The following is the transcript of the above interview, recorded in the KALX studios on February 26, 2025.
Kat Smith: [00:00:00] You are listening to a special interview broadcast at KALX Berkeley 90. 7 FM. My name is Kat Smith and I am the news director of KALX News. I am joined in the studio today with Heather Cox Richardson. Heather is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College. She is known for her Substack titled Letters from an American with over 2 million subscribers, which acts as a daily chronicle of today’s political landscape.
Thank you for joining us in the studio. It’s such a pleasure to be talking to you.
Heather Cox Richardson: Oh, it’s going to be so much fun.
Kat Smith: I’m excited. So just to start off, I want to know about your relationship with your Substack. Why did you start it? What purpose does it serve for you today? And how do you keep up the stamina to approach the blank page every day, sift through the news and produce something?
Heather Cox Richardson: Well, those are interesting questions and they’re actually two very different questions. [00:01:00] So I never intended to start a Substack, I never intended to start a newsletter, any of that. I’m a teacher and I had a Facebook page in which I wrote about once a week, uh, something about life or history or whatever.
And during the lead up to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, I recognized that something big had happened in the news that day and I wrote an essay about it. And I got just swamped with people asking me questions. And so I answered them the way one would do in a classroom to say, Oh, well, this is how this works.
And this is how this works and so on. And then more and more people swamped me with questions. And the next thing I knew, you know, the, the, I had to take it over to Substack and it became a really big thing, but, um, That’s really what it is. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a community of people who are trying to understand the world and so that’s my relationship to it.
I’m just somebody who’s really good at research and is a decent writer so I can say this is what’s happening in [00:02:00] this particular place and here’s why it matters. But the question of how you face a blank screen every day is a really different one and that’s, I think, again, partly about the community.
That, I’m not going to let those people down. I’m not going to not write. I mean, there are a couple of nights. When I fell asleep sitting upright in my chair because, you know, if you got several million people you’re hanging out with, you’re not going to ignore them. So there is that sense of this is not really about me or the blank page.
Interestingly enough, when I face a blank page to write a book now, it’s still as hard as it ever was. But then I can flip to the, the, file that’s the Knight’s letter and I can just write.
Kat Smith: So how is that process different between writing a Substack piece and writing a book?
Heather Cox Richardson: I have absolutely no idea. I’m serious.
I can sit in the same place listening to the same playlist on the same computer with the same, you know, seltzer water or Diet Coke next to me and, and I [00:03:00] can write without a problem on the, the Substack and then, which I did them both on, on Google Docs. And then I open up the Google Docs for the book and I’m like, you know, I should do some laundry.
I haven’t cleaned the basement in, you know, two decades. You know, all the usual stuff you go through when you write a book. It’s all psychological. I have no idea what makes one imperative and the other less so.
Kat Smith: You mentioned, um, taking pride in being a good researcher. How do you approach looking for sources in your sub stack? Because you use a variety of sources from op eds, New York Times articles, even moments on X. Um, so how do you sift through those sources every day?
Heather Cox Richardson: So I start every morning by reading through social media, a number of different social media sites, probably for an hour to two hours. just to see what the public conversation is about, which is always what has interested me as a scholar, is what are people talking about?
Because I believe that ideas change society. So I’m really interested in seeing [00:04:00] what people are talking about. And once I have decided what this seems to be the important story of the day, at least in politics, there, of course, are going to be different important stories in sports or in culture that are not really things that I’m educated enough in to write about.
But once I know what those stories are, then I can do the research to say, what really happened? What is my evidence that happened? Who are the actors and why does it matter? So the, the variety of sources, people have sometimes said to me, how do you have the time to read all this? And the truth is that, you know, I don’t read Stars and Stripes every day, but whenever there’s a military story, I know I need to read Stars and Stripes or, you know, for a while there, I did a bunch of stories on the, the we were changing the laws having to do with long distance train hauling.
Now there’s a whole bunch of trade papers on long distance hauling and on trains and on on, uh, labor in the train industry and so on. I read those papers on those days. I don’t read them if I’m writing about the Navy or about, you know, the [00:05:00] presidency. So that’s where the research comes in and that’s where a doctorate in history and a number of books in history really matter is that’s my playing field like I know how to do that. I know how to learn about Congress. I know how to learn about like I just say the Navy. And so then, you know, once it’s just a skill set that that anybody would have in their own field. And then once I do that, then I just say what I found. Basically. That’s all I do is I write what I found.
Kat Smith: Do you consider yourself a journalist?
Heather Cox Richardson: No, I do not. No, I’m a historian.
Kat Smith: Do you consider yourself a political writer or just surely a historian?
Heather Cox Richardson: No, I’m a historian. And, um, the, the difference between a journalist and a historian is a journalist’s job is to inform people about what has happened.
And that’s hard work, and it’s dangerous work. And that’s really important to remember, especially at a time when so many of our journalists, both in the United States but also abroad, are coming under fire sometimes – [00:06:00] literally under fire. But historians do something different, and that is that we study how and why societies change.
And what that means is that we want to understand what creates change in a society. And as I say, what I believe creates change before anything else is the way people think. What they think about and how they think. So I’m looking for the stories where the rubber is meeting the road, where an ideology, for example, is trying to grapple with reality, and it’s not fitting.
Uh, so for example, right now while we’re talking, Congress is having to deal with the upcoming budget and the fact that the ideology with which a number of the Republicans, especially in the House, are approaching the budget question doesn’t comport with reality. And somehow they’ve got to make sense out of that, because reality has a nasty way of winning the bets every time. So that’s a story that really interests me in way more detail than a story that is sort of more of the same.
And what I do is I [00:07:00] try to make sense of those places where society is changing. And that’s just very different. So there are stories that I don’t cover because they’re not significant yet to that. So somebody might say, I’m going to run for president. And my answer to that would be wait till you filed papers for me to pay attention to you, or for example, I never covered the Republican debates in 2024 when, when, uh, when Trump and the other people were running because it was very clear to me that Trump was going to get the nomination. So what was the point? But what I did do is I covered, um, uh, some of the short clips at the time that labor leaders were cutting with Joe Biden because it suggested that the labor movement was switching its allegiances at the time from the Republicans to the Democrats.
And so that was much more important. So I covered, you know, a one minute Bluesky video or a one minute X video rather than the debates because that was more important to [00:08:00] me. A journalist would have done it the other way.
Kat Smith: And then as a historian, um, what is this political moment that we’re in right now? Is this an unprecedented moment? Is this a unique moment or has this happened in history before?
Heather Cox Richardson: In a, in a very immediate way, it’s unprecedented. And what I mean by that is we have in the presidency, uh, a man and his advisors around him who disagree with the premise of American democracy, which is that we need to have three independent branches of government.
They need to be able to check and balance each other. And you can see the destruction. in the independent civil service through the takeover, the Department of Justice, for example, by the large numbers of firings we’re having in the nonpartisan civil service, and with the attempt to take over the military by getting rid of military leaders and the, um, the JAGs who lay down the legal requirements for the ways in which the military responds to presidential orders, among other things.
[00:09:00] So you can see all of those things happening. It is a very immediate constitutional crisis like we have never had one before. In, in longer terms, though, we certainly have had in the United States times when we didn’t have a democracy. So you look, for example, at the American South between, let’s say, about 1874 and 1965, that was a one party system for the most part.
There were, um, people did not have the protection of the laws. People did not have the right to vote. Capital was concentrated among a very small group of people. All the things that you associate now with a country like Hungary, for example, as it has lost its democracy, that’s happened. Or someplace like Russia under Vladimir Putin.
But we have had those moments in America before. So we’re not entirely flying blind. We know How these things happen and we know how you can resist them and recover democracy.
Kat Smith: What would be your response [00:10:00] to someone who truly believes in the Make America Great Again? What are they hoping for? We kind of talked about this briefly last night, um, but what does that mean, the Great Again piece?
Heather Cox Richardson: Well, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, is not traditional Republicanism. I feel, I always feel like that’s a really important thing to lay out because there are a number of people who vote republican because their mothers did. And that is much less now than it used to be since the MAGA Republican, uh, movement took off.
But It’s important to remember that there is that legacy group of people who are just always going to vote according to the way that their parents did, and the Democrats have the same people. It’s sort of an interesting project in America, this legacy voting, um, and, and how that works. But the idea of Make America Great Again, I think means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
So we know now that there are a number of people that are neo-Nazis, that are alt right neo-Nazi people who are [00:11:00] racist and sexist, and they want to see the, the assertion of white supremacy, but especially white Christian nationalism. That Christian piece in there, the evangelical Christianity of a certain variety, is really important in that movement.
And what they would like to do is destroy our secular society and put in place this white Christian nationalism. And that looks very much, as I say, like Victor Orban on steroids, really, in the United States. But then there are other people, also that you would see in Hungary, but here in the United States, who essentially want to make sure that power and money gets concentrated among a very small group of people.
And they’re working in tandem with those people I just talked about, but they don’t share many values except that they want to get rid of the current American state. They want to get rid of the American state because they want to get rid of regulation and they want to get rid of taxation and they’re married, if you will, because they both want to get rid of the modern American state.
But then I think there are a lot of people who vote… voted MAGA both because they were [00:12:00] victims of disinformation, the idea that we would never get Project 2025, for example, there’s a lot of disinformation out there, but also that they just have this vague sense that life used to be better, and life used to be easier, and that Is again, not uncommon.
People have nostalgia for the past, but it’s also sort of a knee jerk reaction to a modern world that in many ways has left a lot of Americans behind for a number of reasons. And, and you didn’t ask this. And in fact, nobody has asked this, but one of the things that worries me a lot. When you look at other countries and then look at where the United States is now, is that in many ways the United States really didn’t change in the 1980s the way it needed to in order to come to grips with the modern world.
And what you’re seeing in the MAGA movement now is an attempt to make us go back again, even further, to go back before the 80s, back before the [00:13:00] 70s, back before the 60s, maybe to the 50s, or maybe all the way back to the 1920s. And the truth is the modern world is going to keep getting more and more modern and if we don’t hurry along and get with it, the backlash when we have to do that is going to be extraordinary. And I think one of the things you’re seeing now in the MAGA movement is the fact that we didn’t make the gradual changes we needed to from the 1980s on to accommodate, for example, to climate change or to Um, to accommodate for the rise of oligarchs around the world, including in the United States.
You know, if we’d been adjusting all along, fixing our infrastructure, doing things that needed to be done and weren’t, it wouldn’t be that big a wrench now for people to say, oh, yeah, we probably should have rural broadband, you know, but when you have to say we have to fix our roads and our bridges and our childcare and our housing and our, and our broadband, people look at it and just say, no, you’re trying to destroy my world.[00:14:00]
Kat Smith: So, and talking to my friends about the world that we’re in, people who are young and are about to go into the workforce and are about to come into adulthood, and we look at this, the state of this country, and we’re just asking ourselves, what do we do? What’s coming next? So I’m curious, what do you tell your students? What are kind of the messages of hope that you give them? And a tangential question to that -what, where do you see the role of education in the world right now?
Heather Cox Richardson: Well, I start by telling them that Lafayette was, I think, something like 24 when he was here. It might even have been younger. It might have been 18.
And, you know, you have to remember that we’re in this really weird moment in the United States where advanced medical care and advanced transportation has enabled us to have an extraordinarily old population running things. You know, even the idea of Supreme Court justices, for example, you literally used to have to ride a horse around a circuit. So it was a young [00:15:00] man’s game and people would quit because they didn’t want to ride the circuit. And imagine, you know, Clarence Thomas riding his horse around the circuit. It wouldn’t be happening, right? He would be somewhere, you know, by a fire reading a book the same way that people were in the 19th century.
So we’re in this weird demographic moment anyway because of that. But here’s what worries me about the future. And that is what anybody who is younger than 50 nowadays does not remember a time when democracy worked. What people who are under 50 have seen is the takeover of this country by a group of people who have suppressed the vote, which begins in 1986 and really takes off in 1998. They have suppressed the vote so that a few people could stay in power. They have gerrymandered states so that even if, as in North Carolina, Democrats win the majority of the votes for their, their seats in the North Carolina legislature, the Republicans have a super majority.
They have seen the use [00:16:00] of the Electoral College to enable, um, you know, people. to take the presidency, even though they have lost the popular vote. They have seen the Senate stopping extraordinarily popular legislation through the filibuster by a very small percentage of people who are senators who represent a very small percentage of the American people stopping very popular legislation like common sense gun safety legislation after the Sandy Hook massacre.
So you don’t know that democracy really can work. And what worries me is that people will give up on democracy in the United States the same way they have in other countries because they say why should I believe in a system that doesn’t work when what you’re really seeing is a system that has been perverted by a very few people.
And when I look at the destruction of democracy and one of the reasons that I try so hard to protect it is that when people either on the right or on the left want to destroy democracy because of its shortcomings – the people on the right [00:17:00] because they believe that, uh, that most of us shouldn’t have the right to vote because we’re not able to manage our affairs and people on the left because they think that the constitution, for example, has been so tainted by racism and sexism that it is irretrievable, what I always say is, what are you going to replace it with that isn’t worse? And I, in my lifetime, have never seen that. So that’s my worry. But I left what I’m hopeful for there for last, because as I said last night, your world is not my world, and in some ways that’s a bad thing. I, I am heartbroken that your generation has grown up with the gun violence that we live with now.
You shouldn’t have to live with that. That is not my world. And, um, and I wrote a piece once after the Las Vegas shooting, in part because I looked out at my class that day, and they were just going about their day like it was normal. And, and it just broke my heart because it’s not normal. And [00:18:00] so I worry about the world that you have grown up in in that way, but I’m also so hopeful about it because you have so much more access to new languages, and new people, and new countries, and new ideas, and new ways to think about the environment, and new ways to think about interacting with each other, and my real fervent hope is that my generation can stop the backsliding of democracy and hand you a country that you can turn into what it really should be. And I just, my prayer is that I live long enough to see it.
Kat Smith: And then, as an educator, where do you see education in that?
Heather Cox Richardson: Well, education, like journalism, is changing a lot. I mean, right now, as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t speak for my university, and I don’t speak really for anybody but myself on this, but, um, Education, higher education is, um, is out of reach. I mean, it’s ridiculously expensive. [00:19:00] And that’s a huge problem. And that seems to me to be a real failure on the part of our society, that we are not investing in education. I’m very worried about the voucher system in K through 12 going into place in so many places around the country. But on that front, that, to me, is a manageable problem if we want to manage it.
So one of the things I like to point to is if anybody knows the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book. Did you read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books?
Kat Smith: I know of the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books.
Heather Cox Richardson: Um, she, that’s The Little House on the Prairie and so on. Um, and she, people always look at the fact that she, you know, the family works forever to send Mary, the sister Mary who goes blind, to send her to college. And what they don’t realize is that actually Laura’s family is working and saving for her train ticket and her clothing. Because the state of South Dakota paid for Mary to go [00:20:00] to college for six years, even though she was blind and suffered from, uh, I think it was neuralgia, so that she really was never going to be able to hold a job or to marry or to anything.
But they believed that everybody in the country needed to be educated in order to have a healthy society. We’ve been there before. That was the 1880s. We could be there again. The other piece of education in the future, I think, though, that we’re going to have to grapple with is A, disinformation, but B, the extraordinary opportunities, as well as, as deficits of the reach that we now have through social media, which I don’t think people like me have used well enough to, um, to spread the kind of things that we could on it. And that’s one of the things that I hope to be doing in the next couple of years.
Kat Smith: If you’re just joining us, um, my name is Kat Smith, and I am the news director of the KALX News Program here, and I’m joined in the studio [00:21:00] by writer and historian Heather Cox Richardson. Um, I want to talk about briefly your most recent book, Democracy Awakening. Can you just say a little bit on what this book covers and, in your opinion, what are the pillars of a functioning full American democracy and where are we at with those pillars?
Heather Cox Richardson: So Democracy Awakening was an attempt to answer the questions that everybody asks me all the time. You know, what is liberalism? Um, how did the party switch sides? You know, those sorts of questions. And what I realized very quickly is that what people asked me most often was what on, how did we get here? What on earth is going on and how do we get out of it? So it’s arranged in those three pieces. And, um, what it. What it argues is, uh, you know, that we have this, that with the rise of Donald Trump coming from a certain kind of moment that followed the patterns of the rise of fascism, but [00:22:00] then he turned it into a fascist movement after the, the, um, August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Richmond, Virginia.
But then it goes on to talk about what has happened in the United States to expand democracy in times when there has not been democracy. And so the final section of it is sort of a how to manual. How do populations that don’t have rights in the United States expand them? And what it argues is that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but primarily the Declaration, gives the people who live in the United States a language for arguing for inclusion in the larger body politic.
And once they have that language, they can leverage everything from, from, uh, poetry and art, um, education, labor, and so on to expand their participation in that birthright, if you will. But when I talk about democracy, and many people argue about what democracy means, when [00:23:00] I talk about it, what I mean is very simple.
It’s the right to be treated equally before the law. It’s a right to have a say in your government. Those two things are huge, huge aspects of this country, and they’re both guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. And it’s also the right, which should be established by those first two pieces, to have equal access to resources.
And by that I don’t just mean mines, for example, which is the way they talk about it in the 19th century, but to education and to healthcare and to all of the pieces of the world that are necessary for an individual to be able to control their own destiny. And that’s really what American democracy is about is about the human quest to have control over who and what we become, which is not only about the United States and is not only about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It’s really, I think, a human quest and a profound search that all of us go through. I think [00:24:00] that the documents and the traditions of the United States of America have given us the tools to do that in a way that, that we are extraordinarily privileged to have, and that people need to be aware that we are in danger of losing them.
Kat Smith: How are we in danger? What is that danger?
Heather Cox Richardson: We appear to be on a track to establish authoritarianism in the United States. And the whole concept of authoritarianism is the opposite of you being able to control your own destiny because you are treated equally before the law, because you have a right to say, to a say in your government.
Both of those things being under attack at this very moment by the politicization of the Department of Justice and by things like the SAVE Act coming up to Congress, I think even possibly this week, that require people to have documentation of their citizenship when they vote, um, even though it is already currently against the law to vote [00:25:00] as a non citizen.
But that will knock a lot of people out of being able to vote about, they estimate about, that about 69 million American women have changed their names and therefore do not have birth certificates that reflect their current names. And I think it’s about 174 million American voters don’t currently have a passport, and of course it’s very hard and expensive to get a passport.
So you’d knock a lot of people out of having the right to vote under things like the SAVE Act. So if you’ve lost the right to vote and you’ve lost the right to be treated equally before the law, you are no longer able to create a government that, in fact, gives you access to things like health care and things like education and all the things that also are currently on the chopping block.
And when that happens, you are at the mercy of a state media, which we are also in the process of constructing by the fact that the, um, The White House press secretary announced yesterday that the White House Correspondents Association will no longer be able to manage the press pool at the White House, and rather that the [00:26:00] White House will decide who gets to ask questions and what is an acceptable question to ask.
That’s the idea of establishing, uh, an information bubble that we will all have to live in. And when that happens, what you see is the rise of extraordinary corruption, which puts the public benefits of a democracy into the pockets of a very few private people, the way we have seen happen in Hungary. And it quite recently and you will lose the ability to control what you do because you can’t speak freely. You can’t get the job you want. You can’t vote to get other people that you want in office and your life becomes somebody else’s to determine.
Kat Smith: And I know you’ve said that you can’t predict the future, but What can we do for the future? If you have any guests your talk tonight is on Forming a new political system 2024 and beyond. So what is that political system that we have to form?
Heather Cox Richardson: Well, I’ll leave the [00:27:00] political system to the the help of Dylan Penningroth that I’ll be talking with and who has a fabulous new book out. But what we can do now is actually I think really crucial and that’s that the American democracy has always depended on the support of the people. It has to demonstrate its, um, legitimacy. And this is actually, again, in the Declaration of Independence. A government in the United States is not legitimate in two ways, um, it can be challenged, its legitimacy can be challenged in two ways. One, it can be acting unconstitutionally, which senators currently are saying correctly this administration is not doing.
It is openly violating the Constitution, um, by challenging Congress’s prerogatives. And it’s doing so quite deliberately, and now it’s pushing against the courts. So, if in fact our legislators wanted to challenge this administration, they could do so. a [00:28:00] handful have. The Democrats have, the Independents have, but the Republicans have not, and the Republicans hold the majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
But the people are not powerless, because that’s the real biggie. If the people demonstrate that they do not support a government, it loses legitimacy. And one of the things that my friend Joanne Freeman, who’s a professor at Yale, always points to is that if people speak up, even if they are speaking up to their Republican Congress critters, and say that they aren’t, and by the way, that’s a Molly Ivins term, I believe, and it’s not intended derogatorily, it’s actually somewhat loving, believe it or not, if they are willing to speak up, even to the people who are standing against them, to the Republicans, to demonstrate that they do not support what is happening, that undermines legitimacy of the government, and it demonstrates to them that they might want to change course, which almost none of them will do historically.
But it also demonstrates to a new generation of leaders, and by generation I’m not solely referring to [00:29:00] age, but a different group of leaders, that if they want to get elected, they’ve got to behave in a different way. And right now, as you’re seeing these town halls all over the country, especially in deep red districts, where legislators thought that they would be safe, you’ll notice that the purple groups are not, were not holding town halls, only the deep red ones were. Um, it’s a really powerful demonstration that, uh, what is happening under Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency and therefore under Donald Trump is really unpopular. And you’ve already started to see somebody like Thom Tillis, who’s a senator from North Carolina, back off on the Department of Government Efficiency a bit.
So speaking up. Above all, speaking up and then, of course, running for office and getting involved with Democratic people who are who are defending any kind of Democratic principles, small d as well as big D, um, making sure you’re with people so that you are not feeling alone, supporting the community pieces of a democracy from the [00:30:00] local level up through the national level. Crucial right now, the American people are going to have to speak up about this.
Kat Smith: Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll leave it on that powerful note.
Heather Cox Richardson: It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me Kat.
Kat Smith: Tonight Heather will be in conversation with Dylan Thomas [sic: Penningroth] at Zellerbach Hall and a sold out lecture on quote, forming a new political system 2024 and beyond.
You can keep engaging with Heather’s work and writing at her substack, heathercoxrichardson. substack. com Thank you again for joining us in the KALX studio. This has been Kat Smith, News Director of KALX.
