was against most of the principles Lincoln was for.
And the irony is that when Lincoln is assassinated
in April of 1865,
Andrew Johnson takes over
and he has all the war powers Lincoln had.
That was not good planning by Lincoln.
And we can look back on it now and say,
even though Lincoln is the first president
who was assassinated,
he should have known that there were people coming for him.
It wasn't inevitable that he'd be assassinated,
but he should have had a backup plan
for who would take over,
hopefully someone who was capable of doing the job
and Andrew Johnson was not capable.
So for me, for personally,
if I were to put myself in Lincoln's shoes
or any leadership position shoes,
it is difficult to think about what happens after my death,
after I'm gone, right, to plan well.
But at the same time, if you care about your actions
to have a long-term impact,
it seems like you should have a succession plan
that continues on the path,
the continues to carry the ideals that you've implemented.
So I'm not, I'm unsure why people don't do that more often.
Like I wonder how much Vladimir Putin spends percentage
of time per day thinking what happens after he's gone
to help flourish the nation and the region
that he deeply cares for.
And the same as for other presidents, Donald Trump, Joe Biden,
they might think politically, like how do I guarantee
that it's a Democrat or a Republican?
But do they think like visionary for the country?
I don't know, I wonder.
I think that's very rare.
And I think what I understand from the literature
among business people who talk about this a lot
is what ends up happening is you become so powerful.
You assume you're always going to be in power.
You convince yourself of that.
You convince yourself that the end is far away.
And of course, for Lincoln, the end could have been far away.
He was healthy, he was only in his fifties.
He could have lived a lot longer,
but it also, it ended fast as it could.
And my understanding is that most Americans
don't prepare their wills and estates,
and it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor.
They assume things are just going to go on
because it's not fun to think about this.
Yeah, but I feel like it's freeing.
Like, you know what I did, which is interesting?
Before I went to Ukraine, I recorded a video.
I set up a whole thing where I record a video,
like what happens if I die?
I record a video to release.
I gave my brother access to my passwords so that,
and I gave him instructions.
You're not allowed to look at this,
but please publish this if I die.
And you know that made me,
it sounds silly and ridiculous,
but that made me feel free to do the best thing I want to do.
It's like, it's liberating.
So like, I guess that's for your will,
but also like do the best possible damn job you can.
I feel like as a leader, having a plan what happens
if you fail, if you die, if you,
or you lose some of the power,
some of the momentum that is driving you currently,
that there's going to be a handoff
where you will still,
and you will still be remembered as a great man or woman.
But you identify one of the other problems, right?
Which is one of the other reasons why someone like Lincoln
or certainly Henry Kissinger doesn't create a successor,
because you're afraid they're going to steal your passwords.
You're afraid they're going to steal the power from you.
That's true.
You had to find someone in your brother,
hopefully, who you could trust.
No, no, no, let's just be clear.
I love my brother, but he's a troll.
So there's a feature on the password,
whatever password manager I may or may not use,
and there's a bunch of services like this.
It's interesting.
I don't know if you know about this.
I've learned about all of this,
is you can have them request access,
and it's going to wait 30 days before it gives them access.
So it kind of has this built-in trust padding.
I mean, to me, on that aspect,
it's just to have a plan in all aspects of life.
This is for leadership in your private life.
What happens to not just your will and your wealth or whatever,
but what happens to other stuff,
like social media and all of that in this digital world?
And anything you care about if you wanted to live on,
and that's the problem.
But unless you can devise a technical solution like that,
you have to give someone power now.
And that's the tricky thing.
I mean, democracy is a kind of technology.
You're going to have to figure out how to do it correctly,
how to have that power propagate,
and especially during war,
how you get everybody together into this war-mongering mood,
and then how do you come down from that and just relax?
Precisely.
So in some sense, that's what Andrew Johnson,
that was the problem, is the over-centralization of power.
It was the over-centralization of power,
but it was also that Lincoln had a designated successor
who was going to do and tried to do everything
that ran against what Lincoln was doing.
And it set the country back.
We went forward at the end of the Civil War,
and then we went backward.
More so than we would have if there had been a new election,
because if there had been a new election,
there still would be reason for that person running,
even if they were on the other side,
to try to find some compromised positions.
Andrew Johnson inherited power with very few limitations
on how he used that power.
Congress wasn't even in session.
And so this became very directly a problem
because Andrew Johnson started pardoning Southerners,
allowing them to come back into power.
So he had like a few months where he just went wild.
Yeah.
It's giving the car keys to someone who's not prepared to drive,
but decided that they're going to do what they want
with the car for a while.
All right. Is there any level to which power corrupted Lincoln,
a war president?
Yes, I do think there were some areas.
And I think that even though he was a great president,
if not our greatest president,
maybe one of the greatest figures of our history,
he was flawed.
One is his problem of succession,
but also I think Lincoln over-invested
in the power of the presidency.
He came to believe too much in the role of one man
and not in creating a more balanced approach to governance.
And that's a function of war.
That's where war is dangerous.
War has an inherent centralizing power in a democracy.
And that is dangerous,
because even when you have the best of people running a war,
that gives them a lot of power to make decisions.
Yeah. How do you come down from that?
I see that was Zelensky and Putin currently.
It's a war.
How do you come down because Ukraine and everybody,
anybody in a war kind of,
especially if you're fighting for the ideal of democracy,
it seems like war is anti-democratic.
It is.
So how do you come down from that?
What's the interesting mechanism of,
I mean, some of it is leadership.
You have to be like a George Washington type figure
to be able to walk away from power.
I think you gave the answer right there.
Yeah.
You need to walk away from power
or you need to be forced to walk away from power.
Historically, one of the things that democracies have tended to do
when they have a chance is to vote out of office the victor in the war.
Think about Winston Churchill.
Roosevelt is elected to his fourth term when he's still in the war.
It's not clear that he would have been elected again.
Let's say he lived on,
because there is a sensibility that the person has become too powerful
in this role and that they,
someone else should now step in.
Someone else who's also not a war president,
it will be dangerous.
So let's hope Ukraine wins this war.
Zelensky should then step down,
or someone else should be voted in.
It will be dangerous if he remains president.
Let's say he wins somehow and a true victory,
just as a hypothetical.
He should not be, he should be praised,
maybe given a nice villa,
but someone else should take over,
because the problem is that he's going to have too much power.
And honestly, he's going to be too out of touch
with what the country needs after the war.
What do you think would have happened if Lincoln had lived?
That's the sort of counterfactual view of history.
It's an interesting question that probably you think about a lot.
What would have happened if he didn't get assassinated?
It's a reasonable question,
because it was not inevitable he'd be assassinated.
He could have had more protection that night.
He'd invited Ulysses Grant to go to the theater with him,
and Grant and his wife didn't go.
If they had been there,
there would have been more protection for Grant.
They would have had at least double the security there.
So there are many ways in which he might not have died.
I think it still would have been a difficult transition,
but I think there were a few things that would have been better.
First of all, Lincoln would not have pardoned
all of these Confederate leaders
and allowed them to come back into power.
Lincoln also would have been a better politician
at holding his Republican coalition together.
And I think Lincoln was more committed
to empowering former slaves and others.
So we still would have had a lot of conflicts,
but I think what would have been a degree of difficulty
was doubled or tripled,
because Lincoln was removed
and the opposite came into power with Andrew Johnson.
So you don't think there's a case you made
that Andrew Johnson turned out to be a bad decision,
but the spirit of the decision is the correct one?
No, I think it was a terrible decision,
because you should never put someone one step away
from enormous power who's not prepared.
Oh, in that sense, I got it.
But the spirit of the decision,
meaning you put somebody who represents
a very opposing viewpoint than you.
I'm for that so long as that person is on board
with some of the basic values that you're pursuing,
and that person is capable of doing the job.
Do you think that was obvious to him
that Andrew Johnson was not capable of doing the job?
Yes.
Everyone recognized that.
But it made sense.
I mean, what Lincoln has to be praised for
is in the midst of a war
when at that point he was not doing well.
The war was not going well.
He ran for reelection.
He didn't try to postpone the election.
He didn't try to do anything.
And so he needed all the help he could get when running.
And so he wanted to have someone on there
who looked like a unity candidate
who could appeal to some Southerners.
So it made sense from a political point of view,
but it created a really big problem.
There were people who said
he should have removed Johnson as soon as he was elected
and in retrospect he probably should have.
How gangster is that to
during a war still run the election?
It's extraordinary.
Lincoln believed in democratic values.
He also believed he would win,
but he knew it was not guaranteed.
And it's interesting, for people who don't know this,
the reason we have mail-in balloting in the U.S.
is because of that.
So almost...
What?
Almost a million
union voters are away from their homes.
And so how do they vote?
As soldiers, as nurses,
they vote by mail.
The Post Office delivers their ballots.
That's why we have mail-in balloting.
What about the other counterfactual question of
what would have happened if Confederate States won the war?
The Confederate States had won the war.
You would have seen, I think,
a separate country
in the South.
You would have seen two countries
in a smaller country,
but it probably would have been able to defend itself
because it would have actually gotten much richer than it was.
It was poor at the time,
but through its cotton trade and other things,
it would have been recognized by Great Britain,
by France, by other societies.
And you would have seen
a Southern Republic.
I don't think you would have seen
that Southern Republic dominate the continent.
The union had the men and people
and had the resources.
But you would have seen a rival Republic
to the United States in the South.
Do you think they had interest
to dominate the continent, to take over the union?
They had a foreign policy.
They had a plan. Many have written about this.
They had plans, many Southerners did,
of expanding into the Caribbean,
which was actually more feasible.
They did not have the personnel
to occupy so much territory going out west
if you think about the amount of land that had to be covered.
But they had the nautical capabilities
and naval power and the money
to dominate islands
in the Caribbean.
And those islands were important for their trade.
So there were many Southerners
who wanted to take control of Cuba,
wanted to take control of Haiti
and the Dominican Republic.
So you probably would have seen
Southern warfare in those areas.
From a counterfactual
history perspective,
can you make the case
that secession would have been
created by the world?
Like if we're sitting today
in the future thing, the secession
in this context, if we put aside
the suffering
and the loss of life
in the war, that we would be
in a better world today,
just looking at the political climate.
And can you also make the case that
actually this outcome of the union winning the war
is the better one?
I think the union victory is by far
the better outcome, because I think
what you would have had otherwise
is you would have had a slave republic
that would have encouraged slavery
in other parts of the world,
would have exported slavery,
and would have necessarily
been hostile to
many of the positive changes that occur in the union,
the movement toward progressive reforms,
creating cities with health codes
and public education and many of those things.
Public education really develops in the north
as a way of training workers
who are being paid to be better workers
in a factory. There's a reason you don't educate slaves,
because if you educate slaves, they'll rebel.
Yeah, so don't you think there would be a huge
pressure from the north
to abolish slavery anyway?
There would have, but I think the south
could have survived without another war.
I mean, I think the way that
slavery would have
ended in the south
if it didn't end with the civil war,
would have been with another war.
I guess the deeper question is, is it
better to work through your problems
together, or is it better to get a divorce?
I think in this case it was better
to work through the problems.
It's not even working through them together.
It's better to work through the problems where
one side has the resources
to incentivize you to work through the problems
rather than leaving you on your own
to go your own direction.
I think the argument against
the union winning would be
the argument that would be made by those who
believe they suffered from union power later on.
So you could argue
if you're a historian of Native Americans,
if you're
a historian of the Philippines,
you could argue some of the areas where
this newly united nation coming out
of the civil war was able to use its power
to spread its influence.
It would have been harder for the union to do that
if the union had to deal
with a rival to the south.
So as a historian,
the union won.
To which degree are the people
from the union, there is now the United States,
the writers of the history,
that color,
the perspective of who's the good guys and the bad guys.
So this is such
an interesting question because
I like how you take every question I ask
and make it into a better question.
I deeply appreciate it.
I'll ask every time I ask some ridiculous
question and you go, that's really interesting.
No, because they're really good questions.
They're thoughtful questions. You know, actually the best questions
are not the simple ones, right?
So
the axiom is that
the union knows right history.
And that's usually the case, right?
Most of the history I learned about Ukraine
when I was growing up was written by Russians.
It was Russian history of Ukraine.
Most of the history of Europe
has been written by Germans and French
and British citizens, right?
So usually it's that way.
And for the most part, our history has been written
from a sort of northeastern point of view.
But it's very interesting.
The history of the years after the civil war
that I focus on in this book
because the union
and its legacies, and I grew up in New York,
so I'm growing up as a legacy of that, right?
Those were individuals who wanted to write
about what happened long after the civil war
when the North got rich.
All those beautiful buildings in New York,
all that wealth in New York, it's 1880s,
90s, late 19th centuries, the Gilded Age.
And that's what Northerners want to write about,
right? Because there's glory there.
The 20 years or so
after the civil war, the years that really count,
1865 to 1880 or so,
those years are ugly.
It's messy.
And so who wrote about them?
Southerners wrote about them.
And they wrote a story that was about
northern carpetbaggers
and corrupt African-Americans.
And this is the story
that Americans learned until a few years ago.
I've gone around the country talking about this book
and the number of people have told me
they never learned this basic history
because they grew up in Chicago,
not because they grew up in Texas,
but because they grew up in Chicago.
And the story they were told, the civil war ended.
Oh, now let's talk about the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
And how Chicago is coming of age is this great city.
We don't like to write
history in our country
that's not about glory.
I'm all for the greatness of our country,
but you become great by studying
your failures as well as your successes.
And that's a real problem we have.
And I would love to see a kind of
humility from a history perspective.
One of the things that always surprised me
from the Soviet Union to
the United States, as you've
I think spoken about,
is the perspective on World War II
and who was the critical component of winning the war.
Obviously, in the Soviet Union
it's a great patriotic war.
It's, you know,
the Soviet Union are the ones that suffered
and often actually don't emphasize
the suffering, they emphasize the glory
that they defeated this huge evil.
But then you listen to the United States
perspective on this and it's almost like
the
I mean there's several ways of phrasing it
but basically the United States won the war
without the United States it would be impossible
to win the war. There were the turning point
there were the
my last my everything
that song
my first my last my everything.
So that and I'm sure
I wonder what growing up
in
maybe after war in Britain
I wonder if there's history books written there
that basically say and they could also make
a pretty strong case that Britain was
central to the turning point.
You can really make a strong
case that like Churchill and Britain
were like the turning point
of the war that the responsible
for some of the first failures, major
failures of Hitler from a military strategy perspective.
But
that's interesting to look at that very recent
history from very different perspectives.
And it's the same problem with the Civil War.
We want to tell the story of the Union winning the war
and then everything is good.
And it's not the way it's not the way it worked.
What I'm really trying to get at is
when you love your country
you have to study the failures.
Because by studying the failures
that's how you improve yourself and that's where you see
where real courage is.
It's actually that Lincoln failed for so long
that makes him a great president.
He lost more battles than he won
but he learned
and he got it right in the end same with Ulysses Grant
I don't want generals. I'm just echoing Lincoln here.
I don't want generals. I don't want leaders
who think they're going to get it right the first time
because they're never going to get it right the first time.
You never get it right the first time in an AI experiment, right?
It's those who can work through failure
learn from failure.
And we as a society have to start doing that better.
We have to
not just trumpet the successes.
Let's talk about where we failed as Republicans
as Democrats as independents
and let's move forward from there.
In recent years have been a kind of
movement
of highlighting some of the hypocrisy
sort of highlighting the racism
the fact that many of the Finding Fathers
were slave owners, that kind of thing
sort of highlighting from the current
ethics of our world
showing that
many of the people involved
in the war on each side were evil.
What do you think about that perspective on history?
I think it's super valuable.
I think we should expose
the gap between ideals
and practice.
But that doesn't mean we should throw away
the great people who are also hypocrites.
Because everyone I've studied
is a hypocrite. I'm a hypocrite.
I think I'm a pretty good father.
Luckily my son isn't even a better mother.
But
there are parts of me that I mean
I often find myself telling our children to do things
that I didn't do, right?
But they're smart and they recognize that
and they learn something from that.
So let's not cover over
let's not throw people away for being hypocritical.
Here's my view of Thomas Jefferson, which is similar
to my view of Abraham Lincoln, right?
These are incredibly insightful, thoughtful people
who added so much to our country.
But they also
created flawed systems.
And one of
excuse me, Jefferson's flaws
was even though he saw all the evils of slavery
he was a terrible farmer and he could not imagine
living the lifestyle he lived without slaves.
He could never work his way out of that.
But that doesn't make the Declaration of Independence
less valuable. In fact, it makes it
more valuable. There's more that we can learn
from that.
And to me, on the hypocrisy side
many of the people that participate in
cancel culture and these kinds of movements
that call everything as racist
and so on
sometimes they're highlighting
properly
the evils in our current society
but the hypocrisy
they have is not realizing
if they were placed in Germany
in the 40s
if they were placed
in the position of being
a white Christian
during slavery at the founding of this country
they would do the same thing.
They would do the evils that are not criticizing
most of them.
So it takes a truly heroic
human to think
outside, to be aware of all the
evils going on around you
and take action.
It's easy now on Twitter
to call people as racist.
What's hard is to see the racism
when you're living in it and your well-being
is funded by it.
I think that's right. I think to analyze
ourselves and look honestly in the mirror
is very hard. I also think
I make this point in actually all of my books
the real
and it's an Eli Wiesel point
that a lot of the evil in our world
is the evil of silence and just looking
away.
And one form of that on Twitter is just
getting like
it's a cheap way
of pretending you're doing something
that's important, right? After the Civil
War there's all sorts of bad stuff
that happens. I talk about it a lot.
There always are people there who could stop it.
Most people
are not responsible for the bad activities
but most don't do something
to stop it.
And when I say do something, I mean really do something.
Yeah, really. And it's also
to push back and push back
silence on Twitter
is not what Eli Wiesel was talking about.
Right.
So sometimes silence on Twitter is
the courageous action because you wait
and think and learn and have
patience to truly understand the situation
before you take actual action
not participate in the outrage
crowds on Twitter, the hysteria
of cancellation. What's hard
to do is to speak up when everybody
else is silent. That's what's hard to do.
And to speak up against those who
thought were on your side. Yes.
Exactly. Good luck
to those on the left who speak up against the left.
And the same.
Good luck to those on the right who speak up against the right.
It's a lonely place.
It's a painful place.
That's why walking in the center
is tough. You get attacked by both sides.
It's a wonderful, wonderful
journey. And you know what's
interesting to me
and what I learned writing this book, every book is a journey.
What I learned in this, in the laboratory
of this book, right,
was a lot of those figures
who do stand up
even in their own lifetime
they don't get the accolades they deserve
but they make a difference. And that's
maybe not enough comfort
because you want to see benefits in your own lifetime
but I think it really matters and many of the figures
I talk about were not even well known in their time.
So you can make
a difference. You do
impart something small in the universe
that can grow into something better and we shouldn't
forget that. That's why I admire
Boxer, the horse. I will work harder
even if he gets sent to the slaughter
by the evil pigs.
You're on Orwell today.
Recently, Animal Farm
is one of my favorite books.
I've been recently, I just
am rereading 1984 now.
It's been politicized, that book in general.
But to me it's a love story.
It is a love story.
Love
is the story
of an oppressive government, it's a surveillance state
and the nature of truth being manipulated
by war time.
But
the beacon of hope
in the human heart
that wakes you up in a world
like that is a love of another
human being. It's transcendence.
I totally agree. My understanding
you would know better than I would is that it's now a best
selling book in Russia again. 1984?
Yeah, it's actually being downloaded.
There was a piece on NPR I heard about this actually.
Yeah.
I hope it's because they're looking for love.
That's what I was just going to say. Hopefully not in all the wrong places.
Hey,
there's no such thing as the wrong places.
But that's my opinion.
I'm the one that showed up naked and drunk to your classroom.
I still surprise that was you.
I was wearing a wig. I'm sorry.
Quick pause.
Can I take a bath?
And we're back.
John Wilkes Booth assassinated
Abraham Lincoln
in his diary as you write in your book.
He wrote about Lincoln,
our country owed all her troubles to him.
And God simply made
me the instrument of his punishment.
The country is not what it was.
What was the idea
of the country that John Wilkes Booth
believed in? You talked about this country
that just constantly being repeated
in his writing. For John Wilkes Booth
and many other people
who are close to the southern part of the country
and the Confederacy,
they believe the country should be a democracy
for white people, a bounded democracy.
Booth was horrified
and we have to empathize with it.
Not sympathize, but recognize how strange it seemed to him
that all of a sudden those who were slaves
were now soldiers with guns.
And he was particularly offended
when he saw in Washington, D.C.
a group of African-American
Union soldiers holding
southern prisoners of war.
And the world was turned upside down for him.
Democracy for him, he believed in democracy,
but democracy for white people
and that justified
mistreating
black people for him.
So, country
means
white people.
Yeah, and I don't think it's that different
from... And white Christians.
White Christians, yes.
Yeah, he was not arguing for Jewish
emancipation either.
I don't think that's really
different from what we've seen in the 20th century
for people who justify ethnic cleansing
or genocide.
Let's go to the
extreme example of Hitler again
that we've talked about before.
His view was actually...
He claimed he wanted a democracy
for Germany. He wanted a democracy
of the right Germans.
And he wanted those we saw infecting
and mongrelizing the society out.
That's in essence what John Wilkes Booth
thought. The scary thing is
those kinds of ideas, you can put
a pretty face on them.
You don't have to use...
Maybe Hitler didn't until the war
started or even parts of the war
make it so clear
that you just want
the certain kind of Germans that have made
Germany a great nation
to be the people that are running that nation
and other people who are not truly
interested in it, don't hold the interest
of the country at heart. They should
go elsewhere where they can flourish also.
It's wonderful. But like the good Germans
they've built
all these amazing things. We should give them
the power and not to the others.
And you can put a bunch of flowery language
around that. Precisely. It's the argument
that's made all the time today against immigration.
That the wrong people
are coming into our society. It's ironic
because it's often made by those who themselves
are immigrants. History teaches us
that those who have arrived as immigrants
are no more likely to like those who come.
They might be against the next group
for just this reason because they think they're the right group.
Can you
describe to me if it's useful at all
to know the difference
if there's a difference between white nationalism
white supremacism
and Christian
nationalism.
Is there an intersection between them?
I've heard these terms used
oh, separatism too, right?
Is there
interesting distinction that permeated that history
that's the last today?
I think there's a long
history in the United States
of a belief in white supremacy.
And it's not unique to the United States.
We actually inherit this from Europe.
And white supremacy
is the belief that
for whatever reason
those with lighter color
skin, usually of northern
European extraction
are superior, have more rights
or the better people to make decisions
all sorts of things. It's an aesthetic judgment
as much as it is a political judgment
and that gets embedded in our society.
We inherit that.
Christian nationalism
is the presumption
that it's not just your race
but now it's also your Christian belief.
And that is
actually relatively new. There are little pieces
of that in our history.
But many of those
who are white supremacists, even those in the
Confederacy, are not Christian nationalists
because
they don't agree on which kind of Christianity
and they don't view those
who are from a different denomination of Christianity
as being good Christians.
There isn't this Big 10 Christianity in the 19th
century.
This notion that there is one
Christian nation and that we're all part of it
that's actually really a
20th century creation.
It precedes the evangelical movement
but it's been made even more popular.
But it would not make sense to a Confederate
to say we're a white Christian nation.
It would make sense to say we're a white
Protestant nation
because they didn't consider Catholics good Christians
or a white Presbyterian nation.
And so that's
something new
and I think what's particularly dangerous
about this notion of Christian
nationalism is it creates
this false history
saying we've always been together as Christians.
That's always how we've denied. I defined ourselves
and that's not accurate.
One interesting thing.
I recently talked to
a left leaning
or maybe a far left political streamer named
Destiny, Stephen Bernal.
I don't know if you're familiar with him.
He does
live streaming debates with people. It's very
passionate. I've heard of this.
My students are always up on the most
hip things.
The funny thing about him,
he's already considered a boomer.
He's already the old streamer because he's been
there for years. He's not the cool kids anymore.
Anyway, he goes into some
difficult political territory
and he actually had a mini conversation
with Nick Fuentes.
And he says,
some of it is humor, but some of it
is pretty dark
hard hitting criticism.
He says that anyone who claims to be a Christian
nationalist asks them
if they would rather
have
a million people who are atheists
from Sweden who are white
come, or if you would rather
have a million
people from Africa
who are Christian come.
And the truth comes out, that this is
a very surface level. This kind of idea
of Christian nationalism is still
underneath it is a deep racism.
Like, hatred towards black people.
I think that's, I'm sure that's right.
I'm sure that's right. That's the sense I got
into it. It does not seem to have deep
kind of historical
context to it. It's just
a different, a rebranding of the
old kind of hate. What I think
is important though in drawing this distinction
and why it really matters beyond
the history of it is
someone like Lincoln
quotes scripture all the time.
The second inaugural is filled.
Second inaugural address, Gettysburg address
filled with biblical references.
But he does it in a way that's not
Christian nationalist because
he's using the text to bring
people together. He's using it
as a fable of humanity.
And you could say, he's not
open to Islamic thinking. He's ignorant
of the Islamic world. But as a Jew
I'm a Jew, reading
and studying Lincoln, I know he's a Christian
but I don't feel excluded from his rhetoric.
Because I share
that Bible. We have different
views but I don't feel
excluded. It actually brings people together.
The Christian nationalist approach that we've seen
in the 20th century and especially in
recent decades is intended
to divide people. It excludes Jews.
It excludes
Christians who don't interpret Christianity
their way.
And to say that's what we've always done
is an entire distortion of our country
and it also hides why this is so
dangerous. In so far as
Christianity matters to our country it should be
in the way Lincoln uses it as a set of common
texts that many of us resonate
with knowing that we have different
rituals and different understandings.
Not as a way to exclude people
and not as a cover for racism which is
what it is. It's kind of interesting that you could talk
about, I've talked to a lot of people
Muslim folks, Jewish folks
Christian folks. There's a way to talk about religion
that's inclusive and then that's
exclusive. It's just been
I've been listening
to a lot of these interfaith conversations
and they're awesome.
They celebrate the beauty of each religion.
They banter and argue with each other about details
and so on. But it feels
like love. It feels like anybody
from any of those religions
would feel welcome at that
party. And I think that's possible.
Can you tell me about
the disputed election of 1876?
So this is fascinating.
The 1876 election is one of many
elections we've had some recently
that are intensely controversial
and they're controversial because they're so
close. They're controversial
because it's not always clear who's one.
In 1876
Samuel Tilden, the governor
of New York, who's running as the Democratic
candidate, wins
more votes across the country.
So everyone knows he becomes president, right?
Wrong. He doesn't become president because
in three states, South
Carolina, Louisiana and Florida
it's very, very close.
And even though Tilden has
more total votes, if he loses
those states, the electors in those
states, all of which go to the winner
of the state, would actually make
for it be Hayes, the Republican candidate president.
In all three of those states, you also
have Republican governors who have just
lost, but are still the people who have to
certify the election.
All three states say that Hayes won
even though it's very close and disputed.
So Hayes has one more electoral vote.
Of course, the Democrats
won't accept that. And so we go
into February.
The inauguration was done in March, not in January.
We go from November to February
without clear agreement on who the president
is. In the end, there's an agreement
that they come to a deal,
which is where the Democrats will accept Hayes
as president in return for Hayes doing
all the things the Democrats want in the south.
And so in essence,
you have a deal made
that one side will get
all it wants
while allowing the other side to have the figurehead.
And so in a certain way,
this marks a moment
when the Confederacy wins.
For example, Hayes has to agree
to pull out all federal force from the south.
Which means there's no protection
for fair elections going forward.
And you'll see in states like Mississippi
the number of African-American
voters will decline
and not recover again until the late
20th century.
So that's what that election does. And from 1876
until 1896, we have a series
of elections that are very close. It happens also
in
1888 that the
person with the most popular vote loses
that's Grover Cleveland who loses to Benjamin Harrison.
And
again, we'll have the same issue
where there's a dispute. And so what
that election shows us, 1876,
1888, is that
our election system and the problem of having an electoral
college really complicates things and makes it
harder for us to come to any kind of
consensus, any kind of agreement
on who's won an election. Super important
for today. Because
most of the 20th century, we don't have close elections.
So it doesn't matter. When we come to a world
today where our elections are very close, our system
is not well designed to deal
with those issues. Do you draw any parallels
with our
time? And what are some key differences?
There's been contested elections
Florida, Florida, Florida
with Al Gore
and there's been just contested election after
contested election. And of course
most famously recently
with the contested
election that led to January 6th.
So I think
a couple of parallels and a couple of differences.
One parallel is that when you have close
elections,
the losing side is never happy.
It's a myth
that when you have a close election, the other side just accepts it
and it's not. That doesn't happen.
And we need to be attentive to that and ready
for that. January 6th actually
should surprise us not because it happened
but because it hadn't happened before.
People who lose a close election are never happy
and they always think that something has been done.
That's one parallel. Second parallel
is elections are violent.
We have this myth that our elections are peaceful.
No, there's always violence involved
in one way or another. Violence in either
trying to prevent people from voting
or violence in preventing people from preventing
people from voting, right?
Elections are not peaceful walks
in the park. And that's why
most countries have a
centralized system to manage elections
and provide protection for people.
We need to think about that. A lot
of people don't vote because they're afraid
they don't want to take the time
but they're also afraid that they're going to anger someone
or that they're going to be seen as politicizing
an issue. Differences.
In 1876, there was fraud in the election.
There were people who voted
two, three times. One of the things the Ku Klux Klan did
is it prevented black people from voting
and that it helped white people
go to multiple voting booths.
And this was quite common.
In the 1880s, if you went to vote
here's how it would happen in a place like
Chicago or New York.
The union boss from your factory
would come and get you at the factory,
give you lunch, get you drunk
and then drive you from one voting booth
to another and give you a ballot that you would bring
in and just then he would watch you deposit
that ballot. Sounds pretty nice.
Not going to lie. I take
that right. So that's a difference.
That is not how our elections work now.
One of our great accomplishments has been
to eliminate virtually all the fraud
in our elections. How have we done that?
By creating safeguards.
It is very difficult.
All the evidence we have
is that the minimal fraud that's occurred
in elections are onesies and twosies
and it's never in the last 20 years
had any big difference in the outcome of elections.
So that's a big difference.
And then another big difference I think
is that
in that time the Democrats and Republicans
are on the opposite sides of where they are now
and that changes everything.
So the Democrats then are the party of the Confederacy.
The Democrats are the party of exclusion.
The Republicans are more the party of economic
expansion.
And the Republicans are the big 10
party. We're reversed today.
Do you think
because there's much less election fraud
now
like you described
one of the lessons we want to maybe
learn from that is that doesn't actually
have to be election fraud for either
side to claim there's election fraud.
It seems like it's more and more common
and it seems to me that in
2024 election
in the United States
if a Republican wins there would also
be
just
maybe just as likely as
if
if a Democrat wins that there would be
nuanced
claims of
election fraud
because it's become more and more normalized.
I think what this history shows
is that our election system
makes it easy for people to claim fraud
because it's so unnecessarily complex.
First of all
we don't have a system where the person who gets the most
votes is necessarily the winner.
So that already creates one problem.
Second problem is everything I talked about this in the book
is controlled at the county level.
So what happens
with Hayes and Tilden in 1876
is you have one county official who says they think
one person won. Another county official thinks
says the other person won. There's no centralized
system.
It would be as if we allowed every airport
to control safety in airplanes. Our airplanes
would not be safe. Our airplanes are safe because the
FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board
have strict universal guidelines
for what makes for a safe plane and therefore
our planes generally don't fall out of the sky.
Our system is very complex.
It has complex rules
and has too many people who have authority in too many
different places.
Complexity makes it easier for someone to make
an argument that the wrong thing has been done.
We should simplify the system.
In Brazil they had a very close election
and
it's very hard for Bolsonaro who lost that close
election to claim there was fraud
because there's a central authority run by the judiciary
that counted the votes and it's just simple.
It's not about which states
it's not about who the county officials were.
Did he claim or no?
He has not acknowledged that he lost.
So to push back
on your statement
I'm undefeated monopoly and risk because anytime
I lose I walk away
claiming
there was fraud and cheating involved
and I refuse to believe otherwise.
I just think that
accusations of fraud is a narrative
that's disjoint from the reality
of whether there was enough fraud.
Yeah, I agree but I think we make it a little
easier for that narrative by having a complex
convoluted system.
And I wonder if there's other improvements
that take us into the 21st century
that allow for electronic voting.
There's improvements that seems our system
is dragging their feet on.
Rank chairs, voting, all that kind of stuff.
Let's make this clear.
We claim to be the greatest 21st century democracy
and we still vote like the 19th century.
We're not even in the 20th century.
Most people when they went to vote
they actually like
checked a box and put a piece of paper
in a box, right?
I mean that's not 21st century.
We can move millions of dollars
maybe billions for you Lex
from our keyboard.
From our keyboards.
Billions of rubles.
Billions of pennies.
Why can we move money safely
and not vote in the same ways?
And at the same time, so there's security there
in the movement of money and then there's
the actual engagement, most of us
depending on your age demographic
click like on Facebook
or Twitter or TikTok
tens of thousands
of times a year.
I think this kind of mechanism
constantly and alike is a vote.
So you're constantly voting, voting, voting, voting.
We love voting. We love
giving our opinion on that stuff.
It just seems obvious that gamifying
the system, which is essentially what the election is
making it fun to be engaged
on different issues. And there's also be a case
I don't understand
these things deeply, but it always seemed
to me that issue based voting
should be the future.
It seems like too complicated to vote for
singular people versus on
ideas, which on Twitter
we don't necessarily vote for people,
we vote for ideas. If you like a tweet
or not, you like it and so on.
That too seems to be
a possibility for improvement.
Well, there's certainly a way to improve polling.
We could measure public opinion better. We still
poll as if we're in the early 20th century.
They still actually call people. It's amazing to me.
I was talking to one pollster.
They will call 100 people
and get one person, but they still do that.
They probably still call landlines, right?
Yeah, well, they try to get cell phones too,
but they do call landlines.
But one could create a system that would be far
better in the way you're describing it seems to
me, Lex, to actually assess
what people like and don't like.
So your book, your work
in general, your perspective
on history is,
I would say, at least from my perspective,
nonpartisan. Thank you.
Yeah, you do exceptionally good job with that.
Despite the attacks
and the criticisms. That said,
you personally, just the way you speak,
my judgment, and you can push back on this,
I think you lean left in your politics
on the political spectrum.
Maybe you can push back on that.
Can you make the case for either perspective
on your own personality as a
fan of yours that
you do lean left or you don't lean left?
I think it depends on the kinds
of issues we're talking about. I do tend to
lean left on the social and cultural
issues. Yes. So I'm a
believer, a firm believer.
I didn't believe this when I was younger. I've
come to believe that
people should choose their own lifestyle and
that we should get out of the way. I'm a
believer, deep believer as a father
of a 20 year old woman
that my 20 year old daughter should have the right
to make any choice she wants with her body.
And if she were to
get pregnant at a fraternity
party at college,
she should have the right to decide
whether to have a child or not. So on those issues
would code me
left of center.
I'm actually reasonably
conservative on fiscal issues.
I don't think we should spend money
we don't have.
I'm skeptical. I've long been skeptical
of cryptocurrency and things like that.
I know some of your listeners will disagree with me.
This part is part of my own ignorance of crypto.
But I'm conservative, lower
KC in the way I think about fiscal issues.
I worry about debt.
I'm a believer that there are certain
areas where the federal government should play more
of a role. And there are other areas
where things should be left to the localities.
And so sometimes that can code me one way
or another. But I think I sound
sometimes a little more left of center because on the social issues
I definitely would that because
there's other explanations not to be grilling
you too hard. No, it's fair
because you're also an exceptionally
respected and successful
professor in the university system
where sometimes there is
a lean towards the left
and the other aspect is
I think your viewpoints on Trump
where you're
a strong critic of Donald Trump.
And I guess the question I want to ask
is you as a historian
does that color your perspective
of history?
Do you ever catch yourself
where maybe
your criticism
of Donald Trump might affect
how you see the Civil War?
As you were completely diving
in and looking at the Civil War
are you able to put aside
your sort of
the current day political viewpoints?
No, I'm not. I think we have to be honest
that none of us are objective.
We strive to be nonpartisan.
I really liked when you said that because I think
it's an aspiration.
No one is objective.
We all have our biases, you know.
Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla
and it's just that's just the reality, right?
And as far as I know
there's really hard, it's very hard
even to biologically explain that.
And so
my view
is that what a good historian, what a good scholar does,
I don't care what the field is,
is your self-conscious of your biases
and
you try to
recognize them as you're doing your research
and you make doubly certain
that where your research seems to reinforce
your biases that you actually have the evidence
to make that argument.
But I still believe even doing that
that someone with a slightly different perspective
might read the same evidence in different ways.
That's what makes history vibrant.
So I wrote this book
in part, as I say in the introduction
because I was self-critical
watching Trump and the things I
quite frankly find deeply
dangerous about Donald Trump
and about what happened on January 6th
and I found I had not
thought deeply enough about the roots of that
in our society.
I don't believe Trump or any one figure creates
these kinds of movements that come out of a deeper
history.
Just a small side tangent.
I do believe your work is
non-partisan.
But it's also funny
that there are a lot of people on the right
that would read your work and say that you are partisan.
And I think the reason
that can happen sometimes, not strongly though,
I think you do a really good job,
is like certain, the use of certain words
also.
I try to be cognizant of that.
I try not to use words that
trigger people's
tribalism.
It's kind of interesting. So you have to be also aware of that
maybe when you're writing history, when you're writing
in general, is if you're interested
in remaining, you can put on different hats.
You can be carefree
in just stating your opinion
of criticizing Donald Trump
or Joe Biden
or you can be non-partisan deliberately.
And that takes skill probably
and avoiding certain triggering words.
And to me, it's about choosing your battles.
So I try to write
because I want everyone to read
and I actually think people on the left
and right have a lot to learn from this history.
So many people have said to me around the country,
this is history I wish I had known before.
But there are
moments when I use words that I know are controversial
because I'm trying to show there's a fact base behind them.
So
white supremacy does exist.
I've had people say, I don't think that's
I think that's a politically correct term
or it's a woke term.
It can be used in the wrong ways.
One should not go around calling everything
one doesn't like that.
But the Confederates were white supremacists.
And I use that word
because I think it's an accurate descriptor
and we need to recognize that that is
a part of our history.
But that does trigger some people.
Because that language is used
to mean other things currently.
So the press will take on certain terms
of white supremacist and label everybody white supremacist.
A lot of people
that basically are in the right or something like that
they use this outraged
language and that actually ruins
the ability to use the language precisely
for historical context.
That's exactly right.
But unfortunately we do have to
No, actually people disagree.
You might disagree with this.
But I tend to try to avoid
take on the responsibility of avoiding that language.
If the press
is using a certain kind of language
I try to avoid it.
What I try to do is sometimes avoid it
but where I think the language is necessary
to be precise but also to contextualize it.
So I don't call
all Confederates
white supremacists.
But I point out where white supremacist ideas
have influenced them.
And I point out where certain individuals
are doing things that resonate with that.
But I'm against these kind of
blanket labels and categories.
And you also have to
speak about white supremacism
in that context in a nuanced way.
So people use white supremacists
without thinking what that means
and they just use it as a slow word
like this evil person.
But white supremacist is also just an ideology
that a lot of people have believed throughout.
Supremacy, whatever, white
black supremacy, whatever supremacy
believing that some people
are better than others, some group is better than another.
And there's been nations
that's built around these kinds of ideas.
And a lot of human history
is built around those ideas.
It's not just evil people believing this.
We in the United States of America
believe this kind of ideology is not productive.
It's unethical.
But those ideas have been
held by a lot of people.
And not like fringe groups.
But majorities of nations.
I'd say the same about anti-Semitism.
And there are many people
who are not anti-Semites
but don't recognize
that they're carrying around
or promoting anti-Semitic ideas
or anti-Semitic myths.
It's a thought that's been held by a lot of people
and you need to be convinced out of it
that requires conversation
and being empathetic.
It's not just calling somebody anti-Semite
and you're evil because
you've ever said something
that's kind of a dog whistle against Jewish people.
You have to be open-hearted to that.
These are ideas you have to contend with
that you have to
ultimately, I think
heal the division
behind those ideas by having
empathetic conversations with people
as opposed to, again, throwing poop.
I just like same poop.
All right.
Ooh, I got a challenge for you.
Given that you
have been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump,
can you say one thing you like
and one thing you don't like
about Donald Trump?
And perhaps, can you do the same
for our current president, Joe Biden?
One thing you like and one thing you dislike.
So it's harder for me to do the one thing I dislike
because there's so many things I dislike.
But the one thing I like
about
Donald Trump,
he believes
that
America
should be a better country.
I disagree on what he thinks it should be,
but he's not a declineist.
He's someone who believes the world could be made better.
I disagree with what he's trying to do.
I disagree with how he's trying to do it.
But I like the fact that he thinks it can be better.
His whole argument for himself is that
he can make things better. I don't think he can.
But I think things can be made better.
So I like the second half of that sentence.
When he says, I can make things better, take the eye out.
I like the can be better because there are too many people
on the left and the right
who think that, you know,
that we can't make things better. We have to accept them as they are
or they're getting worse.
I think a world without hope is horrible.
And I think what he has offered his followers
is a kind of hope.
So underneath his message
is a kind of optimism
for the future of this nation.
Yeah, it's a narcissistic optimism, but it's still an optimism.
Yes.
He's promising that
if you elect him again,
he will make things better.
And I think
people need to be told and we need to believe
that we can make things better. So that part I accept.
I reject those who say
we can't make things better.
My whole historical career is about showing that history
gives us tools to make things better.
So I like the idea
of trying to make things better
and giving people hope and reason to believe
that things can be better.
What's the main thing you dislike about Donald Trump?
I think he has
no
concern or care for the welfare
of anyone other than himself.
So, Jimmy,
what do you think of Donald Trump?
I think he's just
in psychology perspective.
And I think
he doesn't even care about his children.
I think he's just, I think it's
him. I think he's gone into a rabbit hole.
He might not always have been this way.
I did watch him a long time in New York City
when I was growing up in New York.
And I think he's been in this path.
And I think it's an extreme,
it's a clinical kind of narcissism.
So you,
of course, you have to.
Leadership is about human being. Policy matters.
It's one part of the equation, but it's not the only part.
What about Joe Biden?
What do you like and what do you dislike about?
So what I like about Joe Biden
is, in contrast to Trump,
I think Joe Biden really, right now in his career,
sees his role
as the shepherd of democracy.
He really believes that it's his role as president
to make our democracy more
stable and more vibrant.
I think he really believes.
I think that's why he's doing what he's doing right now.
And he comes from that system,
the political system
that basically,
the process of democracy,
he's worked there for many decades.
It's all he's done. Yeah, that's all he knows.
And he wants that to propagate
for better and for worse.
And he's not an extreme Democratic partisan at all.
He's actually a pretty middle-of-the-road guy
on most issues. Some people don't like him for that.
But I think he is about democracy.
What do I dislike about Biden?
I think
he does not have the capacity
right now
to provide the language
and the public discussion
of where our country should go.
He doesn't have a
he doesn't have a language
to inspire and build
enthusiasm
for the future.
That would probably be one of my
because I'm a sucker for great speeches.
And so, for me,
definitely a thing that stands out
for several reasons. One, in a time,
because we've been facing
so many challenges, like the pandemic,
it just seems like a
like, to me, it seems like an easy
like, layout.
There's so many
troubles we're going through that just require
a great unifying president or the great
like, just if I were to speak
candidly about
kind of the speaking ability
of Obama, for example,
Obama would just destroy this right now,
both on the war in Ukraine,
on the pandemic, all of it.
The unified, there's a hunger
for unification, I believe, maybe
people disagree with that because
they've, I think people have become
cynical in that the divisions that we're
experiencing are kind of already
really baked in. They're really
they're really planted their feet, but I don't think
so. I think there's a huge hunger, maybe
a little bit of a quiet hunger for a unifier,
for a great unifier.
I agree. I agree. And I think what's
what a great speech does is it's like a great
piece of music or poetry.
It helps you see something in yourself
and feel something you didn't feel before.
It doesn't overcome all different.
I don't think that speeches are unifying,
but I think what they are is they're mobilizing
and you can mobilize people to the same
mission with different points
of view.
Do you think Trump derangement syndrome
is a medical condition?
Or is there such a thing as a Biden
derangement syndrome? What I mean by that
it's a
funny kind of question, but
why are people so deeply outraged
seemingly beyond
reason at their hatred
or support of Donald Trump?
But hatred in particular.
I've seen a lot of friends
and people I respect
lose their mind completely.
Yeah. So I'm
not sure it's a medical condition or not because I'm not
a medical doctor.
My kids say I'm the wrong kind of doctor.
I'm a doctor, so let me take you
from here. No.
The fact that you get the doctor
signed after getting a PhD is a ridiculous
hilarity to me. Hilarious, ridiculous.
So as the wrong kind of doctor
I'll say I'm not going to comment on whether it's a medical condition,
but I do think you're onto something.
I think there is a way
in which
these men
become
touchstones of anger.
And there's all kinds of anger
and anxiety that people have.
And I've seen this in other historical periods.
You
center it on one person.
In a way, that's
John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln.
He actually didn't have a personal beef with Lincoln.
It was that all the things he feared
were
manifest in that.
And I think that's
an old story and then it's made worse
by social media
and the way we're bombarded.
It becomes a drug.
I mean, there are people I know who
hate Trump or Biden so much and just watch them.
It's not that they don't watch them.
It's that they do watch them, right?
And it triggers you
and you get hateful and then you feel
like you've done something by shouting
out your hate or typing in.
And so I don't know if it's a derangement syndrome.
I think it's a way
in which our energy gets channeled
and expressed in totally useless ways.
Yeah.
That's an interesting psychology which reminds me.
I need to explore that because I've noticed that
believe it or not,
it's easy for me to believe, but there's people
watching this right now
who really hate me
and they're watching because they hate me.
They hate the way I look, the way I speak,
the mumbling, all of that
and they're still watching.
And I'd like to say that
as I
try to explain myself,
I like to say that that's not a productive way.
I get it.
I understand.
There's a kind of...
What is it?
Is it the same psychological effect
when you see a car crash and you keep staring?
Yeah.
It's something that pulls you in.
Totally.
But I feel like it's that feeling
that's probably slightly different,
but you kind of want to
live your day-to-day life. Life is hard
and you just want to channel that anger towards something.
But the internet really
makes that easy for some reason.
And it makes sense of your life. That's the problem.
For people whose lives are chaos,
hating you and blaming you
gives order to their lives.
If it makes you happy, please continue.
It seems to bother you though, doesn't it?
Yeah, hate of any kind.
Not towards me, just the people.
Because I think about them
and I tend to think that most people
are amazing human beings and have a capacity
to do great things in this world.
And so I just think
that's not a productive way of being.
Like, psychologically, for anything,
whatsoever, everybody has quirks that you can hate.
But you just focus on the really positive stuff.
And you celebrate that stuff.
And that feels good. That has a momentum to it.
I guess the hate has a momentum to it too.
And that's what I'm trying to highlight.
If you follow the momentum of hate,
that's going to maybe
feel good in the short term.
It's not, it's going to fuck you over
more and more in your life.
You have to be cognizant of that
as you interact with each other.
I agree with everything you said,
but I think people who do things
that are influential and serious,
there always are some people who hate them.
I suppose that, but I wanted to show
the difference between philosophical
disagreement that borders on hate
and what's called hate watching.
Where you just,
which is what I would say TDS is.
Which is you're almost enjoying
how much you hate this person.
You're sitting in their hate and you forgot.
You lose all reason. You lose everything.
Your capacity to think as an individual
to empathize with others, you lose all of that.
You're in this muck of hate.
And you, and
somehow it helps you make sense
of this particular difficult moment in your life.
But otherwise it just,
it just seems like a shitty way to live.
But disagreement, definitely.
I like disagreement.
But I guess what I'm saying is,
and I think this is your message too, right,
is that don't let the fact
that people don't like you,
or even that some people hate you,
stop you from doing the right thing.
Think about how you can perhaps trigger them less,
but don't stop what you're doing.
I see too many, and this is why I bring this up,
too many of my students,
too many young, very talented people
who are afraid to take risks
because they're afraid that someone will hate them.
And that can't get in your way.
The reality is, most people,
or there will always be at least one person,
that will get,
that will have you back,
and that will support you, and just focus on them.
As long as you're doing the right thing,
focus on them for the strength.
But in general, I'm exaggerating here,
because most of the time,
99% of people are supportive on the internet.
It's just that something about the human psychology
really stands out to you
when somebody criticizes.
Well, it's easy on the internet.
This is historically different from where we were before
in a society.
It's very easy now to say hurtful things to people
and not have to even deal with them
looking at you in the face.
One of the things that encourages politeness
is the fact that we're looking at one another.
And I don't,
we are naturally programmed
not to want the other person
to react to us in certain ways.
But when we don't see their face,
it's very easy to say all kinds of things.
Let me actually comment on that point.
There's a lot of people on the internet
that say that I don't
push back on points
or criticize people or ask the hard questions enough.
First of all, oftentimes,
I disagree with that assessment.
But also,
I don't think you guys realize how hard that is
to do when you're sitting with a person.
I don't care about access.
I don't care about them being famous, just in a basic human level.
It's really hard
to ask a hard question
from a place of empathy.
Except when I'm sitting here, you seem to be only asking me hard.
No, this is a super fun.
I mean, when there's brilliant people like you
where there's nothing to push back on, that's easy.
But there's a basic human thing
that doesn't,
I think it's almost easier to be a journalist.
Like journalists do this well
where they don't have empathy for the person.
They're just asking the hard questions.
So where were you at this time last night?
Because that's very suspicious.
It's in contradiction to what you said
about actual stuff.
If you actually truly have a conversation
with another human being you empathize,
it's very difficult.
Because they have a story.
They have a vision of themselves
that they're the good person.
And to call somebody a liar
while having empathy
basically imply that they're a liar
that's damn, damn hard.
So anyway,
I'm trying to figure this thing out.
Can you make the case that the January 6th
Capitol is a big deal?
And can you make the case that it is not a big deal?
I think
the case is overwhelming that it was a big deal.
And I opened the book with this
before going back to the end of the Civil War
because I think it echoes that moment.
You had a group of people
who literally
tried to stop
the peaceful transfer of power
and were intending
and there's overwhelming evidence of this.
If they had caught
the Vice President
or the Speaker of the House
to do bodily harm to them
or to kidnap them.
So this was a coup d'etat.
That is the definition of a coup d'etat
when you try to capture and prevent elected officials
from doing their job. That's a huge deal.
That had happened before in our country
in states.
I talk about this in Louisiana, in Tennessee
and places like that after the Civil War.
But it never happened in the Capitol. That's a huge deal.
That is, if I might say,
what we would think of as third-world behavior
in our society and no offense to those
from other parts of the world. I'm just trying to make a point
is how we see that as happening somewhere else, not here.
That's a big fucking deal.
The case that is not a big deal,
I guess the case to make
there is that they didn't succeed.
The case that is not a big deal
is not that their intentions were not bad.
I don't see how you can defend
their intentions.
The case that is not a big deal is that there are a bunch of clowns.
And
they broke in
but in the end, once they got in there,
they didn't know what to do, which is true.
I think
a professional coup plotter
would say these were the amateurs
and that they had no real chance of succeeding
because
once they got into the Capitol, they had no plan
what to do next. What were they going to do?
Steal Stapler from Nancy Pelosi's
office. They didn't seem
to have a plan on what ended up happening.
They left the building.
That would be the case. That's not a big deal
because
their intention was not to overthrow.
Their intention was to
protest because if the intention was to overthrow
it would be much more organized.
I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming
that they were there
to stop the certification of the election.
They were there to prevent Donald Trump
from having to leave office.
They just didn't have a good plan. This was the
Keystone Cops.
So you're saying there is some
possibility that this would have
succeeded at halting
the basic process of democracy.
You could imagine a scenario where it might have.
If they had gotten lucky, sure.
If they had caught the vice president.
If they caught the vice president...
They couldn't go on and certify then.
He has to be there. No, but don't you think that would resolve itself
through police action and so on?
My question is how much
is this individual hooligans
and how much of this is a gigantic
movement that's challenging
the very fabric of our democracy?
It's not a gigantic movement,
but it was a small coup d'etat
that could have actually made the transition much more difficult.
Was there a scenario where Donald Trump
stayed in office legitimately? No.
But was there a scenario where they created
a great deal of chaos that further
undermined our democracy? Actually, yes.
Here's how it would happen, right?
They capture Pence.
They either kidnap him and try to ransom him.
Or they...
Which is what they were trying to do with the Michigan governor,
or they kill him.
And then Donald Trump says,
okay, well, there's no vice president, so you can't certify.
The Senate would choose someone else
to be vice president, but Donald Trump says,
no, that's not legitimate. Do you think it's possible
Donald Trump would say something like that? Absolutely.
I disagree with you.
He said that morning
that Pence should not certify. He said that morning.
But there's a difference between sort of
Twitter rhetoric. No, no, he said it at a rally.
Sure, a rally rhetoric.
And there is a threshold.
It feels like a big leap.
He asked people around him
in the Oval Office how he could make that happen.
He tried to get a new person appointed
Attorney General who would do that.
He tried to find legal justification for it.
I think the evidence is
overwhelming that Trump
was supportive of efforts after
the election didn't go the way he wanted.
To keep him in office.
And
whether that's legally actionable
and whether one thinks that means
he's a bad president or not
is a matter of opinion.
But facts are facts.
Yeah, I just wonder if it's possible
for him to have stayed president
in this kind of context. No.
He seems like a heated, just like you said, elections
can't even be violent.
They're heated. People are very upset.
When Donald Trump won the presidency
in 2016,
I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts
the amount of anger
I was
just the energy
I was getting from people.
I mean, that
if there was any way to channel that anger
I think people would be in trouble.
There's anger. Yeah, I agree with that.
And that is right. And elections are violent
as I said. But this is different.
This is the person in
the office of the presidency
using the power of the presidency
to try to stay in office
to imperil people's lives
to distort our government
out of scale we had not seen before.
And these are not opinions of mine.
We have the documentary evidence.
We have the testimony from people about this.
We can differ over what you think
of his presidency as a whole.
We can differ over whether you think
he should be held legally responsible.
Those are matters of opinion. But the facts
are he sat on January 6th
watched it on TV
did not send ever
ever.
Send any protection for Congress.
That is his job.
And throughout asked
continued to ask how
this could the certification could be prevented
to you. That's not incompetence.
That's malevolence. Absolutely.
If I watch
my children
getting harmed and I don't do something
about it. I'm watching it. And in fact
I take action
that tries to help those who are
doing the harm. You would not just
be an incompetent president.
You would say it was a negligent parent
and you would call parental support
to take away my children.
I was troubled by the way the press
covered it. That they politicized
the crap out of that.
And not just the press
but also Congress itself it just seemed
like impeachment and all of this.
It just seemed to be a kind of circus
that wasn't interested in democracy
or
non-partisanship.
So it's very
difficult for me to see the situation
with clear eyes.
Because it's been colored by the press.
It's very difficult for me to know what is even true.
Members of Congress
including our members of Congress from
our district and others, right?
Their lives were threatened.
They were traumatized.
I have a lot of students
at least a dozen who are staff members
more than half for Republicans.
Part of what traumatized them
was that the president
did not do his job
to protect them. Yes.
As a child would be traumatized
not only if
harmed by someone but if mom and dad
don't do everything they can.
One of the things that makes people feel safe
is they know their parents, they know their person
and authority can't always keep them safe
but they want to know the person is always trying.
I agree with you that they're, listen
I'm somebody that
the idea of family, especially people I work with
that to me is a high ideal to protect
but that's a little bit different.
It's his job. Hold on a second.
That's a little bit different than protecting democracy.
Those are two different things.
Protecting your employees
and protecting democracy is an ideal.
You could say he didn't protect either
but I think
the criticism that he didn't protect the employees is one thing.
But the employees in this case
are the ones carrying out democracy.
So it's like saying the general who doesn't
protect his soldiers is maybe
not protecting his employees. Those are not protecting
the war effort.
The people we're talking about
are the people who are actually doing the work of democracy
at that moment. The most basic function of democracy
which is certifying votes
and their lives with
I'm telling you I had students
one who works for Senator Romney
for example
who spent hours in a closet
hearing people outside
looking on her phone
as the president sending people
to protect us so we can do our job
and she was not happy with the way the election turned out
but she was there to do her job
because she believes in democracy
to service the Senate in the Senate's role.
What should have Donald Trump done
without turning him into a different human being?
He should have immediately
just as we were watching
things get breached the moment they had
the members of the House and the Senate had to
evacuate their respective chambers
he should have immediately
gone on TV and Twitter
and every space he could
and tell his supporters to leave
and say what he never said
this is un-American what you're doing
this is unacceptable, never use those words
this is un-American, this is unacceptable
I'm completely against anyone
storming the Capitol like this
go home now please.
Or you can use his own language but tell him to leave.
And immediately as soon as we know he was watching
for hours and we have testimony from his own daughter
from Ivanka saying she tried
and again to get him to say something earlier on
and he didn't. He watched it.
He can still criticize
all the politicians
he can criticize everyone he wants but he should have told him to leave.
All he has to do in that moment is
basic protecting democracy
protecting the Capitol
leave, tell them to leave and do everything he can
to find any kind of force he can give to go protect
the Capitol.
I wonder how difficult it is
to lose a presidential election.
It's happened so many times
I understand that but
especially when
what is it
80 million people vote for you
millions and millions
millions and millions of people vote for you.
It's crazy.
This democracy thing is crazy.
George H.W. Bush won a war
in the Middle East.
He had 90% approval rating and then a year later
lost the election.
To someone Bill Clinton he thought
had none of the experience he had
and had the right moral character
and Bush
did everything he could to help the next president
get started well and they became good friends.
George W. Bush
he didn't love Obama
that's considered one of the
smoothest transition. George W. Bush
ordered every single person
in his administration
to do everything they could to help the new
that's what a leader does.
Humility is one of the things I admire in leaders.
Well
that felt heated.
Speaking of which
can you just linger on
how do you think we can heal the divide
in this country? Do you think it's possible?
There feels to be a strong division.
I think we can heal the divide.
I think as you said
there's so many opportunities with new technology
to bring people together just as we're using it
to tear them apart.
I have the best job in the world
because I get to teach
so many students
of 300 in my class in the spring
in U.S. history class
and what I found with my students is they're
mostly not Democrats or Republicans
they mostly care about the same things.
Every one of my students seems to care about climate change.
I thought you were going to say
tiktok but okay. Second to that
climate change.
You know and I think
they offer a
new future for us and here's what I'll say as a historian
we go through cycles of
division and cycles of less division
and less partisanship.
One moment when it seems people agree too much
on the mainstream encourages people to go the extremes.
When people see the extremes
they want to come back to the middle
and that is where my students are.
Most of my students want
lower inflation.
They agree with Republicans on that but they want
more to be done about climate change.
They're in the middle on these issues and I think
giving them more opportunity.
So what's the best way to heal
our divisions honestly?
Get the old men out and the young
women and men in. Because they ultimately
don't have that same division
deeply baked in. Not only that
they find it disgusting
in the way you and I do. Yeah.
That's true. What's the right way
to have conversations?
Just to stay on that
with people on the left and the right.
I don't know how often you practice this.
Do you talk to people
who voted for Trump
or who are Republicans? It's hard.
I try but it's hard. 75%
of the people I talk to
are not those people. Do you have people
who are Trump supporters in your extended family?
Thanksgiving?
No, I don't in my extended family.
Are they no longer?
They're no longer in my family.
It's a session.
I have taken them out of the photograph.
They do not exist.
But I know
I have friends
who fall into that.
But it's still a minority of my friend group.
So I want to be clear that I'm not as good
at this as I should.
But I think we do have to reach out.
But I also
I'm less interested honestly
in
re-fighting old battles
with old dogs.
I'm more interested in finding ways
to get a new crop of people
and involved and engaged
without imparting
the same
partisanship on them.
So I will support
and encourage
especially any student of mine,
but any young person who
is smart, has good ideas.
I don't ask whether they're a Democrat or Republican.
And I have given money to some young candidates
who are not Democrats.
So that's the way I think
it's a generational change.
I'm trying out
and trying to
get people to see beyond partisan divisions
who are in their 20s
and teens rather than that.
That's why we do our podcast.
This is Democracy. Zachary and I do that at my son and I
because we're exactly that.
You will never hear an episode where we take one side or another.
Our goal is to explain the issue
whether it's
the challenges of democracy in China
or its climate change
or whatever it is
memory of war in our society
and to explain the issue
and then offer people an optimistic pathway
that's neither one side nor the other.
So actually to push back a little bit on young people
I do see that
the exhaustion with the sort of partisanship
but I've also
and this I think is the case throughout history
and I see it now
especially in the teenage years
especially if I'm being honest with boys
there's a desire for extremism
in various directions
all kinds of extremism
like just extreme
awesomeness or extreme
anything just extreme
and F the man that tries to make me behave
this kind of energy
and that's why you can take any ideology
basically any extreme ideology
starts being exciting whether you're a Marxist or a communist
you're not just going to be like
for socialized healthcare
you can be like no no no no
let's go full
hammer and sickle I'm going to wear red
and then the same
with white supremacy
or just
the way you see
the way you see society
the way you see the world the extremism is there
and part of that
it's kind of to steal that
perspective it can be productive that energy
if it's controlled and especially
if we have institutions
that keep it a little under control
one of the criticisms I have
with a lot of people I have
I'm
actually much more moderate than that criticism
of universities is they give a little too much power
to the 18 year old who just showed up
with their Marxist like books and so on
and they want to burn the whole thing down
that's beautiful but
the whole process of the universities get
different viewpoints educate
more make
that person's viewpoint more
sophisticated complex nuance
and all that kind of stuff
I think you're right but I think that's more talk than action
in my experience
there is especially among young men
you're absolutely right there is a valorization
of the tough guy
because most men
18 and 19 are still not
fully comfortable in their masculinity however
they're going to define it and so
a way of performing
that is being extreme
in one way or another and I've
definitely seen that but I think it's
it's more often than not
rhetoric and actually
there's a very strong power
of peer pressure and conformity
that works on young people and the positive
side of that now is
the peer pressure among them
is not to join one party or the other
it's to say this is terrible
look at how our parents are screwing things up
and they're right
and I think we can lean into that
and get a lot of positive creative action
out of that
on universities you brought this up a few times
and I think we have to be careful
I think you and I agree on this
it's not that universities are free of bias
universities especially large universities
whether it's UT, MIT, Yale
whatever we're talking about
they're large complex empires
and
most universities people in the arts
tend to be a little left of center
itself selection
those in engineering tend to be pretty much
in the middle and those at business schools
tend to be right of center
and so I think we need to be careful
we need to realize
at the University of Texas there's as much influence
from the business school and the athletic department
as there is from the humanities
so it's not
a left leaning campus
and that's also true at Yale
you have the school of management at Yale
you have a huge medical school
people who are very professional
and less political on a lot of these issues
so I think we have to be careful
I think there are certain pockets of things
but some of that you're never going to avoid
engineers are always going to be the people
who
who want to generally
find some objective measure
and avoid political interpretation
they want to find their objective measure
I'm surprised how most people in robotics
they're afraid of humans
precisely
and the arts people are always
going to be more touchy feely and the business people
are always going to like markets
my own personal opinion on this
this is just me talking
I don't know if it's grounded in data
but just my own experiences
it seems
a lot of the things that people criticize about universities
comes from administrations
from the bureaucracies
the faculty and the students are even with biases
are really
interesting people and all of their
different I wouldn't call them biases
the different perspectives add to the conversation
it's the
too much of course you need
institutions you need some
but too much it becomes too heavy handed
and
somehow
that has been getting a little bit out of hand
at a bunch of universities just too much
administration and I don't know what the mechanism is
to make it more efficient
but that's been always the struggle
maybe the public criticism is the very mechanism
that makes universities the administration smaller
absolutely we have those issues
and you can also say athletics has gotten out of control
sure
like you said you co-host
a podcast with your son Zachary
called this is democracy
what's been
there's a million questions I can ask
just that pops to memory
what's been a challenging or maybe an eye-opening
conversation you've had on it
oh we've had a lot of eye-opening
conversations our most recent episode
is an episode
on the German right
as I'm sure many
of your listeners know
there was a group called the Reichsberger
I think they still exist in Germany
they were actually led by a former German prince
and
they had been planning
to assassinate the bundeskanzler
and were organizing all sorts of other
efforts they do not believe
that the current
German government is legitimate they think the last legitimate
government was the Nazi government they see the whole
post-war period is illegitimate
so it's the German far right correct and
we had on
a member of the German Bundestag of their parliament
who's been involved in the investigations
or in the oversight of the investigations
and
talking with her about the depth
of these issues and the challenges
they face in Germany it's certainly
not a huge part of German society
but it's a significant number of people
probably more than 20,000 people who are part of this
to me
brought home
how much of what we thought was the past
is still in the present
and I think that's a recurring theme
in our show
and our show is optimistic it's not about
woes to the world
it's actually about taking issues we take a topic
each week that's in the news we go back to understand
the history and we then use that history
to make better policy to talk about how to make
better policy today and in this case
it was clear
that even in Germany there's a lot of unfinished
work
in explaining to people
and helping those for instance in the former east
of this group has its support
why this government is legitimate
why it operates the way it does and addressing
their concerns it was strikingly
similar to some of the problems we have in our own
yeah it's interesting that there's a far right
movement in Germany so you look at different
parts of the world as well in the United States
we do we did an episode recently
on China on the effects
of zero COVID and the protests in China
we've done a number of episodes on the war
in Ukraine our role
each week is to have on
either a policymaker or a scholar
or an activist who can help
us understand an issue and get beyond partisanship
so what's been eye-opening
are some of the details but what's also been eye-opening
honestly is how easy it is
to have a nonpartisan conversation
it's not hard
we open every episode with a poem
that Zachary writes he writes an original poem
I'll brag on my son he's the
youth poet laureate in Austin right now
and he writes a poem on each topic
what's the style of poetry usually
is he dark is he
he's often ironic
ironic like with a bit of humor
yes okay and he likes word plays
so he's not like a rebellious dark
teenager that's just
no he's a creative know-it-all
strong words he would probably disagree
but what's interesting
sounds like you're the know-it-all
we do have a lot of followers
and most of them comment on him
they don't comment on me so I'm the junior partner
you're the yoko ono
of the partnership
but what I will say and this is a really optimistic
thing that I deeply believe
if you frame things properly
you open with a poem you open with
questions not with partisan positions
even when we have someone on
who's a known Republican or Democrat
we can have a very nonpartisan conversation
I mean of course we get criticisms
but we're almost never criticized for being
partisan one way or the other
it's not hard to do this you just have to
make an effort to avoid
the partisan clap trap
that we can all fall into
focus on humanity what is your
brilliant popular son Zachary
taught you about life
oh he's taught me so much
in his 18 years as has our daughter
who's 20 two things stand out
he's taught me that
a new generation
has so much to offer
and I don't just mean because he's smart
and engaged as our daughter is too
I also mean that you realize when you have a child
that even though you're doing the same
things with them they see the world differently
and legitimately and it reminds
us that the world can be seen legitimately
in different ways and
it's not that he and I disagree on major
political issues it's actually the small stuff
that he sees differently like in the details
you see that you can have
very different perspectives exactly
you have a very way different way to draw
to create a painting of the same
scene and then the other thing he's taught
me is as I said
about the poetry the importance of
the arts I've always been a lover
of the arts but it had always
been in some ways parallel
to my historical scholarship we need
to do a better job of integrating
as the Greeks did
right the artistry
all the things we do we separate them
as disciplines but they're all deeply
connected this is what I like about your podcast
honestly is that you integrate all these things
you'll have people on with AI you'll have a guy doing
arm wrestling you have all these things together right
and it's that
these worlds come together
and there's a lot to gain
by bringing the arts and the sciences and all this together
it's an obvious thing to say but we forget
yeah and it somehow becomes
bigger than the individual parts
what gives you hope about the future
you looked at
especially with this book at just such a divisive
part of our
history and the claim
the idea that you carry through the book
that that division still permeates
our society so what gives you hope
I try to end the book on a very hopeful note
because I am hopeful
that these divisions
were made by people
and can be unmade by people
I do not believe
that what I describe in this book
the division the hate
that we see today as well
I don't think it's inevitable
I think it can be actually corrected
quite easily
and corrected easily by
addressing the challenges in our institutions
the ways in which this history has been embodied
in our institutions even though we're different
and
through our own recognizing of it
the gift of the last few years I don't care whether you're a democrat or republican
the gift of the last few years
is that we've been able to see the horror around us
and once you see the horror
you can do something about it
what's dangerous is when the horror is there and you don't see it
it's hidden
it's been unmasked I don't care where you stand
I probably spoken in about
25-30 cities about this book
every audience I've asked
how many of you have been shaken by the last 4-5 years
and everyone everywhere has raised their hand
that's a gift
that's consciousness raising
I grew up in a time in the 1980s
when we were concerned everyone was apathetic
that was what was being said
we had lower voter turnout than we have now
people didn't seem to care
my students when I was a young
I'm still a young professor
in the early 2000s
my students all wanted to go work for banks
they just wanted to make money
the best students wanted to go work for Goldman
we're not in that world anymore
there's been a consciousness raising
knowing there's a problem
naming the problem
gives us a chance to fix the problem
and I think that's where we are as a society now
young people are excited to solve the problem
do you think the individual
like if a young person is listening to this
do you think the individual has power in this
and the individual has a huge amount of power now
there's a demographic reason
we've got all these old people who have held on too long
look at the president
look at any institution
and we're reaching a demographic cliff
unlike China we have a large population
that's coming up
so those who are watching now who are in their 20s
they're going to get to move
into leadership positions much faster
than their parents did
let's go
and then the second thing is
what we're doing here
social media when used properly
gives a platform to young people
they don't have to go through the New York Times
like I do
this is why I do the podcast with my son
find other ways
you reach millions of people
and
this can be done
you don't need to wait for the old guys to give you
the check mark that it's okay
just put on a suit
get a haircut
speaking nonsense to microphone
and uh...
well also I mean have a very neat place
that's why I love you
alright Jeremy you're an incredible human being
thank you for talking once more time
thank you for writing this important book
I hope you keep writing
and I hope to keep
talking to you because you're
this shining beacon
of political hope I have here in Austin
that we get to enjoy
I want to thank you for having me on
and thank you for your show I think what you're doing
is so important and
I really deeply respect what you do
thanks for listening
to this conversation with Jeremy Surrey
to support this podcast please check out our sponsors
in the description
and now let me leave you with some words
from Abraham Lincoln
nearly all men can stand adversity
if you want to test the man's character
give him power
thanks for listening
and hope to see you next time