Jeremi Suri: Civil War, Slavery, Freedom, and Democracy

00:00:00.000 | the war continues after the battles end.

00:00:01.720 | This is something that's hard for Americans to understand.

00:00:03.520 | Our system is built with the presumption

00:00:05.160 | when war is over, when we sign a piece of paper,

00:00:07.640 | everyone can go home.

00:00:08.680 | It's not what happens.

00:00:10.760 | - The following is a conversation with Jeremy Suri,

00:00:15.400 | a historian at UT Austin.

00:00:17.920 | This is the "Alex Friedman Podcast."

00:00:19.800 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:21.700 | in the description.

00:00:23.040 | And now, dear friends, here's Jeremy Suri.

00:00:26.840 | What is the main idea,

00:00:29.200 | the main case that you make in your new book,

00:00:31.640 | "Civil War by Other Means,

00:00:33.360 | "America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy."

00:00:36.520 | - So our democratic institutions in the United States,

00:00:39.480 | they are filled with many virtues

00:00:41.480 | and many elements in their design

00:00:44.200 | that improve our society and allow for innovation.

00:00:47.080 | But they also have many flaws in them,

00:00:48.640 | as any institutions created by human beings have.

00:00:51.520 | And the flaws in our institutions go back

00:00:54.160 | to a number of judgments and perspectives

00:00:57.840 | that people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries had.

00:01:01.280 | And those flaws have been built into our institutions,

00:01:04.200 | and they continue to hinder innovation

00:01:07.160 | and growth in our society.

00:01:08.720 | Three of the flaws that I emphasize in this book

00:01:11.680 | are flaws of exclusion,

00:01:14.120 | the ways our institutions exclude people,

00:01:15.760 | not just African-Americans, many different groups.

00:01:18.540 | The ways our institutions also give power

00:01:22.720 | to certain people who have position

00:01:24.800 | rather than skill or intelligence or quality.

00:01:28.560 | And third, and most of all,

00:01:29.680 | the ways our institutions embed certain myths in our society,

00:01:33.360 | myths that prevent us from gaining the knowledge

00:01:36.260 | we need to improve our world.

00:01:37.960 | In all of these ways,

00:01:38.860 | our democracy is hindered by the false reverence

00:01:43.600 | for institutions that actually need to be reformed,

00:01:46.680 | just as we need to highlight the good elements of them.

00:01:48.900 | That's really what my book is about.

00:01:50.160 | - And then the myth, the false reverence,

00:01:53.680 | what are we talking about there?

00:01:54.880 | - So there's a way in which we believe

00:01:57.080 | that if we love our country,

00:01:59.260 | it's somehow wrong to criticize our institutions.

00:02:01.960 | I believe if you love your country,

00:02:03.880 | you want to encourage your institutions

00:02:05.320 | to get better and better.

00:02:06.240 | I love my university where I work,

00:02:07.920 | but I want it to be better.

00:02:08.760 | We have many flaws.

00:02:09.800 | I love my family,

00:02:10.640 | but I'm constantly telling family members

00:02:12.120 | how they can be better.

00:02:13.920 | That's what true knowledge leadership is about,

00:02:17.400 | not just cheerleading.

00:02:18.720 | - What's the counterpoint to that?

00:02:20.000 | 'Cause the other extreme is a deep,

00:02:24.200 | all-encompassing cynicism towards institutions.

00:02:28.160 | So for me, I like the idea of loving America,

00:02:32.120 | which seems to be sometimes a politicized statement

00:02:34.680 | these days that you believe in the ideals of this country.

00:02:38.640 | That seems to be either a naive or a political statement,

00:02:42.880 | the way it's interpreted.

00:02:43.840 | So the flip side of that,

00:02:45.440 | having a healthy skepticism of institutions is good,

00:02:48.080 | but having a complete paralyzing cynicism seems to be bad.

00:02:51.880 | - Absolutely, both are ahistorical positions.

00:02:54.680 | What I try to do as a historian

00:02:56.200 | is work in between those spaces.

00:02:57.680 | The virtue is in the middle ground,

00:03:00.000 | for better or for worse.

00:03:01.280 | And what we have to recognize

00:03:03.640 | is that our institutions are necessary.

00:03:06.120 | There's a reason government exists.

00:03:08.280 | There's a reason our union was created.

00:03:11.440 | That's what Abraham Lincoln was heroically fighting for.

00:03:14.720 | So we have to believe in our union.

00:03:16.400 | We have to believe in our government.

00:03:17.840 | And we as business people, as intellectuals,

00:03:20.040 | we have to be part of the solution, not the problem.

00:03:23.160 | But that doesn't mean just ignoring

00:03:26.000 | the deep flaws in our institutions,

00:03:27.440 | even if we find personally ways to get around them.

00:03:30.360 | What really worries me is that there are a lot of

00:03:32.760 | very intelligent, well-intentioned people in our society

00:03:36.160 | who have figured out how to live with the flaws

00:03:38.680 | in our institutions, rather than how to use their skills

00:03:41.520 | to correct the flaws in our institutions.

00:03:43.720 | - There's folks like somebody that lives next door to me,

00:03:46.400 | Michael Malice, is an anarchist.

00:03:48.240 | Philosophically, maybe more than practically,

00:03:51.800 | just sort of argues for that position.

00:03:53.960 | It's an interesting thought experiment, I would say.

00:03:57.280 | And so if you have these flaws in institutions,

00:04:01.040 | one thing to do, as the communists did

00:04:04.000 | at the beginning of the 20th century,

00:04:05.240 | is to burn the thing down and start anew.

00:04:08.200 | And the other is to fix from within,

00:04:12.040 | one step, one slow step at a time.

00:04:14.400 | What's the case for both from a history perspective?

00:04:17.560 | - Sure, so historically, there has always been an urge

00:04:21.000 | to burn down the institutions and start again,

00:04:22.800 | start with a blank slate.

00:04:24.440 | The historical record is that almost never works.

00:04:26.800 | Because what happens when you destroy the institutions,

00:04:28.800 | you gave the example of the Bolshevik Revolution.

00:04:32.200 | When you destroy the institutions,

00:04:34.120 | all you do is in the jungle that's left behind,

00:04:37.400 | you give advantages to those who are the most powerful.

00:04:40.080 | Institutions always place certain limits

00:04:42.840 | upon the most powerful in the jungle.

00:04:44.720 | If you go back to the jungle,

00:04:46.160 | the most powerful are actually going to have

00:04:48.240 | the most influence and most control.

00:04:50.080 | So the revolutionaries who are usually the vulnerable

00:04:53.160 | turn out to then be the victims of the revolution.

00:04:55.240 | And this is exactly what we saw with the French Revolution,

00:04:57.680 | with the Russian Revolution.

00:04:58.960 | So the record for that is not a great record.

00:05:00.880 | There still might be times to do that.

00:05:02.680 | But I think we should be very cautious about that.

00:05:04.760 | The record for working through institutions

00:05:06.560 | is a much better record.

00:05:08.040 | Now, what we have to be careful about

00:05:09.800 | is as we're working through institutions,

00:05:11.200 | not to become bought into them,

00:05:13.120 | not to become of those institutions.

00:05:15.440 | So what I've written about in this book

00:05:17.160 | and in other books, my book on Henry Kissinger, for example,

00:05:19.840 | is how it's important when in an institution

00:05:22.120 | to still bring an outsider perspective.

00:05:24.480 | I believe in being an inside outsider.

00:05:27.600 | And I think most of your listeners are inside outsiders.

00:05:29.720 | They're people who care about what's going on inside,

00:05:32.040 | but they're bringing some new ideas from the outside.

00:05:34.120 | - I think the correct statement to say

00:05:35.360 | is most of the listeners, most people,

00:05:37.000 | aspire to be inside or outsiders.

00:05:40.760 | But we, human nature is such

00:05:43.000 | that we easily become inside or insiders.

00:05:45.880 | So like, we like that idea, but the reality is,

00:05:50.160 | and I've been very fortunate because of this podcast

00:05:53.520 | to talk to certain folks that live in certain bubbles.

00:05:56.720 | And it's very hard to know when you're in a bubble

00:06:02.600 | that you should get out of the bubble of thought.

00:06:06.320 | And that's a really tricky thing because like, yeah,

00:06:08.520 | when you're, whether it's politics,

00:06:10.560 | whether it's science, whether it's any pursuits in life,

00:06:15.560 | because everybody around you, all your friends,

00:06:19.360 | you have like a little rat race

00:06:20.720 | and you're competing with each other.

00:06:22.280 | And then you get a promotion, you get excited,

00:06:24.160 | and you can see how you can get more and more power.

00:06:26.720 | It's not like a dark, cynical rat race.

00:06:30.320 | It's fun.

00:06:31.600 | That's the process of life.

00:06:33.200 | And then you forget that you just collectively

00:06:38.200 | have created a set of rules for the game

00:06:40.120 | that you're playing.

00:06:41.120 | You forget that this game doesn't have to have these rules.

00:06:43.800 | You can break them.

00:06:44.900 | This happens in like in Wall Street,

00:06:48.960 | like the financial system,

00:06:50.920 | everybody starts to like collectively agree

00:06:53.040 | on a set of rules that they play.

00:06:54.560 | And they don't realize like,

00:06:55.800 | we don't have to be playing this game.

00:06:57.440 | It's tough.

00:06:58.280 | It's really tough.

00:06:59.480 | It takes a special kind of human being

00:07:01.080 | as opposed to being anti-establishment on everything,

00:07:04.760 | which also gets a lot of attention.

00:07:07.840 | But being just enough anti-establishment

00:07:11.200 | to figure out ideas how to improve the establishment.

00:07:14.880 | That's such a tricky place to operate.

00:07:17.040 | - I agree.

00:07:17.880 | I like the word iconoclastic.

00:07:20.120 | I think it's important to be an iconoclast,

00:07:22.520 | which is to say you love ideas,

00:07:25.080 | you're serious about ideas,

00:07:27.520 | but you're never comfortable with consensus.

00:07:30.600 | And I write about that in this book.

00:07:32.000 | I've written about that actually a lot

00:07:33.080 | in the New York Times too.

00:07:34.160 | I think consensus is overstated.

00:07:37.680 | As someone who's half Jewish and half Hindu,

00:07:41.240 | I don't wanna live in a society where everyone agrees

00:07:43.160 | 'cause my guess is they're gonna come after people like me.

00:07:45.880 | I wanna live in a society that's pluralistic.

00:07:48.400 | This is what Abraham Lincoln was really fighting for

00:07:50.320 | in the Civil War.

00:07:51.160 | It's what the Civil War is really about

00:07:52.400 | and what my book's about,

00:07:53.240 | which is that we need a society

00:07:55.800 | where institutions encourage, as you say,

00:07:58.560 | different modes of thought

00:08:00.120 | and respect different modes of thought

00:08:01.680 | and work through disagreement.

00:08:03.240 | So a society should not be a society where everyone agrees.

00:08:06.000 | A democratic society should be a society

00:08:07.600 | where people disagree but can still work together.

00:08:10.080 | That's the Lincoln vision.

00:08:12.200 | And how do you get there?

00:08:13.200 | I think you get there by having a historical perspective,

00:08:15.480 | always knowing that no matter what moment you're in

00:08:18.080 | and no matter what room you're in with really smart people,

00:08:20.880 | there are always things that are missing.

00:08:22.720 | We know that as historians.

00:08:24.480 | No one is clairvoyant and the iconoclast

00:08:26.920 | is looking for the things that have been forgotten,

00:08:28.880 | the silences in the room.

00:08:31.000 | - And also, I wonder what kind of skill,

00:08:35.000 | what kind of process is required for the iconoclast

00:08:38.200 | to reveal what is missing to the rest of the room?

00:08:41.480 | Because it's not just shouting with a megaphone

00:08:44.200 | that something is missing

00:08:45.040 | 'cause nobody will listen to you.

00:08:47.000 | You have to convince them.

00:08:48.400 | - Right.

00:08:49.240 | It's honestly where I have trouble myself

00:08:51.160 | 'cause I often find myself in that iconoclastic role

00:08:54.000 | and people don't like to hear it.

00:08:56.200 | I like to believe that people are acting out of goodwill,

00:08:59.880 | which I think they usually are,

00:09:01.240 | and that people are open to new ideas,

00:09:02.800 | but you find very quickly,

00:09:04.320 | even those who you think are open-minded,

00:09:06.080 | once they've committed themselves and put their money

00:09:08.760 | and their reputation on the line,

00:09:10.640 | they don't wanna hear otherwise.

00:09:11.840 | So in a sense, what you say is bigger

00:09:14.280 | than even being an iconoclast.

00:09:16.200 | It's being able to persuade and work with people

00:09:19.080 | who are afraid of your ideas.

00:09:20.680 | - Yeah, I think the key is, like in conversations,

00:09:23.000 | is to get people out of a defensive position,

00:09:26.000 | like make them realize we're on the same side,

00:09:29.240 | we're brothers and sisters, and from that place,

00:09:32.400 | I think you just raise the question.

00:09:34.160 | It's like a little thought that just lands,

00:09:38.880 | and then I've noticed this time and time again,

00:09:42.120 | just a little subtle thing, and then months later,

00:09:45.680 | it percolates somewhere in the mind.

00:09:47.280 | It's like, all right, that little doubt,

00:09:49.960 | because I also realize in these battles,

00:09:53.240 | especially political battles,

00:09:54.680 | people often don't have folks on their side

00:10:00.920 | like that they can really trust as a fellow human being

00:10:05.920 | to challenge them.

00:10:07.200 | That's a very difficult role to be in,

00:10:09.000 | and because in these battles, you kinda have a tribe

00:10:12.240 | and you have a set of ideas, and there's another tribe,

00:10:14.000 | and you have a set of ideas,

00:10:15.160 | and when somebody says something counter to your viewpoint,

00:10:18.040 | you almost always wanna put them in the other tribe

00:10:19.960 | as opposed to having, truly listening to another person.

00:10:23.520 | That takes skill, but ultimately, I think that's the way

00:10:27.240 | to bridge these divides

00:10:28.440 | is having these kinds of conversations.

00:10:31.280 | That's why I'm actually, again, optimistically believe

00:10:34.960 | in the power of social media to do that

00:10:36.800 | if you design it well,

00:10:38.400 | but currently, the battle rages on on Twitter.

00:10:42.000 | - Well, I think what you're getting at,

00:10:43.800 | which is so important, is storytelling,

00:10:46.920 | and all the great leaders that I've studied,

00:10:51.200 | some of whom are in this book, some of whom are not,

00:10:53.680 | whether they're politicians, social activists,

00:10:56.800 | technologists, it's the story that gets people in.

00:11:01.600 | People don't respond to an argument.

00:11:04.040 | We're trained, at least in the United States,

00:11:06.920 | we're often trained to argue.

00:11:09.360 | You're told in a class, okay, this part of the room,

00:11:12.280 | take this position, this part of the room,

00:11:14.360 | take this position, and that's helpful

00:11:15.920 | because it forces you to see different sides

00:11:17.520 | of the argument, but in fact, those on one side

00:11:20.200 | never convince those on the other side through argument.

00:11:22.880 | It's through a story that people can identify with.

00:11:25.400 | It's when you bring your argument to life in human terms,

00:11:28.800 | and someone, again, like Abraham Lincoln

00:11:30.760 | was a master at that.

00:11:32.760 | He told stories.

00:11:34.440 | He found ways to disarm people and to move them

00:11:37.920 | without their even realizing they were being moved.

00:11:40.600 | - Yeah, not make it a debate, make it tell a story.

00:11:47.680 | That's fascinating 'cause yes,

00:11:50.320 | some of the most convincing politicians,

00:11:52.520 | I don't feel like they're arguing a point.

00:11:54.080 | They're just telling a story,

00:11:55.760 | and it gets in there, right?

00:11:57.800 | - That's right, that's right.

00:11:58.640 | I mean, when we look at what Zelensky has done in Ukraine

00:12:01.560 | in response to the Russian invasion,

00:12:03.640 | and I know you were there on the front lines yourself,

00:12:06.340 | it's not that he's arguing a position that persuaded us.

00:12:10.280 | We already believe what we believed about Russia,

00:12:12.960 | but he's bringing the story of Ukrainian suffering to life

00:12:16.040 | and making us see the behavior of the Russians

00:12:18.960 | that is moving opinion around the world.

00:12:23.200 | - Well, the interesting stuff,

00:12:24.400 | sometimes it's not actually the story told by the person,

00:12:27.440 | but the story told about the person.

00:12:29.320 | And some of that could be propaganda.

00:12:31.000 | Some of that could be legitimate stories,

00:12:34.960 | which is the fascinating thing.

00:12:36.000 | The power of story is the very power

00:12:39.200 | that's leveraged by propaganda to convince the populace.

00:12:43.040 | But the idea, one of the most powerful ideas

00:12:45.640 | when I traveled in Ukraine,

00:12:47.280 | and in general to me personally,

00:12:49.160 | the idea that President Zelensky stayed in Kiev

00:12:53.160 | in the early days of war,

00:12:55.200 | when everybody from his inner circle to the United States,

00:12:58.800 | everybody in the Western NATO,

00:13:00.040 | everybody was telling him,

00:13:02.000 | and even on the Russian side,

00:13:03.680 | I assume they thought he would leave, he would escape,

00:13:07.080 | and he didn't.

00:13:07.960 | From foolishness or from heroism, I don't know.

00:13:12.140 | But that's a story that I think united a country,

00:13:15.560 | and it's such a small thing, but it's powerful.

00:13:18.680 | - It's the most basic of all human stories,

00:13:20.440 | the story of human courage.

00:13:21.960 | - Yeah, courage.

00:13:22.800 | I remember watching his social media feed on that,

00:13:26.120 | and he was standing outside, not even in a bunker,

00:13:29.560 | standing outside in Kiev, right,

00:13:31.240 | as the Russian forces are attacking and saying,

00:13:33.160 | "I'm here, and this minister is here,

00:13:35.720 | "and this minister is here.

00:13:36.600 | "We're not corrupt.

00:13:38.040 | "We're not stooges of the Americans who told us to leave.

00:13:40.960 | "We're staying because we care about Ukraine."

00:13:43.360 | And the story of courage, I mean,

00:13:45.280 | that's the story that babies grow up

00:13:48.000 | seeing their parents as courageous, right?

00:13:50.000 | It's the most natural of all stories.

00:13:51.920 | - And it's also the stories, for better or worse,

00:13:53.800 | that are told throughout history.

00:13:55.680 | - Yeah.

00:13:56.720 | - Because stories of courage and stories of evil,

00:14:01.720 | those are the two extremes, are the ones that are kinda,

00:14:05.680 | it's a nice mechanism to tell the stories of wars,

00:14:08.480 | of conflicts, of struggles, all of it.

00:14:13.240 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:14:14.320 | - The tension between those two.

00:14:15.480 | - And the reason I believe studying history

00:14:18.080 | and writing about history is so essential

00:14:20.360 | is because it gives us more stories.

00:14:22.840 | The problem with much of our world, I think,

00:14:25.040 | is that we're confronted by data,

00:14:26.960 | we're confronted by information,

00:14:28.880 | and of course it's valuable,

00:14:30.560 | but it's easy to manipulate or misuse information.

00:14:34.440 | It's the stories that give us a structure.

00:14:36.440 | It's the stories where we find morality.

00:14:38.120 | It's the stories where we find political value.

00:14:40.640 | And what do you get from studying history?

00:14:42.880 | You learn more stories about more people.

00:14:45.640 | - Yeah, I'm a sucker for courage, for stories of courage.

00:14:48.920 | Like I've been in too many rooms,

00:14:52.320 | I've often seen too many people sort of in subtle ways

00:14:57.320 | sacrifice their integrity and did nothing.

00:14:59.880 | And people that step up when the opinion is unpopular

00:15:04.880 | and they do something where they really put themselves

00:15:07.840 | on the line, whether it's their money,

00:15:09.200 | whether it's their wellbeing, I don't know.

00:15:11.520 | That gives me hope about humanity.

00:15:13.420 | And of course, during a war like Ukraine,

00:15:16.560 | you see that more and more.

00:15:18.560 | Now, other people have a very cynical perspective of it

00:15:21.240 | that saying, oh, those are just narratives

00:15:23.200 | that are constructed for propaganda purposes and so on.

00:15:26.440 | But I've seen it with my own eyes.

00:15:28.000 | There's heroes out there, both small and big.

00:15:31.440 | So just regular citizens and leaders.

00:15:34.160 | - One set of heroes I learned about writing this book

00:15:36.320 | that I didn't know about that I should have

00:15:38.080 | are more than 100,000 former slaves

00:15:42.600 | who become Union soldiers during a civil war.

00:15:45.000 | It's an extraordinary story.

00:15:46.040 | We think of it as North versus South,

00:15:48.440 | white Northern troops versus white Southern troops.

00:15:51.360 | There are, as I said, more than 100,000 slaves,

00:15:54.440 | no education, never anything other than slaves

00:15:59.160 | who flee their plantations, join the Union Army.

00:16:02.560 | And what I found in the research,

00:16:03.720 | and other historians have written about this too,

00:16:05.160 | is they become some of the most courageous soldiers

00:16:08.240 | because they know what they're fighting for,

00:16:09.880 | but there's something more to it than that.

00:16:11.960 | It seems in their stories that there is a humanity,

00:16:15.240 | a human desire for freedom

00:16:18.200 | and a human desire to improve oneself,

00:16:21.560 | even for those who have been denied

00:16:23.400 | even the most basic rights for all of their lives.

00:16:26.320 | And I think that story should be inspiring to all of us

00:16:30.160 | as a story of courage,

00:16:31.440 | 'cause we all deal with difficulties,

00:16:33.360 | but none of us are starting from slavery.

00:16:36.120 | - That's really powerful, that flame,

00:16:38.840 | the longing for freedom can't be extinguished

00:16:41.680 | through the generations of slavery.

00:16:43.160 | So that's something you talk about.

00:16:44.280 | There's some deep sense in which,

00:16:46.400 | while the war was about, in part about slavery,

00:16:51.240 | it's not, the slaves themselves fought for their freedom

00:16:56.240 | and they won their freedom.

00:16:58.440 | - I don't think it's a war about slavery.

00:17:00.040 | I think it's a war about freedom.

00:17:01.720 | Because if you say it's a war about slavery,

00:17:03.800 | then it sounds like it's an argument

00:17:05.560 | between the slave masters and the other white guys

00:17:09.920 | who didn't want slavery to exist.

00:17:11.240 | And of course that argument did exist,

00:17:13.640 | but it wasn't, it was a war over freedom,

00:17:16.800 | especially after 1863 into the second year of the war

00:17:20.760 | when Lincoln, because of war pressures,

00:17:23.120 | signs the Emancipation Proclamation,

00:17:26.440 | which therefore says that the contraband,

00:17:30.080 | the property of Southerners, i.e. their slaves,

00:17:33.480 | will now be freed and brought into the Union Army.

00:17:37.080 | That makes it about freedom.

00:17:38.680 | Already the slaves were leaving the plantations.

00:17:41.440 | They knew what was going on

00:17:42.840 | and they were gonna get out of slavery

00:17:44.240 | as soon as they could.

00:17:45.520 | But now it becomes a war over freeing them,

00:17:48.040 | over opening that opportunity for them.

00:17:51.680 | And that's how the war ends.

00:17:52.880 | That's really important, right?

00:17:54.120 | And that's where we are in our politics today.

00:17:55.960 | It's the same debate.

00:17:56.840 | It's why I wrote this book.

00:17:58.680 | The challenge of our time is to understand

00:18:01.480 | how do we make our society open to more freedom

00:18:04.360 | for more people?

00:18:05.960 | - So let's go to the beginning.

00:18:08.840 | How did the American Civil War start and why?

00:18:12.560 | - So the American Civil War starts

00:18:14.360 | because of our flawed institutions.

00:18:17.160 | The founders had mixed views of slavery,

00:18:20.160 | but they wanted a system that would eventually work its way

00:18:23.840 | toward opening for more people of more kinds.

00:18:27.360 | Not necessarily equality,

00:18:28.600 | but they wanted a more open democratic system.

00:18:30.880 | But our institutions were designed in ways

00:18:33.480 | that gave disproportionate power to slave holders

00:18:37.200 | in particular states in the Union.

00:18:39.280 | Through the Senate, through the Electoral College,

00:18:41.880 | through many of the institutions we talk about

00:18:43.440 | in our politics today.

00:18:45.280 | Therefore, that part of the country

00:18:47.680 | was in the words of Abraham Lincoln,

00:18:49.520 | holding the rest of the country hostage.

00:18:52.080 | For a poor white man like Abraham Lincoln,

00:18:54.720 | born in Kentucky, who makes his way in Illinois,

00:18:57.320 | slavery was an evil, not just for moral reasons.

00:19:00.360 | It was an evil because it denied him democratic opportunity.

00:19:04.120 | Why would anyone hire poor Abe to do something

00:19:06.840 | if they could get a slave to do it for free?

00:19:09.400 | And his economy of opportunity for him

00:19:11.760 | had to be an economy that was open

00:19:13.840 | and that did not have slavery,

00:19:15.000 | particularly in the new states

00:19:16.160 | that were coming into the Union.

00:19:18.040 | Lincoln was one of the creators of the Republican Party,

00:19:21.000 | which was a party dedicated to making sure

00:19:23.120 | all new territory was open to anyone

00:19:27.320 | who was willing to work, any male figure,

00:19:29.720 | who would be paid for their work.

00:19:30.760 | Free labor, free soil, free men, basic capitalism.

00:19:34.120 | Southerners, Southern plantation owners

00:19:35.800 | were an aristocracy that did not want that.

00:19:39.400 | They wanted to use slavery

00:19:40.560 | and expand slavery into the new territories.

00:19:42.840 | What caused the Civil War?

00:19:43.840 | The clash and our institutions that were unable to adapt

00:19:48.280 | and continue to give disproportionate power

00:19:51.880 | to these Southern plantation slave owners.

00:19:54.280 | The Supreme Court was dominated by them.

00:19:56.880 | Senate was dominated by them.

00:19:58.880 | And so the Republican Party came into power

00:20:01.960 | as a critique of that.

00:20:03.240 | And Southerners unwilling to accept,

00:20:07.200 | Southern Confederates unwilling to accept that change

00:20:10.460 | went to war with the Union.

00:20:12.240 | - So who was on each side, the Union Confederates?

00:20:15.480 | What are we talking about?

00:20:16.640 | What are the states?

00:20:17.560 | How many people?

00:20:18.700 | What's like the demographics and the dynamics of each side?

00:20:25.320 | - The Union side is much, much larger, right?

00:20:28.760 | In terms of population, I think about 22 million people.

00:20:32.000 | And it is what we would today recognize

00:20:34.200 | as all the states basically North of Virginia.

00:20:37.720 | The South is the states in the South

00:20:40.340 | of the Mason-Dixon line.

00:20:41.620 | So Virginia and there on South, West through Tennessee.

00:20:45.220 | So Texas, for example, is in the Confederacy.

00:20:47.260 | Tennessee is in the Confederacy.

00:20:49.640 | But other states like Missouri are border states.

00:20:53.320 | And the Confederacy is a much smaller entity.

00:20:58.260 | It's made up of about 9 million people

00:21:00.300 | plus about 4 million slaves.

00:21:02.260 | And it is a agricultural economy,

00:21:05.980 | whereas the Northern economy

00:21:07.020 | is a more industrializing economy.

00:21:09.240 | Interestingly enough, the Confederate states

00:21:11.140 | are in some ways more international

00:21:14.140 | than the Northern states

00:21:15.600 | because they are exporters of cotton, exporters of tobacco.

00:21:20.000 | So they actually have very strong

00:21:21.680 | international economic ties,

00:21:23.000 | very strong ties to Great Britain.

00:21:24.880 | The United States was the largest source of cotton

00:21:26.800 | to the world before the Civil War.

00:21:28.520 | Egypt replaces that a little bit during the Civil War.

00:21:31.640 | But all the English textiles were American cotton

00:21:35.360 | from the South.

00:21:36.600 | And so it is the Southern half of what we would call

00:21:40.360 | the Eastern part of the United States today

00:21:42.120 | with far fewer people.

00:21:43.560 | It's made up, the Confederacy is, of landed families.

00:21:47.480 | Wealth in the Confederacy was land and slaves.

00:21:51.240 | The Northern United States is made up

00:21:53.140 | predominantly of small business owners

00:21:56.000 | and then larger financial interests,

00:21:58.240 | such as the banks in New York.

00:21:59.740 | - And what about the military?

00:22:03.240 | Who are the people that picked up guns?

00:22:05.560 | What are the numbers there?

00:22:06.520 | So the Union also outnumbered the Confederacy.

00:22:09.360 | - By far, but it is a really interesting question

00:22:11.440 | because there's no conscription in the Constitution.

00:22:14.040 | Unlike most other countries,

00:22:15.900 | our democracy is formed on the presumption

00:22:18.300 | that human beings should not be forced

00:22:19.800 | to go into the military if they don't want to.

00:22:21.720 | Most democracies in the world today

00:22:23.120 | actually still require military service.

00:22:25.400 | The United States has very rarely in its history done that.

00:22:27.940 | It's not in our Constitution.

00:22:29.560 | So during the Civil War,

00:22:31.920 | in the first months and years of the Civil War,

00:22:34.320 | Abraham Lincoln has to go to the different states,

00:22:38.580 | to the governors, and ask the governors for volunteers.

00:22:41.880 | So the men who take up arms,

00:22:43.880 | especially in the first months of the war,

00:22:46.000 | are volunteers in the North.

00:22:48.200 | In the South, they're actually conscripted.

00:22:51.000 | And then as the war goes on,

00:22:52.800 | the Union will pass the Conscription Acts of 1862 and 1863,

00:22:57.800 | which for the first time,

00:22:58.920 | and this is really important

00:22:59.760 | 'cause it creates new presidential powers,

00:23:01.560 | for the first time,

00:23:02.400 | Lincoln will have presidential power

00:23:04.720 | to force men into the army,

00:23:06.920 | which is what leads to all kinds of draft riots

00:23:09.120 | in New York and elsewhere.

00:23:11.240 | But suffice it to say,

00:23:12.080 | the Union Army throughout the war

00:23:13.580 | is often three times the size of the Confederate Army.

00:23:17.360 | - What's the relationship between this no conscription

00:23:22.200 | and people standing up to fight for ideas

00:23:25.720 | and the Second Amendment?

00:23:27.320 | A well-regulated militia being necessary

00:23:29.680 | to the security of a free state,

00:23:31.280 | the right of the people to keep and bear arms

00:23:33.520 | shall not be infringed.

00:23:35.900 | We're in Texas.

00:23:36.740 | - Yeah, yes.

00:23:37.580 | - What's the role of that in this story?

00:23:41.440 | - The American population is already armed before the war.

00:23:44.960 | And so even though the Union and the Confederate Armies

00:23:47.460 | will manufacture and purchase arms,

00:23:50.040 | it is already an armed population.

00:23:51.640 | So the American presumption going into the war

00:23:55.260 | is that citizens will not be forced to serve,

00:23:57.780 | but they will serve in militias

00:23:59.100 | to protect their own property.

00:24:00.700 | And so the Second Amendment,

00:24:01.660 | the key part of the Second Amendment for me as a historian

00:24:03.680 | is the well-regulated militia part.

00:24:05.600 | The presumption that citizens as part of their civic duty

00:24:09.580 | do not have a duty to join a national army,

00:24:12.100 | Prussian style,

00:24:13.580 | but are supposed to be involved

00:24:15.340 | in defending their communities.

00:24:17.460 | And that's the reality.

00:24:19.220 | It's also a bit of a myth.

00:24:20.700 | And so Americans have throughout their history

00:24:23.860 | been gun owners,

00:24:25.460 | not AK-47 owners, but gun owners.

00:24:28.020 | And gun ownership has been for the purpose

00:24:30.240 | of community self-defense.

00:24:32.180 | The question coming out of that is,

00:24:34.260 | what does that mean in terms of,

00:24:36.100 | do you have access to everything?

00:24:38.380 | Antonin Scalia even himself asked this question

00:24:40.780 | on the Supreme Court.

00:24:42.020 | He said, in one of the gun cases,

00:24:45.860 | you have the right to defend yourself,

00:24:47.540 | but you don't have the right to own an Uzi.

00:24:50.420 | You don't have the right to have a tank.

00:24:51.780 | I don't think they'd let you park a tank, Lex,

00:24:53.860 | in your parking spot, right?

00:24:55.300 | - I looked into this.

00:24:56.140 | I think there's a gray area around tanks, actually.

00:24:59.880 | I think you're legit allowed to own a tank.

00:25:03.860 | - Oh, you really?

00:25:04.700 | - I think there's, somebody look into this,

00:25:06.180 | 'cause somebody told me,

00:25:07.220 | but I could see that,

00:25:09.140 | 'cause it's very difficult for that to get out of hand.

00:25:11.340 | - Right, right.

00:25:12.260 | - Okay, there may be one guy in a tank.

00:25:14.340 | You could be breaking laws in terms of the width

00:25:17.060 | of the vehicle that you're using to operate.

00:25:19.780 | Anyway, that's a hilarious discussion.

00:25:22.020 | But, so then to make the case,

00:25:23.740 | speaking of AK-47s and rifles,

00:25:25.740 | and back to Ukraine for a second,

00:25:27.380 | one of the fascinating social experiments

00:25:29.860 | that happened in Ukraine at the beginning of the war

00:25:32.940 | is they handed out guns to everybody, rifles,

00:25:36.940 | and crime went down,

00:25:39.380 | which I think is really interesting.

00:25:41.660 | - Yeah.

00:25:42.960 | - I hope somebody does a kind of psychological

00:25:46.040 | data collection analysis effort here

00:25:48.520 | to try to understand why.

00:25:50.260 | Because it's not obvious to me that in a time of war,

00:25:54.640 | if you give guns to the entire populace,

00:25:56.740 | anyone who wants a gun,

00:25:58.020 | it's not going to,

00:25:59.340 | especially in a country who has historically

00:26:01.340 | suffered from corruption,

00:26:02.820 | not result in robberies and assaults

00:26:05.740 | and all that kind of stuff.

00:26:06.740 | There's a deep lesson there.

00:26:08.060 | Now, I don't know if you can extend that lesson

00:26:09.740 | beyond wartime, though.

00:26:11.100 | - Right, that's the question,

00:26:11.940 | what happens after the war?

00:26:13.060 | I mean, my inclination would be to say

00:26:15.060 | that can work during war,

00:26:16.100 | but you have to take the guns back after the war.

00:26:18.560 | (laughing)

00:26:19.560 | - But they might be very upset when you try to take--

00:26:21.720 | - That's the problem.

00:26:22.560 | No, that's precisely the problem.

00:26:23.840 | That's actually part of the story here.

00:26:25.480 | I mean, what happens after the Civil War,

00:26:27.240 | after Appomattox in 1865,

00:26:29.740 | is that many Southern soldiers go home with their guns

00:26:34.000 | and they misuse their weapons

00:26:35.440 | to, quite frankly, shoot and intimidate former slaves

00:26:41.280 | who are now citizens.

00:26:42.320 | And this is a big problem.

00:26:43.160 | I talk about this in the book in Memphis in 1866.

00:26:45.920 | It is former Confederate soldiers and police officers

00:26:49.340 | and judges who are responsible for hundreds of rapes

00:26:53.740 | within a two-day period

00:26:55.100 | and destroying an entire community of African-Americans.

00:26:58.660 | And they're able to do that

00:26:59.860 | because they brought their guns home.

00:27:01.540 | - But underneath the issue of guns there

00:27:05.080 | is just the fundamental issue of hatred

00:27:08.980 | and inability to see other humans in this world

00:27:15.100 | as having equal value as another human being.

00:27:18.540 | What was the election of 1860 like

00:27:21.980 | that brought Lincoln to power?

00:27:24.380 | - So the election of 1860 was a very divisive election.

00:27:28.460 | We have divisive contested elections

00:27:31.620 | from 1860 really until 1896.

00:27:34.620 | The 1860 election is the first election

00:27:36.660 | where a Republican is elected president, that is Lincoln,

00:27:40.340 | but he's elected president with less than 40% of the vote

00:27:43.160 | because you have two sets of Democrats running,

00:27:46.380 | Democrats who are out to defend the Confederacy

00:27:49.260 | and everything, and then Democrats who want to compromise

00:27:52.560 | but still keep slavery.

00:27:54.300 | Most famous Stephen Douglas,

00:27:56.040 | who argues for basically allowing each state

00:27:59.720 | to make its own decisions, popular sovereignty,

00:28:01.700 | as he called it.

00:28:02.740 | And then you still have traditional Whigs who are running.

00:28:04.820 | That was the party that preceded the Republican Party.

00:28:07.380 | So you have four candidates.

00:28:08.780 | Lincoln wins a plurality.

00:28:10.140 | Lincoln is elected largely because the states

00:28:13.320 | that are anti-slavery or anti-expansion of slavery

00:28:17.200 | are not a majority, but they're a plurality.

00:28:19.800 | And the other states have basically factionalized.

00:28:23.280 | And so they're unable to have a united front against him.

00:28:26.540 | - Was the main topic at hand slavery?

00:28:29.640 | - I think the main topic at hand at that time

00:28:31.560 | was the expansion of slavery into new territories.

00:28:35.480 | - Into new territory.

00:28:36.320 | - Right, it was not whether to abolish slavery or not,

00:28:38.120 | Lincoln is very careful

00:28:39.120 | and his correspondence is clear.

00:28:41.320 | He wants no one on his side during the election

00:28:43.720 | to say that he's arguing for abolitionism,

00:28:46.120 | even though he personally supported that.

00:28:48.320 | What he wants to say is the Republican Party

00:28:50.960 | is for no new slave territories.

00:28:54.240 | - Did he make it clear that he was for abolition?

00:28:58.600 | - No, he was intentionally unclear about that.

00:29:01.380 | - Do you think he was throughout his life?

00:29:06.360 | Was there a deep...

00:29:08.440 | Because that takes quite a vision.

00:29:10.000 | Like you look at society today

00:29:11.520 | and it takes quite a man to see

00:29:17.360 | that there's something deeply broken

00:29:19.440 | where a lot of people take for granted.

00:29:21.120 | I mean, into modern day, you could see factory farming.

00:29:24.440 | It's one of those things that in a hundred years

00:29:26.280 | we might see as like the torture,

00:29:28.320 | the mass torture of animals could be seen as evil.

00:29:32.080 | But just to look around and wake up to that,

00:29:34.400 | especially in a leadership position.

00:29:36.540 | Yeah, was he able to see that?

00:29:38.280 | - In some ways, yes.

00:29:39.120 | In some ways, no.

00:29:39.940 | I mean, the premise of your question is really important

00:29:42.040 | that to us, it's obvious that slavery is a horror,

00:29:46.760 | but to those who had grown up with it,

00:29:48.200 | who had grown up seeing that,

00:29:50.240 | it was hard to imagine a different world.

00:29:52.160 | So you're right.

00:29:53.720 | Lincoln's imagination like everyone else's

00:29:55.860 | was limited by his time.

00:29:57.760 | I don't think Lincoln imagined a world of equality

00:30:00.320 | between the races,

00:30:01.600 | but he had come to see that slavery was horrible.

00:30:05.440 | And historians have differed in how he came to this.

00:30:08.560 | Part of it is that he had a father

00:30:12.540 | who treated him like a slave.

00:30:14.640 | And you can see in his early correspondence

00:30:16.520 | how much he hates that his father,

00:30:18.080 | who was a struggling farmer,

00:30:19.840 | was basically trying to control Lincoln's life.

00:30:22.680 | And he came to understand personally,

00:30:25.560 | I think how horrible it is to have someone else

00:30:27.400 | tell you what you should do with your labor,

00:30:29.680 | not giving you your own choices.

00:30:32.760 | But Lincoln was also a pragmatist.

00:30:34.320 | This is what made him a great politician.

00:30:36.120 | He wanted to work through institutions,

00:30:37.920 | not to burn them down.

00:30:39.680 | And he famously said that if he could preserve the union

00:30:44.680 | and stop the spread of slavery

00:30:47.100 | by allowing slavery to stay in the South, he would.

00:30:49.320 | If he could do it by eliminating slavery in the South,

00:30:51.320 | he would.

00:30:52.160 | If he could do it by buying the slaves

00:30:53.040 | and sending them somewhere else, he would.

00:30:55.200 | His main goal, what he ran on,

00:30:57.880 | was that the new territories West of Illinois,

00:31:00.540 | that they would be areas for free, poor,

00:31:03.140 | white men like him, not slavery.

00:31:05.500 | - What do you learn about human nature,

00:31:09.740 | if we step back and look at the big picture of it,

00:31:11.940 | that slavery has been a part of human civilization

00:31:14.540 | for thousands of years?

00:31:15.880 | That this American slavery is not a new phenomenon?

00:31:20.520 | - I think history teaches us a very pessimistic

00:31:23.740 | and a very optimistic lesson.

00:31:25.240 | The pessimistic lesson is that human beings

00:31:27.540 | are capable of doing enormous harm and brutality

00:31:31.580 | to their fellow man and woman.

00:31:33.620 | And we see that with genocide in our world today.

00:31:36.460 | That human beings are capable with the right stimuli,

00:31:40.380 | the right incentives of enslaving others.

00:31:45.140 | I mean, genocide is in the same category, right?

00:31:48.160 | The optimistic side is that human beings

00:31:52.820 | are also capable with proper leadership and governance

00:31:56.420 | of resisting those urges,

00:31:58.680 | of putting those energies into productive uses

00:32:01.740 | for other people.

00:32:02.780 | But I don't think that comes naturally.

00:32:05.380 | I think that's where leadership and institutions matter.

00:32:08.220 | But leadership and institutions can tame us.

00:32:10.300 | We can tame, we can civilize ourselves.

00:32:13.460 | You know, for a long time,

00:32:14.280 | we stopped using that verb, to civilize.

00:32:16.180 | I believe in civilization.

00:32:17.900 | I believe there's a civilizing role.

00:32:19.940 | Lincoln spoke of that, right?

00:32:21.340 | So did Franklin Roosevelt,

00:32:22.340 | the civilizing role that government plays.

00:32:24.660 | Education is only a part of that.

00:32:26.360 | It's creating laws, minimal laws,

00:32:28.160 | but laws nonetheless, that incentivize and penalize us

00:32:32.540 | for going to the dark side.

00:32:34.380 | But if we allow that to happen,

00:32:35.580 | or we have leaders who encourage us to go to the dark side,

00:32:38.140 | we can very quickly go down a deep, dark tunnel.

00:32:42.440 | - See, I believe that most people want to do good.

00:32:46.420 | And the power of institutions, if done well,

00:32:49.540 | they encourage and protect you if you want to do good.

00:32:54.420 | So if you're just in the jungle,

00:32:56.440 | from a game theoretic perspective,

00:33:00.340 | you get punished for doing good.

00:33:02.760 | So being extremely self-centered and greedy

00:33:06.240 | and even violent and manipulative

00:33:08.440 | can have, from a game theory perspective, benefits.

00:33:11.620 | But I don't think that's what most humans want.

00:33:14.160 | Institutions allow you to do what you actually want,

00:33:16.580 | which is to do good for the world, do good for others,

00:33:19.560 | and actually in so doing, do good for yourself.

00:33:23.240 | Institutions protect that natural human instinct, I think.

00:33:26.800 | - And what you just articulated,

00:33:28.280 | which I think the historical record is very strong on,

00:33:31.060 | is the classic liberal position.

00:33:33.200 | That's what liberalism means in a 19th century sense, right?

00:33:36.580 | That you believe in civilizing human beings

00:33:39.260 | through institutions that begins with education.

00:33:41.860 | Kindergarten is an institution.

00:33:44.380 | Laws.

00:33:46.120 | And just basic habits that are enforced by society.

00:33:53.160 | How do you think people thought about the idea,

00:33:56.360 | how did they square the idea of all men are created equal,

00:33:59.280 | those very powerful words at the founding of this nation?

00:34:03.560 | How did they square that with slavery?

00:34:07.180 | - For many Americans, saying all men were created equal

00:34:10.040 | required slavery because it meant that

00:34:13.200 | the equality of white people was dependent upon

00:34:15.880 | others doing the work for us.

00:34:17.480 | In the way some people view animal labor today.

00:34:21.500 | And maybe in 50 years, we'll see that as a contradiction.

00:34:25.560 | But the notion among many Americans in the 17th,

00:34:29.120 | 18th century, and this would also be true

00:34:30.620 | for those in other societies, was that

00:34:32.440 | equality for white men meant that you had access

00:34:37.440 | to the labor of others that would allow you

00:34:40.080 | to equalize other differences.

00:34:42.540 | So you could produce enough food so your family

00:34:47.200 | could live equally well nourished as other families

00:34:50.560 | because you had slaves on the land doing the farming for you.

00:34:53.660 | This is Thomas Jefferson's world.

00:34:55.720 | - So it's like animal farm, all animals are equal,

00:34:58.960 | but some are more equal than others.

00:35:00.520 | - That's right.

00:35:01.360 | And I think that's still the way people view things.

00:35:03.800 | - Yeah.

00:35:04.640 | - Right?

00:35:05.480 | - I don't know if that's a liberal position

00:35:07.760 | or it's just a human position that all humans

00:35:11.660 | have equal value, just on the basic level of humanity.

00:35:16.660 | - But do we really believe that?

00:35:19.120 | - We want to, I don't know if our society

00:35:22.120 | really believes that yet.

00:35:23.680 | - And I don't know exactly, I mean,

00:35:25.600 | it's super complicated, of course,

00:35:27.840 | when you realize the amount of suffering

00:35:30.080 | that's going on in the world where there's children

00:35:32.840 | dying from starvation in Africa,

00:35:34.800 | and to say that all humans are equal,

00:35:36.860 | well, a few dollars can save their life.

00:35:39.520 | And instead we buy a Starbucks coffee

00:35:42.700 | and are willing to pay 10, 50, $100,000

00:35:46.440 | to save a child, our child, like somebody from our family,

00:35:50.040 | and don't want to spend $2 to save a child over in Africa.

00:35:54.000 | - Right.

00:35:54.840 | - So there's, and I think Sam Harris or others

00:35:57.320 | have talked about, well, I don't want to live in a world

00:36:00.120 | where we'd rather send $2 to Africa.

00:36:04.920 | There's something deeply human about saving those

00:36:07.360 | that are really close to you, the ones we love.

00:36:09.560 | So that hypocrisy that seems to go at tension

00:36:13.920 | with the basic ethics of alleviating suffering in the world,

00:36:17.440 | that's also really human.

00:36:19.100 | That's also part of this ideal of all men are created equal.

00:36:23.740 | It's a complicated, messy world, ethically.

00:36:26.000 | - It is, but I mean, I think,

00:36:27.800 | at least the way I think about it is,

00:36:30.080 | so what are the things, even within our own society,

00:36:34.020 | where we choose to do something with our resources

00:36:37.540 | that actually doesn't help the lives of many people?

00:36:40.320 | So we invest in all kinds of things that are often,

00:36:43.700 | because someone is lobbying for them.

00:36:45.460 | This happens on both sides of the aisle.

00:36:46.860 | This is not a political statement, right?

00:36:48.980 | Rather than saying, you know, if we invested

00:36:51.620 | a little more of our money, really a little more,

00:36:53.520 | we can make sure every child in this country

00:36:55.220 | had decent healthcare.

00:36:56.320 | We can make sure every child in this country

00:36:59.320 | had what they needed to start life healthy.

00:37:02.140 | And that would not require us to sacrifice a lot,

00:37:05.460 | but it would require us to sacrifice a few things.

00:37:09.100 | - Yeah, there's a balance there.

00:37:10.620 | And I also noticed the passive-aggressive statement

00:37:13.740 | you're making about how I'm spending my money.

00:37:16.060 | (Lex laughing)

00:37:16.900 | - It'll be two.

00:37:17.720 | - Spending it a little more wisely.

00:37:19.260 | (Lex laughing)

00:37:21.100 | - You know, I like to eat nice meals at nice restaurants,

00:37:24.100 | so I'm as guilty of this as you are.

00:37:26.060 | - I got a couch, and that couch serves no purpose.

00:37:29.960 | - It looks nice, though.

00:37:30.800 | No, it's a nice-looking couch.

00:37:31.620 | - It does, thank you, I appreciate that.

00:37:32.460 | - It's a nice-looking couch.

00:37:33.300 | It's actually very clean.

00:37:34.120 | - I got it for occasional Instagram photos

00:37:35.780 | to look like an adult.

00:37:37.100 | - Okay.

00:37:38.380 | - 'Cause everything else in my life is a giant mess.

00:37:40.980 | What role did the ideas that the founding documents

00:37:46.020 | of this country play in this war,

00:37:48.540 | the war between the Union and the Confederate States,

00:37:51.940 | and the founding ideas that were supposed to be unifying

00:37:54.980 | to this country?

00:37:55.820 | Is there interesting tensions there?

00:37:57.620 | - Well, there were certainly tensions

00:37:58.900 | because built into the founding documents, of course,

00:38:01.500 | is slavery and inequality and women's exclusion

00:38:04.700 | from voting and things of that sort.

00:38:07.100 | But the real brilliance of Abraham Lincoln

00:38:09.980 | is to build on the brilliance of the founders

00:38:12.580 | and turn the Union position into the defense

00:38:15.820 | of the core ideas of the country.

00:38:18.380 | So the Confederacy is defending one idea,

00:38:21.260 | the idea of slavery.

00:38:22.300 | Lincoln takes the basket of all the deeper ideas

00:38:26.780 | and puts them together.

00:38:28.020 | Three things the war is about for Lincoln,

00:38:29.980 | and this is why his speeches still resonate with us today.

00:38:32.380 | You know, every time I'm in Washington,

00:38:33.780 | I go to the Lincoln Memorial.

00:38:35.660 | It's the best memorial, best monument,

00:38:37.780 | I think, in the world, actually.

00:38:39.500 | And there are always people there

00:38:43.180 | reading the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural.

00:38:47.540 | Lincoln had two years of education,

00:38:48.900 | yet he found the words to describe

00:38:50.500 | what our country was about better than anyone.

00:38:52.100 | And it's because he went back to these founding values,

00:38:54.700 | three values, we already talked about one, freedom.

00:38:57.100 | That, and freedom is actually complex, but it's also simple.

00:39:01.700 | The simple Lincoln definition

00:39:04.580 | is that freedom is the right of each person

00:39:07.060 | to work for himself or herself,

00:39:10.060 | which is to say, it doesn't mean you own your own company,

00:39:11.940 | but it means you control your labor.

00:39:14.260 | And no one can tell you you have to work for a certain wage.

00:39:17.740 | You might not have a job, but you decide, you decide, right?

00:39:20.860 | You can see where that comes from his own background

00:39:23.020 | as a poor man, right?

00:39:24.020 | So freedom is the control of your own labor.

00:39:26.940 | Second, democracy, government of the people,

00:39:29.660 | by the people, for the people.

00:39:31.220 | The government is to serve the people,

00:39:32.460 | it's to come from the people.

00:39:34.580 | And then the third point,

00:39:36.260 | justice and helping all human beings.

00:39:38.660 | He, at the end of his life, as the civil war is ending,

00:39:42.500 | he never declares that the South should be punished.

00:39:46.300 | His argument is that we shouldn't apologize

00:39:48.940 | for their misdeeds,

00:39:50.500 | but that all should be part of this future.

00:39:52.380 | He's not arguing for consensus,

00:39:53.740 | he's arguing for a society

00:39:55.580 | where everyone has a stake going forward.

00:39:58.460 | So justice, democracy, freedom, those are the gifts.

00:40:03.500 | I talked about the flaws in our system,

00:40:05.220 | those are the virtues in our system

00:40:07.380 | that our founders coming out of the enlightenment planted

00:40:10.620 | and Lincoln carries them forward.

00:40:12.140 | He gives us the 2.0 version of them.

00:40:15.300 | - So a few tangent questions about each of those.

00:40:18.700 | So one on democracy,

00:40:20.020 | people often bring up the United States is not a democracy,

00:40:24.260 | it's a republic, that it's representative.

00:40:27.660 | Is there some interesting tensions there in terminology

00:40:30.140 | or is, yeah, can you maybe kind of expand

00:40:33.980 | on the different versions of democracy,

00:40:36.300 | so the philosophy of democracy,

00:40:38.580 | but also the practical implementations of it?

00:40:40.820 | - Sure, the founders intended for us to be a democracy.

00:40:43.700 | This argument that they wanted us to be a republic

00:40:45.620 | instead of a democracy is one of these made up myths.

00:40:49.100 | They believed that fundamentally what they were creating

00:40:52.900 | was a society, very few of which had existed before,

00:40:56.220 | a society where the government would be of the people,

00:40:58.860 | by the people, for the people, that's what they expected.

00:41:01.380 | That's what it meant.

00:41:02.220 | So the legitimacy of our government was not gonna be

00:41:04.820 | that the person in charge was of royal blood,

00:41:07.900 | that's the way the Europeans did it,

00:41:09.300 | or that the person in charge had killed enough people,

00:41:12.700 | a la Genghis Khan, or that the person in charge

00:41:16.380 | was serving a particular class.

00:41:18.100 | It was that the person in charge,

00:41:19.420 | the institutions were to serve the people.

00:41:22.420 | They adopted Republican tools to get there

00:41:26.380 | because they were fearful appropriately

00:41:29.580 | of simply throwing every issue up to the masses.

00:41:33.500 | Democracy is not mob rule.

00:41:35.740 | Democracy is where you create procedures

00:41:38.660 | to assess the public will and to act in ways

00:41:42.660 | that serve the public without harming other elements

00:41:45.980 | of the public that are not in the majority.

00:41:48.020 | That's why we have a constitution and a bill of rights.

00:41:50.660 | And for their time, the founders did not believe

00:41:53.020 | that women should be part of this discussion,

00:41:55.100 | that they were not capable.

00:41:56.580 | They were wrong about that in their time,

00:41:58.380 | that's how they thought.

00:41:59.220 | We've of course changed that.

00:42:00.820 | They believed you had to have property to have a stake.

00:42:04.060 | We don't believe that anymore.

00:42:05.460 | So we can argue over the details,

00:42:07.380 | and those 50 years from now will criticize us, right,

00:42:10.420 | for the way we think about these things.

00:42:12.380 | But it was fundamentally about,

00:42:14.340 | this is the radicalism of the American experiment,

00:42:17.900 | that government should serve the people, all people.

00:42:21.020 | - So democracy means of the people,

00:42:23.060 | by the people, for the people,

00:42:24.580 | and then it doesn't actually give any details

00:42:28.380 | of how you implement that,

00:42:29.340 | 'cause you could implement all kinds of ways.

00:42:31.340 | - And I think what we've learned as historians,

00:42:32.780 | I think what the founders knew,

00:42:33.700 | 'cause they were very well-read

00:42:35.020 | in the history of Rome and Greece,

00:42:36.660 | was that democracy will always have unique characteristics

00:42:39.340 | for the culture that it's in.

00:42:40.780 | If coming out of the war against Russia,

00:42:44.180 | Ukraine is able to build a better democracy

00:42:46.540 | than it had before,

00:42:47.540 | it's never gonna look like the United States.

00:42:50.460 | I'm not saying it's gonna be worse or better.

00:42:52.260 | A culture matters.

00:42:53.620 | The particular history of societies matters.

00:42:57.100 | Japan is a vibrant democracy.

00:42:59.420 | I've been there many times.

00:43:00.940 | It does not look at all like the American democracy.

00:43:04.460 | So democracy is a set of values.

00:43:07.740 | The implementation of those values

00:43:09.540 | is a set of practical institutional decisions

00:43:11.740 | one makes based in one's cultural position.

00:43:15.180 | - So just the one on that topic,

00:43:16.580 | is there, if you do representative,

00:43:18.660 | you said like, you know, democracy should not,

00:43:21.820 | one failure mode is mob rule.

00:43:25.820 | So it should not descend into that.

00:43:27.420 | Not every issue should be up to everybody.

00:43:29.100 | - Correct.

00:43:29.940 | - Okay, so you have representation,

00:43:31.460 | but, you know,

00:43:32.820 | Stalin similarly felt that he could represent

00:43:38.620 | the interests of the public.

00:43:40.300 | He was also helping represent the interests of the public.

00:43:43.740 | So that's a failure mode too.

00:43:46.260 | If the people representing the public

00:43:48.260 | become more and more powerful,

00:43:50.060 | they start becoming detached

00:43:51.820 | from actually being able to represent

00:43:54.940 | or having just a basic human sense of what the public wants.

00:43:57.740 | - I think being of the people, by the people, for the people

00:44:01.180 | means you are in some way accountable to the people.

00:44:04.100 | And the problem with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

00:44:07.020 | this was already evident before Stalin came into power,

00:44:10.220 | is the same problem the Communist Party of China has today,

00:44:13.300 | which is that you have leadership that's non-accountable.

00:44:18.020 | - Well, let me go then to one of the other

00:44:20.460 | three principles of freedom,

00:44:21.940 | because one of the ways to keep government accountable

00:44:24.340 | is the freedom of the press.

00:44:26.300 | So there's the internet, and on the internet,

00:44:28.500 | there's social networks, and one of them's called Twitter.

00:44:31.460 | I think you have an account there, people should follow you.

00:44:33.980 | And, you know, recently people have been

00:44:36.340 | throwing around recently, for a while,

00:44:38.540 | the words of freedom of speech.

00:44:40.340 | Just out of curiosity, for a tangent upon a tangent,

00:44:45.140 | what do you think of freedom of speech?

00:44:47.620 | As it is today, and as it was at that time

00:44:50.660 | during the Civil War, after the Civil War,

00:44:52.180 | and throughout the history of America?

00:44:54.340 | - So freedom of speech has always been

00:44:56.500 | one of the core tenets of American democracy,

00:44:59.340 | and I'm near absolutist on it,

00:45:01.700 | because I think that people should have the right to speak.

00:45:05.620 | What makes our democracy function

00:45:08.940 | is that there is always room for, quite frankly,

00:45:12.020 | people like you and me, who like to disagree,

00:45:16.260 | and have reasons to disagree.

00:45:18.180 | So I am against almost all forms of censorship.

00:45:21.100 | The only time I believe in censorship

00:45:23.500 | is if somehow an individual or a newspaper

00:45:26.620 | has stolen the Ukrainian plans

00:45:29.420 | for their next military movements in the next week.

00:45:32.020 | You should not be able to publish that right now,

00:45:34.780 | maybe after they act.

00:45:35.820 | But criticism, opinion, interpretation,

00:45:39.340 | should be wide open.

00:45:41.060 | Now, that doesn't mean, though,

00:45:43.660 | that you have the right to come to my classroom

00:45:48.580 | and start shouting and saying whatever you want.

00:45:51.380 | You have the right on the street corner to do that,

00:45:54.100 | but my classroom is a classroom for my students

00:45:57.020 | with a particular purpose.

00:45:58.300 | - Sorry about that from last week.

00:45:59.900 | I'll never do it again.

00:46:00.740 | (laughing)

00:46:03.100 | Really sorry.

00:46:04.100 | - It's okay.

00:46:04.940 | - Never happened.

00:46:05.780 | I get drunk, and I get...

00:46:07.180 | To the people who don't know,

00:46:08.020 | you're a professor at UT Austin, and it's nearby,

00:46:10.700 | so sometimes I get a little drunk and wander in there.

00:46:13.380 | I apologize. - You're not the only one.

00:46:14.220 | Was that you?

00:46:15.060 | I didn't even know it was you.

00:46:15.880 | - I'm sorry.

00:46:16.720 | (laughing)

00:46:17.540 | Okay.

00:46:18.380 | - So the point is that free speech

00:46:20.820 | is not licensed to invade someone else's space,

00:46:24.260 | and I also believe in private enterprise.

00:46:26.220 | So I think that if I owned a social media network, I don't.

00:46:31.220 | It would be up to me to decide

00:46:36.100 | who gets to speak on that network and who doesn't,

00:46:38.500 | and then people could decide not to use it

00:46:41.020 | if they don't wanna use it.

00:46:42.300 | But there's a...

00:46:43.380 | So yes, that's one of the founding principles.

00:46:45.140 | So oftentimes when you talk about censorship,

00:46:47.360 | that's government censorship.

00:46:49.580 | So a social media, if you run a social media company,

00:46:52.860 | you should be able to decide from a technical perspective

00:46:55.580 | of what freedom of speech means.

00:46:57.060 | But there's some deeper ethical, philosophical sense of

00:47:01.260 | how do you create a world where every voice is heard

00:47:06.280 | of the people, by the people, for the people?

00:47:08.000 | That's not a...

00:47:09.820 | That's a complicated technical problem

00:47:11.940 | when you have a public square.

00:47:13.580 | How do you have a productive conversation

00:47:15.460 | where critics aren't silenced, but at the same time,

00:47:18.220 | whoever has the bigger megaphone

00:47:19.700 | is not gonna crowd out everybody else?

00:47:22.040 | - So I think it's very important to create rules of the game

00:47:26.500 | that'll give everyone a chance to get started

00:47:29.020 | and that allow for guideposts to be created

00:47:33.520 | from the will of the community, which is to say

00:47:36.660 | that we as a community can say,

00:47:39.460 | we can't stop people from speaking,

00:47:41.540 | but we as a community can say that in certain forms,

00:47:44.260 | we're gonna create certain rules

00:47:46.260 | for who gets to speak and who doesn't, under what terms,

00:47:49.140 | but they can still have somewhere else to go.

00:47:50.780 | So I believe in opening space for everyone,

00:47:53.980 | but creating certain spaces within those spaces

00:47:57.600 | that are designed for certain purposes.

00:47:59.480 | That's what a school does.

00:48:01.060 | So I will not bring someone to speak to my students

00:48:04.860 | who is unqualified.

00:48:06.780 | It's not a political judgment.

00:48:08.260 | The rules at a university,

00:48:09.820 | or where an educational institution,

00:48:11.260 | you need to have the educational credentials

00:48:13.020 | to come speak about artificial intelligence.

00:48:14.860 | I'm not gonna bring some bum off the street to do that.

00:48:18.900 | We have certain rules, but that bum on the street

00:48:20.580 | can still, in his own space or her own space,

00:48:23.140 | can still say what he or she wants to say

00:48:24.620 | about artificial intelligence.

00:48:26.100 | This is how newspapers work.

00:48:27.620 | When I write for the New York Times,

00:48:29.060 | they have an editorial team.

00:48:31.540 | The editorial team makes certain decisions.

00:48:33.980 | They check facts, and there are certain points of view.

00:48:37.100 | They don't allow anti-Semitic comments.

00:48:40.340 | You're not gonna be able to publish an anti-Semitic screed,

00:48:43.220 | whether you think it's true or not true

00:48:45.540 | in the New York Times,

00:48:46.380 | but that doesn't prevent you from finding somewhere else.

00:48:49.100 | So we allow entities to create certain rules of the game.

00:48:52.220 | We make transparent what those rules are.

00:48:55.380 | And then we, as citizens,

00:48:56.480 | know where to go to get our information.

00:48:58.020 | What's been a problem the last few decades, I think,

00:49:00.620 | is it hasn't been clear

00:49:02.180 | what the rules are in different places,

00:49:03.820 | and what are the legitimate places to get information,

00:49:06.220 | and what are not.

00:49:07.060 | - Yeah, the transparency seems to be very critical there.

00:49:09.220 | Even for the New York Times,

00:49:10.740 | I think there's a lot of skepticism

00:49:12.780 | about which way the editorial processes lean.

00:49:16.660 | I mean, there's a public perception that it's,

00:49:18.940 | especially for opinions,

00:49:20.380 | it's going to be very left-leaning in the New York Times.

00:49:23.520 | And without transparency

00:49:26.220 | about what the process is like,

00:49:27.600 | about the people involved,

00:49:29.340 | all you do, like conspiracy theories

00:49:31.380 | and the general public opinion about that

00:49:33.900 | is going to go wild.

00:49:36.380 | And I think that's okay for the New York Times.

00:49:39.100 | People can, in a collective way, figure stuff out.

00:49:42.420 | Like they can say, okay, New York Times,

00:49:44.420 | 73% of the time is going to lean left in their head.

00:49:48.780 | They have like a loose estimation or whatever.

00:49:51.620 | But for a platform like Twitter,

00:49:53.740 | it seems like it's more complicated.

00:49:57.020 | Of course, there should be rules of the game,

00:49:58.460 | but I think there's, maybe I want to say a responsibility

00:50:02.860 | to also create incentives

00:50:05.100 | for people to do high effort empathetic debate

00:50:10.100 | versus throwing poop at each other.

00:50:12.700 | - Yeah, I think those are two slightly different things,

00:50:15.100 | so I agree.

00:50:16.420 | I think that my view is that the failure of Facebook

00:50:19.860 | and Twitter and others in recent years

00:50:22.460 | has been that they have been completely untransparent

00:50:25.100 | about their rules.

00:50:26.340 | So what I would think would advance us

00:50:29.980 | is if they had a set of rules that were clear,

00:50:32.540 | that were consistently followed,

00:50:34.640 | and we understood what they were,

00:50:36.780 | that would also tell us as consumers

00:50:38.900 | what the biases are, how to understand what's going on.

00:50:43.260 | It seems, if I might say,

00:50:44.360 | that since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter,

00:50:46.100 | it's been arbitrary in who's thrown off

00:50:47.860 | and who's not thrown off.

00:50:49.500 | And that's a real problem.

00:50:50.820 | Arbitrariness is in some ways the opposite of democracy.

00:50:54.220 | - But there's also a hidden arbitrariness

00:50:57.860 | in interpretation of the rules.

00:51:00.860 | So for example, what comment incites violence?

00:51:04.800 | That's really, really difficult to figure out to me.

00:51:07.880 | There's a gray area.

00:51:09.220 | Obviously, there's very clear versions of that,

00:51:11.860 | but if I know anything about people

00:51:14.040 | that try to incite violence,

00:51:15.840 | they're usually not coming out and clearly saying it.

00:51:18.720 | They're usually kinda dog-whistling it.

00:51:21.320 | And same with racism and anti-Semitism, all of that.

00:51:23.640 | It's usually dog whistles.

00:51:24.960 | And they usually have fun playing with the rules,

00:51:29.280 | playing around the rules.

00:51:30.360 | So it's a gray area.

00:51:31.840 | Same with during COVID, misinformation.

00:51:34.320 | What's misinformation, right?

00:51:36.000 | - I agree.

00:51:36.840 | And some of these are age-old problems.

00:51:38.840 | Our legal system, common law,

00:51:40.380 | has been struggling with what is incitement to violence

00:51:43.000 | since the first Supreme Court decisions

00:51:45.100 | in the 18th century, right?

00:51:46.420 | So you're absolutely right.

00:51:49.180 | But I will say this.

00:51:50.460 | There are certain things

00:51:51.340 | that are clearly incitement to violence.

00:51:53.260 | I'll give you very clear examples.

00:51:54.960 | I'll just make it personal, right?

00:51:57.060 | My wife is an elected official here in Austin.

00:51:59.620 | There have been people who have put things up on Twitter

00:52:01.820 | calling for her to be hanged

00:52:03.520 | or calling for her to be attacked.

00:52:05.440 | That's incitement to violence.

00:52:06.880 | When you specifically call for violence against someone,

00:52:10.260 | I agree, there's a lot of other stuff

00:52:11.420 | where it's a gray area,

00:52:12.500 | but we could start if we're applying these rules

00:52:17.140 | by getting that material off of these sites.

00:52:19.360 | - So some of that is a problem of scale too,

00:52:22.020 | but the gray area is still a forever problem

00:52:25.260 | that we may never be able to solve.

00:52:26.940 | And maybe the tension within the gray area

00:52:29.940 | is the very process of democracy.

00:52:32.100 | But saying like, "We need to take our country back."

00:52:35.100 | Is that incitement to violence?

00:52:36.460 | - I don't think that.

00:52:37.300 | I think we need to take our country back, just that, no.

00:52:39.660 | - But then, you know- - 'Cause I might say that.

00:52:41.220 | I might say we need to take our-

00:52:42.380 | - I say that all the time.

00:52:43.900 | Again, I walk around drunk,

00:52:44.980 | just screaming at everybody.

00:52:46.860 | - I thought you wanted us to take you back.

00:52:48.900 | - Exactly.

00:52:50.140 | I was very confused.

00:52:50.980 | My messaging needs to work.

00:52:52.620 | - But let's go to the January 6th example, right?

00:52:54.920 | To say, "Hang Mike Pence," that's incitement to violence.

00:52:57.920 | - Yeah.

00:52:58.920 | - To say, "Go get Nancy," that's incitement to violence.

00:53:03.920 | - Yeah, yeah, it's very clear.

00:53:05.360 | Again, I don't think that's the big problem.

00:53:06.800 | The big problem is the gray area.

00:53:08.520 | But yeah, and the other problem is just how to get,

00:53:12.720 | how to technically find the large scale of comments

00:53:16.440 | and posts and so on that are doing this kind of clear-

00:53:20.000 | - Yeah, but it's something for you to solve.

00:53:21.080 | You're the AI guy. - I understand, I understand.

00:53:21.920 | - I mean, don't ask me those questions.

00:53:23.640 | - Well, I have to say some of that is motivation,

00:53:26.600 | some of that is vision, and some of that is execution.

00:53:29.240 | So for example, just to go out briefly on a dark topic,

00:53:32.180 | something I've recently became aware of is,

00:53:35.640 | Facebook and Twitter and so on,

00:53:38.700 | people post violence on there,

00:53:40.800 | like literal, like videos of violence, child porn,

00:53:43.940 | some of the darkest things in this world.

00:53:47.440 | And to find them at scale is a difficult problem.

00:53:51.760 | And to act on it aggressively is a difficult problem.

00:53:55.120 | But I think part of this motivation,

00:54:00.120 | like saying, "This is a big problem.

00:54:02.000 | We need to take this on.

00:54:03.080 | We need to find all the darkest aspects of human nature

00:54:07.200 | that rise and appear on our platform and remove them

00:54:10.340 | so that we can create a place for humanity to flourish

00:54:14.800 | through the process of conversation."

00:54:16.120 | But it's just hard, it's just really hard.

00:54:17.780 | When you look at millions of posts,

00:54:19.700 | trillions of interactions, it's wild,

00:54:22.700 | what's like the amount of data.

00:54:24.580 | - But where we are now with social media

00:54:27.580 | seemed wild and impossible five years ago, right?

00:54:30.060 | - Yes.

00:54:30.900 | - I actually, what frustrates me is I think there are people

00:54:34.620 | who have politicized this issue in unnecessary ways.

00:54:37.660 | Everyone, regardless of their politics,

00:54:40.300 | should support what you just said.

00:54:42.060 | Investing our money, maybe grants from the federal government

00:54:46.600 | in AI skilled people like you figuring out ways

00:54:50.300 | to get violent videos off of there.

00:54:52.620 | That shouldn't be political.

00:54:54.880 | - Well, some of that also requires being transparent

00:54:57.020 | from a social media company perspective

00:54:59.580 | and transparent in a way that really resists being political.

00:55:03.580 | To be able to be transparent about your fight

00:55:06.220 | against these evils while still not succumbing

00:55:11.140 | to the sort of the political narratives of it.

00:55:14.700 | That's tricky, but you have to do that kind of,

00:55:17.040 | and walk calmly through the fire.

00:55:19.360 | So that's what Twitter feels like if you're being political.

00:55:22.160 | It's like a firing squad from every side.

00:55:24.760 | As a leader, you have to kind of walk calmly.

00:55:26.520 | - And that is where we need a new generation

00:55:30.400 | of people who will have diverse politics,

00:55:33.480 | but will stand up against that, right?

00:55:35.040 | I mean, that's the lesson from after the civil war

00:55:37.360 | is where progress is made.

00:55:39.400 | The war doesn't solve problems of hate.

00:55:41.720 | Where progress is made is where you have local leaders

00:55:44.040 | and others who stand up and say, we can differ,

00:55:46.500 | but we're gonna stop calling people

00:55:48.900 | from certain backgrounds monkeys,

00:55:50.420 | which was a common thing to do at that time.

00:55:52.780 | Jews are still called monkeys in certain places, right?

00:55:55.640 | People have to stand up while still maintaining

00:55:57.880 | their political differences.

00:55:59.280 | - Several hundred thousand people died.

00:56:02.260 | What made this war such a deadly war?

00:56:06.540 | - It's extraordinary how many people died,

00:56:08.300 | more than half a million.

00:56:09.940 | And this was without a single automatic rifle,

00:56:13.260 | without a single bomb.

00:56:14.700 | It was mostly in hand to hand combat,

00:56:16.660 | which is to say that these 600,000 or so people who died,

00:56:21.120 | they died where the person who killed them

00:56:22.700 | was standing within a few feet of them.

00:56:24.700 | And that's really hard.

00:56:26.900 | Most of the killing that happens in wars today

00:56:28.860 | is actually from a distance.

00:56:30.420 | It's by a drone, it's by a bomb, it's by a rocket,

00:56:33.140 | or by an automatic weapon.

00:56:35.820 | And just to make this even more focused,

00:56:39.100 | to this day, the deadliest day in American history

00:56:42.220 | was during the Civil War.

00:56:43.780 | September, 1862 at Antietam,

00:56:46.460 | more than 22,000 Americans killed one another hand to hand.

00:56:51.460 | There hasn't been a day that deadly in American history

00:56:54.540 | since then, that's amazing considering

00:56:56.420 | the technological changes.

00:56:58.380 | - What was in the mind of those soldiers on each side?

00:57:00.700 | Was there conviction for ideas?

00:57:02.820 | Did they hate the other side?

00:57:04.740 | - I think actually they were fighting out of fear.

00:57:07.320 | What we know from reading their letters,

00:57:10.620 | what we know from the accounts,

00:57:12.820 | is that yes, there are ideas that are promoted to them

00:57:16.580 | to get them to the battlefield,

00:57:17.900 | they believe in what they're doing,

00:57:19.780 | but here it's the same as World War I,

00:57:21.340 | and I think the Civil War and World War I

00:57:23.180 | are very similar as wars.

00:57:25.020 | You are in these horrible conditions,

00:57:27.260 | you're attacked, and you have the chance

00:57:29.100 | to either kill the other side and live, or die.

00:57:33.420 | And you fight to live,

00:57:35.260 | and you fight to save the people next to you.

00:57:38.340 | What is true about war,

00:57:40.060 | what is both good and dangerous about it,

00:57:42.100 | is you form an almost unparalleled bond

00:57:45.580 | with those on your side.

00:57:46.660 | This is the men under arms scenario, right?

00:57:49.580 | And that's where the killing goes,

00:57:51.700 | and it's a civil war, which means

00:57:53.860 | sometimes it's brother against brother, quite literally.

00:57:57.660 | And what it teaches us is how human beings

00:58:00.920 | can be put into fighting and will commit enormous damage.

00:58:04.740 | And that's why this happens, it goes on for four years.

00:58:07.700 | - In just the extensive research you've done

00:58:10.660 | on this war for this book,

00:58:13.580 | what are some of the worst and some of the best aspects

00:58:16.860 | of human nature that you found?

00:58:19.580 | Like you said, brother against brother,

00:58:22.180 | that's pretty powerful.

00:58:24.080 | - They're both, right?

00:58:25.140 | So the level of violence that human beings are capable of,

00:58:27.620 | how long they're able to sustain it.

00:58:29.820 | The South should not have,

00:58:31.120 | the Confederacy should not have lasted in this war

00:58:33.100 | as long as it did.

00:58:34.440 | By the end, I mean, they're starving and they keep fighting.

00:58:39.440 | So the resilience in war of societies

00:58:43.680 | and the power of hate to move people.

00:58:48.000 | What are the bright sides?

00:58:50.000 | You see in Lincoln and Grant,

00:58:52.640 | who I talk about a lot in the book as well, Ulysses Grant,

00:58:55.200 | you see the ability of empathetic figures

00:58:57.520 | to still rise above this in spite of all the horror.

00:59:00.560 | Lincoln went to visit more soldiers in war

00:59:04.120 | than any president ever has.

00:59:06.400 | Often at personal peril 'cause he was close to the lines

00:59:09.520 | and he connected, it wasn't propaganda.

00:59:12.040 | There weren't always reporters following him.

00:59:14.320 | He was able to build empathy in this context.

00:59:18.200 | And I think, as I said, war is horrible as it is,

00:59:21.560 | often gives opportunities to certain groups.

00:59:24.080 | So African-Americans, former slaves

00:59:26.200 | are able to prove themselves as citizens.

00:59:29.040 | Jews did this an enormous number in World War II.

00:59:31.600 | Henry Kissinger, who I wrote about before,

00:59:33.600 | he really only gets recognized as an American.

00:59:35.920 | He's a German Jewish immigrant.

00:59:37.480 | He's seen as an American

00:59:38.560 | because of his service in World War II.

00:59:41.000 | So the bright side of this is that often in the case of war,

00:59:44.800 | on your own side,

00:59:46.400 | you will let go of some of your prejudices.

00:59:49.120 | Ulysses Grant has a total transformation.

00:59:51.000 | He goes into the Civil War, an anti-Semite and a racist.

00:59:55.440 | He comes out with actually very enlightened views

00:59:57.800 | 'cause he sees what Jewish soldiers

01:00:00.280 | and what African-American soldiers did.

01:00:02.160 | - What's Ulysses Grant's story?

01:00:04.680 | What do you learn from him?

01:00:06.280 | Was he a hero or a villain of this war?

01:00:08.840 | - I think he's a hero,

01:00:10.200 | though he's a flawed hero, as all heroes are.

01:00:12.680 | He's a man from Ohio and Illinois

01:00:17.760 | who was really a failed businessman time and again,

01:00:21.560 | and had an ability to command people in war.

01:00:27.880 | Where did this come from?

01:00:29.400 | He was a clear communicator and an empathetic figure.

01:00:32.440 | He tended to drink too much,

01:00:34.160 | but he was the kind of person people wanted to follow.

01:00:36.840 | They trusted him.

01:00:37.840 | And so in battle, that became very important.

01:00:41.760 | And the second thing is he did his homework.

01:00:44.120 | He had a sense of the terrain.

01:00:45.880 | He had a sense of the environment he was operating in,

01:00:48.440 | and he was ruthless in pursuing what he had studied.

01:00:52.120 | So he turns out at battles like Vicksburg and elsewhere

01:00:55.820 | to actually undertake some pretty revolutionary maneuvers.

01:00:59.780 | And then he figures out that the advantage now

01:01:03.420 | is on his side in numbers,

01:01:04.860 | and he just pounds Lee, pounds him to death.

01:01:08.180 | Similar to what the United States does

01:01:09.620 | at the end of World War II with Germany and Japan.

01:01:12.500 | He comes out of the war, Grant does.

01:01:14.260 | He's a believer in union.

01:01:15.700 | He wants to protect former slaves and other groups,

01:01:20.220 | and he tries to use the military for that purpose.

01:01:22.420 | He's limited.

01:01:23.500 | And then as president, he tries to do that as well.

01:01:26.540 | Right now, we still use many of the laws

01:01:29.820 | that were passed during Grant's presidency

01:01:31.620 | to prosecute insurrectionists.

01:01:32.980 | So the 900 or so people who have been prosecuted

01:01:36.260 | for breaking into the Capitol

01:01:38.180 | and attacking police on January 6th, those insurrectionists,

01:01:41.360 | they've been prosecuted

01:01:42.380 | under the 1871 Anti-Klu Klux Klan law.

01:01:45.900 | So that's a big accomplishment by Grant,

01:01:47.700 | and we still benefit from it.

01:01:49.560 | The problem is Grant was not a great politician.

01:01:51.580 | Unlike Lincoln, he didn't give good speeches.

01:01:55.260 | He wasn't a persuasive figure in a political space.

01:01:59.300 | And so he had trouble building support

01:02:01.460 | for what he was doing, even though he was trying to do

01:02:04.860 | what in the end, I think, were the right things.

01:02:07.220 | - What was the role of the KKK at that time?

01:02:08.940 | - So the Klu Klux Klan is formed

01:02:10.260 | at the end of the Civil War by Confederate veterans,

01:02:13.460 | first in Tennessee, in Pulaski, Tennessee,

01:02:15.340 | and then it spreads elsewhere.

01:02:16.420 | And there are other groups that are similar,

01:02:18.280 | the Red Shirts and various others.

01:02:20.240 | These are veterans of the Confederate Army who come home

01:02:25.240 | and are committed to continuing the war.

01:02:28.180 | They are gonna use their power at home and their weapons

01:02:31.780 | to intimidate and if necessary, kill people

01:02:34.360 | who challenge their authority, not just African-Americans,

01:02:37.420 | Jews, Catholics, various others.

01:02:40.380 | They are going to basically protect the continued rule

01:02:43.740 | of the same families who owned the slaves before

01:02:47.060 | in post-slavery Tennessee and post-slavery South Carolina.

01:02:51.800 | And when we get to voting, they're often the groups

01:02:54.320 | that are preventing people from voting.

01:02:56.640 | The white sheets and the ritual around that

01:02:59.720 | was all an effort to provide a certain ritualistic

01:03:03.720 | legitimacy and hide identity,

01:03:05.820 | though everyone knew who they were.

01:03:07.640 | - Oh, so that whole brand, that whole practice

01:03:09.800 | was there from the very beginning.

01:03:11.400 | Have you studied the KKK's history a little bit?

01:03:13.540 | - I have and there are a number of other historians

01:03:15.080 | who have too, so I've used their research as well.

01:03:17.540 | - I'm kind of curious, I have to admit that my knowledge

01:03:20.540 | of it is very kind of caricature knowledge.

01:03:22.140 | I'm sure there's interesting stories and threads

01:03:24.200 | because I think there's different competing organizations

01:03:27.660 | or something like that.

01:03:28.500 | - Of course. - Within the United States.

01:03:29.860 | And I feel like through that lens, you can tell a story

01:03:32.780 | of the United States also of these different groups.

01:03:35.260 | - They're often business associations.

01:03:36.720 | I mean, there's a lot of work showing that actually

01:03:39.460 | people joined the KKK for the reasons I just laid out,

01:03:42.560 | but also because it was networking for your business.

01:03:45.260 | You gained legitimacy in the area that you were in.

01:03:48.060 | So these were community groups that were formed

01:03:51.780 | to help white business people.

01:03:54.100 | They helped white sheriffs get elected.

01:03:56.380 | What we have to understand today is when we're debating

01:03:59.300 | policing, this history matters enormously, right?

01:04:02.940 | I have nothing against police.

01:04:05.460 | My cousin, one of my closest relatives just retired

01:04:07.540 | from 25 years in the New York Police Department.

01:04:09.660 | Thank God he survived.

01:04:11.020 | I have deep respect, he's one of the best public servants

01:04:12.880 | I know.

01:04:13.960 | But what we also have to recognize as we respect

01:04:16.080 | police officers is that for many communities in our country,

01:04:20.500 | they know this history and the KKK in the 1870s

01:04:24.160 | and in the 1930s, you look at any KKK organization

01:04:27.440 | as I have in my research and you find the police chiefs

01:04:30.660 | are the KKK members, the local police officers,

01:04:33.940 | local judges, because it was how you became police chief.

01:04:37.380 | - So these groups infiltrated some of the main institutions

01:04:41.620 | in our nation.

01:04:43.180 | - I don't even think they infiltrated.

01:04:44.120 | I think they were part of those institutions.

01:04:46.160 | - The deeper question today in the 21st century is one,

01:04:50.260 | how much of that is still there and how much of the history

01:04:53.540 | of that reverberates through the institutions?

01:04:55.940 | - And I'm making the latter point that it's not there

01:04:58.060 | that much now, but people remember it.

01:05:00.740 | - Well, and some people would even say it's not there

01:05:03.260 | at all, that there is not institutional racism

01:05:06.380 | in policing, but if that's the case,

01:05:10.380 | then you can also say that if there is not direct

01:05:13.580 | institutional racism there, what is it?

01:05:15.580 | The echoes of history still have effects.

01:05:18.300 | - Of course, and that's really important

01:05:20.380 | and that we have to take that seriously.

01:05:21.760 | That's not an excuse for people then saying nasty things

01:05:25.180 | about the police, but it is what we have to recognize.

01:05:28.340 | Look, I'm Jewish and there are certain elements

01:05:32.820 | of Russian behavior today I see in Ukraine

01:05:35.660 | that reverberate with the history of how my grandparents

01:05:39.300 | dealt with pogroms in Russia, right?

01:05:41.880 | Even though what Putin is doing in Ukraine

01:05:43.940 | might not technically be a pogrom,

01:05:46.300 | that history matters in how I view these issues

01:05:48.940 | and that's a reality.

01:05:50.500 | - Yeah, I went to 7-Eleven recently and what did I eat?

01:05:55.500 | I ate one of their salads.

01:05:57.740 | I'm sorry, I love 7-Eleven, I'm sorry.

01:06:01.020 | I ate one of the salads and got like terrible food poisoning.

01:06:04.620 | I was suffering for like four days and now I can't,

01:06:07.500 | I love 7-Eleven, I love going to 7-Eleven late at night

01:06:10.340 | in sweatpants and just I escaped the world.

01:06:12.540 | I'm listening to an audio book

01:06:14.540 | and now every time I pass that salad,

01:06:17.100 | for the rest of my life, I would have hate for that salad.

01:06:20.940 | So history matters, even if the salad is no longer

01:06:25.180 | have any bad stuff in it.

01:06:26.900 | It's probably the lettuce or something, whatever,

01:06:29.940 | mostly for humor's sake, but I'm also giving

01:06:32.660 | a kind of metaphor that history can have an individual

01:06:37.660 | and a large-scale society effect on human interactions,

01:06:43.620 | both the good and the bad.

01:06:45.740 | If you actually recommend to me offline books on the KKK,

01:06:48.820 | that would be really-- - I'd be happy to.

01:06:50.140 | There were a few mentioned in the footnotes

01:06:52.500 | of my book here.

01:06:53.380 | - And also in part, 'cause I also want to understand

01:06:55.940 | the white nationalism, white supremacists,

01:06:59.380 | Christian supremacists or Christian nationalism,

01:07:01.500 | all those different subgroups in the United States

01:07:04.660 | and elsewhere in the world.

01:07:05.500 | I'm a bit, my mind has been focused

01:07:08.460 | on some of the better aspects of human nature

01:07:10.220 | that it's nice to also understand

01:07:13.060 | some of the darker aspects.

01:07:14.460 | Let me ask you sort of a personal question for me.

01:07:18.380 | Do you think it's possible, do you think it's useful

01:07:21.900 | to do a podcast conversation with somebody like David Duke

01:07:25.380 | or somebody, this is somebody that everybody knows,

01:07:32.180 | so it's not like you're giving a platform

01:07:33.700 | to somebody that's a hidden member of the KKK

01:07:38.700 | or like a, it's sort of putting a pretty face

01:07:42.180 | on some dark ideas, but everybody knows.

01:07:44.500 | And so now you're just exploring,

01:07:46.220 | you're sitting across the table, maybe not in his case,

01:07:48.980 | maybe somebody who's an active KKK member,

01:07:52.700 | sitting across from a person that literally hates me, Lex.

01:07:57.500 | I think that's fascinating to explore that way.

01:08:00.860 | - I think so long as what you are doing

01:08:05.100 | is not boosting someone, so taking an obscure figure

01:08:09.420 | and making that figure now famous,

01:08:12.540 | but if it's someone who's already infamous

01:08:15.140 | and it helps us to understand them,

01:08:17.780 | and so long as your effort is to ask them tough questions,

01:08:21.860 | which you do, right?

01:08:23.140 | You don't give them all the questions in advance,

01:08:26.340 | you don't have limitations on what you can ask,

01:08:28.700 | so long as it is a real interview, not pablum,

01:08:32.380 | then I'm for it.

01:08:33.380 | What I'm against is a softball interview

01:08:36.500 | that allows someone to sound reasonable when they're not.

01:08:38.980 | But the way I've seen you do this,

01:08:39.980 | when you've had figures like that,

01:08:41.340 | I won't name who I have in mind,

01:08:42.380 | but when I've seen that is, I think that's useful

01:08:45.700 | because honestly, the historian in me

01:08:48.060 | and the citizen in me wants to understand.

01:08:50.580 | My Jewish grandfather always was the first

01:08:54.900 | to be against any effort to suppress anti-Semites

01:08:58.460 | because his view was he wanted to know who they were

01:09:01.700 | and he wanted to know what they thought

01:09:02.980 | so he could be prepared.

01:09:04.700 | - And I also see, perhaps as a historian,

01:09:07.920 | you may be able to appreciate this kind of thing,

01:09:11.820 | that's probably how you see the world,

01:09:13.300 | but there's several ways to see a human being.

01:09:17.080 | Like Vladimir Putin is an example.

01:09:18.940 | One is a political figure that's currently

01:09:22.540 | doing actions on the world, geopolitics internally,

01:09:27.100 | the politics of Russia, but there's also that human being

01:09:30.900 | in a historical context.

01:09:32.940 | And collecting information about that person

01:09:34.980 | in the historical context is also very valuable.

01:09:37.500 | So you could see interviews with Hitler in '39, '40, '41

01:09:42.500 | as being very bad and detrimental

01:09:45.420 | to all that is good in the world.

01:09:48.580 | But at the same time, it's important to understand

01:09:50.900 | that human mind, how power affects that mind,

01:09:55.020 | how power corrupts it, how they see the world.

01:09:57.100 | - Absolutely, absolutely.

01:09:58.580 | I would be all in favor, and maybe he will,

01:10:01.020 | if Vladimir Putin would sit down with you, absolutely.

01:10:04.020 | I don't think you're boosting someone like that

01:10:06.420 | when you ask them tough questions.

01:10:07.560 | In fact, I think that's what we need to do.

01:10:09.420 | Those sorts of figures tend to insulate themselves

01:10:11.780 | from tough questions.

01:10:13.020 | So just to restate, I am for the Lex Fridman interview

01:10:17.820 | of those sorts of figures.

01:10:20.100 | I am not for the puff piece on Fox and Friends

01:10:24.060 | where they just come on and they're asked,

01:10:26.260 | "Oh, isn't it, tell us what you think of this.

01:10:29.180 | Tell us what you think of that."

01:10:30.860 | - So, but there's a balance there

01:10:32.260 | because a lot of people that interview somebody

01:10:35.300 | like Vladimir Putin, all they do is hard-hitting questions.

01:10:39.180 | They often demonstrate a lack of knowledge

01:10:41.540 | of the perspective of the Russian people and the president.

01:10:43.920 | There's not an empathy to understanding

01:10:45.500 | that this is a popularly elected,

01:10:48.260 | you can criticize that notion,

01:10:49.640 | but this is still there that represents the beliefs

01:10:53.120 | of a large number of people

01:10:54.420 | and they have their own life story.

01:10:55.780 | They see the world,

01:10:56.620 | they believe they're doing good for the world.

01:10:58.380 | And I don't, that idea seems to not permeate the questions

01:11:03.380 | and the thoughts that people say

01:11:06.740 | because they're afraid of being attacked

01:11:09.220 | by the people back home, fellow journalists,

01:11:11.540 | for not being hard enough.

01:11:13.020 | - Well, maybe.

01:11:13.860 | I think that's probably true.

01:11:15.740 | I think in my experience with interviewers

01:11:18.020 | is that a lot of them are really lazy.

01:11:20.420 | You're not, which is why I like talking to you.

01:11:23.100 | - Can I just say, okay, this is not you saying it.

01:11:25.040 | Can I just rant?

01:11:26.920 | If you're sitting across from Xi Jinping

01:11:29.200 | or from Vladimir Putin, you should be fired

01:11:34.080 | if you have not read at least several books on the guy.

01:11:37.760 | The surprising lack of research

01:11:40.800 | that people do leading up to it.

01:11:42.440 | So you need to be a historian or a biographer.

01:11:45.440 | You need to be the kind of person

01:11:46.600 | that writes biographies or histories

01:11:48.520 | before you sit in front of the person.

01:11:52.440 | Not a low effort journalist.

01:11:53.880 | And it's so surprising to me

01:11:55.760 | that I think they're probably really busy

01:11:57.440 | and it's probably not part of the culture

01:11:59.320 | of the people that do interviews

01:12:00.720 | to do deep, deep investigative.

01:12:03.140 | You need to be the kind of person that lives that idea.

01:12:06.720 | See it as a documentary that you work on

01:12:08.480 | for three years kind of thing.

01:12:09.800 | Anyway, of course, some journalists do do that

01:12:13.160 | and they do that masterfully

01:12:14.200 | and that's the best of journalism.

01:12:15.880 | - But I think a lot of the times when the questions are,

01:12:17.920 | as you said, out of touch with the society

01:12:20.800 | that person is leading,

01:12:22.840 | it's because the interviewer hasn't taken the time.

01:12:24.920 | And I understand you can't be an expert on every subject,

01:12:28.440 | but you can do what you do.

01:12:29.920 | You read my book to prepare for this.

01:12:31.600 | You looked things up.

01:12:32.440 | You had a sense of the person you're talking to

01:12:35.560 | and you put the time in to do that.

01:12:37.640 | This is what I always tell my students.

01:12:39.860 | The secret to success in anything

01:12:41.760 | is outworking other people.

01:12:43.080 | Be more prepared.

01:12:45.040 | What you show is like an iceberg.

01:12:46.920 | It's the tip of the iceberg, right?

01:12:48.460 | Is what people see.

01:12:50.000 | It's all the work that goes on below the surface.

01:12:52.040 | - And if you work hard enough, which I aspire to do,

01:12:54.800 | at the end of the day, just like an animal farm,

01:12:56.860 | you'll be like the horse boxer

01:12:58.600 | and slaughtered unjustly

01:13:00.960 | by those that are much more powerful than you.

01:13:02.800 | - But you'll be happy when you're slaughtered.

01:13:05.020 | - You have lived for the right ideal

01:13:07.480 | and history will remember you fondly.

01:13:09.720 | Okay, what about Robert E. Lee?

01:13:11.760 | So he's the Confederate general that you mentioned.

01:13:14.520 | Was he a hero or a villain?

01:13:15.880 | - To me, he's a villain.

01:13:16.720 | Many people treat Robert E. Lee as a hero.

01:13:18.720 | And one of the points I make in the book

01:13:20.720 | is we have to rethink that.

01:13:22.200 | And it's very important for our society

01:13:23.800 | because Robert E. Lee pops up all over our society,

01:13:26.680 | names of schools, names of streets.

01:13:28.960 | And he also embeds and justifies certain behaviors

01:13:31.880 | that I think are really bad.

01:13:33.240 | Lee was a tremendous general.

01:13:35.640 | He had the weaker side and he managed to use maneuver,

01:13:39.660 | secrecy and circumstance to give himself so many advantages

01:13:43.480 | and win so many battles he should have lost.

01:13:45.520 | So in terms of the technical generalship,

01:13:48.280 | he's a great general.

01:13:50.320 | But Lee at the end of the war

01:13:52.280 | never wants to really acknowledge defeat.

01:13:54.960 | What he acknowledges at Appomattox

01:13:57.040 | is that his soldiers will have to leave the battlefield

01:14:00.020 | because they have not won on the battlefield.

01:14:02.400 | But he refuses to do what Grant asks him,

01:14:05.880 | which is to help sell his side

01:14:08.160 | on the fact that we're going into a post-war moment

01:14:11.160 | where they don't have to see themselves as losers,

01:14:13.720 | but they have to get on board with change.

01:14:15.960 | Real leadership is convincing people who follow you

01:14:19.760 | that they have to change when they don't want to change.

01:14:22.400 | Lee refuses to do that.

01:14:24.280 | He says to Grant, I quote this in the book,

01:14:25.960 | he says to Grant at Appomattox,

01:14:27.760 | if you want to change the South,

01:14:29.160 | you have to run your army over the South three or four times.

01:14:32.560 | He's not gonna do anything.

01:14:33.760 | He's not gonna help.

01:14:35.120 | And he becomes a figure who people rally around

01:14:39.720 | in the rest of his life and even after he dies.

01:14:42.220 | So it is as if at the end of World War II,

01:14:47.220 | Hitler had been allowed to just retire

01:14:50.280 | and he didn't go back into politics,

01:14:53.800 | but yet he was there and he continued to have meetings

01:14:56.480 | with former Nazis and people would rally around the idea

01:14:59.880 | of bringing back or going back to Hitler's ideas.

01:15:02.200 | Think of how harmful that would be.

01:15:04.060 | Lee played that kind of role after the war.

01:15:07.840 | And I think it's one of the problems we have now.

01:15:09.880 | I don't think we should continue to revere him

01:15:13.000 | because it justifies too much

01:15:14.760 | of what the Confederates stood for.

01:15:16.520 | - And that's the difference that you highlight

01:15:19.240 | between World War II and the Civil War

01:15:20.960 | that in the case of Hitler,

01:15:22.520 | there was an end to that war.

01:15:25.200 | There's a very distinctive, clear end to that war.

01:15:27.320 | And you also make the case that World War II

01:15:29.960 | is not a good example, not a good model of a war

01:15:34.920 | to help us analyze history.

01:15:36.800 | - It's given Americans the wrong idea of what war is

01:15:39.120 | because World War II ends as most wars don't end.

01:15:41.520 | World War II ends with the complete defeat

01:15:44.120 | of the German army and the German society

01:15:46.560 | and the near complete defeat of Japan.

01:15:49.200 | And where both sides in different ways, accept defeat.

01:15:52.940 | What I'm pointing out in the book is that most wars

01:15:56.080 | don't end with one side accepting defeat.

01:15:59.680 | And generally the war continues after the battles end.

01:16:02.840 | This is something that's hard for Americans to understand.

01:16:04.640 | Our system is built with the presumption of a war is over.

01:16:07.000 | When we sign a piece of paper, everyone can go home.

01:16:09.800 | It's not what happens.

01:16:11.960 | - I mean, Civil War is a special case.

01:16:13.680 | It's especially a strong case of that

01:16:17.160 | because the people that fought the war

01:16:18.520 | is still living in that land.

01:16:20.080 | - That's exactly right.

01:16:21.040 | - And in this case, some of them are leaders also.

01:16:23.320 | - Many of them become the leaders of the very areas

01:16:25.880 | that they were leading before.

01:16:27.840 | And I think that's another lesson here too

01:16:30.440 | that we did undertake after World War II,

01:16:32.680 | though in a flawed way.

01:16:33.800 | We had a Nuremberg system.

01:16:35.680 | We did prohibit at least Nazi leaders

01:16:38.040 | from coming back into power.

01:16:39.080 | We made an exception for the emperor in Japan,

01:16:41.360 | but we generally followed the same rule in Japan.

01:16:44.000 | Whereas in the United States, as I point out,

01:16:46.640 | many of the leaders of the Confederacy,

01:16:48.520 | first of all, don't surrender.

01:16:50.160 | They flee to Mexico.

01:16:52.280 | Then they come back after they lose in Mexico a second time,

01:16:55.320 | they come back to the United States

01:16:56.520 | and they get elected to office.

01:16:58.880 | The guy who writes the election laws in Texas,

01:17:01.640 | Alexander Watkins Terrell,

01:17:03.120 | most people don't know this even in Texas,

01:17:05.120 | he was a Confederate general, fled to Mexico.

01:17:07.600 | So he committed treason by joining the army of Maximilian,

01:17:11.240 | emperor of Mexico, who was put in power by Louis Napoleon.

01:17:14.080 | After Maximilian's defeated,

01:17:16.000 | Alexander Watkins Terrell comes back to Texas,

01:17:18.160 | runs for the state legislature

01:17:20.360 | and then writes the election laws.

01:17:22.480 | It's crazy.

01:17:23.320 | - Can you make the case for that,

01:17:24.440 | that that's a feature of the American system, not a bug,

01:17:27.400 | that that is an implementation of justice,

01:17:29.600 | that you forgive,

01:17:30.960 | that you don't persecute everybody

01:17:33.800 | on the other side of the war?

01:17:35.680 | - Maybe, and I think that's a good feature

01:17:37.520 | in terms of lower level individuals,

01:17:40.120 | but I think a bad feature of our system

01:17:42.320 | is we do allow elite figures who have committed wrongdoing,

01:17:47.320 | we give them many ways to get out of punishment.

01:17:50.240 | You are more likely to be punished in this society

01:17:52.560 | if you do something wrong and you're not an elite figure

01:17:55.600 | than if you are an elite figure.

01:17:56.960 | - There should be a proportional,

01:17:58.240 | like forgiveness should be equally distributed across.

01:18:00.640 | - And it's not.

01:18:01.480 | - Yeah. - And it's not.

01:18:03.560 | But we could change that, we could fix that.

01:18:06.120 | - How do we fix that?

01:18:07.160 | (laughs)

01:18:08.000 | How do we fix that?

01:18:09.000 | - What I think was argued at the end,

01:18:10.520 | this is one of the really important things

01:18:12.000 | about studying history,

01:18:12.840 | you learn about ideas that were not pursued

01:18:15.280 | that could be pursued today.

01:18:17.240 | At the end of the Civil War,

01:18:18.880 | there was an effort to ban anyone

01:18:21.720 | who was in a leadership position in the Confederacy

01:18:24.360 | from ever serving in federal office again.

01:18:26.800 | That's the third element of the 14th Amendment.

01:18:30.560 | It's in the 14th Amendment.

01:18:31.600 | The 14th Amendment clause three

01:18:33.280 | says that if you took an oath of office,

01:18:35.440 | meaning you were elected to office,

01:18:37.120 | you're an elite figure,

01:18:38.640 | and you violated that oath,

01:18:40.600 | you can still live in the country,

01:18:42.000 | you can still get rich,

01:18:43.280 | but you can't run for elected office again.

01:18:45.600 | - Yeah.

01:18:46.440 | - And that, we've never really implemented that.

01:18:50.360 | - Is it obvious that everybody

01:18:51.920 | who's in a leadership position on the Confederate side

01:18:54.680 | is a bad person for the future of the United States?

01:18:59.360 | Or is that just a safe thing to assume

01:19:01.960 | for the future of the nation?

01:19:03.640 | - I think it's the latter.

01:19:05.440 | People do things for all kinds of reasons,

01:19:07.120 | and sometimes they have regrets.

01:19:09.080 | That's also why we have the pardoning capability.

01:19:10.840 | You could pardon someone individually

01:19:12.960 | if they show you that they've changed.

01:19:15.280 | And it would only create fairness,

01:19:16.680 | because right now, let's say, Lex,

01:19:19.600 | you take out a huge, huge loan,

01:19:22.400 | and you don't pay your loan back,

01:19:24.000 | that will go on your credit,

01:19:25.920 | and you won't get a big loan again.

01:19:28.000 | You don't get to say, "Just give me another chance."

01:19:30.800 | You're gonna have to prove.

01:19:32.160 | I think about holding public office in the same way.

01:19:36.680 | If you've violated your credit rating on that,

01:19:40.640 | you should have a much higher road to go

01:19:43.360 | to prove to us that you should be back in office.

01:19:45.760 | - How did the war end, in quotes?

01:19:52.160 | What was the, so you said,

01:19:55.280 | and you make this case in the book,

01:19:56.440 | that in some sense, the elements,

01:19:58.320 | the tensions behind the Civil War continue to this day,

01:20:00.960 | but officially, how did the war end?

01:20:03.320 | - So officially, the war ends at Appomattox

01:20:06.720 | in the early spring of 1865,

01:20:10.160 | when Grant has pretty much smashed Robert E. Lee's army.

01:20:14.160 | Appomattox Courthouse is a small town in Virginia,

01:20:17.840 | and the two men meet, and there are portraits of this,

01:20:21.600 | there's a painting of it we have in the book,

01:20:24.200 | and Grant and Lee sign a paper,

01:20:26.240 | which basically allows Lee's soldiers

01:20:29.200 | to leave the battlefield,

01:20:30.760 | and leave with their side arms to go back home.

01:20:33.280 | That's pretty much the end.

01:20:35.800 | Jefferson Davis, who's the president of the Confederacy,

01:20:38.320 | goes into hiding.

01:20:39.640 | He's later captured, and then not convicted,

01:20:43.640 | but there's no formal settlement

01:20:45.680 | in the way there is at the end of World War II,

01:20:47.680 | where they meet in Yokohama Bay,

01:20:50.080 | the US and Japanese leaders in China.

01:20:51.680 | This is not that.

01:20:52.560 | - So what stands out to you as brilliant ideas

01:20:56.080 | during this time, and actions too, of Lincoln,

01:21:00.000 | Abraham Lincoln?

01:21:00.880 | - So I mentioned his values.

01:21:02.560 | I think a number of the things that he does

01:21:04.640 | that are quite extraordinary.

01:21:06.240 | First, in emancipating the slaves.

01:21:09.440 | Now, the slaves were freeing themselves,

01:21:11.640 | but Lincoln recognizes that he needs more labor

01:21:14.720 | in the Union Army,

01:21:16.000 | and he recognizes that there's still a lot of resistance,

01:21:20.040 | and what he does is he makes the case

01:21:22.800 | for freeing the slaves based on the argument,

01:21:26.240 | not just of the moral value of that,

01:21:28.520 | but based on how that will benefit the North.

01:21:31.040 | He's able to convince non-abolitionists

01:21:33.960 | to pursue abolitionist policies

01:21:36.480 | by serving their own interests.

01:21:39.320 | What he's basically saying by 1863 or '64 is,

01:21:42.120 | "I can ask for more white soldiers,

01:21:44.280 | "or I can bring in former slaves.

01:21:45.920 | "Would you like me to take your son,

01:21:47.160 | "or would you like me to put in?"

01:21:48.560 | It's the same thing Franklin Roosevelt does

01:21:50.120 | during World War II.

01:21:51.280 | He says, "We need to build more planes,

01:21:52.600 | "and more tanks,

01:21:53.800 | "and I'm sending all the soldiers off to Europe.

01:21:56.040 | "I've got all this African-American population

01:21:58.080 | "in the South.

01:21:58.920 | "Wouldn't you like me to move them up to Chicago

01:22:00.080 | "so we can win this war and build things in the factories?"

01:22:02.960 | So Lincoln uses the war

01:22:06.680 | to move the country forward morally,

01:22:09.040 | even if at times he's convincing people

01:22:10.720 | by using other reasons,

01:22:12.840 | and I think that's great politics.

01:22:14.200 | - I guess that's one of the components

01:22:15.600 | of great leadership,

01:22:16.600 | is do the right thing

01:22:20.920 | for the wrong reasons.

01:22:24.000 | (laughing)

01:22:24.840 | Or publicly sounding wrong reasons, yeah.

01:22:27.200 | - Find ways to move people.

01:22:29.200 | What we talked about before,

01:22:30.480 | different stories move different people.

01:22:32.640 | So you can tell different stories.

01:22:34.640 | He tells one set of stories

01:22:35.920 | to the religious leaders who are abolitionists,

01:22:38.200 | and a different set of stories to the New York bankers.

01:22:41.480 | And that's leadership.

01:22:42.360 | You tell different kinds of stories

01:22:43.680 | to move people to a new position.

01:22:46.640 | The other thing Lincoln is really brilliant at

01:22:50.400 | is managing the international side of this.

01:22:53.800 | So one of the real dangers for the Union

01:22:56.640 | is that the British will come in

01:22:58.040 | on the side of the Confederacy.

01:22:59.200 | The Confederates expected the British would,

01:23:00.680 | 'cause again, the Confederates

01:23:01.800 | were selling all their cotton to Britain.

01:23:04.000 | And they knew that the British leadership,

01:23:05.840 | first of all, was very happy to work

01:23:07.760 | with slave-holding societies,

01:23:08.840 | even though they didn't have slaves,

01:23:09.960 | and number two, that they believed the Union

01:23:12.560 | was getting too strong

01:23:13.560 | and threatening the British in Canada.

01:23:15.480 | So there were many reasons the British

01:23:16.880 | might have gone in with the Confederates.

01:23:19.040 | Lincoln mixes sticks and carrots with the British.

01:23:23.360 | He threatens them, and when the British

01:23:26.640 | actually try to send diplomats

01:23:28.240 | to negotiate with Southerners, he interdicts that.

01:23:31.240 | He basically initiates a quarantine of the South.

01:23:33.920 | On the other hand, he reaches out to them

01:23:36.400 | and tries to show that he wants better relations,

01:23:38.360 | and makes the argument that they will actually benefit more

01:23:41.200 | from having the industrial capability

01:23:42.960 | of the Union on their side.

01:23:44.120 | So he's a very good diplomat.

01:23:47.320 | - He is considered to be one of the great presidents

01:23:50.040 | in the history of the United States.

01:23:52.160 | Are there ways that he failed?

01:23:54.760 | Is there things he could have done better?

01:23:56.800 | - So he failed in the ways that most great leaders fail,

01:24:00.520 | which is that he had a terrible succession plan.

01:24:02.920 | His vice president, who I spend a lot of time on

01:24:07.000 | in the book, Andrew Johnson,

01:24:08.160 | who was probably our worst president ever,

01:24:10.880 | Andrew Johnson had no business being anywhere

01:24:13.640 | near the presidency.

01:24:15.000 | Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator

01:24:19.000 | who did not secede.

01:24:21.000 | And so even though he was a Democrat,

01:24:23.000 | Lincoln wanted to show that he was creating a unity ticket

01:24:26.960 | when he ran for re-election in 1864.

01:24:29.400 | This happens today, right?

01:24:30.720 | So he put someone on as vice president

01:24:33.200 | who he didn't even like,

01:24:34.480 | but who he thought was politically useful.

01:24:36.840 | Problem is, when Lincoln was assassinated,

01:24:39.920 | this guy took over.

01:24:40.960 | Andrew Johnson was drunk at his own inauguration.

01:24:44.120 | The guy was a true drunkard.

01:24:45.840 | He was not prepared to lead in any sense,

01:24:49.040 | intellectually, politically,

01:24:51.320 | and he was against most of the principles Lincoln was for.

01:24:54.200 | And the irony is that when Lincoln is assassinated

01:24:59.360 | in April of 1865, Andrew Johnson takes over

01:25:02.440 | and he has all the war powers Lincoln had.

01:25:04.520 | That was not good planning by Lincoln.

01:25:07.600 | And we can look back on it now and say,

01:25:09.640 | even though Lincoln is the first president

01:25:11.240 | who was assassinated,

01:25:13.280 | he should have known that there were people coming for him.

01:25:15.240 | It wasn't inevitable that he'd be assassinated,

01:25:16.920 | but he should have had a backup plan for who would take over,

01:25:19.520 | hopefully someone who was capable of doing the job,

01:25:22.240 | and Andrew Johnson was not capable.

01:25:23.880 | - So for me, for a person,

01:25:25.240 | if I were to put myself in Lincoln's shoes

01:25:27.200 | or anybody, any leadership position's shoes,

01:25:29.920 | it is difficult to think about what happens after my death,

01:25:33.040 | after I'm gone, right?

01:25:34.400 | To plan well.

01:25:35.840 | But at the same time,

01:25:36.960 | if you care about your actions to have a long-term impact,

01:25:43.560 | it seems like you should have a succession plan

01:25:46.360 | that continues on the path,

01:25:48.760 | that continues to carry the ideals that you've implemented.

01:25:52.440 | So I'm unsure why people don't do that more often.

01:25:55.680 | Like, I wonder how much Vladimir Putin

01:25:58.240 | spends percentage of time per day

01:26:01.840 | thinking what happens after he's gone

01:26:05.320 | to help flourish the nation and the region

01:26:07.840 | that he deeply cares for.

01:26:09.640 | I wonder, and it's the same as for other presidents,

01:26:11.760 | Donald Trump, Joe Biden,

01:26:13.680 | they might think politically,

01:26:16.080 | like, how do I guarantee that it's a Democrat or a Republican

01:26:19.840 | but do they think like visionary for the country?

01:26:23.360 | I don't know, I wonder.

01:26:24.200 | - I think that's very rare.

01:26:25.160 | And I think what I understand from the literature

01:26:28.320 | among business people who talk about this a lot

01:26:30.880 | is what ends up happening is you become so powerful,

01:26:35.160 | you assume you're always gonna be in power.

01:26:37.080 | You convince yourself of that.

01:26:38.240 | You convince yourself that the end is far away.

01:26:40.840 | And of course, for Lincoln,

01:26:41.680 | the end could have been far away.

01:26:42.600 | He was healthy, he was only in his 50s.

01:26:45.040 | He could have lived a lot longer,

01:26:47.160 | but it also, it ended fast as it could.

01:26:49.840 | And my understanding is that most Americans

01:26:53.200 | don't prepare their wills in the States.

01:26:55.120 | And it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor.

01:26:57.280 | They assume things are just gonna go on

01:26:59.920 | because it's not fun to think about this.

01:27:02.360 | - Yeah.

01:27:04.000 | But I feel like it's freeing.

01:27:06.040 | Like, you know what I did, which is interesting?

01:27:08.320 | Well, before I went to Ukraine, I recorded a video.

01:27:10.640 | I set up a whole thing where I record a video,

01:27:13.000 | like what happens if I die?

01:27:14.440 | I record a video to release,

01:27:15.800 | and I gave my brother access to my passwords,

01:27:19.440 | and I gave him instructions.

01:27:21.840 | You're not allowed to look at this,

01:27:22.800 | but please publish this if I die.

01:27:25.120 | And you know, that made me,

01:27:26.920 | it sounds silly and ridiculous,

01:27:28.320 | but that made me feel free to do the best thing I wanna do.

01:27:33.320 | It's like, it's liberating.

01:27:34.920 | So like, I guess that's for your will,

01:27:36.600 | but also like do the best possible damn job you can.

01:27:40.080 | I feel like as a leader, having a plan what happens

01:27:43.200 | if you fail, and not if you fail, if you die,

01:27:45.960 | or you lose some of the oomph, some of the power,

01:27:51.880 | some of the momentum that is driving you currently,

01:27:54.560 | that there's going to be a handoff,

01:27:56.360 | where you will still be remembered as a great man or woman.

01:28:00.480 | - But you identify one of the other problems, right?

01:28:03.120 | Which is one of the other reasons why someone like Lincoln,

01:28:05.920 | or certainly Henry Kissinger, doesn't create a successor.

01:28:09.480 | Because you're afraid they're gonna steal your passwords.

01:28:11.560 | You're afraid they're gonna steal the power from you.

01:28:13.480 | - That's true.

01:28:14.320 | - You had to find someone, your brother,

01:28:15.480 | hopefully who you could trust.

01:28:17.120 | - No, no, no.

01:28:17.960 | - But let's just be clear.

01:28:19.520 | - I love my brother, but he's a troll.

01:28:21.600 | - So there's a feature on the password,

01:28:24.720 | on whatever password manager I may or may not use.

01:28:27.720 | And there's a bunch of services like this.

01:28:30.080 | It's interesting, I don't know if you know about this.

01:28:32.120 | I've learned about all of this.

01:28:35.400 | Is you can have them request access,

01:28:39.800 | and it's gonna wait 30 days before it gives them access.

01:28:42.720 | So it's kind of has this built-in trust, trust padding.

01:28:47.720 | But it's interesting, I mean, to me,

01:28:50.760 | on that aspect is just to have a plan

01:28:52.760 | in all aspects of life.

01:28:53.800 | This is for leadership in your private life.

01:28:56.800 | Like what happens to not just your will

01:29:00.200 | and your wealth or whatever,

01:29:02.840 | but what happens to other stuff like social media

01:29:05.520 | and all of that in this digital world.

01:29:07.840 | - And anything you care about if you want it to live on.

01:29:10.200 | And that's the problem.

01:29:11.200 | But unless you can devise a technical solution like that,

01:29:16.200 | you have to give someone power now.

01:29:18.960 | - Yeah, and that's the tricky thing.

01:29:20.080 | I mean, democracy is a kind of technology.

01:29:23.400 | You're gonna have to figure out how to do it correctly,

01:29:25.320 | how to have that power propagate,

01:29:27.960 | and especially during war,

01:29:29.360 | how you get everybody together

01:29:31.680 | into this warmongering mood.

01:29:34.320 | And then how do you like come down from that

01:29:38.080 | and just relax?

01:29:39.240 | - Precisely.

01:29:40.080 | - So in some sense, that's what Andrew Johnson,

01:29:43.160 | that was the problem is the over-centralization of power.

01:29:46.880 | - It was the over-centralization of power,

01:29:48.480 | but it was also that Lincoln had a designated successor

01:29:53.480 | who was going to do and tried to do everything

01:29:56.520 | that ran against what Lincoln was doing.

01:29:58.480 | And it set the country back.

01:29:59.720 | We went forward at the end of the Civil War,

01:30:01.880 | and then we went backward.

01:30:03.880 | More so than we would have if there had been a new election.

01:30:06.720 | Because if there had been a new election,

01:30:08.480 | there still would be reason for that person running,

01:30:10.800 | even if they were on the other side,

01:30:11.960 | to try to find some compromise positions.

01:30:14.320 | Andrew Johnson inherited power

01:30:16.920 | with very few limitations on how he used that power.

01:30:19.520 | Congress wasn't even in session.

01:30:21.920 | And so this became very directly a problem

01:30:23.960 | because Andrew Johnson started pardoning Southerners,

01:30:26.240 | allowing them to come back into power.

01:30:28.440 | - So he had like a few months where he just went wild.

01:30:31.080 | - Yeah.

01:30:32.200 | It's giving the car keys to someone

01:30:34.320 | who's not prepared to drive,

01:30:35.520 | but decided that they're gonna do what they want

01:30:37.240 | with the car for a while.

01:30:38.480 | - All right.

01:30:40.320 | Is there any level to which power corrupted Lincoln?

01:30:45.840 | A war president?

01:30:46.760 | - Yes, I do think there were some areas.

01:30:48.520 | And I think that even though he was a great president,

01:30:51.320 | if not our greatest president,

01:30:53.000 | maybe one of the greatest figures of our history,

01:30:56.560 | he was flawed.

01:30:57.480 | One is his problem of succession,

01:30:59.480 | but also I think Lincoln over-invested

01:31:04.480 | in the power of the presidency.

01:31:05.840 | He came to believe too much in the role of one man

01:31:10.560 | and not in creating a more balanced approach to governance.

01:31:15.560 | And that's a function of war.

01:31:16.640 | That's where war is dangerous.

01:31:18.240 | War has an inherent centralizing power in a democracy.

01:31:23.040 | That is dangerous because even when you have

01:31:24.920 | the best of people running a war,

01:31:27.440 | that gives them a lot of power to make decisions.

01:31:29.440 | - Yeah, how do you come down from that?

01:31:30.840 | I see that was Zelensky and Putin currently.

01:31:32.960 | - Yep. - It's a war.

01:31:34.000 | How do you come down?

01:31:34.920 | 'Cause Ukraine and everybody,

01:31:38.320 | anybody in a war kind of,

01:31:39.680 | especially if you're fighting for the ideal of democracy,

01:31:43.000 | it seems like war is anti-democratic.

01:31:45.520 | - It is.

01:31:46.360 | - So how do you come down from that?

01:31:48.320 | What's the interesting mechanism of,

01:31:51.200 | I mean, some of it is leadership.

01:31:52.560 | You have to be like a George Washington type figure

01:31:54.680 | to be able to walk away from power.

01:31:56.440 | - I think you gave the answer right there.

01:31:58.840 | You need to walk away from power

01:32:00.200 | or you need to be forced to walk away from power.

01:32:02.160 | Historically, one of the things that democracies

01:32:04.320 | have tended to do when they have a chance

01:32:07.160 | is to vote out of office the victor in the war.

01:32:09.880 | Think about Winston Churchill.

01:32:11.380 | Roosevelt is elected to his fourth term

01:32:15.120 | when he's still in the war.

01:32:16.600 | It's not clear that he would have been elected again,

01:32:19.480 | let's say he lived on,

01:32:20.800 | because there is a sensibility

01:32:22.560 | that the person has become too powerful in this role

01:32:26.560 | and that someone else should now step in,

01:32:28.640 | someone else who's also not a war president

01:32:30.320 | but has other interests.

01:32:31.520 | So let's hope Ukraine wins this war.

01:32:35.100 | Zelensky should then step down

01:32:38.200 | or someone else should be voted in.

01:32:41.160 | It will be dangerous if he remains president.

01:32:43.840 | Let's say he wins somehow and a true victory,

01:32:46.680 | just as a hypothetical.

01:32:48.480 | He should not be, he should be praised,

01:32:52.040 | maybe given a nice villa,

01:32:53.440 | but someone else should take over

01:32:57.160 | because the problem is that he's gonna have too much power

01:33:00.560 | and honestly, he's going to be too out of touch

01:33:03.200 | with what the country needs after the war.

01:33:05.300 | - What do you think would have happened if Lincoln had lived?

01:33:08.340 | That's the sort of counterfactual view of history.

01:33:11.040 | It's an interesting question that probably

01:33:12.620 | you think about a lot, this gets raised a lot.

01:33:14.640 | What would have happened if he didn't get assassinated?

01:33:16.480 | - It's a reasonable question

01:33:17.920 | because it was not inevitable he'd be assassinated.

01:33:20.040 | He could have had more protection that night.

01:33:21.720 | He'd invited Ulysses Grant to go to the theater with him

01:33:24.360 | and Grant and his wife didn't go.

01:33:25.960 | If they had been there,

01:33:26.800 | there would have been more protection for Grant.

01:33:28.420 | So he would have had at least double the security there.

01:33:32.040 | So there are many ways in which he might not have died.

01:33:34.160 | I think it still would have been a difficult transition,

01:33:37.880 | but I think there were a few things

01:33:39.000 | that would have been better.

01:33:39.840 | First of all, Lincoln would not have pardoned

01:33:41.320 | all of these Confederate leaders

01:33:42.720 | and allowed them to come back into power.

01:33:44.720 | Lincoln also would have been a better politician

01:33:46.560 | at holding his Republican coalition together.

01:33:49.600 | And I think Lincoln was more committed

01:33:52.080 | to empowering former slaves and others.

01:33:54.320 | So we still would have had a lot of conflicts,

01:33:56.400 | but I think what would have been a degree of difficulty

01:33:59.440 | was doubled or tripled because Lincoln was removed

01:34:03.960 | and the opposite came into power with Andrew Johnson.

01:34:06.840 | - So you don't think there's a case you made

01:34:08.440 | that Andrew Johnson turned out to be a bad decision,

01:34:13.440 | but the spirit of the decision is the correct one?

01:34:16.240 | - No, I think it was a terrible decision

01:34:18.560 | because you should never put someone one step away

01:34:21.400 | from enormous power who's not prepared.

01:34:23.760 | - Oh, in that sense.

01:34:24.760 | - Yeah. - So in that sense, I got it.

01:34:26.680 | But the other, the spirit of the decision,

01:34:28.840 | meaning you put somebody who's in,

01:34:30.840 | represents a very opposing viewpoint than you.

01:34:35.480 | - Well, I'm for that so long as that person is on board

01:34:38.920 | with some of the basic values that you're pursuing

01:34:42.000 | and that person is capable of doing the job.

01:34:44.040 | - Well, do you think that was obvious to him

01:34:45.520 | that Andrew Johnson was not capable of doing the job?

01:34:47.560 | - Yes. - Okay.

01:34:49.200 | - It's in the, I mean, everyone recognized that,

01:34:52.040 | but it made sense.

01:34:52.980 | I mean, what Lincoln has to be praised for

01:34:55.240 | is in the midst of a war,

01:34:57.520 | when at that point he was not doing well,

01:34:59.120 | the war was not going well, he ran for re-election.

01:35:01.960 | He didn't try to postpone the election.

01:35:03.640 | He didn't try to do anything. - Yeah.

01:35:05.240 | - And so he needed all the help he could get when running.

01:35:08.120 | And so he wanted to have someone on there

01:35:09.760 | who looked like a unity candidate

01:35:11.000 | who could appeal to some Southerners.

01:35:13.640 | So it made sense from a political point of view,

01:35:16.880 | but it created a really big problem.

01:35:19.280 | And there were people who said he should have removed

01:35:22.760 | Johnson as soon as he was elected.

01:35:24.280 | And in retrospect, he probably should have.

01:35:26.360 | - How gangster is that to,

01:35:27.640 | during a war still run the election?

01:35:30.000 | - It's extraordinary.

01:35:30.840 | I mean, he, Lincoln believed in democratic values.

01:35:34.400 | He also believed he would win,

01:35:35.480 | but he knew it was not guaranteed.

01:35:37.400 | - Yeah. - And it's interesting

01:35:38.480 | for people who don't know this,

01:35:39.600 | the reason we have mail-in balloting in the US

01:35:41.320 | is because of that.

01:35:42.520 | So almost, what?

01:35:47.040 | I think almost a million union voters

01:35:51.240 | are away from their homes.

01:35:53.120 | And so how do they vote?

01:35:54.080 | As soldiers, as nurses, they vote by mail.

01:35:57.160 | The post office delivers their ballots.

01:35:59.120 | That's why we have mail-in balloting.

01:36:01.480 | - What about the other counterfactual question

01:36:03.160 | of what would have happened

01:36:04.760 | if Confederate States won the war?

01:36:06.480 | - The Confederate States had won the war,

01:36:08.400 | you would have seen, I think, a separate country.

01:36:11.680 | In the South, you would have seen two countries.

01:36:14.160 | And that Confederate country

01:36:15.520 | would have been a smaller country,

01:36:17.080 | but it probably would have been able to defend itself

01:36:18.960 | because it would have actually gotten much richer

01:36:20.960 | than it was.

01:36:21.800 | It was poor at the time,

01:36:22.640 | but through its cotton trade and other things,

01:36:24.440 | it would have been recognized by Great Britain,

01:36:26.120 | by France, by other societies.

01:36:27.880 | And you would have seen a Southern Republic.

01:36:31.760 | I don't think you would have seen

01:36:33.720 | that Southern Republic dominate the continent.

01:36:36.160 | The Union had the men and people and had the resources,

01:36:39.740 | but you would have seen a rival Republic

01:36:43.480 | to the United States in the South.

01:36:45.440 | - Do you think they had interest to dominate the continent,

01:36:48.320 | to take over the Union?

01:36:49.840 | - They had a foreign policy, they had a plan.

01:36:52.100 | Many have written about this.

01:36:53.100 | They had plans, many Southerners did,

01:36:54.920 | of expanding into the Caribbean,

01:36:57.400 | which was actually more feasible.

01:36:59.160 | They did not have the personnel

01:37:00.660 | to occupy so much territory going out West,

01:37:03.240 | if you think about the amount of land

01:37:04.520 | that had to be covered.

01:37:05.780 | But they had the nautical capabilities and naval power

01:37:08.960 | and the money to dominate islands in the Caribbean

01:37:13.380 | and those islands were important for their trade.

01:37:15.480 | So there were many Southerners

01:37:16.600 | who wanted to take control of Cuba,

01:37:18.360 | wanted to take control of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

01:37:22.440 | And so you probably would have seen

01:37:24.800 | Southern warfare in those areas.

01:37:27.080 | - From a counterfactual history perspective,

01:37:31.560 | can you make the case that secession

01:37:35.100 | would have been created a better world?

01:37:37.600 | Like if we're sitting today and do back to the future thing,

01:37:40.600 | a secession in this context,

01:37:42.780 | if we put aside the suffering

01:37:46.000 | and the loss of life in the war,

01:37:49.140 | that we'd be in a better world today?

01:37:51.300 | Just looking at the political climate.

01:37:53.060 | And can you also make the case that actually this outcome

01:37:56.100 | of the Union winning the war is the better one?

01:37:59.260 | - I think the Union victory is by far the better outcome,

01:38:02.460 | because I think what you would have had otherwise

01:38:04.420 | is you would have had a slave republic in the South

01:38:07.860 | that would have encouraged slavery

01:38:10.120 | in other parts of the world, would have exported slavery,

01:38:13.200 | and would have necessarily been hostile

01:38:17.060 | to many of the positive changes that occur in the Union.

01:38:20.000 | The movement toward progressive reforms,

01:38:22.280 | creating cities with health codes and public education,

01:38:25.020 | and many of those things.

01:38:25.860 | Public education really develops in the North

01:38:28.160 | as a way of training workers who are being paid

01:38:30.840 | to be better workers in a factory.

01:38:32.480 | There's a reason you don't educate slaves,

01:38:34.160 | 'cause if you educate slaves, they rebel.

01:38:36.120 | - Yeah, so don't you think there'll be a huge pressure

01:38:39.480 | from the North to abolish slavery anyway?

01:38:43.120 | - There would have, but I think the South

01:38:44.280 | could have survived without another war.

01:38:46.460 | I mean, I think the way that slavery

01:38:48.440 | would have ended in the South,

01:38:52.220 | if it didn't end with the Civil War,

01:38:53.520 | it would have been with another war.

01:38:55.520 | - I guess the deeper question is,

01:38:56.960 | is it better to work through your problems together,

01:39:00.860 | or is it better to get a divorce?

01:39:02.600 | - I think in this case, it was better to work

01:39:05.800 | through the problems,

01:39:06.640 | it's not even working through them together,

01:39:07.520 | it's better to work through the problems

01:39:08.760 | where one side has the resources to incentivize you

01:39:12.960 | to work through the problems,

01:39:14.460 | rather than leaving you on your own

01:39:16.040 | to go your own direction.

01:39:18.080 | I think the argument against the union winning

01:39:21.520 | would be the argument that would be made

01:39:22.960 | by those who believe they suffered from union power

01:39:25.680 | later on.

01:39:26.660 | So you could argue,

01:39:28.400 | if you're a historian of Native Americans,

01:39:30.500 | if you're a historian of the Philippines,

01:39:33.780 | you could argue some of the areas

01:39:35.160 | where this newly united nation coming out of the Civil War

01:39:38.880 | was able to use its power to spread its influence,

01:39:41.600 | it would have been harder for the union to do that

01:39:44.480 | if the union had to deal with a rival to the South.

01:39:47.840 | - So as a historian, the union won,

01:39:51.440 | to which degree are the people from the union,

01:39:55.000 | that is now the United States,

01:39:56.480 | the writers of the history,

01:39:58.080 | that color the perspective of who's the good guys

01:40:01.760 | and the bad guys?

01:40:02.840 | So this is such an interesting question because-

01:40:05.880 | - I like how you take every question I ask

01:40:07.800 | and make it into a better question.

01:40:09.960 | That's a deep, I deeply appreciate it.

01:40:12.120 | Unless every time I ask some ridiculous question

01:40:14.440 | and you go, "That's really interesting."

01:40:16.480 | - No, because they're really good questions,

01:40:17.880 | they're thoughtful questions.

01:40:18.800 | You know, actually the best questions

01:40:20.120 | are not the simple ones, right?

01:40:22.440 | So,

01:40:23.280 | the axiom is that the winners write history.

01:40:29.180 | And that's usually the case, right?

01:40:31.320 | Most of the history I learned about Ukraine

01:40:33.200 | when I was growing up was written by Russians.

01:40:35.440 | It was Russian history of Ukraine.

01:40:37.140 | Most of the history of Europe has been written

01:40:39.840 | by Germans and French and British citizens, right?

01:40:42.520 | I mean, so usually it's that way.

01:40:44.360 | And for the most part, our history has been written

01:40:46.520 | from a sort of Northeastern point of view.

01:40:48.800 | But it's very interesting,

01:40:49.880 | the history of the years after the civil war

01:40:52.300 | that I focus on in this book

01:40:53.920 | has largely been written by the losers.

01:40:56.320 | Because the union and its legacies,

01:40:59.400 | and I grew up in New York,

01:41:00.400 | so I'm growing up as a legacy of that, right?

01:41:02.760 | Those were individuals who wanted to write about

01:41:04.540 | what happened long after the civil war,

01:41:06.560 | when the North got rich.

01:41:08.600 | All those beautiful buildings in New York,

01:41:10.200 | all that wealth in New York, it's 1880s, '90s,

01:41:12.680 | late 19th century, it's the Gilded Age.

01:41:15.240 | And that's what Northerners wanna write about, right?

01:41:17.200 | Because there's glory there.

01:41:18.560 | The 20 years or so after the civil war,

01:41:21.360 | the years that really count, 1865 to 1880 or so,

01:41:24.620 | those years are ugly, it's messy.

01:41:28.360 | And so who wrote about them?

01:41:29.720 | Southerners wrote about them.

01:41:31.120 | And they wrote a story that was about

01:41:34.120 | Northern carpetbaggers and corrupt African-Americans.

01:41:39.120 | And this is the story that Americans learned

01:41:41.440 | until a few years ago.

01:41:43.160 | I've gone around the country talking about this book,

01:41:45.040 | and the number of people have told me

01:41:46.140 | they never learned this basic history.

01:41:48.200 | Because they grew up in Chicago,

01:41:49.760 | not because they grew up in Texas,

01:41:50.960 | 'cause they grew up in Chicago.

01:41:52.700 | And the story they were told, the civil war ended,

01:41:54.640 | oh, now let's talk about the Chicago World's Fair in 1893,

01:41:57.240 | and how Chicago is coming of age as this great city.

01:42:00.200 | We don't like to write history in our country

01:42:03.760 | that's not about glory.

01:42:05.520 | I'm all for the greatness of our country,

01:42:07.480 | but you become great by studying your failures

01:42:10.040 | as well as your successes.

01:42:11.920 | And that's a real problem we have.

01:42:13.560 | - And I would love to see a kind of humility

01:42:16.120 | from a history perspective.

01:42:18.160 | One of the things that always surprised me

01:42:19.640 | just coming from the Soviet Union to the United States,

01:42:23.240 | as you've, I think, spoken about,

01:42:25.780 | is the perspective on World War II,

01:42:28.040 | and who was the critical component of winning the war.

01:42:30.520 | Obviously, in the Soviet Union,

01:42:32.280 | it's a great patriotic war,

01:42:34.680 | the Soviet Union are the ones that suffered,

01:42:38.400 | and often actually don't emphasize the suffering,

01:42:40.920 | they emphasize the glory,

01:42:42.440 | that they defeated this huge evil.

01:42:44.260 | But then you listen to the United States'

01:42:45.920 | perspective on this, and it's almost like,

01:42:48.600 | I mean, there's several ways of phrasing it,

01:42:52.360 | but basically the United States won the war,

01:42:54.440 | without the United States it would be impossible

01:42:56.260 | to win the war, they were the turning point,

01:42:58.140 | they were the,

01:42:59.080 | my last, my everything, that song,

01:43:03.380 | my first, my last, my everything.

01:43:05.980 | So that, and I'm sure, I wonder what,

01:43:09.380 | growing up in, maybe after war in Britain,

01:43:14.380 | I wonder if there's history books written there

01:43:16.260 | that basically say, and they could also make

01:43:17.780 | a pretty strong case, that Britain was central

01:43:20.780 | to the turning point.

01:43:22.780 | You could really make a strong case that

01:43:25.020 | Churchill and Britain were the turning point

01:43:28.020 | of the war, they're responsible for some

01:43:30.380 | of the first failures, major failures of Hitler

01:43:32.700 | from a military strategy perspective.

01:43:34.660 | But that's interesting to look at that very recent history

01:43:38.500 | from very different perspectives.

01:43:40.180 | - And it's the same problem with the Civil War,

01:43:41.600 | we wanna tell the story of the Union winning the war,

01:43:44.020 | and then everything is good.

01:43:45.320 | - Yeah.

01:43:46.160 | - And it's not the way it worked.

01:43:48.280 | What I'm really trying to get at is,

01:43:52.700 | when you love your country, you have to study the failures.

01:43:55.740 | - Yeah.

01:43:56.580 | - Because by studying the failures,

01:43:57.740 | that's how you improve yourself,

01:43:58.940 | and that's where you see where real courage is.

01:44:01.660 | It's actually that Lincoln failed for so long

01:44:04.580 | that makes him a great president.

01:44:06.340 | He lost more battles than he won, but he learned,

01:44:09.880 | and he got it right in the end.

01:44:10.860 | Same with Ulysses Grant.

01:44:11.920 | I don't want generals, I'm just echoing Lincoln here.

01:44:14.320 | I don't want generals, I don't want leaders

01:44:15.740 | who think they're gonna get it right the first time,

01:44:17.260 | 'cause they're never gonna get it right the first time.

01:44:19.220 | You never get it right the first time

01:44:20.360 | in an AI experiment, right?

01:44:21.460 | It's those who can work through failure learn from failure.

01:44:25.100 | And we as a society have to start doing that better.

01:44:28.680 | We have to not just trumpet the successes.

01:44:31.340 | Let's talk about where we failed as Republicans,

01:44:33.960 | as Democrats, as Independents,

01:44:36.180 | and let's move forward from there.

01:44:37.640 | - In recent years have been a kind of movement

01:44:41.960 | of highlighting some of the hypocrisy,

01:44:44.660 | sort of highlighting the racism,

01:44:46.540 | the fact that many of the founding fathers

01:44:48.000 | were slave owners, that kind of thing,

01:44:50.180 | sort of highlighting from the current ethics of our world,

01:44:55.180 | showing that many of the people involved

01:44:58.140 | in the war on the East Side were evil.

01:45:00.420 | What do you think about that perspective on history?

01:45:02.700 | - I think it's super valuable.

01:45:03.940 | I think we should expose the gap

01:45:07.420 | between ideals and practice.

01:45:09.580 | But that doesn't mean we should throw away

01:45:12.580 | the great people who are also hypocrites,

01:45:14.980 | 'cause everyone I've studied is a hypocrite.

01:45:16.980 | I'm a hypocrite.

01:45:17.820 | I think I'm a pretty good father.

01:45:19.580 | Luckily, my son is an even better mother.

01:45:21.680 | But there are parts of me that, I mean,

01:45:24.700 | I often find myself telling our children

01:45:26.860 | to do things that I didn't do, right?

01:45:29.020 | But they're smart and they recognize that

01:45:30.900 | and they learn something from that.

01:45:32.420 | So let's not cover over the hypocrisy,

01:45:35.700 | but let's not throw people away for being hypocritical.

01:45:37.660 | Here's my view of Thomas Jefferson,

01:45:39.020 | which is similar to my view of Abraham Lincoln, right?

01:45:41.300 | These are incredibly insightful, thoughtful people

01:45:44.260 | who added so much to our country,

01:45:47.340 | but they also created flawed systems.

01:45:50.000 | And one of, excuse me, Jefferson's flaws

01:45:54.140 | was even though he saw all the evils of slavery,

01:45:55.900 | he was a terrible farmer and he could not imagine

01:45:58.180 | living the lifestyle he lived without slaves.

01:46:00.340 | He could never work his way out of that.

01:46:02.740 | But that doesn't make

01:46:03.580 | the Declaration of Independence less valuable.

01:46:05.620 | In fact, it makes it more valuable.

01:46:06.980 | There's more that we can learn from that.

01:46:09.180 | - And to me, on the hypocrisy side,

01:46:12.180 | many of the people that participate in cancel culture

01:46:14.380 | and these kinds of movements

01:46:16.380 | that call everything is racist and so on,

01:46:20.180 | sometimes they're highlighting properly

01:46:24.420 | the evils in our current society,

01:46:26.700 | but the hypocrisy they have is not realizing

01:46:29.740 | if they were placed in Germany in the '40s,

01:46:34.140 | if they were placed in the position of being

01:46:36.900 | a white Christian during slavery

01:46:40.540 | at the founding of this country,

01:46:42.100 | they would do the same thing.

01:46:43.680 | They would do the evils they're now criticizing.

01:46:46.760 | Most of them.

01:46:47.720 | So it takes a truly heroic human to think outside,

01:46:52.680 | to be aware of all the evils going on around you

01:46:56.920 | and take action.

01:46:58.440 | It's easy now on Twitter to call people as racist.

01:47:02.040 | What's hard is to see the racism when you're living in it

01:47:05.440 | and your wellbeing is funded by it.

01:47:07.320 | - Yep.

01:47:08.160 | I think that's right.

01:47:08.980 | I think to analyze ourselves and look honestly

01:47:11.760 | in the mirror is very hard.

01:47:13.400 | I also think I make this point in actually all of my books,

01:47:16.360 | the real, and it's an Eli Wiesel point,

01:47:20.080 | that a lot of the evil in our world is the evil of silence

01:47:23.520 | and just looking away.

01:47:25.280 | And one form of that on Twitter is just hitting like.

01:47:28.540 | It's a cheap way of pretending

01:47:32.560 | you're doing something that's important, right?

01:47:35.160 | After the civil war,

01:47:36.360 | there's all sorts of bad stuff that happens.

01:47:38.500 | I talk about it a lot.

01:47:39.960 | There always are people there who could stop it.

01:47:43.320 | Most people are not responsible for the bad activities,

01:47:45.840 | but most don't do something to stop it.

01:47:48.640 | And when I say do something, I mean really do something.

01:47:52.080 | - Yeah, really.

01:47:52.920 | And it's also to push back and push back,

01:47:55.180 | silence on Twitter is not what Eli Wiesel was talking about.

01:48:00.000 | So sometimes silence on Twitter is the courageous action

01:48:04.840 | because you wait and think and learn

01:48:07.440 | and have patience to truly understand the situation

01:48:10.120 | before you take actual action,

01:48:12.080 | not participate in the outrage crowds on Twitter,

01:48:15.320 | the hysteria of cancellation.

01:48:17.320 | What's hard to do is to speak up

01:48:19.240 | when everybody else is silent.

01:48:20.800 | That's what's hard to do.

01:48:21.760 | - Right, and to speak up against those

01:48:23.160 | who you thought were on your side.

01:48:25.320 | - Yes, exactly.

01:48:27.120 | Good luck to those on the left

01:48:28.680 | who speak up against the left.

01:48:31.120 | And the same, good luck to those on the right

01:48:32.840 | who speak up against the right.

01:48:34.360 | It's a lonely place.

01:48:37.400 | It's a painful place.

01:48:38.480 | That's why walking in the center is tough.

01:48:40.240 | You get attacked by both sides.

01:48:42.000 | It's a wonderful, wonderful journey.

01:48:45.000 | - And you know what's interesting to me

01:48:47.800 | and what I learned writing this book,

01:48:49.040 | every book is a journey.

01:48:50.040 | What I learned in the laboratory of this book, right,

01:48:53.880 | was a lot of those figures who do stand up,

01:48:57.120 | even in their own lifetime,

01:49:00.080 | they don't get the accolades they deserve,

01:49:01.840 | but they make a difference.

01:49:03.080 | And that's maybe not enough comfort

01:49:05.960 | because you wanna see benefits in your own lifetime,

01:49:08.240 | but I think it really matters.

01:49:09.320 | And many of the figures I talk about

01:49:10.600 | were not even well-known in their time.

01:49:12.600 | So you can make a difference.

01:49:14.600 | You do impart something small in the universe

01:49:17.820 | that can grow into something better,

01:49:19.400 | and we shouldn't forget that.

01:49:20.760 | - Yeah, that's why I admire "Boxer the Horse."

01:49:22.800 | I will work harder even if he gets sent to the slaughter

01:49:25.780 | by the evil pigs.

01:49:27.720 | - You're on Orwell today.

01:49:28.840 | I love that. - I'm on recently.

01:49:30.720 | I mean, "Animal Farm" is one of my favorite books.

01:49:34.560 | I've been recently, I just am rereading "1984" now.

01:49:38.320 | It's been politicized, that book in general.

01:49:40.680 | But to me, it's a love story.

01:49:41.960 | - It is a love story.

01:49:42.800 | - That there's, like, love is the,

01:49:45.960 | it's a story of an oppressive government,

01:49:49.160 | a surveillance state, and the nature of truth

01:49:51.680 | being manipulated by wartime, da, da, da, da, da, so on.

01:49:54.640 | But the beacon of hope in the human heart

01:49:59.080 | that pulls you out, that wakes you up

01:50:01.480 | in a world like that is a love of another human being.

01:50:04.920 | - It's transcendence, I totally agree.

01:50:06.920 | My understanding, you would know better than I would,

01:50:08.840 | is that it's now a best-selling book in Russia again.

01:50:11.280 | - "1984"?

01:50:12.120 | - Yeah, it's actually being downloaded more.

01:50:13.400 | There was a piece on NPR, I heard about this, actually.

01:50:15.840 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:50:17.240 | Well, I hope it's because they're looking for love.

01:50:19.280 | - That's what I was just gonna say.

01:50:20.720 | Hopefully not in all the wrong places.

01:50:23.320 | - Hey, there's no such thing as the wrong places.

01:50:25.880 | But that's my opinion.

01:50:27.520 | I'm the one that showed up naked and drunk

01:50:29.080 | to your classroom.

01:50:30.440 | - I'm still surprised that was you.

01:50:31.720 | (laughing)

01:50:32.920 | - I was wearing a wig, I'm sorry.

01:50:35.240 | Quick pause.

01:50:36.120 | Can I take a breath?

01:50:36.960 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:50:37.800 | (laughing)

01:50:39.920 | - And we're back.

01:50:41.940 | John Willock Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

01:50:45.440 | In his diary, as you write in your book,

01:50:47.400 | he wrote about Lincoln,

01:50:49.200 | "Our country owed all her troubles to him,

01:50:52.520 | "and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.

01:50:56.400 | "The country is not what it was."

01:50:58.920 | What was the idea of the country

01:51:00.400 | that John Willock Booth believed in?

01:51:02.920 | You talked about this country

01:51:04.080 | that just constantly being repeated in his writing.

01:51:06.960 | - For John Willock Booth and many other people

01:51:10.000 | who are close to the southern part of the country

01:51:11.920 | in the Confederacy,

01:51:13.480 | they believe the country should be a democracy

01:51:15.680 | for white people, a bounded democracy.

01:51:19.120 | And Booth was horrified,

01:51:21.760 | and we have to empathize with it, not sympathize,

01:51:23.560 | but recognize how strange it seemed to him

01:51:26.320 | that all of a sudden those who were slaves

01:51:28.120 | were now soldiers with guns.

01:51:30.600 | And he was particularly offended

01:51:32.720 | when he saw in Washington, D.C.,

01:51:35.200 | a group of African-American Union soldiers

01:51:37.480 | holding southern prisoners of war.

01:51:40.240 | And the world was turned upside down for him.

01:51:42.540 | Democracy for him, he believed in democracy,

01:51:44.520 | but democracy for white people.

01:51:46.520 | And that justified mistreating black people for him.

01:51:50.940 | - So country means white people.

01:51:57.880 | - Yeah, and I don't think it's that different from--

01:52:01.320 | - And white Christians.

01:52:02.360 | - White Christians, yes.

01:52:04.200 | Yeah, he was not arguing for Jewish emancipation either.

01:52:07.160 | I don't think that's really different

01:52:10.520 | from what we've seen in the 20th century

01:52:12.400 | for people who justify ethnic cleansing or genocide.

01:52:14.960 | Let's go to the extreme example of Hitler again

01:52:19.440 | that we've talked about before.

01:52:21.760 | His view was actually,

01:52:23.280 | he claimed he wanted a democracy for Germany.

01:52:26.880 | He wanted a democracy of the right Germans,

01:52:29.320 | and he wanted those who he saw infecting

01:52:31.720 | and mongrelizing the society out.

01:52:33.840 | That's in essence what John Wilkes Booth thought.

01:52:37.080 | - The scary thing is those kinds of ideas,

01:52:39.440 | you can put a pretty face on them.

01:52:41.480 | Like you don't have to use,

01:52:43.040 | and maybe Hitler didn't until the war started,

01:52:46.400 | or even parts of the war make it so clear

01:52:50.080 | that you just want the certain kind of Germans

01:52:52.960 | that have made Germany a great nation

01:52:55.680 | to be the people that are running that nation,

01:52:57.680 | and other people who are not truly interested in,

01:53:01.060 | don't hold the interest of the country at heart.

01:53:03.080 | They should go elsewhere where they can flourish also,

01:53:05.840 | it's wonderful, but like the good Germans,

01:53:09.300 | they've built all these amazing things,

01:53:10.840 | we should give them the power and not to the others,

01:53:13.480 | and you can put a bunch of flowery language around that.

01:53:16.320 | - Precisely, it's the argument that's made all the time

01:53:18.760 | today against immigration,

01:53:20.080 | that the wrong people are coming into our society.

01:53:23.040 | It's ironic 'cause it's often made

01:53:25.200 | by those who themselves are immigrants.

01:53:27.240 | History teaches us that those who have arrived

01:53:29.080 | as immigrants are no more likely to like those who come,

01:53:31.700 | in fact they might be against the next group

01:53:33.680 | for just this reason,

01:53:34.600 | 'cause they think they're the right group.

01:53:36.060 | - Can you describe to me if it's useful at all

01:53:39.780 | to know the difference,

01:53:41.720 | if there's a difference between white nationalism,

01:53:44.280 | white supremacism, and Christian nationalism?

01:53:48.620 | Is there an intersection between them?

01:53:51.080 | I've heard these terms used, oh, separatism too, right?

01:53:57.020 | Is there an interesting distinction that permeated

01:53:59.100 | that history that still lasts today?

01:54:01.620 | - I think there's a long history in the United States

01:54:05.960 | of a belief in white supremacy,

01:54:08.340 | and it's not unique to the United States,

01:54:09.660 | we actually inherit this from Europe.

01:54:11.840 | And white supremacy is the belief that for whatever reason,

01:54:17.740 | those with lighter colored skin,

01:54:21.100 | usually of Northern European extraction,

01:54:23.820 | are superior, have more rights,

01:54:26.140 | are the better people to make decisions,

01:54:28.100 | all sorts of things.

01:54:28.940 | It's an aesthetic judgment

01:54:30.460 | as much as it is a political judgment,

01:54:32.500 | and that gets embedded in our society, right?

01:54:34.540 | We inherit that.

01:54:35.600 | Christian nationalism is the presumption

01:54:40.020 | that it's not just your race,

01:54:42.060 | but now it's also your Christian belief.

01:54:44.960 | And that is actually relatively new.

01:54:47.340 | There are little pieces of that in our history.

01:54:49.780 | But many of those who are white supremacists,

01:54:53.260 | even those in the Confederacy,

01:54:54.620 | are not Christian nationalists,

01:54:56.820 | because they don't agree on which kind of Christianity,

01:55:00.040 | and they don't view those

01:55:01.340 | who are from a different denomination of Christianity

01:55:03.780 | as being good Christians.

01:55:05.280 | There isn't this big tent Christianity in the 19th century.

01:55:08.380 | This notion that there is one Christian nation

01:55:12.580 | and that we're all part of it,

01:55:14.260 | that's actually really a 20th century creation.

01:55:17.480 | It precedes the evangelical movement,

01:55:19.480 | but it's been made even more popular.

01:55:21.980 | But it would not make sense to a Confederate

01:55:24.160 | to say we're a white Christian nation.

01:55:26.340 | It would make sense to say we're a white Protestant nation,

01:55:30.160 | 'cause they didn't consider Catholics good Christians,

01:55:32.180 | or a white Presbyterian nation.

01:55:34.120 | And so that's something new,

01:55:38.060 | and I think what's particularly dangerous

01:55:40.300 | about this notion of Christian nationalism

01:55:43.180 | is it creates this false history,

01:55:45.860 | saying we've always been together as Christians,

01:55:47.980 | that's always how we've defined ourselves,

01:55:50.240 | and that's not accurate.

01:55:51.500 | - Well, one interesting thing,

01:55:52.920 | so I recently talked to a left-leaning

01:55:57.400 | or maybe a far-left political streamer named Destiny,

01:56:01.100 | Stephen Bunnell, I don't know if you're familiar with him.

01:56:04.180 | He does live streaming debates with people.

01:56:06.980 | It's very passionate.

01:56:08.020 | - I've heard of this, my students have told me.

01:56:09.380 | I have not actually seen it.

01:56:10.820 | My students are always up on the most hip things.

01:56:12.860 | - Yes, that is, no, no, the funny thing about him,

01:56:15.540 | he's already considered like a boomer.

01:56:17.360 | He's already the old streamer,

01:56:18.740 | 'cause he's been doing it for 10 years.

01:56:20.100 | He's not the cool kid anymore.

01:56:21.740 | Anyway, he goes into some difficult political territory,

01:56:25.400 | and he actually had a mini conversation with Nick Fuentes,

01:56:28.400 | and he says, I mean, some of it is humor,

01:56:32.720 | but some of it is pretty dark,

01:56:34.540 | hard-hitting sort of criticism is,

01:56:37.940 | he says that anyone who claims

01:56:39.320 | to be a Christian nationalist asks them

01:56:42.280 | if they would rather have a million people

01:56:46.960 | who are atheists from Sweden, who are white, come,

01:56:50.600 | or if you would rather have a million people from Africa

01:56:55.600 | who are Christian, come.

01:56:57.780 | And the truth comes out, that this is a very surface level,

01:57:01.220 | this kind of idea of Christian nationalism

01:57:03.100 | is still, underneath it is a deep racism,

01:57:06.300 | like hatred towards black people.

01:57:08.740 | - I think that's, I'm sure that's right.

01:57:10.420 | I'm sure that's right.

01:57:11.260 | - That's the sense I got into it,

01:57:12.380 | does not seem to have deep kind of,

01:57:15.160 | yeah, like historical context to it.

01:57:17.640 | It's just a different, a rebranding of the old kind of hate.

01:57:21.080 | - What I think is important though,

01:57:22.920 | in drawing this distinction,

01:57:24.480 | and why it really matters beyond the history of it,

01:57:27.200 | is someone like Lincoln quotes scripture all the time.

01:57:31.960 | The second inaugural is filled,

01:57:33.800 | second inaugural address, Gettysburg Address,

01:57:35.920 | filled with biblical references,

01:57:38.240 | but he does it in a way that's not Christian nationalist,

01:57:41.760 | because he's using the text to bring people together.

01:57:45.160 | He's using it as a fable of humanity.

01:57:48.020 | And you could say, he's not open to Islamic thinking,

01:57:51.100 | he's ignorant of the Islamic world.

01:57:53.180 | But as a Jew, I'm a Jew, reading and studying Lincoln,

01:57:57.060 | I know he's a Christian,

01:57:58.360 | but I don't feel excluded from his rhetoric.

01:58:01.100 | Because I share that Bible, we have different views,

01:58:04.740 | but I don't feel excluded.

01:58:06.300 | It actually brings people together.

01:58:07.900 | The Christian nationalist approach that we've seen

01:58:10.100 | in the 20th century, and especially in recent decades,

01:58:12.900 | is intended to divide people.

01:58:15.360 | It excludes Jews.

01:58:17.120 | It excludes Christians who don't interpret Christianity

01:58:20.480 | their way.

01:58:21.620 | And to say that's what we've always done

01:58:23.560 | is an entire distortion of our country,

01:58:26.280 | and it also hides why this is so dangerous.

01:58:29.120 | Insofar as Christianity matters to our country,

01:58:31.240 | it should be in the way Lincoln uses it,

01:58:32.960 | as a set of common texts that many of us resonate with,

01:58:36.600 | knowing that we have different rituals

01:58:38.180 | and different understandings,

01:58:39.560 | not as a way to exclude people,

01:58:41.840 | and not as a cover for racism, which is what it is.

01:58:44.440 | - It's kind of interesting that you could talk about,

01:58:46.200 | I've talked to a lot of people,

01:58:47.840 | Muslim folks, Jewish folks, Christian folks,

01:58:50.840 | there's a way to talk about religion that's inclusive,

01:58:52.800 | and then that's exclusive.

01:58:54.440 | I've been listening to a lot of these

01:58:58.600 | interfaith conversations, and they're awesome.

01:59:01.920 | They celebrate the beauty of each religion,

01:59:03.840 | they banter and argue with each other

01:59:05.400 | about details and so on, but it feels like love.

01:59:09.160 | It feels like anybody from any of those religions

01:59:11.640 | would feel welcome at that party.

01:59:14.720 | - And I think that's possible.

01:59:16.220 | - Can you tell me about the disputed election of 1876?

01:59:20.520 | - So this is fascinating.

01:59:21.880 | The 1876 election is one of many elections,

01:59:24.560 | we've had some recently, that are intensely controversial.

01:59:28.480 | And they're controversial because they're so close.

01:59:31.320 | They're controversial 'cause it's not always clear

01:59:33.000 | who's won.

01:59:34.440 | In 1876, Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York,

01:59:38.640 | who's running as a Democratic candidate,

01:59:41.520 | wins more votes across the country.

01:59:44.080 | So everyone knows he becomes president, right?

01:59:46.320 | Wrong, he doesn't become president,

01:59:47.520 | because in three states, South Carolina,

01:59:50.560 | Louisiana, and Florida, it's very, very close.

01:59:54.520 | And even though Tilden has more total votes,

01:59:57.040 | if he loses those states, the electors in those states,

02:00:00.520 | all of which go to the winner of the state,

02:00:02.720 | would actually make Rutherford B. Hayes,

02:00:04.640 | the Republican candidate president.

02:00:06.560 | In all three of those states,

02:00:07.560 | you also have Republican governors who have just lost,

02:00:10.240 | but are still the people who have to certify the election.

02:00:13.600 | All three states say that Hayes won,

02:00:16.080 | even though it's very close and disputed.

02:00:18.120 | So Hayes has one more electoral vote.

02:00:20.200 | Of course, the Democrats don't accept that.

02:00:23.000 | And so we go into February,

02:00:25.680 | the inauguration was done in March, not in January.

02:00:27.760 | We go from November to February,

02:00:29.800 | without clear agreement on who the president is.

02:00:32.480 | In the end, there's an agreement that they come to a deal,

02:00:35.720 | which is where the Democrats will accept Hayes as president

02:00:38.600 | in return for Hayes doing all the things

02:00:40.400 | the Democrats want in the South.

02:00:42.760 | And so in essence, you have a deal made

02:00:45.960 | that one side will get all it wants

02:00:49.680 | while allowing the other side to have the figurehead.

02:00:52.720 | And so in a certain way,

02:00:54.280 | this marks a moment when the Confederacy wins.

02:00:58.160 | For example, Hayes has to agree

02:00:59.920 | to pull out all federal force from the South,

02:01:02.760 | which means there's no protection

02:01:04.200 | for fair elections going forward.

02:01:06.120 | And you'll see in states like Mississippi,

02:01:08.800 | the number of African-American voters will decline

02:01:12.200 | and not recover again until the late 20th century.

02:01:15.080 | So that's what that election does.

02:01:17.320 | And from 1876 until 1896,

02:01:19.440 | we have a series of elections that are very close.

02:01:21.200 | It happens also in 1888

02:01:25.000 | that the person with the most popular vote loses,

02:01:27.960 | that's Grover Cleveland, who loses to Benjamin Harrison.

02:01:30.800 | And again, we'll have the same issue

02:01:33.960 | where there's a dispute.

02:01:34.960 | And so what that election shows us, 1876, 1888,

02:01:39.520 | is that our election system

02:01:40.760 | and the problem of having an electoral college

02:01:42.400 | really complicates things.

02:01:43.520 | It makes it harder for us to come to any kind of consensus,

02:01:46.560 | any kind of agreement on who's won an election.

02:01:49.280 | Super important for today

02:01:50.960 | because most of the 20th century,

02:01:52.800 | we don't have close elections, so it doesn't matter.

02:01:55.000 | When we come to a world today

02:01:56.320 | where our elections are very close,

02:01:57.600 | our system is not well-designed to deal with those issues.

02:02:01.360 | - Do you draw any parallels with our time

02:02:04.480 | and what are some key differences?

02:02:06.080 | There's been contested elections,

02:02:08.280 | Florida, Florida, Florida, with Al Gore,

02:02:11.840 | and there's been just contested election

02:02:13.920 | after contested election.

02:02:15.400 | And of course, most famously recently

02:02:17.400 | with the contested election that led to January 6th.

02:02:22.640 | - So I think a couple of parallels

02:02:25.240 | and a couple of differences.

02:02:26.200 | One parallel is that when you have close elections,

02:02:29.760 | the losing side is never happy.

02:02:31.960 | It's a myth that when you have a close election,

02:02:34.840 | the other side just accepts it and it's not,

02:02:37.080 | that doesn't happen.

02:02:38.320 | And we need to be attentive to that and ready for that.

02:02:40.320 | January 6th actually should surprise us,

02:02:43.080 | not because it happened,

02:02:44.560 | but because it hadn't happened before.

02:02:46.460 | People who lose a close election are never happy

02:02:49.800 | and they always think that something has been done.

02:02:51.760 | That's one parallel.

02:02:52.960 | Second parallel is elections are violent.

02:02:55.840 | We have this myth that our elections are peaceful.

02:02:58.440 | No, there's always violence involved in one way

02:03:00.280 | or another, violence in either trying to prevent people

02:03:02.680 | from voting or violence in preventing people

02:03:04.880 | from preventing people from voting, right?

02:03:07.720 | Elections are not peaceful walks in the park.

02:03:11.200 | And that's why most countries have a centralized system

02:03:15.080 | to manage elections and provide protection for people.

02:03:18.240 | We need to think about that.

02:03:19.400 | A lot of people don't vote because they're afraid.

02:03:22.560 | They don't wanna take the time,

02:03:23.480 | but they're also afraid that they're gonna anger someone

02:03:25.440 | or that they're gonna be seen as politicizing an issue.

02:03:28.840 | Differences, in 1876, there was fraud in the election.

02:03:32.260 | There were people who voted two, three times.

02:03:34.960 | One of the things the Ku Klux Klan did

02:03:37.040 | is it prevented black people from voting

02:03:39.200 | and that it helped white people go to multiple voting booths.

02:03:42.680 | And this was quite common.

02:03:43.920 | In the 1880s, if you went to vote,

02:03:46.460 | here's how it would happen in a place like Chicago

02:03:48.560 | and New York, the union boss from your factory

02:03:51.800 | would come and get you at the factory,

02:03:54.040 | give you lunch, get you drunk,

02:03:56.200 | and then drive you from one voting booth to another

02:03:58.480 | and give you a ballot that you would bring in

02:04:00.280 | and just, and he would watch you deposit that ballot.

02:04:03.320 | - Sounds pretty nice, not gonna lie.

02:04:05.720 | I'd take that ride.

02:04:06.680 | - So that's a difference.

02:04:08.120 | That is not how our elections work now.

02:04:10.060 | One of our great accomplishments has been to eliminate

02:04:12.960 | virtually all the fraud in our elections.

02:04:14.840 | How have we done that?

02:04:16.440 | By creating safeguards.

02:04:17.780 | It is very difficult.

02:04:20.720 | All the evidence we have is that the minimal fraud

02:04:23.360 | that's occurred in elections are onesies and twosies,

02:04:26.080 | and it's never in the last 20 years had any big difference

02:04:29.160 | in the outcome of elections.

02:04:30.160 | So that's a big difference.

02:04:32.200 | And then another big difference I think is that

02:04:34.600 | in that time, the Democrats and Republicans

02:04:38.200 | are on the opposite sides of where they are now,

02:04:39.880 | and that changes everything.

02:04:41.560 | So the Democrats then are the party of the Confederacy.

02:04:44.540 | The Democrats are the party of exclusion.

02:04:46.340 | The Republicans are more the party of economic expansion.

02:04:50.360 | And the Republicans are the Big Ten party,

02:04:52.760 | we're reversed today.

02:04:54.200 | - Do you think because there's much less election fraud now,

02:04:58.600 | like you described, one of the lessons we wanna maybe learn

02:05:04.160 | from that is there doesn't actually have to be election

02:05:06.840 | fraud for either side to claim there's election fraud.

02:05:10.140 | It seems like it's more and more common,

02:05:12.800 | and it seems to me that in 2024 election

02:05:15.840 | in the United States, if a Republican wins,

02:05:18.980 | there would also be just maybe just as likely

02:05:23.980 | as if a Democrat wins, that there'll be nuanced claims

02:05:30.240 | of election fraud, because it's become

02:05:36.680 | more and more normalized.

02:05:37.720 | - I think what this history shows is that our election

02:05:41.000 | system makes it easy for people to claim fraud

02:05:43.840 | because it's so unnecessarily complex.

02:05:46.840 | First of all, we don't have a system

02:05:48.720 | where the person who gets the most votes

02:05:49.920 | is necessarily the winner.

02:05:51.340 | So that already creates one problem.

02:05:53.120 | Second problem is everything I talk about this in the book

02:05:55.900 | is controlled at the county level.

02:05:58.400 | So what happens with Hayes and Tilden in 1876

02:06:01.620 | is you have one county official who says

02:06:03.280 | they think one person won, another county official

02:06:05.200 | thinks says the other person won.

02:06:06.860 | There's no centralized system.

02:06:09.320 | It would be as if we allowed every airport

02:06:11.660 | to control safety and airplanes,

02:06:13.220 | our airplanes would not be safe.

02:06:14.400 | Our airplanes are safe 'cause the FAA

02:06:15.840 | and the National Transportation Safety Board

02:06:17.700 | have strict universal guidelines

02:06:20.120 | for what makes for a safe plane.

02:06:21.340 | And therefore our planes generally

02:06:22.500 | don't fall out of the sky.

02:06:24.040 | Our system is very complex.

02:06:26.560 | It has complex rules and has too many people

02:06:28.560 | who have authority in too many different places.

02:06:31.160 | Complexity makes it easier for someone to make an argument

02:06:34.360 | that the wrong thing has been done.

02:06:36.040 | We should simplify the system.

02:06:37.460 | In Brazil, they had a very close election

02:06:40.320 | and it's very hard for Bolsonaro who lost

02:06:43.320 | that close election to claim there was fraud

02:06:45.500 | because there's a central authority run by the judiciary

02:06:47.880 | that counted the votes and it's just simple.

02:06:50.080 | It's not about which states,

02:06:51.800 | it's not about who the county officials were.

02:06:53.600 | - Did he claim or no?

02:06:55.520 | - He has not acknowledged that he lost.

02:06:57.680 | - Right, so to push back on your statement,

02:07:01.320 | I'm undefeated monopoly and risk

02:07:03.000 | because anytime I lose, I walk away

02:07:05.520 | claiming there was fraud and cheating involved.

02:07:09.480 | And I refuse to believe otherwise.

02:07:10.900 | I just think that accusations of fraud is a narrative

02:07:15.900 | that's disjoint from the reality

02:07:17.600 | of whether there was or not fraud.

02:07:19.320 | - Yeah, yeah, I agree, but I think we make it,

02:07:20.840 | we make it a little easier for that narrative

02:07:23.080 | by having a complex, convoluted system.

02:07:25.840 | - And I wonder if there's other improvements

02:07:27.520 | that take us into the 21st century

02:07:29.200 | that allow for electronic voting.

02:07:30.840 | There's all kinds of improvements

02:07:32.200 | that it seems our system is dragging their feet on.

02:07:35.160 | Rank choice, voting, all that kind of stuff.

02:07:37.280 | - Let's make this clear.

02:07:38.640 | We claim to be the greatest 21st century democracy

02:07:41.340 | and we still vote like the 19th century.

02:07:43.260 | We're not even in the 20th century.

02:07:45.260 | Most people, when they went to vote,

02:07:47.120 | they actually like, you know, checked a box

02:07:50.420 | and put a piece of paper in a box, right?

02:07:52.820 | I mean, that's not 21st century.

02:07:54.980 | We can move millions of dollars,

02:07:57.120 | maybe billions for you, Lex, in a bank accounts

02:08:00.540 | from our keyboard. - Thank you.

02:08:02.380 | - From our keyboards.

02:08:03.340 | - Billions of rubles.

02:08:04.380 | - Billions of pennies.

02:08:06.500 | - Pennies.

02:08:07.860 | - Why can we move money safely and not vote in the same way?

02:08:11.220 | - And at the same time, so there's security there

02:08:13.500 | in the movement of money.

02:08:14.780 | And then there's the actual engagement.

02:08:16.720 | Most of us, depending on your age demographic,

02:08:20.020 | click like on Facebook or Twitter or TikTok

02:08:23.220 | tens of thousands of times a year.

02:08:26.760 | I think this kind of mechanism of constantly,

02:08:30.360 | and a like is a vote.

02:08:32.380 | So you're constantly voting, voting, voting, voting.

02:08:34.100 | We love voting.

02:08:35.060 | We love giving our opinion on that stuff.

02:08:37.420 | It just seems obvious that gamifying the system,

02:08:40.780 | which is essentially what the election is,

02:08:42.500 | making it fun to be engaged in different issues.

02:08:44.860 | And there's also be a case,

02:08:47.200 | now I don't understand these things deeply,

02:08:49.260 | but it always seemed to me that issue-based voting

02:08:51.900 | should be the future.

02:08:54.220 | It seems like too complicated to vote for singular people

02:08:57.380 | versus on ideas, which on Twitter,

02:09:00.020 | we don't necessarily vote for people, we vote for ideas.

02:09:03.340 | If you like a tweet or not, you like it and so on.

02:09:06.820 | That too seems to be like a possibility for improvement.

02:09:09.340 | - Well, there's certainly a way to improve polling.

02:09:11.180 | We could measure public opinion better.

02:09:12.660 | We still poll as if we're in the early 20th century.

02:09:15.700 | They still actually call people.

02:09:17.060 | It's amazing to me.

02:09:18.520 | I was talking to one pollster.

02:09:19.860 | They will call a hundred people and get one person,

02:09:23.120 | but they still do that.

02:09:24.340 | - They probably still call landlines, right?

02:09:26.500 | - Yeah, well, they try to get cell phones too,

02:09:28.460 | but they do call landlines.

02:09:29.980 | But one could create a system that would be far better

02:09:32.380 | in the way you're describing it seems to me, Lex,

02:09:34.620 | to actually assess what people like and don't like.

02:09:37.980 | - So your book, your work in general,

02:09:41.300 | your perspective on history is, I would say,

02:09:45.220 | at least from my perspective, non-partisan.

02:09:47.620 | - Thank you.

02:09:48.460 | - Yeah, you do exceptionally good job with that,

02:09:50.980 | despite the attacks and the criticisms.

02:09:53.120 | That said, you personally, just the way you speak,

02:09:55.820 | my judgment, and you can push back on this,

02:09:57.900 | I think you lean left in your politics

02:10:00.660 | on the political spectrum.

02:10:01.660 | Maybe you can push back on that.

02:10:03.140 | Can you make the case for either perspective

02:10:05.980 | on your own personality as a fan of yours

02:10:08.660 | that you do lean left or you don't lean left?

02:10:12.620 | - I think it depends on the kinds of issues

02:10:14.420 | we're talking about.

02:10:15.260 | I do tend to lean left on the social and cultural issues.

02:10:18.820 | So I'm a believer, a firm believer.

02:10:22.260 | I didn't believe this when I was younger.

02:10:23.700 | I've come to believe that people should choose

02:10:26.740 | their own lifestyle and that we should get out of the way.

02:10:29.240 | I'm a believer, deep believer as a father of a 20-year-old.

02:10:33.060 | Woman, that my 20-year-old daughter should have the right

02:10:35.860 | to make any choice she wants with her body.

02:10:38.700 | And if she were to get pregnant at a fraternity party

02:10:42.260 | at college, she should have the right to decide

02:10:45.680 | whether to have a child or not.

02:10:46.660 | So on those issues that would code me left of center.

02:10:50.740 | I'm actually reasonably conservative on fiscal issues.

02:10:56.500 | I don't think we should spend money we don't have.

02:10:59.620 | I'm skeptical, I've long been skeptical of cryptocurrency

02:11:03.160 | and things like that.

02:11:04.000 | I know some of your listeners will disagree with me.

02:11:05.460 | This part is part of my ignorance of cryptocurrency.

02:11:07.900 | But I'm conservative, lowercase C,

02:11:10.100 | in the way I think about fiscal issues.

02:11:11.740 | I worry about debt.

02:11:13.500 | I'm a believer that there are certain areas

02:11:16.180 | where the federal government should play more of a role.

02:11:18.820 | And there are other areas where things should be left

02:11:20.820 | to the localities.

02:11:21.860 | And so sometimes that can code me one way or another.

02:11:24.760 | But I think I sound sometimes a little more left of center

02:11:26.900 | because on the social issues, I definitely.

02:11:28.820 | - Well that, because, I mean, there's other explanations,

02:11:31.260 | not to be grilling you too hard here.

02:11:32.780 | - No, it's fair.

02:11:34.060 | - Because you're also an exceptionally respected

02:11:37.420 | and successful professor in the university system,

02:11:40.140 | where sometimes there is a lean towards the left.

02:11:44.500 | And the other aspect is, I think, your viewpoints on Trump,

02:11:47.540 | where you're a strong critic of Donald Trump.

02:11:51.700 | - Yes, yes.

02:11:52.740 | - And I guess the question I wanna ask is,

02:11:55.020 | you as a historian, does that color your perspective

02:11:58.220 | of history?

02:11:59.700 | Can you, do you ever catch yourself where maybe your

02:12:04.700 | criticism of Donald Trump might affect how you see

02:12:08.860 | the Civil War?

02:12:09.780 | Like as you were completely diving in

02:12:12.500 | and looking at the Civil War,

02:12:14.580 | are you able to put aside your sort of the current day

02:12:18.900 | political viewpoints?

02:12:20.540 | - No, I'm not.

02:12:21.380 | I think we have to be honest that none of us are objective.

02:12:24.500 | We strive to be nonpartisan.

02:12:25.980 | I really liked when you said that,

02:12:27.420 | because I think it's an aspiration.

02:12:29.660 | No one is objective.

02:12:31.580 | We all have our biases.

02:12:33.580 | Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla.

02:12:36.140 | And it's just, that's just the reality, right?

02:12:38.100 | And as far as I know, there's really hard,

02:12:40.740 | it's very hard even to biologically explain that.

02:12:43.420 | And so my view is that what a good historian,

02:12:48.260 | what a good scholar does, I don't care what the field is,

02:12:50.620 | is you're self-conscious of your biases.

02:12:54.060 | And you try to recognize them as you're doing your research.

02:12:59.060 | And you make doubly certain that where your research

02:13:02.780 | seems to reinforce your biases,

02:13:04.740 | that you actually have the evidence to make that argument.

02:13:07.940 | But I still believe even doing that,

02:13:10.180 | that someone with a slightly different perspective

02:13:12.200 | might read the same evidence in different ways.

02:13:14.580 | That's what makes history vibrant.

02:13:16.620 | So I wrote this book in part, as I say in the introduction,

02:13:20.500 | because I was self-critical watching Trump

02:13:23.340 | and the things I quite frankly find deeply dangerous

02:13:26.780 | about Donald Trump and about what happened on January 6th.

02:13:29.900 | And I found I had not thought deeply enough

02:13:32.780 | about the roots of that in our society.

02:13:35.380 | Because I don't believe Trump or any one figure

02:13:37.380 | creates these kinds of movements.

02:13:38.840 | They come out of a deeper history.

02:13:40.820 | - Just a small side tangent.

02:13:43.100 | I do believe your work is non-partisan,

02:13:46.580 | but it's also funny that there are a lot of people

02:13:50.180 | on the right that would read your work

02:13:51.580 | and say that you're partisan.

02:13:53.260 | And I think the reason that can happen sometimes,

02:13:56.160 | not strongly though, I think you do a really good job,

02:13:59.560 | is like the use of certain words also.

02:14:02.440 | I try to be cognizant of that.

02:14:05.620 | I try not to use words that trigger people's tribalism.

02:14:10.620 | It's kind of interesting.

02:14:12.580 | So you have to be also aware of that maybe

02:14:14.300 | when you're writing history, when you're writing in general.

02:14:16.580 | Is if you're interested in remaining,

02:14:18.900 | you can put on different hats.

02:14:20.820 | You can be carefree in just stating your opinion

02:14:24.080 | of criticizing Donald Trump or Joe Biden,

02:14:27.740 | or you can be non-partisan deliberately.

02:14:30.260 | And that takes skill probably

02:14:32.340 | and avoiding certain triggering words.

02:14:33.940 | - And to me, it's about choosing your battles.

02:14:36.700 | So I try to write, because I want everyone to read them.

02:14:40.580 | I actually think people on the left and right

02:14:42.700 | have a lot to learn from this history.

02:14:43.820 | So many people have said to me around the country,

02:14:45.780 | this is history I wish I had known before.

02:14:49.660 | But there are moments when I use words

02:14:51.500 | that I know are controversial,

02:14:52.460 | because I'm trying to show there's a fact base behind them.

02:14:55.460 | So white supremacy does exist.

02:14:57.820 | I've had people say, I think that's a politically correct

02:15:01.220 | term or it's a woke term.

02:15:03.420 | It can be used in the wrong ways.

02:15:05.180 | One should not go around calling everything

02:15:06.900 | one doesn't like that.

02:15:08.100 | But the Confederates were white supremacists.

02:15:11.900 | And I use that word because I think

02:15:13.900 | it's an accurate descriptor.

02:15:15.420 | And we need to recognize that that is a part of our history.

02:15:18.900 | But that does trigger some people.

02:15:20.660 | - Because that language is used to mean

02:15:23.660 | other things currently.

02:15:25.340 | So the press will take on certain terms

02:15:27.580 | like white supremacist and label everybody white supremacist.

02:15:30.580 | A lot of people that basically are on the right

02:15:33.460 | or something like that, they use this outraged language

02:15:36.860 | and that actually ruins the ability

02:15:38.520 | to use the language precisely.

02:15:40.860 | - Exactly.

02:15:41.700 | - For historical context.

02:15:42.520 | - That's exactly right.

02:15:43.360 | That's exactly right.

02:15:44.200 | - But you do have to, unfortunately, we do have to,

02:15:46.640 | no, actually people disagree.

02:15:47.780 | You might disagree with this, but I tend to try to avoid,

02:15:51.940 | like take on the responsibility of avoiding that language.

02:15:54.740 | If the press is using a certain kind of language,

02:15:57.460 | I try to avoid it.

02:15:58.620 | - Yeah, what I try to do is sometimes avoid it,

02:16:01.180 | but where I think the language is necessary.

02:16:02.740 | - Precise, yeah.

02:16:03.580 | - To be precise, but also to contextualize.

02:16:05.700 | So I don't call all Confederates white supremacists,

02:16:11.380 | but I point out where white supremacist ideas

02:16:13.860 | have influenced them.

02:16:16.800 | And I point out where certain individuals

02:16:18.480 | are doing things that resonate with that.

02:16:20.400 | But I'm against these kind of blanket labels and categories.

02:16:24.360 | - And you also have to speak about white supremacism

02:16:28.720 | in that context in a nuanced way.

02:16:31.040 | So people use white supremacists

02:16:32.400 | without thinking what that means,

02:16:33.680 | and they just use it as a slow word,

02:16:35.480 | like this evil person. - Correct.

02:16:37.500 | - But white supremacist is also just an ideology

02:16:40.160 | that a lot of people have believed throughout.

02:16:41.920 | Supremacy, whatever, white, black supremacy,

02:16:45.200 | whatever supremacy, believing that some people

02:16:48.280 | are better than others, some group is better than another.

02:16:50.720 | And there's been nations built around these kinds of ideas.

02:16:54.240 | And a lot of human history is built around those ideas.

02:16:57.080 | It's not just evil people believe in this.

02:16:59.680 | We in the United States of America

02:17:01.360 | believe this kind of ideology is not productive,

02:17:04.400 | it's unethical, but those ideas

02:17:07.680 | have been held by a lot of people.

02:17:09.280 | And not like fringe groups, but majorities of nations.

02:17:14.560 | - Right, I'd say the same about antisemitism.

02:17:17.280 | And there are many people who are not antisemites,

02:17:20.480 | but don't recognize that they're carrying around

02:17:23.360 | or promoting antisemitic ideas or antisemitic myths.

02:17:27.080 | - It's a thought that's been held by a lot of people,

02:17:29.120 | and you need to be convinced out of it.

02:17:31.080 | That requires conversation and being empathetic.

02:17:36.120 | It's not just calling somebody antisemite and you're evil,

02:17:39.100 | because if you've ever said something

02:17:41.620 | that's kind of a dog whistle against Jewish people,

02:17:44.580 | you have to be open-hearted to that.

02:17:46.340 | These are ideas that you have to contend with,

02:17:48.100 | that you have to ultimately, I think,

02:17:52.660 | heal the division behind those ideas

02:17:54.820 | by having empathetic conversations with people,

02:17:57.620 | as opposed to, again, throwing poop.

02:18:00.180 | I just like saying poop.

02:18:02.220 | All right, ooh, I got a challenge for you.

02:18:04.660 | Given that you have been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump,

02:18:11.060 | can you say one thing you like

02:18:12.980 | and one thing you don't like about Donald Trump?

02:18:16.100 | And perhaps can you do the same

02:18:17.860 | for our current president, Joe Biden?

02:18:20.460 | One thing you like and one thing you dislike.

02:18:22.380 | - So it's harder for me to do the one thing I dislike,

02:18:24.420 | 'cause there's so many things I dislike.

02:18:26.420 | But the one thing I like about Donald Trump,

02:18:31.080 | he believes that America should be a better country.

02:18:39.860 | I disagree on what he thinks it should be,

02:18:42.460 | but he's not a declinist.

02:18:44.220 | He's someone who believes the world could be made better.

02:18:46.600 | I disagree with what he's trying to do.

02:18:48.060 | I disagree with how he's trying to do it,

02:18:49.700 | but I like the fact that he thinks it can be better.

02:18:51.660 | His whole argument for himself

02:18:52.900 | is that he can make things better.

02:18:54.540 | I don't think he can,

02:18:55.780 | but I think things can be made better.

02:18:57.220 | So I like the second half of that sentence.

02:18:58.900 | When he says, "I can make things better,"

02:19:00.860 | take the I out, I like the can be better,

02:19:02.640 | because there are too many people on the left and the right

02:19:05.940 | who think that we can't make things better,

02:19:08.860 | we have to accept them as they are,

02:19:10.180 | or they're getting worse.

02:19:12.220 | I think a world without hope is horrible,

02:19:14.340 | and I think what he has offered his followers

02:19:16.780 | is a kind of hope.

02:19:17.820 | - So underneath his message is a kind of optimism

02:19:23.620 | for the future of this nation.

02:19:24.460 | - Yeah, it's a narcissistic optimism,

02:19:25.780 | but it's still an optimism, yes.

02:19:27.540 | That he's promising that if you elect him again,

02:19:32.180 | he will make things better.

02:19:34.500 | And I think people need to be told,

02:19:36.680 | and we need to believe that we can make things better.

02:19:38.620 | So that part I accept, and I reject those who say,

02:19:42.500 | "We can't make things better."

02:19:43.420 | My whole historical career is about showing

02:19:44.860 | that history gives us tools to make things better.

02:19:48.020 | So I like the idea of trying to make things better

02:19:51.700 | and giving people hope and reason to believe

02:19:54.060 | that things can be better.

02:19:55.220 | - What's the main thing you dislike about Donald Trump?

02:19:58.060 | - I think he has no concern or care for the welfare

02:20:03.060 | of anyone other than himself.

02:20:06.140 | - So assuming, on a basic human psychology perspective.

02:20:09.340 | - And I think he doesn't even care about his children.

02:20:13.860 | I think he's just, I think it's him.

02:20:16.620 | I think he's gone into a rabbit hole.

02:20:18.100 | He might not always have been this way.

02:20:19.740 | I did watch him a long time in New York City

02:20:21.400 | when I was growing up in New York,

02:20:23.420 | and I think he's been in this path.

02:20:24.880 | And I think it's an extreme,

02:20:26.300 | it's a clinical kind of narcissism.

02:20:28.300 | - So do you, when you analyze presidents

02:20:31.260 | and you've written about presidents,

02:20:32.920 | you don't just look at policies and so on,

02:20:35.020 | you look at the human being?

02:20:35.940 | - Of course you have to.

02:20:37.420 | Leadership is about human being.

02:20:38.540 | Policy matters, it's one part of the equation,

02:20:40.660 | but it's not the only part.

02:20:42.220 | - What about Joe Biden?

02:20:44.340 | What do you like and what do you dislike about him?

02:20:45.900 | - So what I like about Joe Biden is, in contrast to Trump,

02:20:49.980 | I think Joe Biden really, right now in his career,

02:20:53.140 | sees his role as the shepherd of democracy.

02:20:55.940 | He really believes that it's his role as president

02:20:58.580 | to make our democracy more stable and more vibrant.

02:21:02.660 | I think he really believes,

02:21:03.980 | I think that's why he's doing what he's doing right now.

02:21:06.580 | - And he comes from that system, the political system,

02:21:09.620 | that basically the process of democracy,

02:21:12.740 | he's worked there for many decades.

02:21:14.300 | - It's all he's done.

02:21:15.140 | - Yeah, that's all he knows,

02:21:16.740 | and he wants that to propagate for better and for worse.

02:21:19.700 | - And he's not an extreme democratic partisan at all.

02:21:21.740 | He's actually a pretty middle of the road guy

02:21:24.420 | on most issues.

02:21:25.780 | Some people don't like him for that,

02:21:27.140 | but I think he is about democracy.

02:21:30.600 | What do I dislike about Biden?

02:21:32.700 | I think he does not have the capacity right now

02:21:37.700 | to provide the language and the public discussion

02:21:42.860 | of where our country should go.

02:21:45.060 | He doesn't have a language to inspire

02:21:48.900 | and build enthusiasm for the future.

02:21:53.900 | - That would probably be one of my,

02:21:55.940 | I mean, 'cause I'm a sucker for great speeches,

02:21:58.180 | and so for me, that's definitely a thing that stands out

02:22:01.840 | for several reasons, one in a time,

02:22:04.940 | 'cause we've been facing so many challenges,

02:22:06.860 | like the pandemic.

02:22:07.900 | It just seems like, to me, it seems like a easy layup.

02:22:13.700 | There's so many troubles we're going through

02:22:17.140 | that just require a great unifying president,

02:22:19.580 | or the great, like, just if I were to speak candidly

02:22:23.740 | about kind of the speaking ability of Obama, for example,

02:22:27.700 | Obama would just destroy this right now,

02:22:30.360 | both on the war in Ukraine, on the pandemic, all of it.

02:22:34.260 | The unified, there's a hunger for unification, I believe.

02:22:37.300 | Maybe people disagree with that, 'cause they've,

02:22:41.020 | I think people have become cynical

02:22:42.380 | in that the divisions that we're experiencing

02:22:44.380 | are kind of already really baked in.

02:22:47.220 | They're really planted their feet, but I don't think so.

02:22:50.020 | I think there's a huge hunger,

02:22:51.500 | maybe a little bit of a quiet hunger for a unifier,

02:22:54.420 | for a great unifier.

02:22:55.860 | - I agree, I agree, and I think what a great speech does

02:22:58.540 | is it's like a great piece of music or poetry.

02:23:01.700 | It helps you see something in yourself

02:23:03.760 | and feel something you didn't feel before.

02:23:06.400 | It doesn't overcome all,

02:23:07.800 | I don't think that speeches are unifying,

02:23:09.920 | but I think what they are is they're mobilizing,

02:23:12.080 | and you can mobilize people to the same mission

02:23:14.960 | with different points of view.

02:23:16.460 | - Do you think Trump derangement syndrome

02:23:21.560 | is a medical condition?

02:23:23.640 | Also, is there such a thing as Biden derangement syndrome?

02:23:26.920 | - What I mean by that, it's a funny kind of question,

02:23:31.380 | but why are people so deeply outraged,

02:23:34.980 | seemingly beyond reason, at their hatred

02:23:39.140 | or support of Donald Trump, but hatred in particular?

02:23:42.280 | I've seen a lot of friends and people I respect

02:23:45.980 | like lose their mind completely.

02:23:47.740 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:23:49.140 | So I'm not sure it's a medical condition,

02:23:51.060 | or not because I'm not a medical doctor,

02:23:53.740 | so my kids say I'm the wrong kind of doctor.

02:23:56.620 | I'm a doctor, so let me take you from here.

02:23:59.160 | No, the fact that you get the doctor's sign

02:24:02.160 | after getting a PhD is a ridiculous hilarity to me.

02:24:04.860 | Hilarious ridiculous.

02:24:05.880 | - So as the wrong kind of doctor,

02:24:08.180 | I'm not gonna comment on whether it's a medical condition,

02:24:10.180 | but I do think you're onto something.

02:24:12.020 | I think there is a way in which these men

02:24:17.860 | become touchstones of anger,

02:24:22.020 | and there's all kinds of anger and anxiety that people have,

02:24:26.220 | and I've seen this in other historical periods.

02:24:28.720 | You center it on one person.

02:24:31.800 | In a way, that's John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln.

02:24:36.100 | He actually didn't have a personal beef with Lincoln.

02:24:38.660 | It was that all the things he feared

02:24:41.180 | were manifest in that, and I think that's an old story,

02:24:46.180 | and then it's made worse by social media

02:24:49.380 | and the way we're bombarded, and it's like,

02:24:52.700 | it becomes a drug.

02:24:53.780 | I mean, there are people I know who hate Trump or Biden

02:24:56.540 | so much and just watch them.

02:24:58.900 | It's not that they don't watch them.

02:24:59.740 | It's that they do watch them, right?

02:25:01.060 | And it's just sort of, and it triggers you,

02:25:02.980 | and you get hateful, and then you feel

02:25:05.700 | like you've done something by shouting out your hate

02:25:08.420 | or typing in, and so I don't know

02:25:10.940 | if it's a derangement syndrome.

02:25:11.980 | I think it's a way in which our energy gets channeled

02:25:15.780 | and expressed in totally useless ways.

02:25:18.900 | - Yeah, that's an interesting psychology,

02:25:21.140 | which reminds me, I need to explore that,

02:25:23.120 | because I've noticed that, believe it or not,

02:25:25.580 | it's easy for me to believe, but there's people

02:25:27.540 | watching this right now who really hate me,

02:25:31.260 | and they're watching because they hate me.

02:25:33.100 | They hate the way I look, the way I speak,

02:25:35.680 | the mumbling, all of that, and they're still watching,

02:25:39.280 | and I'd like to say that, as I nervously

02:25:43.980 | try to explain myself, I'd like to say

02:25:46.220 | that that's not a productive way.

02:25:47.700 | I get it.

02:25:48.540 | I understand, there's a kind of,

02:25:52.380 | 'cause I, what is it?

02:25:54.940 | Is it the same psychological effect

02:25:56.980 | when you see a car crash and you keep staring?

02:25:58.860 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It's some kind

02:25:59.700 | of thing that pulls you in. - Totally.

02:26:01.260 | - But I feel like it's that feeling,

02:26:04.020 | well, it's probably slightly different,

02:26:05.980 | but you kind of want to, you want to maybe feel something,

02:26:09.700 | and there's an anger in you already,

02:26:11.140 | frustration from day-to-day life, life is hard,

02:26:13.780 | and you just wanna channel that anger towards something,

02:26:16.220 | but I just, the internet really makes that easy

02:26:18.420 | for some reason.

02:26:19.260 | - And it makes sense of your life, that's the problem.

02:26:21.440 | For people whose lives are chaos,

02:26:23.740 | hating you and blaming you gives order to their lives.

02:26:26.900 | - Yeah, if it makes you happy, please continue.

02:26:29.260 | (laughing)

02:26:30.220 | - Well, I'm curious, it seems to bother you, though,

02:26:32.020 | doesn't it?

02:26:32.840 | - Yeah, hate of any kind, not towards me,

02:26:34.780 | just the people, 'cause I think about them,

02:26:37.180 | and I tend to think that most people

02:26:39.660 | are amazing human beings and have a capacity

02:26:41.980 | to do great things in this world,

02:26:43.580 | and so I just think that's not a productive way of being.

02:26:47.740 | Like, psychologically, for anything whatsoever,

02:26:50.700 | everybody has quirks that you can hate,

02:26:52.840 | but you just focus on the really positive stuff,

02:26:54.840 | and you celebrate that stuff, and that feels good,

02:26:56.720 | that has a momentum to it.

02:26:59.120 | I guess the hate has a momentum to it, too,

02:27:01.240 | and that's what I'm trying to highlight.

02:27:02.800 | If you follow the momentum of hate,

02:27:04.680 | that's going to maybe feel good in the short term,

02:27:07.640 | but it's not, it's gonna fuck you over

02:27:09.720 | more and more in your life,

02:27:11.160 | and you have to be cognizant of that

02:27:12.960 | as you interact with the internet.

02:27:14.000 | - I agree with everything you said,

02:27:15.160 | but I think people who do things

02:27:18.760 | that are influential and serious,

02:27:21.060 | there always are some people who hate them.

02:27:23.260 | - I suppose that, but I wanted to show the difference

02:27:25.740 | between philosophical disagreement that borders on hate

02:27:30.060 | and what's called hate watching,

02:27:33.300 | where you just, which is what I would say TDS is,

02:27:36.500 | which is you're almost enjoying

02:27:39.380 | how much you hate this person,

02:27:40.700 | and you're just sitting in their hate,

02:27:41.820 | and you forgot, you lose all reason, you lose everything,

02:27:45.020 | your capacity to think as an individual,

02:27:47.280 | to empathize with others, you lose all of that.

02:27:50.180 | You're in this muck of hate,

02:27:52.780 | and somehow it helps you make sense

02:27:56.260 | of this particular difficult moment in your life,

02:27:58.760 | but otherwise, it just,

02:28:00.740 | it seems like a shitty way to live.

02:28:02.720 | But disagreement, definitely, I like disagreement.

02:28:05.200 | - But I guess what I'm saying is,

02:28:06.460 | and I think this is your message, too, right,

02:28:08.940 | is that don't let the fact that people don't like you

02:28:12.900 | or even that some people hate you

02:28:14.200 | stop you from doing the right thing.

02:28:16.020 | Think about how you can perhaps trigger them less,

02:28:18.820 | but don't stop what you're doing.

02:28:20.180 | I see too many, and this is why I bring this up,

02:28:22.940 | too many of my students,

02:28:24.300 | too many young, very talented people

02:28:26.820 | who are afraid to take risks

02:28:29.500 | because they're afraid that someone will hate them,

02:28:31.860 | and that can't get in your way.

02:28:33.940 | - The reality is most people,

02:28:36.420 | or there will always be at least one person

02:28:38.580 | that will have your back, and that will support you,

02:28:42.900 | and you just focus on them,

02:28:44.460 | as long as you're doing the right thing,

02:28:46.220 | focus on them for the strength.

02:28:48.140 | But in general, I'm exaggerating here,

02:28:50.860 | because most of the time,

02:28:52.380 | 99% of people are supportive on the internet.

02:28:55.180 | It's just that something about the human psychology

02:28:58.380 | really stands out to you when somebody criticizes.

02:29:00.740 | - Well, it's easy on the internet.

02:29:02.220 | This is historically different from where we were before,

02:29:04.420 | and it's a society.

02:29:05.580 | It's very easy now to say hurtful things to people

02:29:08.020 | and not have to even deal with them

02:29:09.820 | looking at you in the face.

02:29:11.140 | One of the things that encourages politeness

02:29:14.180 | is the fact that we're looking at one another,

02:29:16.700 | and we are naturally programmed

02:29:19.540 | not to want the other person to react to us in certain ways,

02:29:23.980 | but when we don't see their face,

02:29:26.100 | it's very easy to say all kinds of things.

02:29:28.300 | - Let me actually comment on that point.

02:29:30.380 | There's a lot of people on the internet

02:29:31.980 | that say that I don't push back on points

02:29:36.060 | or criticize people or ask the hard questions enough.

02:29:38.820 | First of all, oftentimes I disagree with that assessment,

02:29:42.060 | but also I don't think you guys realize how hard that is

02:29:46.020 | to do when you're sitting with a person.

02:29:48.380 | I don't care about access.

02:29:49.620 | I don't care about them being famous.

02:29:51.020 | Just on a basic human level,

02:29:52.340 | it's really hard to ask a hard question

02:29:55.620 | from a place of empathy.

02:29:56.460 | - Except when I'm sitting here.

02:29:57.360 | You seem to be able to ask me hard.

02:29:58.500 | - No, this is a super fun,

02:29:59.860 | I mean, when there's brilliant people like you

02:30:01.340 | where there's nothing to push back on, that's easy,

02:30:03.980 | but there's a basic human thing that doesn't,

02:30:07.780 | I think it's almost easier to be a journalist.

02:30:09.540 | Like journalists do this well

02:30:11.020 | where they don't have empathy for the person.

02:30:13.700 | They're just asking the hard questions.

02:30:16.120 | So where were you at this time last night?

02:30:19.460 | Because that's very suspicious.

02:30:21.000 | It's in contradiction to what you said,

02:30:22.940 | and they're just doing factual stuff.

02:30:24.740 | And if you actually truly have a conversation

02:30:27.580 | with another human being you empathize, it's very difficult

02:30:30.460 | because they have a story.

02:30:32.660 | They have a vision of themselves

02:30:34.740 | that they're the good person.

02:30:36.300 | And to call somebody a liar while having empathy

02:30:40.140 | basically imply that they're a liar, that's damn, damn hard.

02:30:43.980 | So anyway, but I'm-

02:30:45.700 | - Well said, I agree.

02:30:47.380 | - Trying to figure this thing out.

02:30:49.100 | Can you make the case that the January 6th storming

02:30:51.340 | of the US Capitol is a big deal?

02:30:54.140 | And can you make the case that it is not a big deal?

02:30:57.500 | - I think the case is overwhelming that it was a big deal.

02:31:00.340 | And I opened the book with this

02:31:01.620 | before going back to the end of the Civil War

02:31:04.100 | because I think it echoes that moment.

02:31:06.500 | You had a group of people who literally tried to stop

02:31:11.500 | the peaceful transfer of power and were intending,

02:31:16.740 | and there's overwhelming evidence of this,

02:31:19.260 | if they had caught the vice president

02:31:21.580 | or the speaker of the house to do bodily harm to them

02:31:25.500 | or to kidnap them.

02:31:27.460 | So this was a coup d'etat.

02:31:29.180 | That is the definition of a coup d'etat

02:31:30.420 | when you try to capture and prevent elected officials

02:31:33.460 | from doing their job.

02:31:34.740 | That's a huge deal.

02:31:36.000 | That had happened before in our country in states.

02:31:38.980 | I talk about this in Louisiana, in Tennessee,

02:31:41.300 | in places like that after the Civil War,

02:31:43.260 | but it never happened in the Capitol.

02:31:44.660 | That's a huge deal.

02:31:45.740 | That is, if I might say, that's like third,

02:31:47.820 | what we would think of as third world behavior

02:31:50.220 | in our society.

02:31:51.060 | And no offense to those from other parts of the world.

02:31:52.980 | I'm just trying to make a point

02:31:53.980 | as how we see that as happening somewhere else, not here.

02:31:56.740 | That's a big fucking deal.

02:31:58.040 | The case that it's not a big deal,

02:32:01.620 | I guess the case to make there is that they didn't succeed.

02:32:04.760 | The case that it's not a big deal

02:32:06.140 | is not that their intentions were not bad.

02:32:08.040 | I don't see how you can defend their intentions.

02:32:11.160 | The case that it's not a big deal

02:32:13.340 | is that they're a bunch of clowns.

02:32:15.540 | And yeah, they broke in, but in the end,

02:32:19.100 | once they got in there, they didn't know what to do,

02:32:20.420 | which is true.

02:32:21.860 | And so, I think a professional coup plotter

02:32:26.100 | would say these were the amateurs

02:32:28.220 | and that they had no real chance of succeeding

02:32:30.460 | because once they got into the Capitol,

02:32:33.020 | they had no plan what to do next.

02:32:34.420 | What were they gonna do?

02:32:35.260 | You know, steal stapler from Nancy Pelosi's office.

02:32:39.220 | They didn't seem to have a plan.

02:32:40.300 | And then what ended up happening, they left the building.

02:32:43.520 | - Well, that would be the case that it's not a big deal

02:32:46.360 | because their intention was not to overthrow.

02:32:50.220 | Their intention was to protest

02:32:52.540 | because if the intention was to overthrow,

02:32:54.180 | it would be much more organized.

02:32:55.220 | - I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming

02:32:56.900 | that they intended to stop.

02:32:58.260 | They were there to stop the certification of the election.

02:33:00.860 | They were there to prevent Donald Trump

02:33:03.060 | from having to leave office.

02:33:04.660 | They just didn't have a good plan.

02:33:06.300 | This was the keystone cops.

02:33:08.700 | - So, you're saying there is some,

02:33:10.740 | like statistically some possibility

02:33:12.900 | that this would have succeeded

02:33:15.460 | at halting the basic process of democracy.

02:33:17.820 | - You could imagine a scenario where it might have

02:33:19.420 | if they had gotten lucky, sure.

02:33:20.980 | If they had caught the vice president.

02:33:23.540 | - But what could have, if they caught the vice president-

02:33:25.900 | - They couldn't go on and certify then.

02:33:27.340 | He has to be there.

02:33:28.180 | - No, but don't you think that would resolve itself

02:33:30.100 | through police action and so on?

02:33:32.100 | My question is how much is this individual hooligans

02:33:36.500 | and how much of this is a gigantic movement

02:33:39.220 | that's challenging the very fabric of our democracy?

02:33:41.620 | - Well, it's not a gigantic movement,

02:33:43.420 | but it was a small coup d'etat

02:33:45.180 | that could have actually made the transition

02:33:47.300 | much more difficult.

02:33:48.140 | Was there a scenario where Donald Trump

02:33:49.260 | stayed in office legitimately?

02:33:50.740 | No.

02:33:51.580 | But was there a scenario where they created

02:33:53.240 | a great deal of chaos that further undermined

02:33:56.020 | our democracy?

02:33:56.860 | Absolutely, yes.

02:33:57.700 | Here's how it would happen, right?

02:33:58.860 | They capture Pence, right?

02:34:00.780 | They either kidnap him and try to ransom him,

02:34:03.100 | or they, which is what they were trying to do

02:34:05.860 | with the Michigan governor, Governor Whitmer,

02:34:08.300 | or they kill him.

02:34:09.740 | And then Donald Trump says, "Okay, well,

02:34:11.460 | there's no vice president, so you can't certify."

02:34:13.980 | The Senate would choose someone else to be vice president,

02:34:16.220 | but Donald Trump says, "No, that's not legitimate."

02:34:18.060 | - Do you think it's possible that Donald Trump

02:34:19.580 | would say something like that?

02:34:20.420 | - Absolutely.

02:34:22.020 | - I disagree with you.

02:34:22.900 | - He said that morning that Pence should not certify.

02:34:26.780 | He said that morning.

02:34:27.860 | - But there's a difference between sort of Twitter rhetoric.

02:34:30.620 | - No, no, he said it at a rally.

02:34:32.100 | - Sure, rally rhetoric.

02:34:33.820 | And there is a threshold.

02:34:35.980 | It feels like a big leap.

02:34:37.460 | - He asked people around him in the Oval Office

02:34:40.340 | how he could make that happen.

02:34:41.380 | He tried to get a new person appointed attorney general

02:34:44.500 | who would do that.

02:34:45.540 | He tried to find legal justification for it.

02:34:48.340 | I think the evidence is overwhelming

02:34:51.340 | that Trump was supportive of efforts

02:34:53.740 | after the election didn't go the way he wanted

02:34:57.160 | to keep him in office.

02:34:59.060 | And whether that's legally actionable

02:35:02.420 | and whether one thinks that means he's a bad president

02:35:05.300 | or not is a matter of opinion, but facts are facts.

02:35:09.900 | - Yeah, I just wonder if it's possible

02:35:11.580 | for him to have stayed president in this kind of context.

02:35:14.500 | To me, it seems like a heated, just like you said,

02:35:16.340 | elections can even be violent.

02:35:19.020 | They're heated.

02:35:20.180 | People are very upset.

02:35:21.980 | When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016,

02:35:25.340 | I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

02:35:28.300 | The amount of anger,

02:35:30.140 | I was just, the energy I was getting from people.

02:35:35.700 | I mean, if there was any way to channel that anger,

02:35:39.860 | I think people would be in trouble.

02:35:41.220 | - But let's just-- - There's anger.

02:35:42.580 | - Yeah, I agree with that, and that is right.

02:35:44.300 | And elections are violent, as I said.

02:35:46.460 | But this is different.

02:35:47.800 | This is the person in the office of the presidency

02:35:51.940 | using the power of the presidency to try to stay in office,

02:35:56.140 | to imperil people's lives, to distort our government

02:35:59.660 | on a scale we had not seen before.

02:36:01.940 | And these are not opinions of mine.

02:36:04.060 | We have the documentary evidence.

02:36:05.900 | We have the testimony from people about this.

02:36:08.300 | We can differ over what you think

02:36:10.140 | of his presidency as a whole.

02:36:12.240 | We can differ over whether you think

02:36:13.660 | he should be held legally responsible.

02:36:15.220 | Those are matters of opinion.

02:36:16.780 | But the facts are he sat on January 6th, watched it on TV,

02:36:21.780 | did not send ever, ever.

02:36:25.500 | Did he ever send any protection for Congress?

02:36:27.860 | That is his job.

02:36:28.760 | And throughout, asked, continued to ask

02:36:32.540 | how this certification could be prevented.

02:36:36.300 | - To you, that's not incompetence, that's malevolence.

02:36:38.940 | - Absolutely.

02:36:39.780 | If I watch my children getting harmed

02:36:44.380 | and I don't do something about it, I'm watching it.

02:36:47.260 | And in fact, I take action that tries to help those

02:36:51.300 | who are doing the harm, you would not just say

02:36:53.820 | I'm an incompetent president.

02:36:54.740 | You would, a parent, you would say I was a negligent parent

02:36:56.980 | and you'd call parental support to take away my children.

02:36:59.820 | - I was troubled by the way the press covered it,

02:37:03.300 | that they politicized the crap out of that.

02:37:05.700 | And not just the press, but also Congress itself.

02:37:10.860 | It just seemed like impeachment and all of this,

02:37:13.300 | there just seemed to be a kind of circus

02:37:15.260 | that wasn't interested in democracy or non-partisanship.

02:37:21.860 | I don't, so it's very difficult for me to see the situation

02:37:26.220 | with clear eyes because it's been colored by the press.

02:37:29.660 | It's very difficult for me to know what is even true.

02:37:32.440 | - Members of Congress, including our members of Congress

02:37:35.580 | from our district and others, right?

02:37:38.060 | Their lives were threatened.

02:37:40.380 | They were traumatized.

02:37:41.700 | I have a lot of students, at least a dozen

02:37:44.840 | who are staff members, more than half are Republicans.

02:37:49.700 | Part of what traumatized them was that the president

02:37:54.020 | did not do his job to protect them.

02:37:56.140 | Yes, as a child would be traumatized,

02:37:58.540 | not only if harmed by someone,

02:38:00.980 | but if mom and dad don't do everything they can.

02:38:03.380 | One of the things that makes people feel safe

02:38:04.900 | is they know their parents,

02:38:05.900 | they know their person in authority

02:38:07.700 | can't always keep them safe,

02:38:08.740 | but they want to know the person's always trying.

02:38:10.620 | - I agree with you that there, listen,

02:38:12.260 | I'm somebody that believes in this kind of idea of family,

02:38:16.500 | especially people I work with,

02:38:17.540 | that to me is a high ideal to protect.

02:38:20.540 | But that's a little bit different.

02:38:22.380 | - It's his job.

02:38:23.660 | - Hold on a second.

02:38:24.500 | That's a little bit different than protecting democracy.

02:38:26.500 | Those are two different things.

02:38:27.800 | Protecting your employees and protecting democracy

02:38:31.300 | is an ideal.

02:38:32.380 | You could say he didn't protect either,

02:38:34.860 | but I think the criticism that he didn't protect

02:38:37.300 | the employees is one thing.

02:38:38.300 | - But the employees in this case

02:38:40.020 | are the ones carrying out democracy.

02:38:42.020 | So it's like saying the general

02:38:43.500 | who doesn't protect his soldiers

02:38:45.620 | is maybe not protecting his employees.

02:38:47.100 | He's also not protecting the war effort, right?

02:38:49.580 | It is his, the people we're talking about

02:38:51.580 | are the people who are actually doing

02:38:52.660 | the work of democracy at that moment,

02:38:53.980 | the most basic function of democracy,

02:38:55.940 | which is certifying votes.

02:38:58.180 | And their lives with, I'm telling you,

02:39:00.500 | I had students, one who works for Senator Romney,

02:39:04.260 | for example, who spent hours in a closet

02:39:08.060 | hearing people outside, looking on her phone,

02:39:11.580 | when is the president sending people to protect us

02:39:14.580 | so we can do our job?

02:39:15.860 | And she was not happy with the way the election turned out,

02:39:17.820 | but she was there to do her job

02:39:19.700 | because she believes in democracy

02:39:21.700 | to serve as the Senate in the Senate's role.

02:39:23.500 | - What should have Donald Trump done

02:39:25.460 | without turning him into a different human being?

02:39:27.420 | - He should have immediately,

02:39:28.860 | just as we were watching things get breached,

02:39:32.340 | the moment they had, that the members of the House

02:39:34.060 | and the Senate had to evacuate their respective chambers,

02:39:37.820 | he should have immediately gone on TV and Twitter

02:39:40.900 | and every space he could and tell his supporters to leave

02:39:45.220 | and say what he never said.

02:39:47.340 | This is un-American what you're doing.

02:39:49.220 | This is unacceptable.

02:39:50.260 | Never use those words.

02:39:51.100 | This is un-American, this is unacceptable.

02:39:52.700 | I'm completely against anyone storming the Capitol like this.

02:39:56.420 | Go home now, please.

02:39:57.780 | - Or you can use his own language, but tell him to leave.

02:39:59.940 | - Yeah, and immediately, as soon as,

02:40:01.580 | we know he was watching for hours

02:40:03.860 | and we have testimony from his own daughter, from Ivanka,

02:40:06.700 | saying she tried time and again

02:40:08.340 | to get him to say something earlier on, and he didn't.

02:40:10.820 | He watched it.

02:40:12.540 | He can still criticize all the politicians.

02:40:15.740 | He can criticize everyone he wants,

02:40:16.980 | but he should have told him to leave.

02:40:17.980 | - All he has to do in that moment is basic,

02:40:20.820 | protecting democracy, protecting the Capitol, leave.

02:40:24.060 | Tell them to leave and do everything he can

02:40:25.740 | to find any kind of force he can give

02:40:27.140 | to go protect the Capitol.

02:40:28.780 | - I wonder how difficult it is

02:40:31.700 | to lose a presidential election.

02:40:33.740 | - It's happened so many times.

02:40:35.980 | We know.

02:40:36.820 | - I understand that, but it's,

02:40:37.900 | especially when like, what is it?

02:40:41.420 | You know, 80 million people vote for you,

02:40:44.060 | or like some, like millions and millions and millions

02:40:46.700 | of people vote for you.

02:40:47.540 | It's crazy.

02:40:48.740 | It's crazy.

02:40:49.580 | This democracy thing is crazy.

02:40:50.900 | - George H.W. Bush won a war in the Middle East, right?

02:40:55.380 | He had 90% approval rating,

02:40:56.980 | and then a year later lost the election

02:40:58.940 | to someone, Bill Clinton, he thought,

02:41:00.940 | had none of the experience he had.

02:41:02.540 | Someone didn't have,

02:41:03.380 | he believed didn't have the right moral character.

02:41:06.580 | And Bush did everything he could

02:41:08.860 | to help the next president get started well,

02:41:10.620 | and they became good friends.

02:41:12.700 | George W. Bush, he didn't love Obama.

02:41:16.100 | That's considered one of the smoothest transitions.

02:41:18.980 | George W. Bush ordered every single person

02:41:21.980 | in his administration to do everything they could

02:41:24.820 | to help the new admin.

02:41:25.820 | That's what a leader does.

02:41:27.540 | - Yeah, humility is one of the things I admire in leaders.

02:41:30.540 | Well, that felt heated.

02:41:34.260 | Speaking of which, can you just linger on,

02:41:38.620 | how do you think we can heal the divide in this country?

02:41:41.260 | Do you think it's possible?

02:41:42.100 | There feels to be a strong division.

02:41:44.180 | - I think we can heal the divide.

02:41:45.380 | I think, as you said,

02:41:47.540 | there's so many opportunities with new technology

02:41:49.420 | to bring people together,

02:41:50.740 | just as we're using it to tear them apart.

02:41:52.840 | I have the best job in the world

02:41:56.140 | because I get to teach so many students.

02:41:59.180 | I'll have 300 in my class in the spring,

02:42:01.700 | in my US history class.

02:42:03.580 | And what I've found with my students

02:42:05.060 | is they're mostly not Democrats or Republicans.

02:42:08.180 | They mostly care about the same things.

02:42:09.780 | Every one of my students seems to care about climate change.

02:42:12.900 | - Oh, I thought you were gonna say TikTok, but okay.

02:42:14.580 | - Yeah, I would take that.

02:42:15.420 | - Second to that, climate change.

02:42:17.980 | - You know, and I think they,

02:42:19.760 | I think they offer a new future for us.

02:42:24.780 | And here's what I'll say as a historian.

02:42:26.460 | We go through cycles of division

02:42:28.460 | and cycles of less division, less partisanship.

02:42:31.660 | One moment when it seems people agree too much

02:42:34.140 | on the mainstream encourages people to go to the extremes.

02:42:36.980 | When people see the extremes,

02:42:38.300 | they wanna come back to the middle.

02:42:40.220 | And that is where my students are.

02:42:41.660 | Most of my students want lower inflation.

02:42:45.740 | They agree with Republicans on that,

02:42:47.340 | but they want more to be done about climate change.

02:42:49.660 | They're in the middle on these issues.

02:42:51.060 | And I think giving them more opportunity.

02:42:53.980 | So what's the best way to heal our divisions, honestly?

02:42:57.820 | Get the old men out and the young women and men in.

02:43:01.140 | - Because they ultimately don't have that same division

02:43:03.260 | in their like deeply baked in.

02:43:05.100 | Not only that, they find it disgusting

02:43:08.060 | in the way you and I do.

02:43:09.340 | - Yeah, that's true.

02:43:11.020 | What's the right way to have conversations?

02:43:13.460 | I mean, just to stay on that

02:43:15.740 | with people on the left and the right.

02:43:17.640 | Yeah, I mean, I don't know how often you practice this.

02:43:21.260 | You care about politics.

02:43:22.180 | How often do you talk to people who voted for Trump

02:43:25.460 | or who are Republicans?

02:43:27.300 | - I try, but it's hard.

02:43:28.860 | 75% of people I talk to are not those people.

02:43:32.140 | - Do you have people who are Trump supporters

02:43:33.900 | in your extended family?

02:43:35.180 | Thanksgiving?

02:43:38.420 | - No, I don't in my extended family.

02:43:39.900 | - Are they no longer?

02:43:41.360 | (laughing)

02:43:42.540 | - No longer in my family.

02:43:43.700 | (laughing)

02:43:45.740 | - It's a fashion.

02:43:47.420 | I have taken them out of the photograph.

02:43:48.900 | - They do not exist.

02:43:49.740 | You just erase, yeah.

02:43:50.860 | - I do, but I know I have friends who fall into that,

02:43:54.900 | but it's still a minority of my friend group.

02:43:57.020 | So I wanna be clear that I'm not as good at this as I should.

02:44:00.660 | But I think we do have to reach out.

02:44:02.220 | But I also, I'm less interested, honestly,

02:44:05.860 | in refighting old battles with old dogs.

02:44:10.860 | I'm more interested in finding ways

02:44:14.020 | to get a new crop of people educated and involved

02:44:18.860 | and engaged without imparting the same partisanship on them.

02:44:23.860 | So I will support, and this I have to,

02:44:28.220 | I will support and encourage,

02:44:29.660 | especially any student of mine,

02:44:31.300 | but any young person who is smart, has good ideas,

02:44:34.700 | I don't care whether,

02:44:35.540 | I don't ask whether they're a Democrat or Republican.

02:44:37.340 | And I have given money to some young candidates

02:44:39.140 | who are not Democrats.

02:44:40.260 | So that's the way.

02:44:42.120 | I think it's a generational change.

02:44:45.020 | And I think it's reaching out and trying to get people

02:44:49.660 | to see beyond partisan divisions

02:44:52.280 | who are in their 20s and teens rather than,

02:44:54.500 | that's why we do our podcast,

02:44:56.020 | this is Democracy, Zachary and I do that, my son and I,

02:44:58.780 | because we're exactly that.

02:44:59.860 | You will never hear an episode

02:45:01.140 | where we take one side or another.

02:45:03.080 | Our goal is to explain the issue,

02:45:05.260 | whether it's the challenges of democracy in China,

02:45:09.420 | or it's climate change, or whatever it is,

02:45:13.100 | or it's memory of war in our society,

02:45:16.380 | and to explain the issue

02:45:17.580 | and then offer people an optimistic pathway

02:45:19.460 | that's neither one side nor the other.

02:45:21.300 | - So actually, to push back a little bit on young people,

02:45:23.860 | I do see that, the exhaustion with the partisanship.

02:45:28.420 | But I've also, and this I think is the case

02:45:30.700 | throughout history, and I see it now,

02:45:32.700 | especially in the teenage years,

02:45:35.460 | especially if I'm being honest with boys,

02:45:37.540 | there's a desire for extremism in various directions,

02:45:42.740 | all kinds of extremism.

02:45:44.260 | Like just extreme awesomeness or extreme anything,

02:45:48.180 | just extreme, and F the man that tries to make me behave,

02:45:52.820 | this kind of energy.

02:45:53.900 | And that's why you can take any ideology,

02:45:56.460 | basically any extreme ideology,

02:45:57.940 | it starts being exciting,

02:45:58.780 | whether you're a Marxist or a communist,

02:46:00.860 | you're not just gonna be like for socialized healthcare.

02:46:04.020 | You're gonna be like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

02:46:06.260 | Let's go full hammer and sickle.

02:46:09.020 | I'm gonna wear red.

02:46:11.060 | And then the same with white supremacy

02:46:13.500 | or just red pill, the way you see society,

02:46:18.500 | the way you see the world, the extremism is there.

02:46:21.860 | And part of that, it's kind of,

02:46:24.700 | to steel map that perspective,

02:46:26.020 | it can be productive, that energy, if it's controlled.

02:46:29.340 | And especially if we have institutions

02:46:31.740 | that keep it a little under control.

02:46:34.340 | One of the criticisms I have, a lot of people have,

02:46:38.020 | I'm actually much more moderate than that criticism

02:46:41.620 | of universities is they give a little too much power

02:46:43.820 | to the 18-year-old who just showed up

02:46:45.780 | with their Marxist books and so on,

02:46:48.100 | and they wanna burn the whole thing down.

02:46:49.740 | That's beautiful, but the whole process of the universities

02:46:53.340 | get different viewpoints, educate more,

02:46:57.100 | make that person's viewpoint more sophisticated,

02:47:00.460 | complex, nuanced, and all that kind of thing.

02:47:02.740 | - I think you're right,

02:47:03.620 | but I think that's more talk than action.

02:47:06.060 | In my experience, there is, especially among young men,

02:47:10.080 | you're absolutely right,

02:47:11.000 | there is a valorization of the tough guy.

02:47:13.780 | Because most men 18 and 19 are still not fully comfortable

02:47:18.640 | in their masculinity, however they're going to define it.

02:47:21.300 | And so a way of performing that

02:47:24.900 | is being extreme in one way or another.

02:47:27.060 | And I've definitely seen that,

02:47:29.180 | but I think it's more often than not rhetoric.

02:47:32.700 | And actually, there's a very strong power

02:47:36.280 | of peer pressure and conformity that works on young people.

02:47:39.340 | And the positive side of that now

02:47:41.580 | is the peer pressure among them

02:47:43.820 | is not to join one party or the other.

02:47:45.680 | It's to say, "This is terrible.

02:47:47.620 | "Look at how our parents are screwing things up."

02:47:50.260 | And they're right.

02:47:51.900 | And I think we can lean into that

02:47:53.980 | and get a lot of positive creative action out of that.

02:47:57.900 | On universities, you brought this up a few times,

02:48:00.100 | and I think we have to be careful.

02:48:01.900 | I think you and I agree on this.

02:48:03.540 | It's not that universities are free of bias,

02:48:05.740 | but universities, especially large universities,

02:48:07.680 | whether it's UT, MIT, Yale, whatever we're talking about,

02:48:11.860 | they're large, complex empires.

02:48:13.580 | And most universities, people in the arts,

02:48:18.300 | tend to be a little left of center.

02:48:19.420 | It's self-selection.

02:48:20.980 | Those in engineering tend to be pretty much in the middle,

02:48:23.940 | and those at business schools tend to be right of center.

02:48:27.060 | And so I think we need to be careful not to generalize.

02:48:31.440 | At the University of Texas, there's as much influence

02:48:34.040 | from the business school and the athletic department

02:48:36.600 | as there is from the humanities.

02:48:38.380 | So it's not a left-leaning campus.

02:48:41.180 | And that's also true at Yale.

02:48:43.220 | You have the School of Management at Yale.

02:48:44.700 | You have a huge medical school, right?

02:48:47.860 | People who are very professional

02:48:49.780 | and less political on a lot of these issues.

02:48:51.620 | So I think we have to be careful.

02:48:53.340 | I think there's certain pockets of things,

02:48:55.780 | but some of that you're never going to avoid, right?

02:48:57.820 | Engineers are always gonna be the people who--

02:49:01.060 | - Hey, now, easy now.

02:49:02.820 | - I'm sure you've heard, who want to generally find

02:49:06.340 | some objective measure and avoid political interpretation.

02:49:09.260 | They wanna find their objective measure.

02:49:11.140 | - I'm surprised how most people in robotics don't seem to,

02:49:14.220 | they're afraid of humans.

02:49:15.140 | They run away from humans.

02:49:15.980 | - Precisely, precisely.

02:49:17.940 | And the arts people are always gonna be more touchy-feely,

02:49:20.820 | and the business people are always gonna like markets.

02:49:22.540 | I mean--

02:49:23.380 | - And my own personal opinion on this is,

02:49:26.740 | this is just me talking.

02:49:28.300 | I don't know if it's grounded in data,

02:49:31.540 | but just my own experiences, it seems a lot of the things

02:49:35.160 | that people criticize about universities

02:49:36.940 | comes from administrations, from the bureaucracies.

02:49:39.420 | The faculty and the students are, even with biases,

02:49:42.980 | are really interesting people.

02:49:44.940 | And all of their different, I wouldn't call them biases,

02:49:47.620 | but the different perspectives add to the conversation.

02:49:50.740 | It's the, too much, of course you need,

02:49:53.500 | just like with institutions, you need some.

02:49:55.700 | But too much, it becomes too heavy-handed.

02:49:58.420 | And somehow, that has been getting a little bit out of hand

02:50:03.260 | at a bunch of universities, just too much administration.

02:50:06.220 | And I don't know what the mechanism is

02:50:07.580 | to make it more efficient,

02:50:09.500 | but that's been always the struggle.

02:50:10.780 | Maybe the public criticism is the very mechanism

02:50:13.140 | that makes universities, the administration smaller.

02:50:16.220 | - Absolutely, we have those issues,

02:50:17.820 | and you can also say athletics has gotten out of control.

02:50:20.540 | - Sure, yeah.

02:50:21.380 | Like you said, you co-host a podcast

02:50:25.100 | with your son, Zachary, called "This is Democracy."

02:50:28.380 | What's been, that's a million questions I can ask,

02:50:31.340 | but just that pops to memory, what's been a challenging

02:50:35.260 | or maybe an eye-opening conversation you've had on it?

02:50:38.360 | - Oh, we've had a lot of eye-opening conversations.

02:50:41.200 | Our most recent episode is an episode on the German right.

02:50:46.200 | As I'm sure many of your listeners know,

02:50:50.420 | there was a group called the Reichsbürger,

02:50:52.620 | I think they still exist in Germany,

02:50:54.140 | they were actually led by a former German prince.

02:50:57.180 | And they had been planning to assassinate

02:51:00.860 | the Bundeskanzler and were organizing

02:51:03.780 | all sorts of other efforts.

02:51:04.860 | They do not believe that the current German government

02:51:08.660 | is legitimate, they think the last legitimate government

02:51:10.700 | was the Nazi government.

02:51:11.560 | They see the whole post-war period as illegitimate.

02:51:13.620 | - So it's the German far right.

02:51:14.820 | - Correct.

02:51:15.660 | And we had on a member of the German Bundestag,

02:51:19.500 | of their parliament, who's been involved

02:51:21.620 | in the investigations or in the oversight

02:51:23.460 | of the investigations, and talking with her

02:51:26.900 | about the depth of these issues

02:51:29.420 | and the challenges they face in Germany.

02:51:31.200 | It's certainly not a huge part of German society,

02:51:34.080 | but it's a significant number of people,

02:51:35.960 | probably more than 20,000 people who are part of this.

02:51:39.100 | To me brought home how much of what we thought

02:51:43.220 | was the past is still in the present.

02:51:45.620 | And I think that's a recurring theme in our show.

02:51:48.660 | And our show is optimistic,

02:51:50.060 | which is not about woes to the world.

02:51:52.760 | It's actually about taking issues,

02:51:54.300 | we take a topic each week that's in the news,

02:51:56.260 | we go back to understand the history,

02:51:58.400 | and we then use that history to make better policy,

02:52:00.540 | to talk about how to make better policy today.

02:52:02.700 | And in this case, it was clear that even in Germany,

02:52:06.620 | there's a lot of unfinished work in explaining to people

02:52:10.580 | and helping those, for instance, in the former East,

02:52:13.020 | where a lot of this group has its support,

02:52:16.200 | why this government is legitimate,

02:52:17.780 | why it operates the way it does,

02:52:19.260 | and addressing their concerns.

02:52:20.480 | It was strikingly similar to some of the problems

02:52:23.220 | we have in our own society.

02:52:24.340 | - Yeah, it's interesting that there's a far right movement

02:52:26.260 | in Germany.

02:52:27.100 | So you look at different parts of the world as well,

02:52:28.860 | not just the United States.

02:52:29.820 | - We do, we did an episode recently on China,

02:52:33.100 | on the effects of zero COVID and the protests in China.

02:52:36.700 | We've done a number of episodes on the war in Ukraine.

02:52:39.140 | Our role each week is to have on either a policymaker,

02:52:43.460 | a scholar, or an activist who can help us

02:52:46.220 | understand an issue and get beyond partisanship.

02:52:48.940 | So what's been eye-opening are some of the details,

02:52:50.860 | but what's also been eye-opening, honestly,

02:52:52.780 | is how easy it is to have a non-partisan conversation.

02:52:55.680 | It's not hard.

02:52:57.380 | We open every episode with a poem that Zachary writes.

02:53:00.900 | He writes an original poem, "I'll Brag on My Son."

02:53:02.940 | He's the youth poet laureate in Austin right now,

02:53:05.780 | and he writes a poem on each topic.

02:53:08.180 | - What's the style of poetry usually?

02:53:10.060 | Is he dark, is he--

02:53:11.380 | - No, he's usually, he's often ironic.

02:53:14.380 | - Ironic, like with a bit of humor?

02:53:15.980 | - Yes.

02:53:16.820 | - Okay.

02:53:17.640 | - And he likes word plays.

02:53:18.480 | - So he's not like a rebellious, dark teenager

02:53:21.340 | that's just-- - No.

02:53:22.860 | He's a creative know-it-all.

02:53:24.460 | - Strong words, he would probably disagree.

02:53:28.580 | - But what's interesting--

02:53:29.420 | - Sounds like you're the know-it-all on the podcast.

02:53:31.140 | - Oh no, oh no.

02:53:32.460 | We do have a lot of followers,

02:53:35.060 | and most of them comment on him, they don't comment on me.

02:53:36.980 | So I'm the junior partner.

02:53:38.620 | - You're the Yoko Ono of the partnership.

02:53:40.620 | - Correct, correct.

02:53:41.820 | But what I will say, and this is a really optimistic thing

02:53:44.380 | that I deeply believe, if you frame things properly,

02:53:47.860 | you open with a poem, you open with questions,

02:53:50.300 | not with partisan positions.

02:53:52.480 | Even when we have someone on

02:53:53.660 | who's a known Republican or Democrat,

02:53:55.900 | we can have a very non-partisan conversation.

02:53:58.380 | I mean, of course, we get criticisms,

02:54:00.140 | but we're almost never criticized

02:54:01.480 | for being partisan one way or the other.

02:54:04.580 | It's not hard to do this, you just have to make an effort

02:54:07.180 | to avoid the partisan claptrap that we can all fall into.

02:54:11.620 | - Focus on the humanity.

02:54:13.080 | What has your brilliant, popular son, Zachary,

02:54:16.060 | taught you about life?

02:54:17.200 | - Oh, he's taught me so much in his 18 years,

02:54:20.740 | as has our daughter, who's 20.

02:54:23.020 | Two things stand out.

02:54:24.500 | He's taught me that a new generation has so much to offer.

02:54:30.460 | And I don't just mean because he's smart and engaged,

02:54:32.860 | as our daughter is too,

02:54:33.700 | I also mean that you realize when you have a child,

02:54:36.940 | that even though you're doing the same things with them,

02:54:38.560 | they see the world differently and legitimately.

02:54:41.220 | And it reminds us that the world can be seen legitimately

02:54:44.140 | in different ways.

02:54:45.660 | And it's not that he and I disagree

02:54:47.320 | on major political issues,

02:54:48.500 | it's actually the small stuff that he sees differently.

02:54:51.340 | - Like in the details, you see that you can have

02:54:53.420 | a very different perspectives.

02:54:55.500 | - Exactly.

02:54:56.320 | - You have a very different way to draw,

02:54:58.380 | to create a painting of the same scene.

02:55:00.820 | - And then the other thing he's taught me is,

02:55:03.440 | as I said about the poetry, the importance of the arts.

02:55:06.640 | I've always been a lover of the arts,

02:55:09.340 | but it had always been, in some ways,

02:55:11.460 | parallel to my historical scholarship.

02:55:13.660 | We need to do a better job of integrating,

02:55:16.000 | as the Greeks did, right?

02:55:18.960 | The artistry, all the things we do,

02:55:21.180 | we separate them as disciplines,

02:55:22.740 | but they're all deeply connected.

02:55:24.660 | This is what I like about your podcast, honestly,

02:55:26.300 | is that you integrate all these things.

02:55:27.860 | You'll have people on with AI,

02:55:29.140 | you'll have a guy doing arm wrestling,

02:55:30.660 | you have all these things together, right?

02:55:32.460 | And it's that these worlds come together,

02:55:36.260 | and there's a lot to gain by bringing the arts

02:55:38.820 | and the sciences and all this together.

02:55:40.020 | It's an obvious thing to say, but we forget.

02:55:41.620 | - Yeah, and it somehow becomes bigger

02:55:44.220 | than the individual parts.

02:55:45.620 | What gives you hope about the future?

02:55:48.580 | You looked at, especially with this book,

02:55:50.940 | at just such a divisive part of our history,

02:55:54.900 | and the claim, the idea that you carry through the book,

02:55:58.260 | that that division still permeates our society.

02:56:00.960 | So what gives you hope?

02:56:02.180 | - I try to end the book on a very hopeful note,

02:56:03.900 | because I am hopeful.

02:56:05.140 | I'm hopeful that these divisions were made by people

02:56:09.620 | and can be unmade by people.

02:56:11.700 | I do not believe that what I describe in this book,

02:56:15.660 | the division, the hate that we see today, as well,

02:56:19.700 | I don't think it's inevitable.

02:56:22.340 | I think it can be actually corrected quite easily,

02:56:25.900 | and corrected easily by addressing the challenges

02:56:29.260 | in our institutions, the ways in which this history

02:56:31.300 | has been embodied in our institutions,

02:56:32.980 | even though we're different,

02:56:34.740 | and through our own recognizing of it.

02:56:37.500 | The gift of the last few years,

02:56:38.900 | I don't care whether you're a Democrat or Republican,

02:56:40.340 | the gift of the last few years

02:56:42.060 | is that we've been able to see the horror around us.

02:56:45.060 | And once you see the horror, you can do something about it.

02:56:47.400 | What's dangerous is when the horror is there

02:56:49.220 | and you don't see it, and it's hidden.

02:56:51.220 | It's been unmasked.

02:56:52.220 | I don't care where you stand.

02:56:53.780 | I've probably spoken in about 25, 30 cities about this book.

02:56:57.260 | Every audience I've asked,

02:56:58.940 | how many of you have been shaken by the last four to five

02:57:01.220 | years, and everyone, everywhere has raised their hand.

02:57:04.660 | That's a gift.

02:57:05.980 | That's consciousness raising.

02:57:07.980 | I grew up in a time in the 1980s when we were concerned

02:57:11.340 | everyone was apathetic.

02:57:12.260 | That was what was being said.

02:57:13.860 | We had lower voter turnout than we have now.

02:57:16.380 | People didn't seem to care.

02:57:18.500 | My students, when I was a young, I'm still young,

02:57:21.180 | I was a very young professor in the early 2000s.

02:57:23.340 | My students all wanted to go work for banks.

02:57:25.220 | They just wanted to make money.

02:57:26.060 | The best students wanted to go work for Goldman.

02:57:27.500 | We're not in that world anymore.

02:57:29.100 | There's been a consciousness raising.

02:57:31.260 | Knowing there's a problem, naming the problem,

02:57:33.860 | gives us a chance to fix the problem.

02:57:36.500 | And I think that's where we are as a society now.

02:57:39.020 | - Young people are excited to solve the problem.

02:57:42.020 | Do you think the individual,

02:57:44.180 | like if a young person is listening to this,

02:57:46.340 | do you think the individual has power in this?

02:57:48.460 | - Absolutely.

02:57:49.700 | I think the individual has a huge amount of power now.

02:57:51.820 | There's a demographic reason.

02:57:52.980 | We've got all these old people who have held on too long.

02:57:55.740 | Look at president, look at senator, look at any institution.

02:57:59.780 | And they're all, we're reaching a demographic cliff.

02:58:02.100 | Unlike China, we have a large population that's coming up.

02:58:05.620 | So those who are watching now who are in their 20s,

02:58:08.940 | they're gonna get to move into leadership positions

02:58:11.460 | much faster than their parents did.

02:58:13.820 | - Let's go.

02:58:14.780 | - Yeah, so that's one.

02:58:15.620 | And then the second thing is just what we're doing here.

02:58:18.820 | I mean, social media, when used properly,

02:58:21.580 | gives a platform to young people.

02:58:23.340 | They don't have to go through the New York Times

02:58:26.380 | like I do, right?

02:58:27.300 | This is why I do the podcast with my son.

02:58:30.180 | Find other ways.

02:58:32.020 | You reach millions of people.

02:58:33.600 | And this can be done.

02:58:37.180 | You don't need to wait for the old guys

02:58:38.740 | to give you the check mark that it's okay.

02:58:41.420 | - Just put on a suit, get a haircut,

02:58:45.220 | and start speaking nonsense into a microphone

02:58:48.220 | and yeah.

02:58:49.980 | - Well, also, I mean, have a very neat place.

02:58:51.860 | (laughing)

02:58:54.700 | - That's why I love you.

02:58:56.300 | All right, Jeremy, you're an incredible human being.

02:58:58.180 | Thank you for talking once more time.

02:58:59.580 | Thank you for writing this important book.

02:59:01.180 | I hope you keep writing and I hope to keep talking to you

02:59:06.180 | 'cause you're the shining beacon of political hope

02:59:10.900 | I have here in Austin that we get to enjoy.

02:59:13.900 | I wanna thank you for having me on

02:59:15.380 | and thank you for your show.

02:59:16.620 | I think what you're doing is so important

02:59:18.900 | and I really deeply respect what you do.

02:59:22.320 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:59:24.660 | with Jeremy Suri.

02:59:25.780 | To support this podcast,

02:59:26.980 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:59:29.660 | And now, let me leave you with some words

02:59:31.780 | from Abraham Lincoln.

02:59:33.700 | "Nearly all men can stand adversity.

02:59:36.740 | "If you want to test a man's character, give him power."

02:59:40.300 | Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:59:44.300 | (upbeat music)

02:59:46.880 | (upbeat music)

02:59:49.460 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jeremi Suri: Civil War, Slavery, Freedom, and Democracy | Lex Fridman Podcast #354

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