Michael Zinder:
Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Zinder. I'm a Brandeis alumnus Class of 75, and a member of the Brandeis Alumni Association board of directors. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's program on behalf of that alumni association, and features a conversation between two great professors, Leah Wright Rigueur, the Harry Truman Associate Professor of History at Brandeis, and Julian Zelizer, Class of 91 at Brandeis and the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes Class of 41, Professor of History and Public Affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. We're delighted to welcome all of you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, students and friends from around the world, thank you so much for joining us today for this exciting presentation on American democracy and the American presidency. Now to introduce our speakers. First, Leah Wright Rigueur, as mentioned is the Harry S Truman Associate Professor of American History at Brandeis University. Her research expertise includes 20th century American political and social history, modern African-American history, race, politics, civil rights, contemporary social movements, political ideologies and institutions, as well as the American presidency.
Michael Zinder:
Professor Rigueur is the author of the award-winning study, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power, published in 2015. Her writing, research and commentary has been featured in major news and media outlets, and in many publications such as CNN, MSNBC, CBS News, and media outlets such as PBS, NPR, A&E Networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and more. She's a regular contributor for ABC News. And Professor Rigueur earned her PhD in History from Princeton University and a BA in History from Dartmouth College.
Michael Zinder:
Julian Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He's the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes class of 41 Professor, as I mentioned, of History and Public Affairs at Princeton, a frequent CNN political analyst where I've seen him often, a regular guest on NPR's Here and Now. Professor Zelizer is the author and editor of 21 books on American political history, including The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, which was the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for best book on Congress.
Michael Zinder:
His latest book, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the new Republican Party, was just published in 2020 by Penguin Press. The New York Times named that book an Editor's Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020. Next fall, Yale University Press will publish his new autobiography about Abraham Joshua Heschel for the Jewish Lives Series. And Columbia University Press will publish his book Defining the Age- Daniel Bell, His Time and Ours, co-edited with Paul Starr. Professor Zelizer is also working on a new book, which would be an edited collection concerning The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment, which will be published in 2022, and something I'm sure we're all anxious to see.
Michael Zinder:
Professor Zelizer has published over 1000 op-eds, including a frequent column on CNN, has received prestigious fellowships from The Brookings Institution, The Guggenheim Foundation, The Russell Sage society, as well as New America and the New York Historical Society. He also co-hosts a popular podcast called Politics and Polls. And I just wanted to mention, there'll be some time for Q & A at the end. And if you could please use the Q & A button when you want to submit a question, that would be terrific. But with that, I'd like to welcome Professors Rigueur and Zelizer, and let's start the conversation.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So thank you so much for that really wonderful introduction, Michael. And thank you all for coming out tonight on this evening, and really for joining us for this conversation about the American presidency and democracy, and I think American politics more broadly. So before we get started, I think I should reveal the connection that Julian and I have, and it's not just the Brandeis connection. Julian was actually on my Dissertation Committee and was instrumental in really helping me think through kind of the really messy and uneven edges of my dissertation. And in fact, was one of the first people to really encourage me to bridge the gap between history and American politics with something as simple as saying, "Well, have you thought about applying to present your work at the American Political Science Association?" As a graduate student, it hadn't even occurred to me that that was something that history students could do, but this is what I think Julian had been doing for so long, right?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Bridging this gap, being really the bond between history and politics and really policy as well, and really thinking creatively about how to do history and politics and how they're intrinsic and integral to one another. So you can't really understand American politics without understanding American history, and certainly vice versa. The reverse is true as well. So I think that's useful in kind of understanding where both of us are coming from and where we're starting from in this conversation, particularly as we move into some of these really large questions about the contemporary state of American democracy. So I thought I would start off the conversation by just asking Julian, what is the state of American democracy in the United States right now? Where are we?
Julian Zelizer:
Well first, thanks for that, those nice comments and the introductions. And it's, I'll just say wonderful to join. 30 years ago, I graduated from Brandeis, and I feel incredibly connected to the school, and some of the questions and elements of how I think that you just raised were really born from my years there. And some of the great professors and students who I know might be on this call, who I met, really helped me think about these at an early age. Look, there's three schools. One school is, everything's AOK. A second school is, we have pretty big problems, problems that go beyond who's in the white house, structural problems that have manifested themselves and exposed themselves particularly in the last four years. And then there is a third school that concludes, it is broken, almost to the point that we are no longer in a place we can repair our democracy.
Julian Zelizer:
And I don't know where you are, or if there's another category. I tend to be in two. And I don't discount the severity of some of the problems that we have. I think for me, when I look back at the last four years, I don't think of them just as being about Donald Trump, President Trump, but I think in many ways he brought to light some of the pervasive problems that we have, for example, the ease with which disinformation now spreads in the public square and is often a rhetorical tool that leaders are willing to use.
Julian Zelizer:
The way in which partisanship often gridlocks Washington, not often, almost always, to deal with many of the long-term problems that we face, whether it's climate change or racial justice. And then other issues like money and politics and how pervasive that's become. So I think there's been moments in American history where we have reformed or improved some of the problems, but I don't discount the kind of dangers we face, not just because you don't like how people speak to each other politically, but because we're unable to actually address core issues until it's too late. I don't know. I mean, I'd love to hear how you think about this kind of question.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Sure. I love the categorization you offerred, that category one, category two, category three. And I think I'm somewhere between category two and category three. And let me explain a bit about why not just category two. Something fundamentally, I think, broke for me in the aftermath of the explosion of this global pandemic, but also kind of the way in which it just ravaged the United States and continues to ravage the United States, and the way we responded to it, coupled with kind of the George Floyd moment that happened almost a year ago. And that the combination of those two moments, and add on top of that, the Trump presidency and everything that the Trump president exposed and the kind of depths which we went that really culminated in that January 6 seize on the Capitol, or insurrection, however we want to look at it, Capital riots, where I said, "I don't know how you fix this."
Leah Wright Rigueur:
I certainly can talk about how we got here, but I think one of the things I've really been struggling with as a historian who is interested in contemporary politics and policy, is how do we make sense of this in the present and come up with solutions to actually address this? How do we not repeat this? And I'm thinking, for example, Trump, I think today said he was planning on running in 2024, perhaps with Candace Owens as his running mate. And the thought of that was deeply alarming as I'm thinking about it, but I also recognized exactly what you said Julian, which is that, Trump is a symptom of greater problems.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
He simply illuminated problems that were inherent to these institutions and the very function of democracy in our country. So I guess I want to put it back on you for a second and think about... Talk us through a little bit, and I think we can expand as we talk through this, but talk me through a little bit about how we got here, and how do we get to a point where we're essentially saying it's not just everything is fine, or we need some reform and then there are deep-rooted issues, but that there's fundamentally a part of the United States that believes that the system is broken. How do we get to this point?
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah, I mean, I'm always listing things, then I realize that I'm going to list them again. I mean, some of the problems that we're talking about are just not new. And you and I have studied these over time, and many historians wouldn't be surprised to see nativism rear its head, or to see white backlash politics, whatever you want to call that, be at the forefront. Because it's been around from the start, it has had many moments where it's front and center and certainly if you study the end of the 60s and 70s, a lot of this was coming to the fore already, to the forefront of American politics. Then you have the issue of polarization. And that's something a lot of people have studied. And it's basically after the 1960s, you have the reconstitution of many of our political institutions, how the political parties work, how the news media works and so on that have certainly fueled the separation between the two parties with a diminishing place for the center, but also created institutions like Fox News that continue to propel extremely partisan politics and decision-making.
Julian Zelizer:
And so you have just the underside of American history and public life, you have political polarization, which has left Washington for sure and many state capitals, and many voters, just far apart on basic issues. And the final one, which I think doesn't always get discussed enough is that the partisanship has not happened equally. And so this is an idea a lot of political scientists call asymmetric polarization. And the idea is that Republicans over the last few decades moved much further as a whole to their extreme than Democrats did. Democrats remain much more divided as a party, they remain much more bound to traditional processes of government, even when you had progressive caucuses and progressive figures, whereas Republicans moved much further to the right as a whole on policy. And what I wrote about with Newt Gingrich in the 80s, also in partisanship. It was a different kind of partisanship.
Julian Zelizer:
It was a partisanship without any sort of guardrails in terms of what you could do to achieve power. And I think what's become pretty clear in the last few years, and I think it's before Trump, you saw with the Tea Party, is just how this radicalization of the party is influencing, not just politicians but voters. And so you put all these together and I think it leaves us in a incredibly vulnerable state as we have seen. And so those are the things I think are at work all at once. And it's important to disentangle them, because some of the things we're talking in terms of what you can fix, can fix part of that, but it doesn't fix some of the other elements. Yeah.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Yeah. And I'm thinking too. So there's so much there that you offered up that I think that we should certainly unpack. And I want to come back in a second and ask you a question about Rush Limbaugh, and especially in the wake of his passing. But I want to start actually by revisiting Newt Gingrich. And you've just written this really wonderful book, Burning Down... I love that title, Burning Down the House, that looks at Newt Gingrich as an insurgent. And I have to say, for a very long time, I really struggled with how to treat Newt Gingrich. And I should say in my own research, I came across Newt Gingrich all the time. Not as an antagonist, right? Not as one these bad guys in a smoke filled room and chomping on cigars plotting things, but actually working with black Democrats, working with Jesse Jackson, showing up in the most unusual places for really kind of disruptive or insurgent reasons, right?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
And I would love if you maybe could talk a bit about this, or a little bit later on about the contract of America, but this is why in 1986 he ends up supporting the Anti-Apartheid Act in the face of opposition from Ronald Reagan and says, "This becomes a way that I'm going to seize power within the Republican party, by going against the old guard." And in your words, blowing off the guard ribs. Right? So ignoring all of what I have to do in order to seize that semblance of power. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about Newt Gingrich and this kind of career that he has as an insurgent, as a disruptor, as someone who doesn't care about perhaps the traditions and norms that we think about with American politics, but does so in a way that has deep and long lasting impact in the present.
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I wrote the book before Donald Trump ever announced he was going to be president. It was pretty much done. So Donald Trump wasn't on my mind at all, even though since it's come out, people have naturally connected the two. But you captured a lot of what Gingrich was. I mean, he comes into Washington in 79, he wins office in 78. And he's seen as someone by both parties, who's pretty dangerous, kind of person you don't want to get too close to, because he was really arguing that younger Republicans had to be prepared to do just about anything. And that meant taking down Democrats, it meant taking down senior Republicans, it meant taking all the processes and norms and ideas of governing that had guided politicians for many, many decades and throwing them out the window. And he wrote about this.
Julian Zelizer:
He said, "Civility and bipartisanship, who cares about that stuff? All that it's going to do is keep Democrats in power." And that Republicans had to go much further if they were going to seize power. And remember Democrats had controlled Congress. They controlled the House since 1955 and effectively since 1933. And Republicans only controlled the Senate for a short period between 1981 and 87, period you've written about. And so he argued, for example, with rhetoric, "Stop worrying about what you say about your opponents. Be willing to say anything." And there's a famous memo he releases in 1990, which famously instructs Republicans to use words like traitorous and treasonous and stealing, and just every kind of adjective that you could think of, which at the time was pretty shocking. He takes basic processes like the budget or the ethics rules, and he weaponizes them. Rather than using them to try to make government better, he blows them up, he makes them a way to attack Democrats.
Julian Zelizer:
And he's very good and very effective at totally tearing people apart in public, ripping their reputation to shreds and criminalizing them in a way that really disturbed a lot of senior members of both parties. But Republicans, over the course of the 80s, they sign on to this, including people like George H W Bush, because Gingrich's promise was, "If you do this, we will finally get a majority in Congress. We will finally have actual power to change things, to do what we want, to make Democrats an irrelevant party." And it culminates in 1994 when Republicans seize control of the House, they win control. And it seemed that Gingrich had fulfilled his promise. But to remember him in the 80s is very different in some ways than the person you see on TV. He's almost the version of Joe McCarthy in the minds of many people, with the difference being he gets power, he moves up to the leadership as opposed to being pushed out.
Julian Zelizer:
And sometimes, I'll just finish by saying, your stories are terrific because he wasn't really committed to any set of principles. He presents himself as an ideas guy because he was a Professor of History originally, but he's really a power broker. And he would enter into alliances or kind of have those discussions if he thought it could ultimately be useful for achieving power. So that's I think a little odd part about him that is sometimes hard to pin down. But his framework was, put partisanship above everything else, governing the health of institutions and even principle, and I think that's been a guiding light in many ways for the modern GOP.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Right. I think a lot about how this is, that somebody like Gingrich emerges against the backdrop, and maybe even not the backdrop, but in front of say a Ronald Reagan. And how Ronald Reagan is a... It's a huge cultural shift, right? It's not Ronald Reagan the individual, it's not even Ronald Reagan the presidency, it is Ronald Reagan the moment. The culture shift, the change in the way that society thinks about things. And so in this new project that I'm working on, one of the things that I talk a lot about is that, as the Reagan administration, as the Reagan presidency is criminalizing say black neighborhoods and Latino neighborhoods, and also saying that, "To be poor is to be immoral," they're also engaging in all kinds of shenanigans behind the scenes. And it's not just Republicans per se, it's also Democrats, who are engaging in things like raiding the Federal piggy bank, right, getting kickbacks, engaging in what today I think we might call grifting.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
But also in reassessing the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior, what is acceptable in kind of the political realm. And then of course that coincides with the emergence of a Rush Limbaugh, right? And the emergence of talk radio. And so I know you've written a little bit about this and you've talked a lot about this as well, but I'm wondering if we can talk a bit about the emergence of media and conservative media in particular as a kind of a vector or a vehicle for this kind of grandstanding change within larger society. And then the real question of, why don't we see that kind of development among the left, right? I have my suspicions, but I want to hear what you have to say here first, Julian.
Julian Zelizer:
Yes. In your story there you just told, what you were saying about grift. It's funny because this is a side story, but when I was there as an undergraduate, I remember one of my favorite professors there is David Hackett Fisher, and he used to hire undergrads to do primary research, which was unbelievable. And one of the projects for a while he was working on, or that I remember I worked on was finding stories about corruption in the Reagan administration, which is of course, right, I was there when Bush senior became president. And so I remember actually looking through the papers at just the amazing number of stories, not just about Reagan, but that was a focus from that era about all sorts of corruption issues. So it's just funny in this context to have that memory. Anyway, the media is important. Look, as you're saying, I mean the political media is very important, not just to reporting what happens, but as we all know, to shaping some of the ideas that get out there with the public. And the conservative media has been incredibly effective, it's a long history.
Julian Zelizer:
There's conservative talk radio we can date back to the beginning of radio. And certainly, in the 1930s, Charles Coughlin is a phenomenon in terms of the reach of his audience. And Clarence Manion is another conservative that a lot of people on the right used to listen to, and you have before the eighties, you had a lot of this. The counter pressure was norms of journalism, generally, still subscribed to the idea that you had to be objective. And so a lot of producers and reporters didn't want to do that kind of reporting. And you have the fairness doctrine, which was a rule from '49 to '87, which wasn't always so effective, but it created a norm that if you were going to put one side of a political issue on, you had to put the other on and radio or TV, or you could face legal action, and that goes away.
Julian Zelizer:
And in '87, the Reagan administration gets rid of that, and you see quickly back to Rush. It's between, it's incredible, just to chat between '87 and about '94 talk radio proliferates and conservatives really kind of dominate the media. And I think part of it was a feeling of being the outsider, of feeling that conservatives didn't have a voice at universities or conservatives didn't have a voice in think tanks and in the national media. So this was the place to do it and Rush was the most successful at commercializing this kind of entertainment. You had others like a guy in New York who I grew up I remember listening to every now and then, Bob Grant, who is just the kinds of stuff. He said, I play it for my students, and their jaws drop. It's so kind of blistering and pretty harsh stuff.
Julian Zelizer:
So you had that whole world, and I think because they felt that they weren't as influential elsewhere, they just invested much more in this kind of alternative media. They were much more willing to jettison some of these older norms. Then liberals who worked at The Times or The Post were not liberal in their reporting, but they were comfortable with how the mainstream media was working. And then you entered cable TV and social media, and I think that pattern has generally continued, and I think it's incredibly powerful force in American politics.
Julian Zelizer:
I think a lot of the arguments we hear actually start on the news, not in Capitol Hill, and it's kind of, we saw it in the pandemic often, and you even see politicians now mimicking what they're hearing. And I don't know your question. I don't know why liberals have not been as good at it. They're better at it, now. They have podcasts. They have MSNBC to some extent, but I don't have a solution to a puzzle other than what I said about the earlier period. I mean, do you have a sense of why this is?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Well, I think there are a couple of things. One of the thing that always strikes me about Rush, Rush Limbaugh, but also in some respects, Alex Jones, who, for those of you who are not familiar, Alex Jones is a conspiracy theorist, such conservative, out right radio host, who is an enormously popular platform, podcasting platform, YouTube channel, and is occasionally on radio as well. He's been banned from a number of different platforms, but he has an enormous amount of influence. In is right now in the process of being sued by parents from Sandy Hook, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, because he propagated the hoax that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. It's a really awful, awful scenario. But one of the things that I think they have been quite good at doing is blurring the line between entertainment and information. And so VH1 and MTV and things like that started calling it infotainment when they would have their reality TV shows.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
But we didn't really notice when talk show hosts, when AM radio host that people just weren't listening to, started kind of melding those worlds together and saying essentially taking the Newt Gingrich approach, which is that rules don't matter. Truth doesn't matter. I was struck by, I think it's Dick Cheney and Karl Rove who said the problem with liberals is that they have truth. He says, conservatives, we have our own truth. We make up our own facts. So it's this idea of post-fact America before post-fact America. And so I think one of the things that we don't really acknowledge is the way that in entertainment and in some respects, humor is used to carry out these ideas in really persuadable ways that really operate from a kernel of truth. You only need a grain of truth in order to propagate a lie.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
But then, even beyond that, I think there is a sense within the conservative worldview that even if this may be infotainment or entertainment mixed with a splash of news, that it is a vector or a vehicle for a broader community of movement. And then the other thing is that we know that these audiences are more likely to have higher incidents of unlikelihood, of believing falsehoods and conspiracy. So certainly, conspiracy appears all over the place. But there was something about the audience that is attracted to talk radio that is more likely to believe in ideas of conspiracy. It's seductive, particularly in that it gives us a way of thinking about the world that suggests that there are greater powers than us.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
That are controlling things and that you were letting you in on a secret. So I don't think it's any mistake that Tucker Carlson has the number one show on cable TV news right now. Of all the channels. But because he's doing that kind of mix of a splash or hint of news mixed with a whole lot of entertainment, a whole lot of conspiracy, this idea that the world is against you and only you can take power in this situation. And we're part of this kind of elite club of people who know better. So that's what I've been thinking about in terms of media. But certainly I've also been thinking about this idea that one of the things that conservative say when they launch a lot of these networks is, "Well, liberals already have the media."
Leah Wright Rigueur:
And this is to your point, Julian, they say, "You guys have The Times, you have The Washington Post, you even have The Wall Street Journal," which we know leans right, in some respects. So I'm wondering if maybe you could talk a bit more about this idea of somebody like Rupert Murdoch in the empire of media and how he used this idea. And I know you've written about this in the textbook that you wrote, the American history textbook that you wrote, but this idea of media and the power of media, particularly in a way that leads us to a point where we get the first president of Twitter, or the Twitter President, Donald Trump.
Julian Zelizer:
It's funny, just as a backdrop, when Gingrich was doing everything he did in the '80s before he became speaker, there was conservative talk radio and stuff, but that really wasn't his focus. When he thought of a media strategy that meant using C-SPAN famously to promote his ideas or saying things provocative enough that the mainstream media, whether it was the New York Times or CNN or ABC News, whatever that they would pick up on it, and he understood right away. He always used to say that to get on TV, you had to be more Indiana Jones, the New York Philharmonic, meaning you had to give them sizzle. You had to give them excitement, but that whole world doesn't really come together until the 1990s. I know it's a long time now, and I am reminded of that since it's my 30th anniversary of graduating this fine institution, but it's still a pretty new phenomenon.
Julian Zelizer:
And when Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch created Fox News in '96, what you were talking about was very deliberate in their minds. They understood. They weren't just kind of creating a more conservative station. They were creating one with commercial appeal. That was always part of what they were thinking about, and bringing the provocative elements that would gain attention together with the more conservative worldview I think has defined a lot of the last 30 years. And maybe part of why it's been a very effective form of communication because at some level it's entertainment and it's meant to attract you. And it's meant to be addictive. It's meant to keep you coming back and back.
Julian Zelizer:
But I think what's happened is it's become more powerful than anyone imagined. And I think you now see more of a revolving door. We saw that in the Trump administration between not the media and administration, but one particular network, which is kind of remarkable. And Trump himself made his name with the birther movement and going on platforms like Fox and calling in when he was just a picture in a little box. And I think the elevation of this sensationalized conservative media ecosystem is now pretty clear, even if you don't really follow politics. And in some ways, politicians can't necessarily undo it because they're beholden to it as well.
Julian Zelizer:
If you're a Republican, you take a big risk by going against the network or saying "But only Trump was able to do that." But, I suspect in some ways he did it to provoke like he does with everything else and to get more attention. But it's important because they're not only not a political institution in a formal sense. Their concern isn't helping shape the debate. It's not helping to govern, but they're not even a straight news institution. And I don't just mean because there's a bias, but it's a commercial operation, and Tucker Carlson every night, I'm sure at some level, thinks about what will garner attention.
Julian Zelizer:
And so I think there is a fundamental problem when that has now become such a pervasive part of politics. And the Twitter social media is almost a whole other bucket of problem because it certainly also has influence. It fuels a lot of the trends we're talking about, but even more than Fox News, it's filterless. It's unbelievable as a historian to watch this platform and to be on it. We're both on it, but where things circulated at international level within seconds and there's no editor reading anything, and there's no producer saying, "Well, let's check that." And I don't think we've really come to terms with the kind of influence the social media has when the information there is based on trust. And I think we all know there's not a lot of reason to always have trust in what you're reading. And so I think that's yet another layer of what we have to deal with these days.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
I think one of the things that emerges from the social media moment in that we're seeing with the hearings on certainly on Russian interference in the 2016 election, but also subsequent hearing on data and social media networks and things like that. The big tech corporations and data privacy. One of the things that we're learning is that we originally imagined social media as playing this huge democratizing function. Then it would level the playing field because all of a sudden, anybody with a Twitter account, anyone with an Instagram account, anyone with a Facebook account could have a platform, could be just as big as the next guy. Now we know that's fundamentally not true. If somebody has 90 million followers and somebody has 100 followers, that's a very different platform, but there is something democratizing about the ability to connect rapidly.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
With the click of a hashtag with millions of people and we see this, for example, with a number of protests that happened in 2010 and 2011 that are organized through social media. Or we see this even, I think in a number of protests around, say, George Floyd. In the end, the aftermath of George Floyd, where people rallied quite quickly. But I don't know that any of us, even scholars, could have predicted the way in which social media could be used to repress democracy right into a press democracy. So certainly none of us imagine, say The Internet Research group that worked out of Russia or Cambridge Analytica. This is the one that really fascinates me because Cambridge Analytica understood us better than we understood ourselves. And certainly, discarded this idea of democracy as unnecessary in their pursuit of profit. So they were willing to work with anyone.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
They were willing to pull data from anyone who they could pull data from in order to create a profile, which then they could then use to create these dark ads, these things online in order to sway voters' influence and what have you. So I am struck by this, Julian. Your point about this is something that we couldn't have imagined. It's in far greater danger than anyone could have imagined. And I know that as a historian, we hate to have questions like these, but I have to pose it, is there anything else that we've seen technologically in the past or historically that rivals the kind of, I think vastness of social media that we see right now, particularly, as it relates to democracy?
Julian Zelizer:
It has two things that other forms of media haven't had certainly in the US history one is speed. I mean, we've never had anything that disseminates information this fast, then I would argue it's faster than TV because even though TV seems fast, there's still a million layers before a story actually gets on the air, a million people looking at it. And in addition to the speed, the ease of getting on these platforms, certainly, we've had local newspapers where you probably could get that an op-ed or a letter to the editor out easily, but not like five minutes from now, someone listening to us can write whatever they think about an issue and it's out there.
Julian Zelizer:
And I can't think of a comparison to that. We've had kind of massive changes in communication, like newspapers that bridge divides and allowed ideas to circulate, but it's fundamentally different than what social media is doing. And even if you think of elections, kind of the elements of Facebook that you're talking about, probably just the surface of what we know. But the ability to sway voters or to influence voters through Facebook, I'm sure. And other platforms I'm picking, Facebook, but they will be refined and perfected. And just imagine you're getting a newsfeed that you don't know how it's basically curated, and someone puts stories in there that aren't true, and that might influence political behavior. That's a pretty kind of powerful thing.
Julian Zelizer:
So I think the changes from the nineties forward really in the early 2000s. That's when social media takes the form. Late '90s, early 2000s that we know today, I think that's a big sea change, and I don't think really we can reverse it. And I think it's unlike a lot of the other areas. I do teach about CNN and cable TV in 1980s as the effect of fundamentally changing what the news cycle is and just creating a new cycle that's pretty much all the time. And that was an important change, but now, in retrospect, I think this is, in many ways, much greater reshaping, and the social media influences the rest of the media. This was the insight, I think, I don't know if it was his insight, but I think President Trump understood it that you can use this platform to then influence what newspapers are going to write and what TV is going to cover relatively quickly if you're a powerful politician and that's an important dynamic that kind of pay attention to.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
As I think about social media, one of the things that I could not have predicted, but none of us could have predicted, but that we need to pay attention to in that history helps us contextualize and understand better so that we can move forward. Is the explosion in the number of conspiracy theories that we see over really the last five years? But especially that ramp up underneath the health pandemic and ultimately result in things like QAnon, four years ago, even as QAnon existed, and Q existed, four years ago, the majority of people had no idea what QAnon was, where they may be known about a crazy guy who carried a gun into a Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington, DC.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Maybe they knew about that, but they didn't know about the kind of vast network that was emerging that had real implications, I think, for American politics and politicians. Nobody could have predicted that Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, a QAnon candidate, would be elected to Congress. But it also makes me think that something else bigger is going on. And I think the moment that it really crystallized for me was with the January 6, Capitol riots, where we see people carrying the flag, it says if they don't tread on me and like the tea party signs, but also death to Mike Pence, putting up a hangman's noose on the Capitol steps, but also carrying Q signs, wearing Q shirts.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
And the way in which we juxtapose that and the emergence of this, around this idea of a fraudulent election, coupled with the rejection of the American State from The Movement for Black Lives, which is actually fighting for a more inclusive democracy, as opposed to another group of people that are storming the Capitol for a less inclusive democracy. So I'm wondering if you, maybe, Julian, you can talk a little bit about this idea of, I think, both conspiracy and its effect on electoral politics. But certainly, this lends itself to the question of race and electoral politics. So how does Trump function in all of this? And on the one hand, he's the law and order president, whose tear-gassing protestors in Washington, DC, as he marches to a church. On the other hand, he's basically cheering on writers and insurrectionists who are raiding the Capitol. So I'm just wondering if we can talk about this a little bit.
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, the conspiracy part, which is a lead-in is, it's one more part of American politics where things that have always been on the fringe and margins, all of a sudden, our mainstream. And we've watched that. Conspiracy theory is an old part of American politics. Richard Hofstadter wrote about this in American politics. There's a book that Daniel Bell edited who was a sociologist, who spoke at my graduation at Brandeis called The Radical Right. And it was a collection that came out first in the '50s and then, in the early '60s of extremist conservative groups and conspiracy was central. But well, now we see with QAnon, and Congresswoman Greene is, is this becomes mainstream. It is not only out there for lots of people. It's discussed by legitimate political leaders, the president of the United States. It's recirculated on big platforms.
Julian Zelizer:
We know a lot about it, and it's not because we've studied it, but we're just citizens who, like many people listening. I've heard a lot about it. And so when the fringe becomes the mainstream, that can be quite problematic if that fringe has destructive elements. And I think that's part of what we saw on January 6th. There was still, in some ways, a notion or a hope or an aspiration that yes, all this is happening, but it's still contained, but this could never reach a level of danger. And that's what happened on January 6th, whatever word you use, whether it's insurrection, riot, mob, what's difficult to argue with is that members of Congress and the vice-president were under threat. They were being threatened. There were people there seeking to do them harm. And there's total clarity on what was going on, and that's dangerous.
Julian Zelizer:
And I certainly think kind of politics reached just dangerous crescendo. I don't think that all goes away, but I think that's what's playing out. And race is a key part of it. I mean, look, race is often been essential in some of these conspiracy arguments or right where groups that are trafficking in racism and antisemitism and nativism often deploy conspiracy as a key rhetorical tool to explain why a majority of the country should be excessively scared of communities that usually don't have as much power and communities that are usually frustrated and struggling, why they're the ones, we should all be scared of. Conspiracy offers the answer to explain what isn't apparent. If you're just looking logically and rationally at a situation. And look, I think people always ask, and I'm sure as any political historian always gets asked of conservatism and race, and you've written about it from a different perspective. But what is the role of race in the last three, four decades of right wing politics? And how has it played in at either explicitly, which is part of what we saw in the last four years or as Lee Atwater would always talk about, more subtly in terms of the issues that and keywords that Republicans would often use and some Democrats as well to stoke some of these.
Julian Zelizer:
And I think it's very much there. I don't think it explains everything. If you're looking at party politics, look, the hatred of... I remember driving in Arkansas in the early '90s to do some research and listening to talk radio about Bill Clinton and you'd think he was shooting people on the streets or something. He was this murdering danger. And so it could be disconnected, but I think racial backlash politics, and that's not the best term because it's not really a backlash. It's just kind of racism, is very much not only integral to politics, but also these kind of conspiracy theories often grow right out of this worldview and can be incredibly pernicious.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think a lot about is that the day of the Capitol riots was also the day that Raphael Warnock and Joseph Ossoff were certified. So a black man, the first black man to become Senator in the Southern states since reconstruction, but in Georgia and then a Jewish American becomes Senator in the south same day. And it's a reflection of the changing face of the south, the changing reality of the south. So I think it's no coincidence that this is all involved in this.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
But it's also part of this larger belief that when I think different marginalized groups, vulnerable groups, groups that have largely been on the sides of American citizenship for so long exercise their political power and their political voice, that it must be fraudulent.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So when we see, for example, Trump saying, "No, no, no. The returns can't be right. This absolutely can't be right." And they say, "Well, what cities are they wrong?" Well, points to Detroit. There are no problems in Detroit. What do you mean? Actually, their regularities are from this predominantly white suburb in Michigan, but you have no problem with that. So it's these areas and it ultimately ends up crystallizing in Georgia, which is the real I think battleground. But it showcases and really highlights how so much of this as we tie it up and we about resistance, we talk about anxiety is linked to these kind of ideas, these isms, including racism and antisemitism that are an integral part of these politics that are propelling some of these politicians.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So it's really I think messy. I think if you asked a lot of people that participated in the Capitol insurrection, many of them will say, "No, no, no. I'm not racist. I'm the least racist person that you'll meet." But their actions dictate otherwise, particularly as they think about how racial minorities or how Jewish Americans or marginalized groups fit into the very function of democracy. And so we know that it's democracy for me, but not democracy for thee.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Now, I know we have a whole lot more to discuss, but I also see that there are a ton of questions in the Q&A box and a couple of them in the chat as well. So at this point, I'd love to turn it over to Michael who's going to moderate a Q&A for our remaining time. And I'm sure it will be robust and energetic, especially based on the questions that I see in the Q&A right now.
Michael Zinder:
Sure. Thanks very much, Leah. There are a number of different questions on different topics. One touched media, which you guys talked about a lot this evening. So I thought I'd start with that one. Julian, I think you kind of touched on this already, but maybe this puts more of a point on it. The question is, do you think Tucker Carlson and other right wing media personalities genuinely believe what they're propounding, or are they speaking cynically to just permanently galvanize a Republican base?
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, I could start. I don't know the answer to that. I think they definitely operate in a conservative worldview. I don't think many of them would be automatically comfortable just shifting over to MSNBC, for example, or a hosting Pod Save America. I think there's parameters and they do come from that worldview.
Julian Zelizer:
But I then think the way they talk about issues... I think, look, I've been on some of these shows and so I've interacted with some of these hosts and I think there's a understanding of what Leah said, it's entertainment. And I don't think they think of it that way, but their goal is to get audience and they know their audience. And they know if they focus on issues in a certain way and they say it a certain way and they play to the politics of fear, it's much more likely people will tune in. And I think they're conservatives who are willing to do that as opposed to just being kind of empty vessels who don't care about anything.
Julian Zelizer:
But again, I don't know. I can't answer that. And certainly, I'm sure there's some who are purely in it to kind of be on whatever channel or whatever website is going to get them in front of the cameras.
Michael Zinder:
Right. And I think the way you touched it before you said the very commercial in its aspects.
Michael Zinder:
Another different kind of question. So some might suggest that polarization today may not be at an unprecedented level. When you think back to the Federalist periods, such as Jefferson and Hamilton Burr, you think about the Mexican War period, the Civil War, for example, Vietnam, the John McCarthy period. So this question is what can we learn from these experiences to guide our attitudes and behaviors in today and beyond?
Julian Zelizer:
Leah, do you want to go or do you want me to jump in?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
I'll take I think the first part of this, which is that I think certainly the question is absolutely right. That we have been in certainly tense periods. And I particularly think the pre-modern period is a wonderful example of that. Perhaps wonderful is not the right choice of words, but it is a great example of this idea of certainly polarization in antagonisms.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
There's also the point that at various moments in history, there have been entire segments of communities, entire segments of the population that have been excluded from ideas of citizenship and certainly of Americanness, right? So they've been ostracized. They've been pushed to the margins, and our democracy has certainly gotten better as those groups fight for inclusion in the democracy. They've made us a better place. And I think they're a great model for how to move forward.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
But I think we do have to wrestle with something that exists beyond partisanship, something that is about the boundaries of partisanship and that exists outside of the margins of partisanship. These people can't even be considered partisan because they weren't included in the political process in an effort to be seen as partisan.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
With that being said, I think it's also true that the measurements that we have going forward from the 1960s on forward showcase that there is a shift in partisanship that is dramatic and that is deep and then polarization. So on a number of issues, Americans were deeply aligned despite political affiliation or political parties. In the 1960s, it was just as common for somebody who was a Republican to marry a Democrat and vice versa and these things like that. Today, when you ask people, "Would you marry somebody who has a different political affiliation than you," overwhelmingly those people say, "No, those people don't share my values. They're not somebody I want to spend my life with. They're not somebody I want to even be friends with." So we do know that the margin by which we measure partisanship and polarization is actually increasing.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
And one last thing that I'll say here is that even in the era, say like a Ronald Reagan period where we have we a tremendous amount of support, or even a Richard Nixon period where we have a tremendous kind of majority around, a consensus around support for a presidential figure. We know that there's partisanship that exists on the basis of race. So for example, Ronald Reagan 1984, that's not political partisanship per se, although it is political partisanship. It's also racial partisanship and racial polarization. Because what we see is that it's racial groups and racial minorities that reject Ronald Reagan. It's not white Americans. It's not white women Americans. It's not white upper class. It's not white lower class. It is a racial divide. So I think that matters as well.
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, I think people often say, "Well, didn't we have the Civil War?" And you're like, "Yes, that's the point of how dangerous this kind of polarization can become when our political system isn't functioning." We've had many moments of intense bitter political fighting. That doesn't mean that it's good now or it was good then. It is certainly a problem endemic in democracy. But I think what Leah is talking about also is notable. It's almost saturation of polarization in every element of American life. It's not simply that we're polarized over the big issues anymore. That would be difficult enough. We're divided over climate change. We're divided over criminal justice. Pick whatever topic, but it's you won't marry someone from another party or our information ecosystem is now not the same.
Julian Zelizer:
It's like in the '60s, if people weren't fighting about, should we be in Vietnam or not? You had half the country saying, "We're not in Vietnam. It's not actually happening." That's the kind of situation that we're increasingly in. And that's a pretty deep divide. And it goes through all of our institutions. And now you're reading all these stories, it's even playing out in the schools across the nation. It's becoming another fault line in terms of the curriculum. And so I think that's part of what makes this moment that we've been in all of us pretty unique and you see its effects.
Julian Zelizer:
We can't even pass a budget anymore very easily. Yes, this huge legislation just passed, but it took a pandemic, a one year devastating pandemic to get Congress to move on something. It was still a party line vote, but all these other issues they're still there. And I often think of students and people who are young today, who kind of have lived now through their lifetime with this polarized system that we're talking about, unable to solve almost anything that matters to them. You wonder why kids get disaffected sometimes from politics. But I think it's that totalness to use that word of polarization which makes it a little different than some of those earlier eras, and major institutions like media institutions that promoted in a way that even the 19th century Party Press I don't believe could. It was nothing like a national television network, for example.
Michael Zinder:
An uplifting thought. Before we have to wrap up, let me see if I can get at least a couple more in with some quicker answers. Next one, as historians, do you see similarities to Germany in the 1920s and they're stab in the back myth? Was January 6th our Beer Hall putch? Just how worried should Americans be about the next few years leading up to the 2024 presidential election?
Julian Zelizer:
Leah, how worried are you?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
I'm very worried. But I think part of that is that worry is a natural part of being a historian. I mean, part of the things that you are exposed to just so much that you can't help but draw parallels between what you see, and you certainly can say, "Well, this is not the same." If something looks the same after 100 years, it's probably not the same. There are usually significant changes.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
But what I worry about is some of these factors that I think lead to some of the more dangerous or harmful things. So for one, Julian was exactly right earlier when he talked about the problem of disinformation and misinformation. We don't even begin to have a handle on that. We don't know what to do with it. And I don't think we have taken enough steps in order to mitigate or temper the problem.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
We also have a problem I think of conspiracy. We haven't done enough to really work with that. So one of the things that we know about conspiracy and about people that are attracted to conspiracy is that disaffection from an isolation from the greater system and the greater kind of community actually breeds more disaffection and breeds more isolation and breeds more conspiracy and more distancing. And so what do we have right now, particularly with the pandemic and particularly with the distance that the pandemic has created with the quarantine as well, is that you have a breeding ground for increased conspiracy and increased conspiracy groups that will certainly be an outgrowth of this.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
And then of course, I look at a moment, I don't actually have to venture very far from home. Although Julian, I would love for you to comment on this, but I don't have to venture very far from home to look at say something like a Barry Goldwater who is the president Republican nominee in 1964 and gets blown out of the water. I mean, just destroyed by Lyndon B Johnson. But Goldwaterism doesn't die. Even when Goldwater finally rejects Goldwaterism, it doesn't die. It comes back with a kind of ferocious in the ensuing years.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So we shouldn't think that just because a figure like Trump goes away or that Trumpism will go away. And I think one of the things that we have to do here, particularly as historians is really historicize how Trump is simply symbolic of a larger movement that is taking place in this country that has weight, that has a movement, that has increasing influence.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
And the thing that I found really alarming besides the Capitol riots, which we should all be really alarmed about, is that a number of people that were adherence to this idea of Trumpism. But the wildest aspects of Trump who felt in some cases that Trump hadn't gone far enough were elected to Congress. And yes, I know that it's a representative democracy and all of that good stuff, but the fact that they are there and they are now part of a voting body of the United States, even if they don't get to vote on anything, even if their sole job is to cause gridlock, means that we are fundamentally on the precipice of something radically different from where we have been before and something that is radically dangerous.
Julian Zelizer:
I think all of that is correct and I don't disagree with it at all. And I share those feelings and I think it's a real phenomenon that's emerged and that came together in the last few years. And the insurrections one example of how it has played out. It's also just played out in our difficulty of being quicker to deal with the pandemic in a different way.
Julian Zelizer:
I would say on a more positive note, I don't use the authoritarian and some people do. It's a kind of a debate that goes on. Is that what it is? There's still this, and you saw it with Trump. There's just a lot of fragmentation in our political system. And there's a kind of difficulty of being a strong arm leader or even unwillingness at some ways, which still provided not a check and balance, but it was a limitation on kind of what any leader is going to be able to do.
Julian Zelizer:
It's a pervasive challenge in our politics from the Federalist structure to just even within Washington, the kind of brokenness and disjointed nature of governing. And there's other impulses, which also have really been quite inspiring to watch. And this is where I tap into my Brandeis education and time when I think about those. And I always think how in the summer of 2020, one of the stories we'll tell is when we were pretty dormant about politics. I think you couldn't even turn on the news and really see much about a major campaign that was on. That was kind of off the issue. And no one was talking about politics.
Julian Zelizer:
We came alive again and there was activism from the ground up. And Black Lives Matter movement and the students and young people who came out after George Floyd's horrific death. They kind of brought politics out again and they brought up... And I think there's a lot of pushes like that, that still exists. And I hold onto this. I hold onto them as a very powerful part of this democracy that can counteract and certainly will not easily accept some kind of either authoritarian or incredibly reactionary form of government. Doesn't mean inevitable kind of what the outcome is, but I see both the difficult dysfunctional element of politics and that kind of grassroots that manifest itself in many ways is quite important and still quite relevant.
Michael Zinder:
Great. If it's okay with the panelists, we'll just stay a few more minutes, a little over.
Julian Zelizer:
Sure.
Michael Zinder:
And hit one or two more questions and wrap up. So another question that came in, so the new voter suppression legislation, which is all over the place these days, is finally being opposed by many in corporate America. Yet it appears that Republicans refuse to accept this as valid. At what point will that party be dragged even if kicking and screaming towards understanding this political and social reality?
Julian Zelizer:
I think it'll be awhile. I mean, I think there's a reason so many red states are moving forward on this. I think there's a political logic to it. And the basic perception that higher rates of voting will hurt Republicans is driving the decision to do this. And I think that even it doesn't necessarily overwhelm, but it certainly pushes back even against corporate opposition. And I don't think Republicans will give up on this, certainly at the state level, very easily. I think they fear that if you have more of what happened in 2020, meaning making voting easier, which is something that historians have been writing about as something that would be good for the country rather than making it harder. That it imperils at some level the standing of the party.
Julian Zelizer:
And so it's interesting now is to have some corporate pushback. My guess is some Republicans think that will go away and more pertinent right now in the immediate is to keep voting limited in certain populations. So I'm not convinced the party is going to do any reversal. And this has been going on by the way for a while now. I mean, it's in the '80s you see the emergence of this cohort of Republicans who are starting to question the Voting Rights Act. After 2013 when the Supreme Court gets rid of a key provision of the VRA, you see in over 15 states within a year, the imposition of voting restrictions, and this is just the latest wave.
Julian Zelizer:
So there's no reason to think that really a generation of Republicans who have seen this as pretty central are going to abandon it because I don't know, name your company, Delta or something is threatening them. It matters. It certainly matters and they listen. But I think there's other factors that will keep them on track with this.
Michael Zinder:
Professor Rigueur.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Sure. So I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind, which is that it's also important to acknowledge where these shifts come from. It's not just kind of moral decision-making or something like that. But one of the things that has been happening over the last year is that a number of employee resource groups, including racial minority employee resource groups have been having conversations with the upper echelons of corporations about what is necessary to actually make change in this country. Not just superficial symbolic change people putting up black boxes are saying, "I stand against systemic racism." But what would actual change look like?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So corporations got their first opportunity to stand for something right in the aftermath of George Floyd with this kind of explosion in the number of voting rights bills that crop up in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. So here we have thousands of employees across the country saying, "This is your time. This is your time to actually stand up for us." So we actually see the impact and the influence that employee resource groups can have at corporations where previously I think for a lot of them, they felt like they were hopeless. They were simply a cog in the machine.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So I think we have to think about the forces that are at play here that are really important. We also know, and this is what's so fascinating to me, is that when these bills crop up, particularly Julian talked about in the aftermath of Shelby V Holder, which happens in 2013. We see 15 states pass these draconian voting rights bills. We also see a number of states disassemble DMVs, shut down polling stations, essentially making it much harder to vote. It actually has the opposite effect. So, even as we know that we should be doing everything within our power to expand the vote. We see that when we do it and when we do it well that it works phenomenally as we saw in the 2020 election. But even as we see this happening, it hasn't some respects the act ... it does motivate a number of minority groups to come out and vote in increased levels.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So I think one of the things that we have to really think about is what is the cultural cache that the Republican party is getting from doing these kinds of actions, that have the immediate effect, short-term effect, of backfiring against them. It looks bad on all fronts. It's inexcusable to say that I want to oppress the right to vote or something like that. But what is it that they're thinking? Certainly it's thinking about a long game. Maybe people will get exhausted. Maybe people will give up, this idea of political fatigue, but also too, that over time, the idea is that over time you'll depress turnout. Not suppress, not the old, "We're intimidating you at the voting booth," but certainly it will suppress turnout because people don't want to deal with the nitty gritty and ultimately people will forget.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So I want us to think about that because this is the long game of thinking about what the Republican party is thinking about. In the short term, they're thinking about, "What kind of value can I get from my voter base? How can I rile them up? How can I rev them up? But then also what is the long-term gain that I can get from cracking down?" I think what we're beginning to see now is the long-term gains of say Shelby v. Holder, that is proliferating all across the United States at this point,
Michael Zinder:
Didn't McConnell, who would take money from anywhere famously say, "Hey corporations, you should keep out of politics," which I thought-
Julian Zelizer:
Yes.
Michael Zinder:
... was a remarkable comment from him. You guys touched on this a little bit before, but another question on the media, how much do you think the asymmetric polarization in the US that you described is caused directly and indirectly by the Murdoch media empire?
Julian Zelizer:
I mean, look, it's an important factor and we've talked a lot about it tonight. I don't think it's the only factor. I mean, any historian will give you many answers to any single question, but I think there's a reason for it and there's a huge body of work on how did we become so polarized, the media being one factor and the Murdoch empire and the conservative media being very important, but there's other changes. Things like the South becoming a bash for the Republican party, made both parties less divided internally, as well as the vanishing role of liberal Republican voters in Northern and Northeastern states. You have the internal organization of the political parties, changes in the '70s and '80s. They centralize and they give party leaders much more muscle, people like McConnell to make sure that everyone in the party within the Senate and house votes the same way. You have gerrymandering, which for the house of representatives is quite important.
Julian Zelizer:
So you have all of this working. I mean, that's what makes it a complicated problem that it isn't like, well, if FOX television goes away, wouldn't we all be in a better place? Some people might agree with it, but I don't think it would totally change the way our politics works, because the changes we left a period in the 1950s and '60s where bipartisanship was the problem. That's how many people thought, liberals and conservatives, that bipartisan alliances in Congress stopped progress on a lot of issues between Southern Democrats and Republicans. Neutrality in the media was seen as a problem because conservatives, as we've said, felt that the neutrality masks liberal values and many progressives thought the neutrality actually just maintained the status quo. So no one wanted to say what was going on in Vietnam, for example. So we had a big push in the '70s, '80s and '90s to take away every element that we had, which worked against this.
Julian Zelizer:
So yes, Murdoch's important. Fox News is really significant institution, but it's not the whole story. It's a little like when people say, "Well, if we have a different president, doesn't everything change?" It's that one answer focus, which is very appealing because we all want the one thing that will make things better, but unfortunately it's much more layered. This is the product of an era. It's really the product of a multi-decade period, rather than of one institution or one politician. That's why it will take such hard work to move into a different kind of politics.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Yeah. If I can just echo a bit of what Julian just said. I don't think that the solution is ... or I don't think the context is as simple as saying Rupert Murdoch came in and completely changed the way that politics was done. Certainly he contributed to it and certainly, particularly we think about the role that the Tea Party plays and how the Tea Party uses Fox News as an incubator for ideas, but also as a bridge for thinking about mobilizing and things like that.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
What we also know is that there were so many other areas that I think contribute to this idea of polarization, that it might've been inevitable that we had moved to that part. It might've happened slower, it might've happened faster. I think we can see that with the explosion in terms of social media, which again, we've talked about in this conversation, how social media was imagined as a platform for expanding democracy, or in the case of Facebook, social media was seen as neutral, it was seen as nothing, but in fact ended up changing the landscape of politics in a way that nobody could have predicted. Nobody could have predicted, although the lawyers at Facebook certainly did, that discrimination would be happening in the dark corners of a social networking, like a friendship website and yet it did.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So certainly, I think that there are things that we should be talking about. One of the things that we also haven't talked about is, I think, the way that certain players manipulate the federal government in ways that we just don't see in say, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s and 1960s. So, specifically thinking of figures like Lee Atwater, or Paul Manafort, or Roger Stone, who are players. Or even, they actually form a consulting group together and Black, if memory serves me correctly, was actually a Democrat.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So this is actually a bi-partisan effort, but it's also a significant shift in the way that the federal government functions with something like consultants and lobbyists. So we certainly think of the federal government as something that is neutral in a lot of ways, but that is inherently not neutral, that has had a long history of either doing harm or repairing harm. So the 1980s are, I think, a remarkable period because we see the infiltration of a number of figures who manipulate the federal government and actually have a dramatic long-term effect on politics, policy, and even polarization within the United States.
Michael Zinder:
Interesting. You touched on this in your remarks already, but this question's asked with a finer point on it. What do you think happens to our democracy if one of our political parties continues to refuse to admit that their standard bearer actually lost the presidential election?
Julian Zelizer:
Yeah, it makes the democracy a lot more difficult to function. It's a problem. You can't have a huge swathe of the public fundamentally believing something that isn't true. It makes it hard at wine level, obviously, to ever achieve genuine negotiation, which we should strive for. We want a political system where different participants can negotiate, but you're in a realm of illegitimacy when you're believing that, that makes it very difficult. Second, the fact that you can have large parts of the population that believes something that just isn't true. That's a problem in itself.
Julian Zelizer:
Democracy at some level depends on not necessarily a common, but at least a pool of facts, that we all work with before we start arguing. It's right in the motto, we need some truth. I think if we are in a place where, as these polls suggest, where we don't have any of this, it makes it very, very difficult. It doesn't mean it's impossible. I think you've seen already elements of the political system working, at least with regards to the pandemic in ways we hadn't seen. But boy, how do you start to make progress on these other questions if you have so many people believing that an election without evidence of malfeasance actually was fraudulent? That's a very, very difficult place to be.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So, everything Julian just said. I do want to add in one layer though, which is to think about ... I think part of what the moment that we're going through right now is forcing us to face is that democracy is fragile. At the same time, democracy is bloody, it is something that has to be fought over. Sean Len says that democracy is something that is constantly remade and remade and remade. It's not something that we can take for granted in this country that just exists, that we have to work at it constantly lest it crumble, because it can crumble. There was a really fabulous book that came out a couple of years ago. It's very short book, How Democracies Die, that really talked about the fact that democracies. We can't take them for granted, that we can actually go backwards.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
I think the other thing that this, this moment points out and that highlights is that democracy as envisioned and democracy as practice have functioned very differently for different communities and populations within the United States. As a consequence of this, one of the things that we see is the development of this idea of the illegitimacy of the state. But the idea of the illegitimacy of the state actually functions very different for different groups of people.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So on the one hand, we have a group like the movement for Black Lives that argues that the state is illegitimate because political institutions have failed the American people and it has failed in particular, the most marginalized populations in the United States. So policing has failed, politicians have failed. The federal government has failed and on and on, and on.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
On the other hand, you have another group of people we can sum them up perhaps in Tea Partiers who have migrated into Trump, who have turned into something else entirely, that are fundamentally arguing that the federal government is illegitimate, in part for a number of reasons, because they have elected a black man to the highest office of the land. They're allowing people to profit from the state and receive entitlements from the state, and then they are experiencing the anxiety of a shifting nation, both economically, even as they are not necessarily affected economically, but they see how various populations are affected. They are very angry, not just at say, the left, or liberals, or progressives, or racial minorities, but they are also very angry at the party elites within their organization and their institution for failing them.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So this is actually how we get a Donald Trump, but this is also how we get a Capitol insurrection, and it's also how we get a movement for Black Lives. So in some respects, I think the questioning of democracy is necessary. It's necessary for us to move forward. It can be dangerous, certainly, but it is necessary for us to reevaluate the boundaries of democracy as they exist right now so that we can ultimately expand them for the future.
Michael Zinder:
Interesting. Let me ask one last question then we'll wrap up. I think Professor Rigueur, you had mentioned earlier that even if Trump goes away, that doesn't mean Trumpism goes away because there's a lot of elements to it. What do you think of the argument though, that there isn't a Trumpism, that other than perhaps America First and the nativist and affiliated aspects of it, that he largely believed in himself and was a singular character as opposed to a movement or a real set of principles. I mean, did he really have any principles beyond all those that derive from America First?
Julian Zelizer:
Who is that for?
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Julian?
Julian Zelizer:
Sure. I mean, I think, look, I think he did. I mean, I don't think he's a principled person. I think he's not someone who operates along those lines. I think he is someone who scrambles day to day to achieve what he needed. But again, it's a little like we were talking about with some hosts of shows. It wasn't as if he was picking and choosing from a huge plate of options. I mean, he touched on many issues that have actually had a lot of core support since the '90s in Republican circles. Restriction of immigration is not new, certainly corporate tax cuts and deregulation, dismissing climate change, even gutting eight key agencies and departments like the state department, these all come out of the Republican playbook.
Julian Zelizer:
I think when he picked his side in 2015, going down the elevator, sure, there were certain places where he did break with the party. Certainly, free trade is the one example where there were more tensions with him and what a lot of the GOP wanted. Although not all, I mean, tensions with China, which is where free trade arguments actually centered has a lot of support in both parties actually. But a lot of the other issues, if we were writing about what would a Republican look like six years ago, who became president? I think it's not correct to think it wouldn't look a little like what we had. I think sure, Trump was unconventional in the way he spoke. And sure, he often did and said things in broad daylight that others would be more subtle about, but the playbook wasn't that different than the Tea Party. It wasn't that different than what we saw in California politics in the 1990s. So, I think it's important not to just treat him as some outlier and nor should we treat him as someone where there was no logic to what he was doing.
Julian Zelizer:
That doesn't mean he's a brilliant strategist, but there was a worldview he was pushing and there is a reason that, not Trumpism, but Republicanism supported Donald Trump through this day, he retained incredibly strong support. He still does and I don't think it's just love of Donald Trump. I think there is a synergy between a lot of what he did and a lot of what the GOP wanted, and the courts is another example. That's why Senator McConnell is happy and even though he had some tension over an insurrection, again like the pandemic, that's what it took to get him to say a few tough words, but overall he was totally fine with what the administration did. He walked away happy.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So I would just echo that as well and also point out that when Steve Bannon is appearing on Lou Dobbs in 2010 and railing against the Mitt Romneys of the party. Lou Dobbs says, "What kind of person would does the Republican base need in the future?" And Bannon says, "We need a Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, or maybe even somebody like a Donald Trump." Which tells us ... and it's not long after that in fact, that Bannon actually reaches out to Donald Trump and arranges for him to speak at CPAC, which is the conservative annual gathering of discussions and ideas. But it's that moment, I think, that people at the base of the Republican party understand that there's a certain ethos that is certainly has principles and values. We certainly may disagree with them, we make critique them, we may analyze them, but they were there.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
What was important though, was that party elites and party leaders were ignoring them and only using them when it worked to their political advantage. So what we see with the Donald Trump, I think is an articulation of the views and the opinions of the base in a way that really resonates with them. It certainly resonates with the tea Party, the vast majority of members of the Tea Party go on to be Trump Republicans. But it also resonates with conventional Republicans who go along to get along, but also go along to get what they want. So, as Julian pointed out many, many Republicans, many conservative Republicans who find Trump to be abhorrent are really happy. They are happy with the tax cuts, and that really big, massive tax bill. They're happy with the ideas that are propagated about healthcare and things like that, even though the Republican healthcare reform doesn't go through.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
So there are a lot of things and I think it's a truism that even as Trump governs like an extreme Republican, he also governs like a conventional Republican. I do wonder, how would his presidency, be that if we take away the Twitter rants and we take away the nasty bits and pieces of the rhetoric, how would his presidency be that much different from say, a Marco Rubio or a Ted Cruz? I don't know that it would be that different at all.
Michael Zinder:
God help us. So listen, many thanks to our speakers tonight for a wonderful early alumni college event. That was a terrific discussion from my perspective and I've received a number of comments from the audience to the same effect. So it sounds like it was received quite well. A special thanks to everybody in the audience for joining us tonight as well. We're delighted to see so many of our Brandeis alumni and friends joining us tonight and coming together to explore topics with our Brandeis faculty, as well as alumni experts. We look forward to more of you joining us this spring for our continued alumni college virtual series online. So, please look on the invitations for the events and I'll just mention the next one that's coming up is next week, a program entitled Black Women, Black Feminism and Justice, which will feature Brandeis professor Shoniqua Roach and professor Hortense Spillers, PhD from the class of '74, which will be held on Tuesday, May 11th from 4:00 to 5:30 Eastern time, sponsored by the African-American Studies department at Brandeis and the Alumni of Color Network.
Michael Zinder:
We greatly appreciate your participation and your continued support of Brandeis. If anyone should find it within their heart to make a further contribution, it would be most appreciated of any size. Thank you very much for Professor Zellzer and Professor Rigueur this evening and to the Brandeis staff and with that we'll say goodbye.
Julian Zelizer:
Thanks everyone.
Leah Wright Rigueur:
Thank you. Have a good evening.
Julian Zelizer:
Bye.