Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics

00:00:00.000 | The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that

00:00:08.720 | human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and

00:00:19.920 | more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force.

00:00:27.280 | And at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of

00:00:33.760 | those political problems. You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US.

00:00:38.480 | Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Capozola, a historian at MIT

00:00:47.600 | specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the

00:00:53.760 | role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization

00:00:59.440 | in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it,

00:01:05.600 | please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Christopher Capozola.

00:01:11.120 | Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I start? On the one hand,

00:01:17.280 | World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914 that brought sort of the

00:01:25.040 | major powers of Europe into conflict with one another. But I actually think it's more useful

00:01:29.520 | to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers,

00:01:37.200 | particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military

00:01:42.720 | affairs and naval affairs. This sets off an arms race in Europe. It sets off a rivalry over the

00:01:49.680 | colonial world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia. And so by the time you get to

00:01:55.920 | the summer of 1914, in a lot of ways, I say the war has already begun. And this is just the match

00:02:01.840 | that lights the flame. So the capacity for war was brewing within like the leaders and within

00:02:08.080 | the populace. They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea

00:02:14.640 | that we can go to war, it's a good idea to go to war, it's a good idea to expand and dominate

00:02:23.840 | others, that kind of thing. Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just the sense

00:02:28.640 | that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale.

00:02:34.320 | Yes, yes and. So yes, there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political

00:02:40.560 | conflict in Europe itself. And the and is that war and military conflict are already happening.

00:02:46.960 | That there's war, particularly in Africa, in North Africa, in the Middle East, in the Balkans,

00:02:54.080 | conflict is already underway. And the European powers haven't faced off against each other.

00:03:00.000 | They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states.

00:03:04.960 | But in some ways that war is already underway.

00:03:08.880 | So do you think it was inevitable? Because World War I is brought up as a case study where it

00:03:16.240 | seems like a few accidental leaders and a few accidental events or one accidental event led to

00:03:24.720 | the war. And if you change that one little thing, it could have avoided the war. Your sense is

00:03:30.160 | that the drums of war have been beating for quite a while and it would have happened almost no

00:03:35.600 | matter what or very likely to have happened. Yes, historians never like to say things are

00:03:40.560 | inevitable. And certainly, you know, there were people who could have chosen a different path,

00:03:45.680 | both in the short term and the long term. But fundamentally, there were irreconcilable

00:03:51.840 | conflicts in the system of empires in the world in 1914. I can't see, you know, it didn't have

00:03:59.280 | to be this war, but it probably had to be a war. So there was the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian

00:04:05.360 | Empire, there's France and Great Britain, US, could US be called an empire at that moment yet?

00:04:12.960 | When do you graduate to empire status? Well, certainly after 1898 with the acquisition of

00:04:20.960 | the former territories of the Spanish Empire, you know, the United States has formal colonial

00:04:24.960 | possessions. And it has sort of mindsets of rule and military acquisition that would define

00:04:31.680 | empire in a kind of more informal sense. So you would say you would put the blame

00:04:36.720 | or the responsibility of starting World War I into the hands of the German Empire

00:04:43.680 | and Kaiser Wilhelm II? You know, that's a really tough call to make. And, you know,

00:04:51.600 | deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years. I think

00:04:57.280 | there are people who would lay all of the blame on the Germans, right? And, you know,

00:05:04.320 | would point toward a generation of arms buildup, you know, alliances that Germany made and promises

00:05:11.280 | that they made to their allies in the Balkans, to the Austro-Hungarians. And so, yes, there's an

00:05:19.040 | awful lot of responsibility there. There has been a trend lately to say, no, it's no one's fault,

00:05:26.480 | right? That, you know, that all of the various powers literally were sleepwalking into the war,

00:05:32.480 | right? They backed into it inadvertently. I think that lets everyone a little too much off the hook,

00:05:38.080 | right? And so I think in between is, you know, I would put the blame on the system of empires

00:05:44.560 | itself, on the system. But in that system, the actor that sort of carries the most responsibility

00:05:50.640 | is definitely Imperial Germany. So the leader of Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Josef I,

00:05:58.960 | his nephew is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was assassinated. And so that didn't have to lead

00:06:08.320 | to a war. And then the leader of the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pressured sort of,

00:06:18.560 | started talking trash and boiling the water that ultimately resulted in the explosion.

00:06:28.960 | Plus all the other players. So what can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled?

00:06:34.240 | Well, US, what's the role of US? What's the role of France? What's the role of Great Britain,

00:06:38.880 | Germany, and Austro-Hungarian Empire? Yeah, over the course of about four weeks,

00:06:44.720 | right, following the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, it sort of triggers a series of

00:06:53.120 | political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums, sort of demanding sort of that one or other power

00:07:00.560 | sort of stand down in response to the demands of either, you know, Britain, France, or in turn,

00:07:07.200 | Germany or Russia, at the same time that those alliances kind of trigger automatic responses

00:07:14.160 | from the other side. And so it escalates. And once that escalation is combined with the call up of

00:07:20.640 | military troops, then none of those powers wants to be sort of the last one to kind of get ready

00:07:27.360 | for conflict. So even throughout it, they think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver.

00:07:33.680 | And they think if there is conflict, well, it might be a skirmish, it might be, you know,

00:07:40.400 | sort of a standoff. It could be solved with diplomacy later, because diplomacy is failing now.

00:07:47.760 | That turns out not to be the case. Diplomacy fails. It's not a skirmish. It becomes a massive

00:07:53.200 | war. And the Americans are watching all of this from the sidelines. They have very little

00:07:57.760 | influence over what happens that summer. How does it go from a skirmish between a few nations

00:08:03.440 | to a global war? Is there a place where there's a phase transition?

00:08:08.320 | Yeah, I think the phase transition is in over the course of the fall of 1914,

00:08:14.320 | when the Germans make an initial sort of bold move into France. In many ways, they're fighting

00:08:20.320 | the last war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And they really do sort of, you know, kind of want to

00:08:29.040 | have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against France to kind of bring the war to a speedy

00:08:36.080 | conclusion. France turns out to be able to fight back more effectively than the Germans expected.

00:08:44.000 | And then the battle lines sort of harden. And then behind that, the French and the Germans,

00:08:52.800 | as well as the British on the side of the French, start digging in, literally, right,

00:08:59.200 | and digging trenches, trenches that at first are, you know, three feet deep to, you know,

00:09:04.320 | to avoid shelling from artillery, then become six feet, 10 feet deep, you know, two miles wide,

00:09:11.280 | that include telegraph wires that include whole hospitals in the back. And then at that point,

00:09:16.720 | you know, the front is locked in place. And the only way to break that is sort of basically dialing

00:09:23.760 | the war up to 11, right, sort of massive numbers of troops, massive efforts, none of which work,

00:09:30.400 | right. And so the war is stuck in this, but that's the phase transition right there.

00:09:36.560 | What were the machines of war in that case? You mentioned trenches. What were the guns used?

00:09:42.320 | What was the size of guns? What are we talking about? What did Germany start accumulating that

00:09:50.400 | led up to this war? One of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution

00:09:57.520 | of the previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare, right. And so you see sort of machine

00:10:05.280 | guns, you see artillery, you know, these are the kind of the key weapons of war on both sides,

00:10:12.320 | right. The vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to

00:10:18.320 | another, not, you know, sort of rifle or even sort of, you know, machine gun kind of attacks.

00:10:24.320 | In some ways, the weapons of war are human beings, right. You know, tens of thousands of them poured

00:10:32.080 | over the top in these sort of waves to kind of try to break through the enemy lines. And it would

00:10:38.160 | work for a little while, you know, but holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be

00:10:43.920 | even more demanding than gaining it. And so often, you know, each side would retreat

00:10:50.000 | back into the trenches and wait for another day. And how did Russia, how did Britain,

00:10:58.480 | how did France get pulled into the war? I suppose the France one is the easy one. But what is the

00:11:05.200 | order of events here? How it becomes a global war? - Yeah, so Britain, France and Russia are at this

00:11:12.080 | time and they're in alliance. And so the conflicts, you know, in the summer of 1914 that lead sort of

00:11:20.320 | to the declarations of war happened sort of one after another, right, in August, in late August

00:11:26.240 | of 1914. And all three powers essentially come in at the same time because they have promised to do

00:11:32.720 | so through a series of alliances conducted secretly in the years before 1914 that committed them to

00:11:40.320 | defend one another. Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire have their own sort of set of

00:11:46.800 | secret agreements that also commit them to defend one another. And what this does is it sort of

00:11:53.280 | brings them all into conflict at the exact same moment. They're also, for many of these countries,

00:11:59.360 | bringing not just their national armies but also their empires into the conflict, right. So Britain

00:12:05.760 | and France, of course, have enormous sort of global empires that begin mobilizing soldiers

00:12:11.600 | as well as raw materials. Germany has less of an overseas empire. Russia and the Ottoman Empire,

00:12:18.000 | of course, have their own sort of hinterland, you know, within the empire. And very soon,

00:12:22.640 | you know, sort of all of the warring powers are bringing the entire world into the conflict.

00:12:28.480 | Did they have a sense of how deadly the war is? I mean, this is another scale of death

00:12:35.040 | and destruction. At the beginning, no, but very quickly. The scale of the devastation of these

00:12:42.000 | sort of massive over-the-top attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers

00:12:47.920 | and it very quickly becomes apparent even at home. You know, there is, of course,

00:12:52.560 | censorship of the battlefields and, you know, specific details don't reach people.

00:12:56.960 | But, you know, for civilians and in any of the warring powers, they know fairly soon

00:13:02.240 | how destructive the war is. And to me, that's always been a real sort of puzzle, right. So

00:13:10.880 | that by the time the United States comes to decide whether to join the war in 1917,

00:13:15.600 | they know exactly what they're getting into, right. They're not backing into the war in the ways that

00:13:20.640 | the European powers did. You know, they've seen the devastation, they've seen photographs,

00:13:26.320 | they've seen injured soldiers, and they make that choice anyway.

00:13:30.640 | When you say "they," do you mean the leaders or the people? Did the death and destruction reach

00:13:39.680 | the minds of the American people by that time?

00:13:42.480 | Yes, absolutely. You know, we don't in 1917 have the mass media that we have now, but, you know,

00:13:50.560 | there are images in newspapers, there are newsreels that play at the movie theaters,

00:13:54.880 | and of course some of it is sanitized. But that combined with press accounts, often really quite

00:14:03.040 | descriptive press accounts, gory accounts, reached, you know, anyone who cared to read them.

00:14:09.600 | You know, certainly plenty of people didn't follow the news, felt it was far away,

00:14:12.960 | but most Americans who cared about the news knew how devastating this war was.

00:14:17.440 | Yeah, there's something that happens that I recently visited Ukraine for a few weeks.

00:14:23.520 | There's something that happens with the human mind as you get away from the actual front,

00:14:31.920 | where the bullets are flying, like literally one kilometer away, you start to not feel the war.

00:14:38.640 | You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion, you start to like get assimilated to it,

00:14:44.000 | or you start to get used to it. And then when you get as far away from like currently what is

00:14:49.360 | Kiev, you start to, you know the war's going on, everybody around you is fighting in that war,

00:14:56.160 | but it's still somehow distant. And I think with the United States, with the ocean between,

00:15:01.840 | even if you have the stories everywhere, it still is somehow distant. Like the way a movie is,

00:15:08.000 | maybe, yeah, like a movie or a video game, it's somewhere else, even if your loved ones are going,

00:15:16.240 | or you are going to fight. - Yeah, that is absolutely the case.

00:15:20.400 | And in some ways that's true even for the home fronts in Europe, you know, except for the areas

00:15:24.640 | where, you know, in Belgium and France, where the war is, you know, right there in your backyard.

00:15:29.920 | For other people, yeah, there's a distance. And soldiers, of course, feel this very strongly,

00:15:35.920 | European soldiers, when they're able to go home on leave, often, you know, deeply resent

00:15:42.640 | what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war.

00:15:48.400 | - So how did US enter the war? Who was the president? What was the dynamics involved?

00:15:55.120 | And could it have stayed out? - To answer your last question first,

00:16:01.680 | yes, right? That the United States could have stayed out of the First World War

00:16:06.800 | as a military power. The United States could not have ignored the war completely, right? It shaped

00:16:15.120 | everything, right? It shaped trade, it shaped goods and services, agriculture, you know, whether,

00:16:22.240 | you know, there was a crop coming, whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work

00:16:27.040 | in American factories, right? So the US can't ignore the war. But the US makes a choice in 1917

00:16:33.760 | to enter the war by declaring war, right, on Germany and Austria. And in that sense,

00:16:42.240 | this is a war of choice, but it's kicked off by a series of events, right? So President Woodrow

00:16:48.960 | Wilson has been president through this entire period of time. He has just run in the 1916

00:16:56.400 | presidential election on a campaign to keep the United States out of war. But then in early 1917,

00:17:04.000 | the Germans, in some ways, sort of twist the Americans' arms, right? The Germans' sort of

00:17:10.080 | high command comes to understand that, you know, that they're stuck, right? That they, you know,

00:17:16.160 | they're stuck in this trench warfare, they need a big breakthrough. Their one big chance is to

00:17:20.800 | sort of break the blockade, to push through that the British have imposed on them, to break through

00:17:28.880 | against France. And so they do. And along with this, they start sinking ships on the Atlantic,

00:17:36.560 | including American ships. The Germans know full well, this will draw the United States into war.

00:17:42.000 | But the Germans look at the United States at this moment, a relatively small army,

00:17:47.840 | a relatively small navy, a country that, at least on paper, is deeply divided about whether to join

00:17:53.840 | the war. And so they say, let's do it, right? They're not going to get any American soldiers

00:18:00.080 | there in time, right? You know, it was a gamble, but I think probably their best chance. They took

00:18:08.400 | that gamble, they lost, right? In part because French resistance was strong, in part because

00:18:14.560 | Americans mobilized much faster and in much greater numbers than the Germans thought they would.

00:18:18.960 | - So the American people were divided.

00:18:20.640 | - The American people were absolutely divided about whether to enter this war,

00:18:24.400 | right? From 1914 to 1917, there is a searing debate across the political spectrum. It doesn't

00:18:31.360 | break down easily on party lines about whether it was in the US interest to do this, whether American

00:18:37.520 | troops should be sent abroad, whether, you know, Americans would end up just being cannon fodder

00:18:44.960 | for the European empires. Eventually, as American ships are sunk, first in the Lusitania in 1915,

00:18:53.920 | then in much greater numbers in 1917, you know, the tide starts to turn and Americans feel that,

00:18:59.920 | you know, our response is necessary. And the actual declaration of war in Congress is

00:19:04.880 | pretty lopsided, but it's not unanimous by any means.

00:19:07.920 | - Lopsided towards entering the war.

00:19:11.200 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:19:12.000 | - Well, that's really interesting because there's echoes of that in later wars where Congress seems

00:19:21.920 | to, nobody wants to be the guy that says no to war for some reason. Once you sense that,

00:19:28.320 | in terms of, sorry, in terms of the politicians, because then you appear weak, but I wonder if

00:19:35.680 | that was always the case. So you make the case that World War I is largely responsible for

00:19:41.840 | defining what it means to be an American citizen. So in which way does it define the American

00:19:50.400 | citizen? - When you think about citizenship,

00:19:53.520 | what it means is two things. First of all, what are your rights and obligations? What is sort of

00:19:58.400 | the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state? And the

00:20:05.600 | second is a more amorphous definition of like, what does it mean to belong, right? To be part

00:20:10.320 | of America, right? To feel American, to, you know, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it,

00:20:16.560 | right? And both of those things really are crystal clear in terms of their importance during the war,

00:20:23.360 | right? So both of those things are on the table. Being a citizen who is a citizen, who isn't,

00:20:30.240 | matters. So people who had never carried passports or, you know, anything before suddenly have to,

00:20:36.720 | but also what it means to be an American, right? To feel like it, to be part of this project is

00:20:43.120 | also kind of being defined and enforced during World War I. - So project, you know, is a funny

00:20:48.960 | way to put a global war, right? So can you tell the story, perhaps that's a good example of it,

00:20:56.160 | of the James Montgomery Flagg's 1916 poster that reads, "I want you." A lot of people know this

00:21:04.880 | poster, I think, in its original form, in its memefied form, I don't know, but we know this

00:21:10.640 | poster and we don't know where it came from, or most Americans, I think, me included, didn't know

00:21:16.960 | where it came from and it actually comes from 1916. Does this poster represent the birth of something

00:21:23.600 | new in America, which is a commodification or, I don't know, that propaganda machine that says

00:21:34.880 | what it means to be an American is somebody that fights for their country? - Yeah, so the image,

00:21:41.680 | it's in fact, I think, one of the most recognizable images, not only in the United States,

00:21:46.640 | but in the entire world, right? And you could bring it almost anywhere on earth in 2022 and

00:21:53.760 | people will know what it refers to, right? And so this is an image that circulated first as a

00:21:59.680 | magazine cover, later as a recruitment poster, where the figure is Uncle Sam, sort of pointing

00:22:06.000 | at the viewer with his finger, sort of pointing and saying, "I want you," right? And the "I want

00:22:11.280 | you" is a recruitment tool to join the U.S. Army. And this image, you know, really kind of starts

00:22:18.720 | as a kind of, like I said, a magazine cover in 1916 by the artist James Montgomery Flagg. It

00:22:25.680 | initially appears under the heading, "What are you doing for preparedness?" Meaning to prepare

00:22:31.040 | in case war comes to the United States. And at that point in 1916, we're still neutral.

00:22:36.240 | In 1917, it's turned into a U.S. Army recruiting poster. And then it reappears in World War II,

00:22:45.840 | reappears generations after, you know, like you said, it's now, it gets remixed, memefied,

00:22:51.520 | it's all over the place. I think for me, it's a turning point, it's a sort of window into

00:22:59.040 | American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal government is now

00:23:05.200 | embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its citizens.

00:23:09.600 | And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media, and what we

00:23:17.680 | would probably call propaganda, are being sort of mobilized for the first time in this new kind

00:23:24.160 | of way. - Well, in some sense, is it fair to say that the empire is born, the expanding empire is

00:23:32.880 | born from the Noam Chomsky perspective kind of empire that seeks to have military influence

00:23:40.240 | elsewhere in the world? - Yes, but I think as historians, we need to be at least as interested

00:23:46.720 | in what happens to the people who are getting pointed to by Uncle Sam, right? Rather than just

00:23:52.160 | the one, you know, whether he's pointing at us. And, you know, so yes, he's asking us to do that,

00:23:58.000 | but how do we respond? - And the people responded. So the people are ultimately the

00:24:03.120 | machines of history, the mechanisms of history. It's not the Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam can only do

00:24:10.560 | so much if the people aren't willing to step up. - Absolutely. And, you know, the American people

00:24:15.120 | responded for sure, but they didn't build what Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster, right?

00:24:21.600 | And I think that's, you know, kind of a crucial aspect that, you know, there never would have been

00:24:26.880 | sort of global US power without the response that begins in World War I. - What was the Selective

00:24:32.880 | Service Act of 1917? - So one of the very first things that Uncle Sam wants you to do, right,

00:24:38.400 | is to register for selective service, for the draft, right? And the laws passed very soon after

00:24:44.560 | the US enters the war. It's sort of, you know, demanding that all men, first between 21 and 30,

00:24:51.840 | then between 18 and 45, register for the draft, and they'll be selected by a government agency,

00:24:59.040 | by a volunteer organization. - So it's a requirement to sign up? - It is a legal requirement

00:25:03.200 | to register. Of course, not everyone who registers is selected, but over the course of the war,

00:25:09.920 | 24 million men register, almost 4 million serve in some fashion. - What was the response? What was

00:25:15.920 | the feeling amongst the American people to have to sign up to the Selective Service Act?

00:25:20.400 | - Well... - Have to register? - Yeah, this is a bigger turning point than we might think,

00:25:27.920 | right? In some ways, this is a tougher demand of the American public than entering the war. It's

00:25:32.640 | one thing to declare war on Germany, right? It's another thing to go down to your local post office

00:25:38.640 | and fill out the forms that allow your own government to send you there to fight. And this

00:25:45.280 | is especially important at a time when the federal government doesn't really have any other way to

00:25:50.400 | find you, unless you actually go and register yourself, right? And so, you know, ordinary

00:25:56.800 | people are participating in the building of this war machine, but at least a half a million of them

00:26:03.360 | don't, right? And simply never fill out the forms, move from one town to another. - But you said 20

00:26:09.200 | million did? 20 something? - Yeah, about 24 million register, at least 500,000. - Is it

00:26:14.880 | surprising to you that that many registered since the country was divided? - It is, and that's what

00:26:20.800 | I, you know, sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did you get 24 million people to register for

00:26:26.400 | the draft, and it's certainly not coming from the top down, right? You know, there may be a hundred,

00:26:32.960 | sort of, agents in what's now called the FBI. You know, it's certainly not being enforced from

00:26:38.160 | Washington. It's being enforced in, you know, through the eyes of everyday neighbors, you know,

00:26:43.840 | through community surveillance, all kinds of ways. - Oh, so there was like a pressure? - There's a lot

00:26:50.320 | of pressure. - Interesting. So there was not a significant, like, anti-war movement, as you would

00:26:57.360 | see maybe later with Vietnam and things like this? - There was a significant movement before 1917,

00:27:04.800 | but it becomes very hard to keep up an organized anti-war movement after that, particularly when

00:27:10.720 | the government starts shutting down protests. - So as the Selective Service Act of 1917 runs up

00:27:17.920 | against some of the freedoms, some of the rights that are defined in our founding documents,

00:27:27.440 | what was that clash like? What was sacrificed? What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this

00:27:33.840 | process? - I mean, I think on some level the fundamental right, right, is liberty, right?

00:27:39.600 | That conscription sort of demands, you know, sacrifice on the behalf of some for notionally

00:27:48.720 | for the protection of all. - So even if you're against the war, you're forced to fight? - Right,

00:27:53.520 | yes. You know, and there were small provisions for conscientious objectors, solely those who

00:28:00.320 | had religious objections to all war, right, not political objections to this war. And some, you

00:28:06.640 | know, several thousand were able to take those provisions, but even then they faced social

00:28:12.800 | sanction, they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation, you know. So those liberty interests,

00:28:19.360 | both individual freedom, religious freedom, you know, those are some of the first things to go.

00:28:23.360 | - So what about freedom of speech? Was there silencing of the press, of the voices of the

00:28:32.800 | different people that were object? - Yes, absolutely, right. And so very soon after the

00:28:37.520 | Selective Service Act is passed, then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in the news

00:28:42.880 | in 2022. - What's the Espionage Act? - The Espionage Act is a sort of omnibus bill. It contains about

00:28:48.240 | 10 or different provisions, very few of which have to do with espionage, but one key provision

00:28:53.600 | basically makes it illegal to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment,

00:28:59.520 | right. And that provision is used to shut down radical publications, to shut down German language

00:29:07.360 | publications, and you know, this really has a chilling impact on speech during the war.

00:29:12.720 | - Could you put into words what it means to be an American citizen that is in part sparked by

00:29:20.720 | World War I? What does that mean? Somebody that should be willing to sacrifice

00:29:28.800 | certain freedoms to fight for their country, somebody that's willing to fight to spread

00:29:38.560 | freedom elsewhere in the world, spread the American ideals, like what, does that begin to

00:29:45.760 | tell the story what it means to be an American? - I think what we see is a change, right. So

00:29:51.840 | citizenship during World War I now includes the obligation to defend the country, right, to serve,

00:30:01.280 | and to, if asked, to die for it, right. And we certainly see that, and I think we see

00:30:07.520 | the close linkage of military service and US citizenship coming out of this time period.

00:30:13.760 | But you know, when you start making lots of demands on people to fulfill obligations,

00:30:19.840 | in turn, they're going to start demanding rights. And we start to see, not necessarily during the

00:30:25.040 | war, but after, more demands for free speech protections, more demands for equality for

00:30:31.440 | marginalized groups. And so, you know, obligations and rights are sort of developing in a dynamic

00:30:37.360 | relationship. - Oh, it's almost like an overreach of power sparked a sense like, oh, crap, we can't

00:30:45.680 | trust centralized power to drag us into a war. We need to be able to, so there's the birth of that

00:30:53.200 | tension between the government and the people. - It's a rebirth of it, you know, of course,

00:30:58.080 | that tension is always there, but in its modern form, I think it comes from this. - Reintensification

00:31:03.600 | of it. So what about, you said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US.

00:31:08.720 | Can you explain? - Yeah, so the Espionage Act, you know, sort of empowers federal organizations

00:31:16.560 | to watch other Americans. They are particularly interested in anyone who is obstructing the draft,

00:31:23.120 | anyone who is trying to kind of organize labor or strikes or radical movements, and anyone who

00:31:31.680 | might have sympathy for Germany, which basically means, you know, all German Americans come under

00:31:36.800 | surveillance. Initially, you know, this is very small scale, but soon every government agency

00:31:43.920 | gets involved, from the Treasury Department's Secret Service to the Post Office, which is

00:31:49.360 | sort of reading mail, to the Justice Department, which mobilizes 200,000 volunteers. You know,

00:31:55.760 | it's a really significant enterprise. Much of it goes away after the war, but of all the things

00:32:01.440 | that go away, this core of the surveillance state is the thing that persists most fully.

00:32:07.680 | - Is this also a place where government, the size of government starts to grow

00:32:14.800 | in these different organizations, or maybe creates a momentum for growth of government?

00:32:19.360 | - Oh, it's exponential growth, right? That, you know, that over the course of the war,

00:32:25.520 | by almost any metric you use, right, the size of the federal budget, the number of federal

00:32:30.880 | employees, the number of soldiers in the standing army, all of those things skyrocket during the

00:32:35.360 | war. They go down after the war, but they never go down to what they were before.

00:32:40.160 | - And probably gave a momentum for growth over time.

00:32:44.560 | - Yes, absolutely.

00:32:45.600 | - Did World War I give birth to the military-industrial complex in the United States? So,

00:32:53.120 | war profiteering, expanding of the war machine in order to financially benefit a lot of parties

00:33:04.240 | involved. - So, I guess I would maybe break that into two parts, right? That, on the one hand,

00:33:12.240 | yes, there is war profiteering, there are investigations of it in the years after the war,

00:33:20.800 | there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played, you know, too much of a part

00:33:27.280 | in the war, and that's definitely the case. But I think when you try to think of this term

00:33:33.040 | military-industrial complex, it's best, you know, to think of it as, you know, at what point does

00:33:39.360 | the one side lock in the other, right? That military choices are shaped by industry, you know,

00:33:45.280 | objectives and vice versa. And I don't think that that was fully locked into place during World War

00:33:52.240 | I. I think that's really a Cold War phenomenon when the United States is on this intense kind

00:33:57.360 | of footing for two generations in a row. - So, industrial is really important there,

00:34:02.240 | there is companies. So, before then, weapons of war were created, were funded directly by

00:34:10.080 | the government. Like, who was manufacturing the weapons of war? - They were generally manufactured

00:34:17.200 | by private industry. There were, of course, arsenals, sort of 19th century iterations where

00:34:24.080 | the government would produce its own weapons, partly to make sure that they got what they

00:34:29.040 | wanted. But most of the weapons of war for all of the European powers, and the United States,

00:34:35.440 | are produced by private industry. - So, why do you say that the military-industrial complex

00:34:39.600 | didn't start then? What was the important thing that happened in the Cold War? - I think one way

00:34:47.120 | to think about it is the Cold War is a point at which it switches from being a dial to a ratchet,

00:34:53.920 | right? So, during World War I, the relationship between the military and industry dials up fast

00:35:01.200 | and high and stays that way, and it dials back down. Whereas during the Cold War, sort of the

00:35:09.040 | relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet. - Yeah, so it becomes unstoppable.

00:35:13.600 | - It goes up again. - In the way that you start, I think

00:35:18.560 | the way the military-industrial complex is often discussed is as a system that is unstoppable.

00:35:27.760 | - Right. - Like it expands. It almost, I mean,

00:35:33.120 | if you take a very cynical view, it creates war so that it can make money. It doesn't just find

00:35:43.440 | places where it can help through military conflict. It creates tensions that directly

00:35:49.360 | or indirectly lead to military conflict that it can then fuel and make money from.

00:35:54.880 | - That is certainly one of the concerns of both people who are critical of the First World War

00:36:03.440 | and then also of Dwight Eisenhower, right, when he's president and sort of in his farewell address

00:36:09.120 | where he sort of introduces the term military-industrial complex. And some of it is about

00:36:13.760 | the profit motive, but some of it is a fear that Eisenhower had that no one had an interest in

00:36:20.640 | stopping this, right, and that no one had a voice in stopping it, and that the ordinary American

00:36:25.680 | could really do nothing to sort of, you know, to kind of, to dial things down.

00:36:32.480 | - Is it strange to you that we don't often hear that kind of speech today with like Eisenhower

00:36:39.840 | speaking about the military-industrial complex? So for example, we'll have people criticizing

00:36:45.680 | the spending on war efforts, but they're not discussing the, yeah, the machinery of the

00:36:54.160 | military-industrial complex, like the basic way that human nature works, the way that we get

00:37:01.520 | ourselves trapped in this thing. They're saying like, there's better things to spend money on

00:37:05.440 | versus describing a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war

00:37:14.320 | that's gonna lead to more war. Like it pulls you in somehow.

00:37:19.120 | - Yeah, I would say throughout the Cold War and even after the end of it, there has not been a

00:37:27.840 | sustained conversation in the United States about our defense establishment, right, what we really

00:37:36.880 | need and what serves our interest, and to what extent sort of other things like market forces,

00:37:47.600 | profit motives, you know, belong in that conversation. What's interesting is that

00:37:53.440 | in the generation after the First World War, that conversation was on the table, right,

00:37:58.800 | through a series of investigations in the US, the Nye Committee in Britain, a Royal Commission,

00:38:04.880 | journalistic exposés. You know, this would have been just talked about constantly in the years

00:38:10.480 | between about 1930 and 1936 as people were starting to worry, right, that storm clouds

00:38:16.400 | were gathering in Europe again. - Yeah, but it always seems like

00:38:21.440 | those folks get pushed to the fringes. You're made an activist versus a thinking leader.

00:38:32.160 | - Those discussions are often marginalized, framed as conspiracy theory, et cetera, and, you know,

00:38:39.840 | I think it's important to realize that, you know, in the generation after World War I,

00:38:45.920 | this was a serious civic conversation. It led to, you know, sort of investigations of defense,

00:38:51.760 | sort of finance. It led to experiments in Britain and France in public finance of war material,

00:38:58.800 | and I think those conversations need to be reconvened now in the 21st century.

00:39:05.120 | - Is there any parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine? The reason I bring it up is

00:39:12.640 | because you mentioned sort of there was a hunger for war, a capacity for war that was already

00:39:24.080 | established, and the different parties were just boiling the tensions. So there's a case made that

00:39:32.560 | America had a role to play, NATO had a role to play in the current war in Ukraine. Is there some

00:39:39.120 | truth to that when you think about it in the context of World War I,

00:39:44.720 | or is it purely about the specific parties involved, which is Russia and Ukraine?

00:39:51.120 | - I think it's very easy to draw parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine,

00:40:02.000 | but I don't think they really work. The First World War in some ways is generated by

00:40:10.560 | a fundamental conflict in the European system of empires, right, in the global system of empires.

00:40:20.480 | So in many ways, if there's a parallel, the war in Ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts

00:40:28.960 | in the Mediterranean and the Balkans in 1911 to 1913, that then later there was a much greater

00:40:41.040 | conflict, right? And so I think if there's any lessons to be learned for how not to let World

00:40:48.400 | War III look like World War I, it would be to make sure that systems aren't locked into place,

00:40:55.920 | that escalate wars out of people's expectations. - That's, I suppose, what I was implying,

00:41:02.400 | that this is the early stages of World War III, that in the same way that

00:41:08.000 | several wolves are licking their chops, or whatever the expression is,

00:41:14.400 | they're creating tension, they're creating military conflict with a kind of unstoppable

00:41:22.240 | imperative for a global war. That's, I mean, many kind of people that are looking at this

00:41:29.920 | are really worried about that. Now, the forcing function to stop this war is that there's several

00:41:38.640 | nuclear powers involved, which has, at least for now, worked to stop full-on global war,

00:41:46.560 | but I'm not sure that's going to be the case. In fact, what is one of the

00:41:50.640 | surprising things to me in Ukraine is that still in the 21st century, we can go to something that

00:41:59.760 | involves nuclear powers, not directly yet, but awfully close to directly, go to a hot war.

00:42:07.040 | And so do you worry about that, that there's a kind of descent into a World War I type of scenario?

00:42:16.240 | >> Yes. I mean, that keeps me up at night, and I think it should keep the citizens of both

00:42:22.960 | the United States and Russia up at night. And I think, again, it gets back to what I was saying,

00:42:32.000 | in the summer of 1914, even then, things that looked like a march toward war

00:42:42.160 | could have been different, right? And so I think it's important for leaders of both countries and

00:42:49.360 | of all of the sort of related countries, of Ukraine, of the various NATO powers, to really

00:42:54.320 | sort of imagine off-ramps and to imagine alternatives and to make them possible,

00:43:02.240 | whether it's through diplomacy, whether it's through other formats. I think that

00:43:11.920 | that's the only way to prevent sort of greater escalation.

00:43:14.560 | >> What's the difference between World War I and the Civil War, in terms of how they defined what

00:43:20.080 | it means to be an American, but also the American citizen's relationship with the war,

00:43:26.320 | what the leaders were doing? Is there interesting differences and similarities?

00:43:32.160 | Besides the fact that everybody seems to have forgot about World War I in the United States,

00:43:38.320 | and everyone still remembers Civil War. >> I mean, it's true. And the American Civil War

00:43:46.880 | defines American identity in some ways, along with the Revolution and the Second World War,

00:43:52.640 | more so than any other conflict. And it's a fundamentally different war, right? It's one

00:44:01.200 | because it is a civil war, right? Because of secession, because of the Confederacy,

00:44:07.120 | this is a conflict happening on the territory of the United States between Americans. And so

00:44:14.480 | the dynamics are really quite different, right? So the leaders, particularly Lincoln, have a

00:44:21.280 | different relationship to the home front, to civilians, than say, Wilson or Roosevelt have

00:44:28.480 | in World War I and II. >> Also, the way you would tell the story of the Civil War, perhaps similar

00:44:34.320 | to the way we tell the story of World War II, there's a reason to actually fight the war. The

00:44:40.160 | way we tell the story is we're fighting for this ideal that all men are created equal, that the

00:44:45.360 | war is over slavery, in part. Perhaps that's a drastic oversimplification of what the war was

00:44:54.960 | actually about in the moment, like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a hot discussion.

00:45:02.640 | And the same with World War II, people kind of framed the narrative that it was against evil,

00:45:10.320 | Hitler being evil. I think the key part of that is probably the Holocaust, that's how you can

00:45:18.960 | formulate Hitler as being evil. If there's no Holocaust, perhaps there's a case to be made that

00:45:23.920 | we wouldn't see World War II as such a quote-unquote good war, that there's an atrocity that

00:45:32.400 | had to happen to make it really, to be able to tell a clear narrative of why we get into this war.

00:45:38.720 | Perhaps such a narrative doesn't exist for World War I, and so that doesn't stay in the American

00:45:44.480 | mind. We try to sweep it under the rug, given though overall 16 million people died.

00:45:51.520 | So to you, the difference is in the fact that you're fighting for ideas and fighting

00:45:58.720 | on the homeland, but in terms of people's participation,

00:46:03.600 | you know, fighting for your country, was there similarities there?

00:46:09.840 | Yeah, I mean I think, I mean the Civil War in both the North and the South, troops are raised

00:46:18.160 | overwhelmingly through volunteer recruitment. There is a draft in both the North and the South,

00:46:24.320 | but you know, it's not significant. Only 8% of Confederate soldiers came in through conscription.

00:46:33.360 | And so in fact, you know, the mobilization for volunteers, often organized locally around

00:46:43.520 | individual communities or states, creates sort of multiple identities and levels of loyalty,

00:46:49.520 | where people both in the North and the South have loyalty both to their state regiments,

00:46:54.000 | to their sort of community militias, and as well to the country. They are fighting over the country,

00:47:00.960 | right, over the United States, and so the Union and the Confederacy have conflicting and ultimately

00:47:07.280 | irreconcilable visions of that. But you know, that sort of nationalism that comes out of the Union

00:47:15.920 | after the victory in the war is a kind of crucial force shaping America ever since.

00:47:21.440 | So what was the neutrality period? Why did the U.S. stay out of the war for so long? Like what

00:47:26.080 | was going on in that interesting, like what made Woodrow Wilson change his mind? What was the

00:47:35.920 | interesting dynamic there? I always say that the United States entered the war in April of 1917,

00:47:43.840 | but Americans entered it right away, right? They entered it, you know, some of them actually went

00:47:49.840 | and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on the side of Britain and France. At least 50,000

00:47:58.400 | joined the Canadian Army or the British Army and served. Millions volunteer, they sent humanitarian

00:48:05.280 | aid. I think in many ways modern war creates modern humanitarianism, and we can see that

00:48:11.520 | in the neutrality period. And even if they wanted the United States to stay out of the war,

00:48:17.200 | a lot of Americans get involved in it by thinking about it, caring about it, you know, arguing about

00:48:22.480 | it. And you know, at the same time, they're worried that British propaganda is shaping their

00:48:29.280 | news system. They are worried that German espionage is undermining them. They're worried

00:48:36.240 | that both Britain and Germany are trying to interfere in American elections and American

00:48:40.640 | news cycles. You know, and at the same time, a revolution is breaking out in Mexico, right? So

00:48:47.360 | there are sort of, you know, concerns about what's happening in the Western Hemisphere as well as

00:48:51.440 | what's happening in Europe. So World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars,

00:48:58.480 | and it didn't. How did World War I pave the way to World War II? Every nation probably has their

00:49:08.560 | own story in this trajectory towards World War II. How did Europe allow World War II to happen?

00:49:15.360 | How did the Soviet Union, Russia allow World War II to happen? And how did America allow World War

00:49:22.320 | II to happen? And Japan. Yeah, you're right. The answer is different for each country, right?

00:49:28.160 | That in some ways, in Germany, the culture of defeat, the experience of defeat at the end of

00:49:34.960 | World War I leads to a culture of resentment, recrimination, finger-pointing, blame that

00:49:42.800 | makes German politics very ugly. As one person puts it, brutalizes German politics.

00:49:50.720 | It places resentment at the core of the populace and its politics.

00:49:56.240 | Yeah. And, you know, so in some ways that lays the groundwork for the kind of politics of resentment

00:50:02.160 | and hate that comes from the Nazis. You know, for the United States, in some ways the failure to win

00:50:08.960 | the peace, you know, sets up the possibility for the next war, right? That the United States,

00:50:16.960 | you know, through Wilson is sort of crafting a new international order in order that this will be the

00:50:23.280 | war to end all wars. But because the United States failed to join the League of Nations,

00:50:28.240 | you see the United States really sort of on the hook for another generation. In Asia, the story

00:50:35.040 | is more complicated, right? And I think it's worth bearing that in mind that World War II is a two

00:50:40.320 | front war. It starts in Asia for its own reasons. World War I is transformative for Japan, right?

00:50:47.680 | It is a time of massive economic expansion. A lot of that sort of economic wealth is poured

00:50:54.560 | into sort of greater industrialization and militarization. And so when the military wing

00:51:00.080 | in Japanese politics takes over in the 1930s, they're in some ways flexing muscles that come

00:51:07.200 | out of the First World War. Can you talk about the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles?

00:51:15.120 | What's interesting about that dynamics there? Of the parties involved, of

00:51:20.880 | how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment? Is there, or again, is it

00:51:27.520 | inevitable? So the war ends and very soon, even before the war is over, the United States in

00:51:37.520 | particular is trying to shape the peace, right? And the United States is the central actor at the

00:51:43.360 | Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Woodrow Wilson is there, he's presiding, and he knows that he

00:51:49.840 | calls the shots. So he was respected. He was respected, but resentfully in some ways by the

00:51:58.240 | European powers, Britain and France and Italy to a lesser extent, who felt that they had sacrificed

00:52:04.000 | to more. They had two goals, right? They wanted to shape the imperial system in order to make sure

00:52:11.120 | that their fundamental economic structures wouldn't change. And they also wanted to

00:52:16.480 | weaken Germany as much as possible, right? So that Germany couldn't rise again.

00:52:22.240 | What this leads to is a peace treaty that maintains some of the fundamental conflicts of the

00:52:30.240 | imperial system and makes, bankrupts Germany, starves Germany and feeds this politics of

00:52:38.160 | resentment that make it impossible for Germany to kind of participate in a European order.

00:52:44.880 | So people like historian Neil Ferguson, for example, make the case that

00:52:51.360 | if Britain stayed out of World War I, we would have avoided this whole mess and we would

00:52:58.160 | potentially even avoid World War II. There's kind of counterfactual history.

00:53:04.880 | Do you think it's possible to make the case for that? That there was a moment, especially in that

00:53:11.360 | case, staying out of the war for Britain, that the escalation to a global war could have been avoided

00:53:17.120 | and one that ultimately ends in a deep global resentment. So where Germany is resentful, not

00:53:23.680 | just of France or particular nations, but is resentful of the entire, I don't know how you

00:53:29.920 | define it, the West or something like this, the entire global world? I wish it were that easy.

00:53:37.520 | And, you know, I think it's useful to think in counterfactuals, you know, what if. And if you

00:53:50.320 | believe, as historians do, in causation, then if that one thing causes another, then you also have

00:53:57.600 | to believe in counterfactuals, right? That if something hadn't happened, then maybe that wouldn't,

00:54:02.160 | you know, that would have worked differently. But I think all the things that led to World War I

00:54:09.680 | are multi-causal and nuanced. And this is what historians do. We make things more complicated.

00:54:16.320 | And so, you know, there was no one thing that could have, you know, that could have turned the

00:54:22.640 | tide of history, you know. And, you know, oh, if only Hitler had gotten into art school, or oh,

00:54:28.800 | if only Fidel Castro had gotten into the major leagues, you know. Those are interesting thought

00:54:34.960 | experiments, but few events in history, I think, are that contingent.

00:54:39.040 | Well, Hitler is an example of somebody who's a charismatic leader that seems to have a really

00:54:48.480 | disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history. So, you know, if you look at Stalin,

00:54:56.880 | you could imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role.

00:55:01.440 | And the same goes for many of the other presidents through, or even Mao. It seems that there's a

00:55:09.920 | singular nature to Hitler, that you could play the counterfactual, that if there was no Hitler,

00:55:16.480 | you may have not had World War II. He, better than many leaders in history, was able to channel

00:55:23.680 | the resentment of the populace into a very aggressive expansion of the military, and

00:55:29.760 | I would say skillful deceit of the entire world in terms of his plans, and was able to

00:55:37.200 | effectively start the war. So, is it possible that, I mean, could Hitler have been stopped?

00:55:45.920 | Could we have avoided if he just got into art school?

00:55:49.280 | Right.

00:55:49.780 | Or again, do you feel like there's a current of events that was unstoppable?

00:55:55.600 | I mean, part of what you're talking about is Hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic

00:56:01.120 | leader who's able to mobilize, you know, the nation, and part of it is Hitlerism, right?

00:56:07.440 | His own sort of individual ability to play, for example, play off his subordinates against one

00:56:14.000 | another to set up a system of that nature that in some ways escalates violence, including,

00:56:20.480 | you know, the violence that leads to the Holocaust. And some of it is also Hitlerism

00:56:25.840 | as a leader cult, and we see this in many other sort of things where a political movement

00:56:33.600 | surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be replaceable. So, yes, the World War II we

00:56:41.600 | got would have been completely different if a different sort of faction had risen to power in

00:56:48.400 | Germany. But, you know, Depression-era Europe was so unstable, and democracies collapsed throughout

00:56:57.120 | Western Europe over the course of the 1930s, you know, whether they had charismatic totalitarian

00:57:03.040 | leaders or not.

00:57:03.760 | Have you actually read one book I just recently finished? I'd love to get your opinion

00:57:11.440 | from a historian perspective. There's a book called Blitzed, Drugs in the Third Reich by

00:57:16.240 | Norman Oler. It makes the case that drugs played a very large, meth essentially, played a very large

00:57:26.000 | role in World War II. There's a lot of criticism of this book, saying that it's, kind of to what

00:57:34.640 | you're saying, it takes this one little variable and makes it like this explains everything.

00:57:40.480 | So everything about Hitler, everything about the blitzkrieg, everything about the military,

00:57:46.240 | the way, the strategy, the decisions could be explained through drugs, or at least implies

00:57:51.360 | that kind of thing. And the interesting thing about this book, because Hitler and Nazi Germany

00:57:58.000 | is one of the most sort of written about periods of human history, and this was not, drugs were

00:58:03.680 | almost entirely not written about in this context. So here come along this semi historian, 'cause I

00:58:10.720 | don't think he's even a historian. He's a, a lot of his work is fiction. Hopefully I'm saying that

00:58:16.880 | correctly. So he tells a really, that's one of the criticisms. He tells a very compelling story

00:58:22.160 | that drugs were at the center of this period and also of the man of Hitler. What are your

00:58:32.240 | sort of feelings and thoughts about, if you've gotten a chance to read this book,

00:58:37.520 | but I'm sure there's books like it, that tell an interesting perspective, singular perspective

00:58:42.160 | on a war? - Yeah, I mean, I have read it,

00:58:45.360 | and I also had this sort of eye-opening experience that a lot of historians did, and they're like,

00:58:51.040 | why didn't we think about this? And I think whether he's, the author Oller is sort of not a

00:59:00.400 | trained academic historian, but the joy of history is like, you don't have to be one to write good

00:59:04.560 | history. And I don't think anyone sort of criticizes him for that. I like the book as a

00:59:13.920 | window into the Third Reich. Of course, drugs don't explain all of it, but it helps us see

00:59:23.440 | the people who supported Hitler, the ways in which it was that mind-altering and performance-altering

00:59:32.640 | drugs were used to kind of keep soldiers on the battlefield, the ways in which.

00:59:37.360 | I think that we don't fully understand the extent to which the Third Reich is held together with

00:59:45.680 | like duct tape from a pretty early phase, by like 1940 or '41 even. It's all smoke and mirrors. And

00:59:54.960 | I think that wartime propaganda, both Germans trying to say, we're winning everything, and

01:00:01.760 | America trying to mobilize, and the other allies to mobilize against Germany, described a more

01:00:08.880 | formidable enemy than it really was by 1941 and '42.

01:00:13.200 | - Yeah, I mean, I could see both cases. One is that duct tape doesn't make the man,

01:00:17.920 | but also as an engineer, I'm a huge fan of duct tape.

01:00:22.320 | - Yeah.

01:00:23.200 | - 'Cause it does seem to solve a lot of problems. And I do worry that this perspective

01:00:29.360 | that the book presents about drugs is somehow to the mind really compelling,

01:00:35.120 | because it's almost like the mind, or at least my mind searches for an answer.

01:00:41.360 | How could this have happened? And it's nice to have a clean explanation. And drugs is one popular

01:00:47.440 | one when people talk about steroids in sports. The moment you introduce the topic of steroids,

01:00:52.640 | somehow the mind wants to explain all success in the context was because this person was on

01:00:58.960 | steroids, Lance Armstrong. Well, it's a very sticky idea. Certain ideas, certain explanations

01:01:07.840 | are very sticky. And I think that's really dangerous because then you lose the full context.

01:01:12.800 | And also in the case of drugs, it removes the responsibility from the person,

01:01:16.960 | both for the military genius and the evil. And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do.

01:01:25.840 | Something about the mind, maybe it's just mind that's sticky to this. Well, drugs explain it.

01:01:31.120 | If the drugs didn't happen, then it would be very different. It worries me

01:01:37.120 | how compelling it is of an explanation.

01:01:39.600 | That's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window into the third, right?

01:01:44.560 | Yes.

01:01:44.800 | Than an explanation of it.

01:01:46.560 | But it's also a nice exploration of Hitler, the man. For some reason, discussing his habits,

01:01:51.760 | especially later in the war, his practices with drugs, gives you a window into the person. It

01:01:59.440 | reminds you that this is a human being. Like a human being that gets emotional in the morning,

01:02:07.440 | gets thoughtful in the morning, hopeful, sad, depressed, angry, like a story of emotions of

01:02:15.520 | the human being. Somehow we construct, which is a pretty dangerous thing to do, we construct an

01:02:22.640 | evil monster out of Hitler when in reality, he's a human being like all of us. I think the lesson

01:02:27.680 | there is the Solzhenitsyn lesson, which is all of us, to some degree, are capable of evil.

01:02:33.280 | Or maybe if you want to make it less powerful a statement, many of our leaders are capable of

01:02:41.520 | evil. That this Hitler is not truly singular in history. That, yeah, when the resentment of the

01:02:49.360 | populace matches the right charismatic leader, it's easy to make the kind of, not easy, but

01:02:55.760 | it's possible to frequently make the kind of initiation of military conflict that happened

01:03:02.320 | in World War II. By the way, because you said not a trained historian, one of the

01:03:09.680 | most compelling and, I don't know, entertaining and fascinating exploration of World War I comes

01:03:17.920 | from Dan Carlin. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form

01:03:24.480 | telling of the blueprint for Armageddon, which is the telling of World War I. What do you think

01:03:29.920 | about Dan Carlin, you yourself as a historian who has studied, who has written about World War I?

01:03:35.520 | Do you enjoy that kind of telling of history? - Absolutely. And I think, again, you don't need

01:03:44.000 | a PhD in history to be a historian. - Does every historian agree with that?

01:03:48.080 | - No. - He gets quite a bit

01:03:49.280 | of criticism from historians. - I mean, we like to argue with each other

01:03:54.560 | and nitpick with each other, but the one thing I have no patience for is when we pull rank on each

01:04:00.160 | other. I think we depend on, if you're a historian in a university with degrees and research materials,

01:04:09.680 | you depend on the work of people in some local community, like recording oral history,

01:04:14.960 | saving documents. And history is a social science, but it's also a storytelling art.

01:04:21.120 | And history books are the ones you find on the shelves in bookstores that people read for fun,

01:04:28.480 | and you can appreciate both the knowledge production as well as the storytelling.

01:04:35.200 | And when you get a good oral storyteller like Dan Carlin, there's a reason that thousands and

01:04:41.760 | hundreds of thousands of people tune in. - Yeah, but he definitely suffers from anxiety

01:04:46.560 | about getting things correct, and it's very difficult. - Well, our first job is to get the

01:04:51.440 | facts correct, and then to tell the story off of those. - But the facts are so fuzzy. So, I mean,

01:05:00.080 | you have probably my favorite telling of World War II is William Shire's Rise and Fall of the Third

01:05:07.200 | Reich, or at least not telling of Nazi Germany. And that goes to primary sources a lot, which is,

01:05:16.960 | like, I suppose that's the honest way to do it. But it's tough. It's really tough to write that

01:05:24.560 | way, to really go to primary sources always. And I think that one of the things that Dan tries to do,

01:05:33.520 | which is also really tough to do, perhaps easier in oral history,

01:05:37.600 | is try to make you feel what it was like to be there,

01:05:42.000 | which I think he does by trying to tell the story of, like, individual soldiers.

01:05:48.880 | Do you find that telling, like individual citizens? Do you find that kind of telling

01:05:56.480 | of history compelling? - Yeah, I mean, I think we need

01:06:01.360 | historical imagination. And I think historical imagination teaches something very valuable,

01:06:09.280 | which is humility, to realize that there are other people who've lived on this planet, and

01:06:18.320 | they organized their lives differently, and they made it through just fine too. And I think that

01:06:27.520 | that kind of meeting other people from the past can be actually a very useful skill for meeting

01:06:35.600 | people unlike you in the present. - Unlike you, but also like you. I think

01:06:40.000 | both are humbling. One, realizing that they did live in a different space and time, but two,

01:06:47.520 | realizing that if you were placed in that space and time, you might have done all the same things,

01:06:53.760 | whether it's the brave, good thing or the evil thing. - Yeah, absolutely. And you get also a

01:07:00.400 | sense of possibility. You know, there's this famous line, right, that those who do not learn

01:07:07.360 | history are condemned to repeat it. But I think the other half is true as well, which is those

01:07:13.040 | who do not learn history don't get the chance to repeat it, right? You know, that we're not

01:07:17.600 | the first people on this planet to face any certain kinds of problems. You know, other people

01:07:23.200 | have lived through worlds like this one before. - It's like when you fall in love as a teenager

01:07:28.400 | for the first time, and then there's a breakup. You think it's the greatest tragedy that has

01:07:35.120 | ever happened in the world. You're the first person. Even though like Romeo and Juliet and

01:07:42.320 | so on had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic heartbreak of

01:07:49.040 | that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it is. We have

01:07:55.920 | lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about nationalism,

01:08:02.960 | which I think is at the core of "I want you" poster. Is nationalism destructive or empowering

01:08:10.480 | to a nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many ways synonymous

01:08:16.640 | to nationalism, but in recent history, perhaps because of the Nazis, has slowly parted ways.

01:08:25.040 | Somehow nationalism is when patriotism gone bad or something like this?

01:08:30.160 | Yeah, they're different, right? Patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion,

01:08:38.080 | right? And a feeling of love of country, right? Literally. And in some ways, that's a necessary

01:08:47.040 | condition to participate in nationalism. To me, I think nationalism is crucial in a world organized

01:08:59.360 | around nation states, and you have to sort of believe that you are engaged in a common project

01:09:06.560 | together, right? And so in the contemporary United States, in some ways that question is

01:09:14.160 | actually on the table in ways that it hasn't been in the past. But you have to believe that you're

01:09:19.200 | engaged in a common project, that you have something in common with the person with whom

01:09:24.240 | you share this nation, and that you would sacrifice for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or

01:09:32.240 | going to war to defend them. That's a vision of what we might call civic nationalism.

01:09:38.080 | That's the good version. The question is whether you can have that without having

01:09:44.240 | exclusionary nationalism, hating the other, right? Fearing the other, saying, "Yeah,

01:09:52.480 | you're part of this nation against all others." And I think there's a long tradition in America

01:09:59.680 | of a very inclusive nationalism that is open, inclusive, welcoming, and new people to this

01:10:09.440 | shared project. That's something to be defended. Exclusionary nationalism is based on

01:10:15.520 | ethnic hatreds and others that we see throughout the world,

01:10:21.440 | and those are things to be afraid of. But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that

01:10:28.160 | a nationalism that includes the big umbrella of democratic nations,

01:10:31.680 | nations that strive for freedom, and everybody else is against freedom and against human nature,

01:10:40.320 | and it just so happens that it's half and half split across the world. So that's imperialism

01:10:47.040 | that feels like it beats the drum of war. - Yeah, and I mean, I don't want to paint too

01:10:54.000 | rosy a picture, and certainly the United States as a nation has often found it easier to define

01:11:00.480 | ourselves against something than to clarify exactly what we're for. - Yeah, yeah. The Cold War,

01:11:09.600 | China today. That's not only the United States, I suppose that's human nature.

01:11:19.200 | We need a competitor. It's almost like maybe the success of human civilization requires

01:11:24.400 | figuring out how to construct competitors that don't result in global war.

01:11:31.920 | - Yes, or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors. There's a real difference.

01:11:43.440 | You compete with competitors, you fight with enemies.

01:11:46.400 | - Yeah, with competitors is a respect, maybe even a love underlying the competition.

01:11:52.560 | What lessons, what are the biggest lessons you take away from World War I?

01:11:59.360 | Maybe we talked about several, but you look back at the 20th century, what,

01:12:08.320 | as a historian, what do you learn about human nature, about human civilization,

01:12:14.000 | about history from looking at this war? - I think the lesson I would want everyone to take

01:12:28.240 | from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap.

01:12:36.000 | All of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front,

01:12:45.680 | they would solve their political problems with military force. At the end of the day in 1918,

01:12:54.080 | one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems.

01:12:58.800 | - And in the end, the regular people paid the price with their lives.

01:13:05.280 | - They did, and people who had been told that their lives were cheap remembered that.

01:13:12.800 | And it sort of reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century,

01:13:19.280 | both in Europe and around the world. - Yeah, the cost of a death of a single soldier

01:13:25.920 | is not just, or a single civilian, is not just the cost of that single life, it's the resentment,

01:13:32.480 | that the anger, the hate that reverberates throughout. One of the things I saw in Ukraine

01:13:39.280 | is the birth of, at scale, of generational hate, not towards administrations or leaders,

01:13:47.440 | but towards entire peoples. And that hate, I mean, overnight that hate is created,

01:13:54.240 | and it takes perhaps decades for that hate to dissipate.

01:13:57.440 | - It takes decades, and it takes collective effort to build institutions that divert that hate

01:14:05.120 | into other places. - One of the biggest things I thought was

01:14:12.640 | not part of the calculus in when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq is the creation of

01:14:21.440 | hate. When you drop a bomb, even if it hits military targets, even if it kills soldiers,

01:14:30.720 | which in that case it didn't, there's a very large amount of civilians, what does that do to the,

01:14:39.600 | yeah, like, how many years, minutes, hours, months, and years of hate do you create with a single

01:14:48.000 | bomb you drop? And I calculate that, like, literally, in the Pentagon, have a chart,

01:14:53.520 | how many people will hate us, how many people does it take, do some science here, how many people

01:14:59.520 | does it take, when you have a million people that hate you, how many of them will become terrorists?

01:15:06.480 | How many of them will do something to the nation you love and care about, which is the United

01:15:14.080 | States, will do something that will be very costly? I feel like there was not a plot in a chart.

01:15:20.800 | It was more about short-term effects. - Yes, again, it's the idea of using

01:15:28.160 | military force to solve political problems, and I think there's a squandering of goodwill that

01:15:34.240 | people have around the world toward the United States. You know, that's a respect for its economy,

01:15:40.560 | for its consumer products, and so forth, and I think that's been lost, a lot of that.

01:15:46.000 | - Do you think leaders can stop war? I have, perhaps, a romantic notion, perhaps,

01:15:51.200 | 'cause I do these podcasts in person and so on, that leaders that get in a room together and can

01:15:55.840 | talk, they can stop war. I mean, that's the power of a leader, especially one in an authoritarian

01:16:04.160 | regime, that they can, through camaraderie, alleviate some of the emotions associated with the ego.

01:16:14.960 | - Yes, leaders can stop war if they get into the room when they understand from

01:16:24.080 | the masses in their countries that war is something that they want stopped.

01:16:31.760 | - So the people ultimately have a really big say.

01:16:34.240 | - They do. You know, that it was mass movements by people in the United States for the nuclear

01:16:40.960 | freeze, in Russia pushing for openness that brought, for example, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail

01:16:48.160 | Gorbachev to Reykjavik to sort of debate, you know, and eventually sort of put caps on nuclear weapons.

01:16:55.040 | You know, those two people made choices in the room that made that possible,

01:17:01.200 | but they were both being pushed and knew they were being pushed by their people.

01:17:06.800 | - Boy, that's a tough one. It puts a lot of responsibility on the German people, for example.

01:17:13.520 | In both wars, we fans of history tend to conceive of history as a meeting of leaders. We think of

01:17:23.200 | Chamberlain, we think of Churchill and the importance of them in the Second World War.

01:17:27.760 | I think about Hitler and Stalin and think that if certain conversations happened,

01:17:31.840 | they could have, the war could have been avoided. You tell the story of how many times Hitler

01:17:37.120 | and Nazi Germany's military might was not sufficient, they could have been easily stopped.

01:17:44.080 | And the pacifists, the people who believed Hitler, were foolish enough to believe Hitler,

01:17:52.480 | didn't act properly. And if the leaders just woke up to that idea,

01:17:57.120 | - Yeah. And in fact, Churchill is a kind of representation of that, but in your conception

01:18:04.320 | here, it's possible that Churchill was also a representation of the British people,

01:18:08.000 | even though seemingly unpopular, that force was,

01:18:12.720 | they gave birth to somebody like Churchill, who said, "We'll never surrender," right?

01:18:19.600 | - Yes. - "We shall fight in the beaches."

01:18:21.680 | - Yes. And I think World War II Britain is a good example of that. It is clearly a dynamic leader

01:18:30.880 | who has his pulse on what the people want and demand and are willing to do. And it's a dynamic

01:18:39.280 | art of leading that and shaping those wants at the same time as knowing that you're bound by them.

01:18:46.080 | - Well, then if we conceive of history in this way, let me ask you about our presidents.

01:18:51.920 | You are taking on the impossibly difficult task of teaching a course

01:18:57.840 | in a couple of years here, or in one year, called the History of American Presidential Elections.

01:19:04.880 | So if the people are in part responsible for leaders,

01:19:12.880 | how can we explain what is going on in America that we have the leaders that we do today?

01:19:18.800 | So if we think about the elections of the past several cycles,

01:19:24.720 | I guess let me ask, are we a divided nation? Are we more of a divided nation than we were in the

01:19:32.080 | past? What do you understand about the American citizen at the beginning of this century

01:19:39.120 | from the leaders we have elected? - Yes, obviously we are a divided country in our rhetoric,

01:19:46.480 | in our day-to-day politics, but we are nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods

01:20:00.320 | in our history, right? The most obvious, of course, being the American Civil War, right? 150 years ago.

01:20:08.000 | And the distinction is not just that we haven't come to blows, but that we are fundamentally one

01:20:16.960 | society, one economy, and deeply integrated as a nation, both domestically and on the world stage,

01:20:27.680 | in ways that look nothing like the United States in 1861. Will political rhetoric

01:20:37.600 | continue to be extreme? Of course. But we're not as divided as people think we are.

01:20:44.400 | - Well, then if you actually look throughout human history, does it always get so outside

01:20:55.200 | the people? Do the elections get as contentious as they've recently been?

01:20:59.920 | So there's a kind of perception that's been very close, and there's a lot of accusations,

01:21:06.880 | a lot of tensions, it's very heated, it's almost fueling the machine of division.

01:21:11.200 | Has that often been the case? - It has. We are... It has and it hasn't. I mean,

01:21:17.600 | I do think right now is different. And there it's worth distinguishing, you know, are there deep

01:21:23.840 | social or economic divisions, which I don't actually think that there are, versus partisanship

01:21:29.520 | in particular, sort of the rivalry between the two parties. And it's very clear that we are in

01:21:34.960 | an era of what political scientists call hyper-partisanship, right? And that the two

01:21:40.160 | parties have taken sort of fundamentally different positions and moved further apart from one another.

01:21:48.000 | And that is what I think people talk about when they say our country is divided. So the country

01:21:56.880 | may not be divided, even if our politics are highly partisan. That is a divergence from other

01:22:03.520 | time periods in our history. - So I wonder if this kind of political partisanship is actually

01:22:11.040 | an illusion of division. I sometimes feel like we mostly all agree on some basic fundamentals.

01:22:21.280 | And the things that people allegedly disagree on are really blown out of proportion. And there's

01:22:29.360 | like a media machine and the politicians really want you to pick a blue side and a red side. And

01:22:35.120 | because of that, somehow, I mean, families break up over Thanksgiving dinner about who they voted

01:22:41.600 | for. There's a really strong pressure to be the red or blue. And I wonder if that's a feature or

01:22:48.560 | a bug, whether this is just part of the mechanism of democracy that we want to, even if there's not

01:22:55.360 | a real thing to be divided over, we need to construct it such that you can always have a

01:22:59.840 | tension of ideas in order to make progress, to figure out how to progress as a nation.

01:23:07.120 | - I think we're figuring that out in real time. On the one hand, it's easy to say that it's a feature

01:23:14.320 | of a political system that has two parties. And the United States is in some ways unique

01:23:24.240 | in not being a parliamentary democracy. And so in some ways, you would think that would be the

01:23:29.280 | feature that is causing partisanship and to reach these heights. That said, we can even see in

01:23:37.840 | parliamentary systems and all around the world that the same kinds of rhetorics of irreconcilable

01:23:46.640 | division, a kind of politics of emotion are proliferating around the world. Some of that,

01:23:53.600 | as you say, I think is not as real as it appears on television, on social media and other formats.

01:24:03.360 | So I don't know that other countries that are experiencing sort of political conflict,

01:24:09.680 | I'm not sure that they're deeply divided either. - So I've had the fortune of being intellectually

01:24:18.720 | active through the George Bush versus Al Gore election, then the Obama, and it's just every

01:24:26.000 | election since, right? And it seems like a large percentage of those elections,

01:24:32.160 | there's been a claim that the elections were rigged, that there is some conspiracy, corruption,

01:24:40.160 | malevolence on the other side. I distinctly remember when Donald Trump won in 2016,

01:24:46.960 | a lot of people I know said that election was rigged and there's different explanations,

01:24:52.960 | including Russian influence. And then in 2020, I was just running in Austin along the river,

01:25:02.000 | and somebody said like, "Oh, huge fan of the podcast." And they said like, "What do you think

01:25:08.560 | of this? It's just not right what's happening in this country." That the 2020 election was

01:25:13.760 | obviously rigged from their perspective in electing Joe Biden versus Donald Trump.

01:25:22.960 | Do you think there's a case to be made for and against each claim in the full context of history

01:25:29.840 | of our elections being rigged? - I think the American election system is fundamentally

01:25:40.080 | sound and reliable. And I think that the evidence is clear for that, regardless of which election

01:25:54.880 | you're looking at. In some ways, whether you look at a presidential election or even a local

01:25:59.920 | county election for dog catcher or something, right? That the amount of time and resources

01:26:09.920 | and precision that go into voter registration, vote counting, certification processes

01:26:16.960 | are crucial to democratic institutions. I think when someone says "rigged,"

01:26:25.280 | regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're coming from,

01:26:32.480 | they're looking for an answer. They're looking for that one answer for what is in fact a complex

01:26:41.120 | system, right? So on the left, when they say "rigged," they may be pointing to a wide range

01:26:50.080 | of ways in which they think that the system is tilted through gerrymandering,

01:27:00.640 | sort of misrepresentation through the electoral college. On the right, when people say "rigged,"

01:27:06.560 | they may be concerned about voter security, about ways in which the media, mainstream media,

01:27:16.960 | may control messages. And in both cases, the feeling is it's articulated as "my vote didn't

01:27:28.400 | get counted right." But the deeper concern is "my vote doesn't count." You know, "my voice

01:27:36.640 | isn't being heard." So no, I don't think the elections are rigged.

01:27:43.200 | So let me sort of push back, right? There's a comfort to the story that they're not rigged.

01:27:48.240 | And a lot of us like to live in comfort. So people who articulate conspiracy theories say,

01:27:55.920 | "Sure, it's nice to be comfortable, but here's the reality." And the thing they articulate is

01:28:01.440 | there's incentives in close elections, which we seem to have nonstop close elections. There's so

01:28:07.120 | many financial interests. There's so many powerful people. Surely you can construct, not just with

01:28:14.080 | the media and all the ways you described both on the left and the right, that elections could be

01:28:18.880 | rigged, but literally, actually in a fully illegal way, manipulate the results of votes.

01:28:29.040 | Surely there's incentive to do that. And I don't think that's a totally ridiculous argument.

01:28:38.560 | Because it's like, all right, well, I mean, it actually lands to the question,

01:28:46.320 | which is a hard question for me to ask, because ultimately as an optimist of how many

01:28:51.920 | malevolent people out there and how many malevolent people are required to rig an election.

01:28:57.520 | So how many, what is the phase transition for a system to become from like a corruption light

01:29:06.000 | to corruption, to high level of corruption such that you could do things like rig elections,

01:29:12.320 | which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in the world even today?

01:29:19.360 | So yes, there is interference in elections and there has been in American history, right? And

01:29:24.560 | we can go all the way back into the 18th century. You don't have to go back to Texas in the 1960s,

01:29:32.320 | LBJ, to find examples of direct interference in the outcome of elections. And there are

01:29:39.840 | incentives to do that. Those incentives will only feel more existential as hyper-partisanship

01:29:48.560 | makes people think that the outcome of the elections are a matter of black and white or

01:29:56.400 | life and death. And you will see people sort of organizing sort of every way they can to shape

01:30:06.880 | elections, right? We saw this in the 1850s, right? When settlers, pro and anti-slavery sort of

01:30:12.960 | flooded into Kansas to try to sort of determine the outcome of an election. And we see this in

01:30:20.400 | the reconstruction period, right? When the Ku Klux Klan shows up to kind of, to block the doors for

01:30:27.040 | black voters in the South. This history is not new, it's there. I think what the reason why I

01:30:37.920 | think that the system is sound is not, or the reason when I say I believe that the election

01:30:44.080 | system is fundamentally sound, it's not, I'm not trying to be reassuring or encourage complacency,

01:30:52.640 | right? I'm saying like, you know, this is something that we need to do and to work on.

01:30:57.760 | So the current electoral mechanisms are sufficiently robust. Even if there is

01:31:05.200 | corruption, even if there is rigging, they're robust, like the force that corrects itself,

01:31:09.920 | self-corrects and ensures that nobody gets out of line is much stronger than the other incentives,

01:31:16.400 | which are like the corrupting incentives. And that's the thing I talked about corrupt,

01:31:22.000 | you know, visiting Ukraine, talking about corruption, where a lot of people talk about

01:31:26.320 | corruption as being a symptom, not if the system allows, creates the incentives for there to be

01:31:35.200 | corruption, humans will always go for corruption. That's just, you have to assume that. The power

01:31:40.240 | of the United States is that it constructs systems that prevent you from being corrupt at scale,

01:31:45.600 | at least, I mean, depends what you believe, but most of us, if you believe in this country,

01:31:49.840 | you have to, you believe in the self-correcting mechanisms of corruption, that even if that

01:31:58.000 | desire is in the human heart, the system resists it, prevents it. That's your current belief.

01:32:08.000 | Yes, as of today. But I do think that that will require oversight by institutions, ideally,

01:32:19.040 | ones that are insulated as much as possible from partisan politics, which is very difficult right

01:32:24.240 | now. And it will require the demands of the American people, that they want these elections

01:32:33.760 | to be fair and secure. And that means, you know, that means being willing to lose them,

01:32:40.800 | you know, regardless of which party you're in favor of. So what do you think about the power

01:32:45.040 | of the media to create partisanship? I'm really worried that there's a huge incentive, speaking

01:32:50.720 | of incentives, to divide the country. In the media and the politicians, I'm not sure where it

01:32:57.600 | originates, but it feels like it's the media. Maybe it's a very cynical perspective on journalism, but

01:33:03.440 | it seems like if we're angry and divided as evenly as possible, you're going to maximize

01:33:08.640 | the number of clicks. So it's almost like the media wants to elect people that are going to be

01:33:13.120 | the most divisive, maximizing. And the worry I have is they are not beyond either feeding,

01:33:25.840 | or if you want to be very cynical, manufacturing narratives that lead that division, like the

01:33:32.080 | narrative of an election being rigged. Because if you convinced half the populace that the election

01:33:37.360 | was completely rigged, that's a really good way to get a lot of clicks. And like, the very cynical

01:33:45.360 | view is, I don't know if the media machine will stop the destruction of our democracy

01:33:56.080 | in service of getting more clicks. It may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks,

01:34:03.360 | just because the fire as the thing burns down will get clicks. Am I putting too much blame

01:34:10.960 | on the media here? The machine of it? You're diagnosing the incentive structure,

01:34:16.240 | or depicting that with 100% accuracy. But I think history teaches that you might be giving

01:34:25.840 | the media too much causal power. That the American people are smarter than the media

01:34:34.800 | that they consume. And even today, we know that. People who consume, even people who consume

01:34:43.120 | just Fox or just MSNBC know what they're consuming. And so I don't think that media will be

01:34:53.280 | the solution. And I certainly don't think that returning to a media structure of the mid-20th

01:35:00.880 | century with three news channels that all tell us one story, that's no golden age that we're

01:35:08.080 | trying to get back to, for sure. - Well, there is a novel thing in human

01:35:13.600 | history, which is Twitter and social media and so on. So we're trying to find our footing as a nation

01:35:20.880 | to figure out how to think about politics, how to maintain our basic freedoms, our sense of

01:35:30.080 | democracy, of our interaction with government and so on on this new media, or medium of social media.

01:35:38.960 | Do you think Twitter, how do you think Twitter changed things? Do you think Twitter is good

01:35:45.120 | for democracy? Do you think it has changed what it means to be an American citizen?

01:35:50.880 | Or is it just the same old media mechanism? - It has not changed what it means to be an

01:35:57.840 | American citizen. It may have changed the day-to-day sound of being and the experience of

01:36:10.000 | it. It got noisier, it got louder, and it got more decentered. I think Twitter is paradoxical.

01:36:21.280 | On the one hand, it is a fundamentally democratic platform, and in some ways it democratizes

01:36:28.720 | institutions that had gatekeepers and authority figures for a very long time. But on the other

01:36:36.560 | hand, it's not a democratic institution at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and it operates

01:36:42.480 | under those principles. And so that said, it's an institution of American and global life

01:36:50.640 | that the people of the United States have the authority to regulate or reshape as they see fit,

01:37:00.000 | both that and other major media players. - So one of the most dramatic decisions

01:37:05.600 | that illustrate both sides of what you're saying is when Twitter decided to ban, I think permanently,

01:37:11.520 | the President of the United States, Donald Trump, off of Twitter. Can you make the case that that

01:37:19.600 | was a good idea and make the case that that was a bad idea? Can you see both perspectives on this?

01:37:24.800 | - Yes, I think, I mean, the simple fact of the matter is, you know, Twitter is a platform. It

01:37:31.840 | has rules of service. Twitter concluded that President Trump had violated the terms of service

01:37:38.720 | and blocked them, right? And if you have rules, you have to enforce them. Did it have, you know,

01:37:46.640 | did it have consequences? It had direct and predictable consequences, you know, that of

01:37:56.480 | creating a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken a side in politics

01:38:05.280 | or confirming their belief that it had done so. Will it have unintended consequences? You know,

01:38:12.960 | this is where the historian can come in and say, yes, there's always unintended consequences.

01:38:18.160 | And we don't know, you know, sort of what it would mean for political figures to be excluded

01:38:26.080 | from various media platforms under these notions, right, that they had violated terms of service,

01:38:36.400 | et cetera. So, you know, so I guess we'll see. - Well, to me, so I'm generally against censorship,

01:38:44.480 | but to take Twitter's perspective, it's unclear to me in terms of unintended consequences

01:38:53.040 | whether censoring a human being from being part of your platform is going to

01:38:59.600 | decrease or increase the amount of hate in the world. So there's a strong case to be made that

01:39:08.400 | banning somebody like Donald Trump increases the amount of resentment among people, and that's a

01:39:15.680 | very large number of people that support him or even love him or even see him as a great president,

01:39:21.600 | one of the greatest this country has had. And so if you completely suppress his voice,

01:39:26.080 | you're going to intensify the support that he has from just the regular support for another

01:39:34.240 | human being who ran for president to somebody that becomes an almost heroic figure for that

01:39:40.640 | set of people. Now, the flip side is removing a person from a platform like Donald Trump

01:39:50.080 | might lessen the megaphone of that particular person, might actually level the democratic

01:39:58.720 | notion that everybody has a voice. So basically removing the loud extremes is helpful for giving

01:40:04.960 | the center, the calm, the thoughtful voices more power. And so in that sense, that teaches a lesson

01:40:13.040 | that don't be crazy in any one direction. Don't go full, don't go Lenin, don't go Hitler, don't,

01:40:22.000 | don't, like you have to stay in the middle. There's divisions in the middle, there's discussions in

01:40:27.680 | the middle, but stay in the middle. That's sort of the steel man, the case for censoring. But I,

01:40:35.360 | boy, is censorship a slippery slope. And also, boy, is Twitter becoming a thing that's more than

01:40:44.720 | just a company. It seems like it's a medium of communication that we use for information,

01:40:52.320 | for knowledge, for wisdom even. During the period of COVID, we used it to gain an understanding of

01:41:01.440 | what the hell's going on, what should we do, what's the state of the art science. Science

01:41:06.080 | fundamentally transformed during the time of COVID because you have no time for the full review cycle

01:41:11.040 | that science usually goes through. And some of the best sources of information for me,

01:41:15.360 | from the conspiracy theory to the best doctors, was Twitter. The data, the stats, all that kind

01:41:22.800 | of stuff. And that feels like more than a company. And then Twitter and YouTube and different places

01:41:29.520 | took a really strong stance on COVID, which is the laziest stance in my opinion, which is we're

01:41:36.080 | gonna listen to whatever CDC or the institutions have said. But the reality is, you're an institution

01:41:43.760 | of your own now. You're kind of the press. You're like, there's a, it's a really difficult position.

01:41:52.960 | It's a really, really difficult position to take. But I wish they have stepped up and take on the

01:41:58.800 | full responsibility and the pain of fighting for the freedom of speech.

01:42:03.200 | Yes, they need to do that. But I'm struck by some of the things that you said, ways in which

01:42:15.440 | Twitter has the power to shape the conversation. And I don't think in a democratic society,

01:42:25.760 | democratic polities should cede that power to for-profit companies.

01:42:32.560 | Do you agree that it's possible that Twitter has that power currently? Do you sense that it has

01:42:38.800 | the power? Because my sense is Twitter has the power to start wars, like tweets have the power

01:42:43.840 | to start wars, to change the direction of elections. Maybe in the sense in the ways in which

01:42:53.440 | a wave has the power to wash away sand. It's still the medium. It's not in itself an actor.

01:43:02.640 | It's how actors use the platform, which requires us to scrutinize the structure of the platform

01:43:08.240 | and access to it. Unfortunately, it's not. Maybe it's similar to the wave. It's not just a medium.

01:43:12.800 | It's a medium plus. It's a medium that enables virality, that benefits from virality of

01:43:22.720 | engagement. And that means singular voices can have a disproportionate impact. Like, not even

01:43:33.120 | voices, singular ideas, dramatic ideas can have a disproportionate impact. And so that actually

01:43:39.520 | threatens, it's almost like, I don't know what the equivalent is in nature, but it's a wave that can

01:43:45.520 | grow exponentially because of the intensity of the, the initial intensity of the wave. I don't

01:43:54.000 | know how to describe this, a dynamical system, but it feels like, it feels like there is a

01:44:00.480 | responsibility there not to accelerate voices just because they get a lot of engagement. You

01:44:06.080 | have to have a proportional representation of that voice. But you're saying that

01:44:12.480 | a strong democracy should be robust to that. A strong democracy can and should, and will be. I

01:44:19.760 | mean, I think the other thing a historian will tell you about Twitter is that this too shall

01:44:23.680 | pass, right? But I do think the structures of the platform, of the algorithm, of this and other major

01:44:33.440 | players are eligible for scrutiny by democratic institutions.

01:44:40.560 | So, in preparing to teach the course, the history of American presidential elections,

01:44:46.960 | leading up to the 2024 elections, so one of the lessons of history is this too shall pass,

01:44:53.440 | so don't make everything about, this is going to either save or destroy our nation. That seems to

01:44:59.280 | be like the message of every single election as I'm doing Trump hands. Do you think Donald Trump,

01:45:07.120 | what do you think about the 2024 election? Do you think Donald Trump runs? Do you think the tension

01:45:13.760 | will grow? Or was that a singular moment? Do you think it'll be like AOC versus Trump or whoever,

01:45:24.560 | whatever the most drama-maximizing thing, will things stabilize?

01:45:29.120 | I think I can, you know, historians don't like to predict the future, but I can predict this one,

01:45:35.360 | that it will not be a calm and stabilized election. I think as of the time that we're

01:45:42.160 | talking in 2022, we don't, there are too many sort of open questions, particularly about whether Joe

01:45:48.160 | Biden will run for re-election. He says he will, but the jury I think is out on that. I can't

01:45:57.920 | predict whether Donald Trump will run for election or not. I think we do know that President Trump

01:46:08.800 | doesn't like to start things he can't win, and if the polling data suggests that he's not a

01:46:16.800 | credible candidate, he might be reluctant to enter the race and might find more appealing

01:46:23.840 | the kind of sideline, kind of kingmaker role that he's been crafting since he left the White House.

01:46:30.160 | You know, I think there are plenty of people who are, you know, dreaming that there's some

01:46:37.120 | sort of centrist candidate, you know, whether it's a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican

01:46:44.480 | who will, you know, save us from all of this, either within the party or in a third-party run.

01:46:51.440 | I don't think that's likely. Why aren't we getting them? Why don't you think it's likely?

01:46:55.520 | What's the explanation? There seems to be a general hunger for a person like this.

01:46:59.280 | You would, but the system sorts it out, right? You know, that the primary systems and the party,

01:47:04.880 | you know, party candidate selection systems, you know, will favor sort of more, you know,

01:47:10.160 | more partisan views, right? More conservative Republicans, more liberal Democrats as the kind

01:47:16.000 | of centric candidates. It seems like the system prefers mediocre executor, mediocre leaders,

01:47:24.400 | mediocre partisan leaders. If I take a cynical look, but maybe I'm romanticizing the leaders

01:47:31.440 | of the past, and maybe I'm just remembering the great leaders of the past. And yeah.

01:47:36.880 | I can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century.

01:47:40.320 | Okay. And the 20th. Well, let me ask you about platforming. Do you think,

01:47:49.840 | Donald, it's the Twitter question, but I was torn about whether to talk to Donald

01:47:55.600 | Trump on this podcast. As a historian, what would you advise?

01:48:01.360 | I think, I mean, you know, this is a difficult question, right? For historians who want,

01:48:08.960 | you know, sort of want to make sure that they know sort of what Americans are thinking and

01:48:16.160 | talking about, you know, four centuries later. So one of the things that, you know, at least my

01:48:22.160 | understanding is that when President Trump was banned from Twitter, his account was also deleted.

01:48:30.080 | And that is one of the most valuable sources that historians will use to understand the era. And

01:48:37.280 | parts of it were sort of, you know, archived and reconstructed. But, you know, but in that sense,

01:48:42.960 | I think that that is also a real loss to the historical record. I mean, I think that your

01:48:50.080 | podcast shows you'll talk to anyone. I'm here, right? So, you know, I'm not in the business of

01:48:58.720 | saying, you know, don't talk to me. That's one of the difficult things when I think about Hitler.

01:49:04.080 | I think Hitler, Stalin, I don't know if World War I quite has the same intensity of

01:49:10.960 | controversial leaders. But one of the sad things from a historian perspective is how few interviews

01:49:19.760 | Hitler has given or Stalin has given. And that's such a difficult thing because it's obvious that

01:49:27.680 | talking to Donald Trump, that talking to Xi Jinping, talking to Putin is really valuable from

01:49:35.760 | a historical perspective to understand. But then you think about the momentary impact of such a

01:49:42.400 | conversation and you think, well, depending on how the conversation goes, you could steer or flame,

01:49:52.320 | what is it, feed the flame of war or conflict or abuses of power and things like this.

01:50:00.400 | And that's, I think, the tension between the journalist and the historian.

01:50:04.960 | Because when journalists interview dictators, for example, one of the things that strikes me

01:50:13.440 | is they're often very critical of the dictator. They're basically attacking them in front of

01:50:23.600 | their face as opposed to trying to understand. Because what I perceive they're doing is they're

01:50:29.360 | signaling to the other journalists that they're on the right side of history kind of thing.

01:50:34.320 | But that's not very productive. And it's also why the dictators and leaders often don't do

01:50:40.160 | those interviews. It's not productive to understand who the human being is. To understand,

01:50:44.640 | you have to empathize. Because few people, I think, few leaders do something

01:50:51.040 | from a place of malevolence. I think they really do think they're doing good.

01:50:56.080 | And not even for themselves, not even for selfish reasons. I think they're doing great for the,

01:51:01.600 | they're doing the right thing for their country or for whoever the group they're leading. And

01:51:08.240 | to understand that, you have to, and by the way, a large percent of the country often supports them.

01:51:14.400 | I bet if you legitimately poll people in North Korea, they will believe that their leader is

01:51:22.160 | doing the right thing for their country. And so to understand that, you have to empathize.

01:51:29.120 | So that's the tension of the journalist, I think, and the historian. Because obviously,

01:51:32.880 | the historian doesn't care. They really want to, they care, obviously, deeply. But they know that

01:51:39.280 | history requires deep understanding of the human being in the full context. Yeah, it's a tough

01:51:46.000 | decision to make. - Yeah. Well, I think it's both for journalists and historians, the challenge is

01:51:52.080 | not to be too close to your subject, right? And not to be overly influenced and used by them,

01:52:01.600 | right? When you're talking to a living subject, which historians do, too, it's a matter of making

01:52:09.920 | sure that you triangulate their story with the rest of the record, right? And that may paint

01:52:17.440 | a different picture of the person than, and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian from

01:52:24.160 | kind of just telling someone else's story. And historians also have the benefit of going back

01:52:32.080 | 30, 40 years and finding all the other stories and figuring out, playing two truths and a lie,

01:52:39.520 | which parts are accurate, which are not. And journalists do that work in a day-to-day basis,

01:52:45.760 | but historians, we get a little more time to think about what we're doing.

01:52:50.400 | - Well, I personally also think it's deeply disrespectful to the populace, to people,

01:52:56.240 | to censor and ignore a person that's supported by a very large number of people.

01:53:03.600 | Like, that you owe, I personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country

01:53:14.240 | a deep empathy and understanding of the leaders they support, even if you disagree with what they

01:53:21.680 | say. I mean, that's, to me, I'm much more worried about the resentment of the censorship, that it's,

01:53:29.760 | to having a good conversation with Donald Trump is ultimately valuable, because he, I think,

01:53:37.120 | especially in this case, I agree with you that Donald Trump is not a singular person.

01:53:43.040 | He is a, he represents a set of feelings that a large number of people have. And whatever those

01:53:48.960 | feelings are, you can try to figure out by talking to people, but also talking to the man,

01:53:55.120 | and then seeing the interplay there, what does this really represent? In this period in history,

01:54:00.960 | in this slice of the world, yeah, ultimately understanding, I think, leads to compassion

01:54:08.960 | and love and unity, which is how this whole thing progresses. The tension between the different

01:54:14.000 | sides is useful to have a good conversation, but ultimately coming up with the right answer

01:54:20.880 | and progressing towards that answer is how you make progress. Do you think a pure democracy can

01:54:26.800 | work? So we have this representative democracy, with these contentious elections and so on.

01:54:34.560 | When we start a civilization on Mars, which becomes more and more realistic technologically,

01:54:41.120 | we can have a more direct access to be able to vote on issues and vote for ideas. Do you think

01:54:47.360 | it can work? I don't think we have to go to Mars to do it, right? I think the answer is not, you

01:54:57.200 | know, to flip a switch and turn on something called pure democracy. When people are not ready

01:55:04.160 | for it, when their incentive structures are not sort of structured for it, but you can, you know,

01:55:11.200 | experiment with more democratic forms of governance, one after another, right? Whether

01:55:15.920 | it's, you know, sort of experimenting with technology to find new ways of sort of getting

01:55:23.280 | greater rates of participation in democracy. I think that we see some experiments in sort of

01:55:31.200 | more complicated systems of voting that in fact might actually be more reflective of people's

01:55:38.080 | choices than simply picking one candidate, right? Sort of rank choice voting or run-offs, other

01:55:43.760 | kinds of things. You know, I think that we can think more creatively about something like

01:55:50.000 | participatory budgeting, right? In which, you know, we put all this money into the government

01:55:55.120 | and then, you know, we should as a people, there are more democratic ways of sort of how we spend

01:56:02.400 | it. And I think the most urgent in some level is a more democratic form of foreign policy making,

01:56:07.680 | right? That foreign policy making, decision making about the military, about foreign policy

01:56:13.200 | is in many ways insulated from popular participation in modern American history.

01:56:21.120 | And I think, you know, technology is not the going to solve this, you know, it's a combination

01:56:28.320 | of technology and human creativity, but I think, you know, I think we can start heading that

01:56:33.680 | direction. Whether we get there before we get to Mars, I don't know.

01:56:37.520 | What interesting lessons and thoughts, if you look at the fundamentals of the history of American

01:56:43.920 | elections, do you hope to reveal when you try to teach the class? And how would those fundamentals

01:56:53.520 | be met by the students that receive that wisdom? So, what do you think about this dance? Especially

01:57:02.720 | such an interesting idea, and I hope you do go through with this kind of idea, is look at the

01:57:08.000 | history while the next one is happening. Yes. I think, you know, it's worth remembering,

01:57:16.640 | right, that the students who are typical American student who's in college right now,

01:57:21.920 | right, has lived their entire life after the election of 2000 and Bush v. Gore, right?

01:57:30.480 | And after 9/11 probably. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, after all of these things, right? And

01:57:38.320 | so, on the one hand, they take partisanship and contentious elections for granted.

01:57:44.720 | They don't, I think, share, you know, sort of some vision that things were, you know,

01:57:54.000 | things used to be different, right? They don't remember a world that had, like, lots of moderate

01:57:59.520 | Democrats and liberal Republicans and, you know, sort of running around in it. But, you know,

01:58:06.800 | so in some ways, it's a way of looking back into the past to find other ways of organizing our

01:58:13.040 | politics. It's also a way of reassuring students that we have been through contentious and even

01:58:20.880 | violent elections before in our history. And, you know, that people have defended the right to vote,

01:58:29.280 | right? People have risked their lives to vote. You know, I think they will understand that as well.

01:58:36.320 | And maybe knowledge of history here can help de-escalate the emotions you might feel about

01:58:44.000 | one candidate or another. And from a place of calmness, you can more easily arrive at wisdom.

01:58:51.520 | That's my hope.

01:58:54.560 | Just as a brief aside, you, brief aside, but nevertheless, you wrote the book Bound by War

01:59:04.080 | that describes a century of war in the Pacific. So looking at this slice of geography

01:59:11.040 | and power, so most crucially through the partnership between the United States and

01:59:18.240 | the Philippines, can you tell us some aspect of the story that is often perhaps not considered

01:59:24.720 | when you start to look more at the geopolitics of Europe and Soviet Union and the United States?

01:59:32.400 | How did the war in the Pacific define the 20th century?

01:59:37.280 | Yeah, I came to this book Bound by War from a sense that our stories were too lopsided

01:59:45.680 | toward Europe, right? That American history, when viewed from the Pacific, specifically in the 20th

01:59:53.120 | century, helps us understand American power in some new ways. Not only American projection of

02:00:02.480 | power into Asia, but also the ways in which American power affected people in Asia, either

02:00:10.720 | as in places like the Philippines where the United States had a colony for almost 50 years,

02:00:17.120 | or Asian Americans, people who had migrated or their descendants in the United States.

02:00:21.920 | And those linkages between the United States and Asia, particularly the US-Philippine connection,

02:00:28.000 | I think were something that needed to be traced across the 20th century, because it's a way,

02:00:32.400 | kind of a new way of seeing American power from a different angle, you see it in that way.

02:00:38.640 | What are some aspects that define America from when you take the perspective of the Pacific?

02:00:44.880 | What military conflict and the asymmetry of power there?

02:00:50.080 | Right. So I start in 1898, with the US invasion of the Philippines, its conquest and annexation.

02:00:59.040 | And I think in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th century that's often

02:01:05.040 | completely overlooked, or described, I think, incorrectly as merely a war with Spain, right?

02:01:10.560 | That the war in the Philippines is our first extended overseas conflict, our first conflict

02:01:17.840 | in what would come to be called the developing world or third world. It's a form of counter

02:01:22.880 | insurgency. You know, this is the US Army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in

02:01:29.280 | the Second World War, in Korea, Vietnam, and even after 9/11.

02:01:33.360 | Is the Philippines our friends or enemies in this history?

02:01:36.400 | Well, that's the interesting part, right, is that the book focuses in particular on Filipinos

02:01:41.600 | who fight with the Americans who fought, you know, sort of in the US Army and Navy

02:01:46.960 | over the course of the 20th century, and they are in a fundamentally ironic position,

02:01:51.360 | right? They are from the Philippines, and they're fighting for the United States,

02:01:55.040 | which is the colonial power occupying their country. And I think that that irony persists,

02:02:02.480 | right? So if you look at sort of polling data, where they ask people all around the world,

02:02:07.520 | you know, do you think positively or negatively about the United States,

02:02:11.760 | that the highest responses are from the Philippines, right? Filipinos view the United

02:02:17.760 | States more favorably than people from any other country in the world, including America, right?

02:02:23.680 | That they think more favorably of Americans than Americans do. And so, you know, sort of unpacking

02:02:29.280 | that irony is part of what I'm trying to get at in the book.

02:02:32.240 | What was the People Power Revolution, and what lessons can we learn from it?

02:02:36.640 | You kind of assign an important, a large value to it in terms of what we can learn

02:02:44.080 | for the American project. Yeah. So in 1986, the president of the

02:02:51.360 | Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, is overthrown by a popular revolution known as People Power,

02:02:56.160 | in the wake of a contested and probably almost certainly rigged election that sort of,

02:03:03.920 | you know, kind of confirms his rule. When that is overturned through sort of mass movements in

02:03:11.680 | the Philippines, it's also sort of confirmed in many ways by the reluctance of the United States

02:03:18.880 | to intervene to prop up a Cold War ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American policy throughout

02:03:24.800 | his administration. The Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan's president at the time,

02:03:29.760 | basically chooses not to support him. That's a personally wrenching decision for Reagan himself.

02:03:35.520 | But he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative political,

02:03:42.720 | foreign policy voices, in particular, Paul Wolfowitz in the State Department and others,

02:03:48.720 | who see sort of movements for democracy and democratization that then kind of take fire in

02:03:54.800 | the late 20th century in Latin America, in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, and, you know,

02:04:01.440 | all around the world until it hits the wall in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

02:04:06.320 | Well, what's that wall? What's the wall? What do you mean by it hits the wall?

02:04:14.080 | So there are, you know, there are global movements for democratization, for opening up,

02:04:21.440 | you know, throughout the world, starting in the 1980s. And, you know, obviously,

02:04:26.240 | they continue in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. You know, I say it hits

02:04:31.680 | the wall in China with the protests in Tiananmen Square that are blocked and that are crushed,

02:04:40.320 | and I think represent a real sort of turning point in the history of democratic institutions

02:04:47.920 | on a global scale in the late 20th century.

02:04:49.840 | So there's some places where the fight for freedom will work and some places not,

02:04:56.000 | and that's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century.

02:05:03.920 | No, I think the lesson is maybe one that, you know, we talked about earlier,

02:05:09.920 | that there's this dynamic dance between leaders, whether totalitarian leaders

02:05:16.240 | or leaders of democratic movements, and the people that they're leading.

02:05:19.760 | And, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

02:05:24.400 | Let me ask a big ridiculous question because we talked about sort of presidential elections.

02:05:29.200 | Now, this is objectively, definitively, you have to answer one person,

02:05:33.840 | who's the greatest president in American history?

02:05:35.920 | Oh, that's easy.

02:05:37.840 | Yeah.

02:05:38.160 | Abraham Lincoln.

02:05:38.960 | Is that easy? Not George Washington?

02:05:44.880 | You know, Washington had the statesman qualities.

02:05:48.640 | He understood his power as the first president.

02:05:53.040 | Also relinquished power.

02:05:54.560 | He was willing to relinquish power.

02:05:56.080 | But Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership, a fundamental moral character,

02:06:09.760 | and just the ability to kind of fight the fight of politics, to play the game of it,

02:06:15.520 | to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game, to kind of, you know,

02:06:20.880 | to work with his enemies, to block them when he had to.

02:06:25.840 | And, you know, I mean, he gets the United States through the Civil War.

02:06:30.800 | So you got to give him some credit for that.

02:06:32.480 | And he's pretty good at making speeches.

02:06:35.280 | Obviously, it helps that he's a remarkable speaker and able to convey those kinds of visions.

02:06:41.840 | But he is first and foremost a politician, and probably the best one we have.

02:06:48.080 | Both at getting elected and at ruling.

02:06:51.440 | In some ways, better at the doing than at the getting elected, right?

02:06:58.480 | You know, the election of 1860 is a, it's just a hot mess, you know, that could have worked out

02:07:04.320 | many different ways.

02:07:05.840 | And even the election of 1864, you know, when we have a presidential election in the middle

02:07:11.600 | of a Civil War, it was not a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would be reelected.

02:07:16.880 | So, you know, both times he sort of, you know, he's not a master campaigner by any means,

02:07:24.160 | but he was a master politician as a governor.

02:07:28.080 | - Do we have leaders like that today?

02:07:30.800 | So one perspective is like, leaders aren't, ain't what they used to be.

02:07:37.440 | And then another perspective is, well, we always romanticize stuff that happens in the past.

02:07:42.080 | We forget the flaws and remember the great moments.

02:07:45.440 | - Yeah, both of those things are true, right?

02:07:49.360 | On the one hand, you know, we are not surrounded by people of Lincoln's caliber right now.

02:07:58.000 | - That feels like the case.

02:07:59.360 | - And I think that, I think we can say that with some certainty.

02:08:03.200 | But, you know, I always like to point to President Harry Truman, who left office with, you know,

02:08:12.560 | some truly abysmal presidential ratings, was dismissed as a, throughout his presidency,

02:08:19.440 | as a, you know, as unqualified, as not knowing what he was doing, et cetera.

02:08:24.960 | And then, you know, turns out, with hindsight, we know that he was better at the job than anyone

02:08:31.360 | understood.

02:08:32.320 | Better at getting elected, right?

02:08:33.760 | You remember that sign, "Dewey defeats Truman," right?

02:08:36.000 | He showed them, right?

02:08:37.680 | And better at holding power and better at sort of, you know, kind of building the kind of

02:08:43.120 | institutions that long after he was gone, demonstrated that he won the long game.

02:08:50.160 | - And some of that is the victors do write the story.

02:08:55.120 | And I ask myself very much, how will history remember Vladimir Zelensky?

02:09:01.600 | It's not obvious.

02:09:03.440 | And how will history remember Putin?

02:09:06.480 | That too is not obvious.

02:09:09.760 | Because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics, the, how the nations, how the history of these

02:09:20.000 | nations unravel, unfold, rather.

02:09:22.400 | So it's very interesting to think about.

02:09:25.920 | And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on.

02:09:36.720 | I think it's probably an unanswerable question of which of the presidents will be remembered

02:09:43.520 | as a great president from this time.

02:09:45.040 | You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of people, and they do.

02:09:49.600 | But it's unclear.

02:09:51.120 | It's fascinating to think about when the robots finally take over, which of the humans

02:09:56.560 | they will appreciate the most.

02:09:57.840 | Let me ask for advice.

02:10:00.800 | Do you have advice for young folks as they, 'cause you mentioned the folks you're teaching,

02:10:09.920 | they don't even, they don't know what it's like to have waited on the internet for the

02:10:15.520 | thing to load up.

02:10:16.320 | For every single web page, it's suffering.

02:10:19.360 | They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes

02:10:23.520 | (mimics dial tone) and then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical

02:10:29.200 | phone.

02:10:29.440 | They don't know any of that.

02:10:30.640 | So for those young folks that look at the contentious elections, that look at our contentious

02:10:37.440 | world, our divided world, what advice would you give them of how to have a career they

02:10:43.200 | can be proud of, let's say they're in college or in high school, and how to have a life

02:10:47.760 | they can be proud of?

02:10:48.800 | - Oh man, that's a big question.

02:10:52.160 | Yeah, I've never given a graduation speech.

02:10:56.000 | - This is like warmup.

02:10:57.920 | Let's look for raw materials before you write it.

02:11:00.560 | - If I did, I think I would advise students that history teaches that you should be more

02:11:12.800 | optimistic than your current surroundings suggest, right?

02:11:17.440 | And I think it would be very easy as a young person today to think there's nothing I can

02:11:23.600 | do about this politics.

02:11:25.040 | There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle.

02:11:29.280 | There's nothing I can do about the planet, et cetera, and just sort of give up.

02:11:35.680 | And I think history teaches that we don't know who the winners and losers are in the

02:11:44.640 | long run, but we know that the people who give up are always the losers, right?

02:11:49.920 | - So don't give in to cynicism or apathy.

02:11:53.040 | - Yeah.

02:11:53.680 | - Optimism paves the way.

02:11:55.680 | - Yeah, because human beings are deeply resilient and creative, even under far more difficult

02:12:03.200 | circumstances than we face right now.

02:12:07.120 | - Well, let me ask a question that you don't even need to, that you wouldn't even dare

02:12:11.040 | cover in your graduation commencement speech.

02:12:14.880 | What's the meaning of life?

02:12:16.800 | Why are we here?

02:12:18.160 | This whole project that history studies and analyzes as if there's a point to the whole

02:12:24.800 | thing, what is the point?

02:12:26.320 | All the wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be

02:12:34.880 | human or reach for a higher ideal, why?

02:12:39.920 | Why do you think we're here?

02:12:40.960 | - Hmm.

02:12:41.600 | I think this is where there is often a handoff from the historian to the clergy, right?

02:12:52.960 | - Yes.

02:12:53.460 | - You know, who, but in the end, there's less distance between the two than you think,

02:13:01.840 | right?

02:13:03.360 | That, you know, if you think about some of the kind of answers to that question, what

02:13:08.960 | is the meaning of life that are given from religious traditions, often they have a fundamentally

02:13:16.400 | historical core, right?

02:13:18.320 | It's about, you know, unifying the past and the present in some other, you know, non-earthly

02:13:25.280 | sort of dimension.

02:13:26.800 | And, you know, so I think there is that.

02:13:31.280 | I think even for people who don't have religious belief, there's a way in which history

02:13:38.400 | and is about the shared human condition.

02:13:41.280 | And I think historians aspire to telling all of that story, right?

02:13:48.560 | You know, we drill down on the miseries of war and depressions and so forth, but, you

02:13:56.800 | know, the story is not complete without, you know, blueberries and butterflies and all

02:14:03.520 | the rest that go with it.

02:14:05.680 | - So both the humbling and the inspiring aspect that you get by looking back at human history

02:14:15.360 | that we're in this together.

02:14:18.080 | Christopher, this is a huge honor.

02:14:22.000 | This is an amazing conversation.

02:14:23.360 | Thank you for taking us back to a war that not often discussed, but in many ways defined

02:14:28.640 | the 20th century and the century we are in today, which is the First World War.

02:14:35.600 | The war that was supposed to end all wars, but instead defined the future wars and defines

02:14:41.040 | our struggle to try to avoid World War III.

02:14:43.840 | So it's a huge honor you to talk with me today.

02:14:46.400 | This is amazing.

02:14:47.680 | Thank you so much.

02:14:48.400 | - Thank you.

02:14:49.200 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Christopher Capozzola.

02:14:53.680 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:14:56.880 | And now let me leave you with some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about World War I that

02:15:04.400 | haunted the rest of the 20th century.

02:15:06.560 | "This is a war to end all wars."

02:15:10.080 | George Santana, a Spanish-American philosopher responded to this quote in 1922 by saying,

02:15:18.080 | "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

02:15:21.760 | Thank you for listening.

02:15:25.120 | I hope to see you next time.

02:15:27.280 | (upbeat music)

02:15:30.080 | (upbeat music)

02:15:32.160 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320

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