Transcript of Grading America's First 250 Years: America, Actually with Astead Herndon

Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the holiday today, so we have an episode of America Actually with Estelle Herndon for you. In this episode, Estelle talks with historian Heather Cox Richardson about America's first 250 years and how the US is facing its biggest stress test since the Civil War. Oh joy. So you enjoy.

So we are 250 years into this American experiment, and I'd say it's going okay. I give us like a C+. The Declaration of Independence, the women's rights movement, the invention of basketball or the iPhone, all good. Slavery, colonialism, income inequality, unequivocally bad. But what's gonna determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in. What's up, y'all?

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Tap in with us. Joining me now is Heather Cox Richardson. She's a historian and professor at Boston College, but you probably know her from her very popular Substack, Letters from an American, and her YouTube channel. I am excited that Heather is joining us cuz she's gonna help us think about not only the future, but how the past connects to it. Thank you for coming.

It's such a pleasure to be here.

I appreciate that. I mean, I wanted to kind of start by looking at your work. As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you've argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years, uh, from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal. I wondered how you thought about those reinventions. What forces shape them? And are we in a reinvention period right now?

Oh, that's interesting. I'm not sure I've ever used the words reinvention because the way I think about it is that Any country has to deal with new challenges all the time. And because we had set out at our foundation a series of principles that at the time were quite limited by who they covered, but were expansive in terms of what they could cover.

Mm-hmm.

We have managed through our history to address new challenges like westward expansion, like industrialization, like globalization, like the advent of nuclear weapons, to expand American democracy, to more closely adhere to those foundational documents. Mm-hmm. To expand as they took on new issues. So are we in a moment like this now? Absolutely.

Mm. Now, what forces shape these kind of, uh, shifts in the country? If we— I don't know if it's reinvention's the right word, but if we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity? And, and, and what are the seeds that we should be looking for right now?

So there's a whole lot embedded in that question. And one of the places that I wanna start with that is that The seeds for reinvention, I think, come from the arts. They come from music, they come from art, they come from new languages and new clothing styles and sculpture and all sorts of new ways to envision the world through our imaginations. And we could talk about the late 19th century, for example, and how extraordinarily creative that time was and so forth. But those ideas, I think, come from there, but that's not enough. I think when you see reinvention, you see Americans reaching back for their stories, for their traditional history, and the places that they can see other Americans having exercised their agency to make those traditions, our best traditions, come into law or at least come into practice. And you know, it's an especially poignant time for us to be talking about this. On April 12th, Hungarian voters put a supermajority of opposition figures to Viktor Orbán into power in their parliament, and they will of course have a different prime minister. One of the things that they appear to have done is to have reached back to Hungarian history and said, listen, we might disagree with each other about immigration and about finances and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country, and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country rather than tear it down.

And that really hit a chord for me because that is precisely what the Republicans did when they formed in the 1850s. It's precisely what the populists and the Democrats did in the 1890s when they organized against the robber barons and then included the progressive Republicans. It's certainly what we saw in the 1920s and the 1930s, what we saw in the 1950s, and I think what we're seeing in the United States again today.

Mm. I wanted to ask about today. You know, the premise of this show is kind of to try to take Trump out of the center, to see the country beyond the lens of him, but kind of baked into that question is whether he is like an aberrant a malign piece in American politics, or is reflective of a system, and we're gonna have to live with Trumpism for maybe longer than even the individual person.

So Trump is very clearly the outcome of at least 40 years of right-wing rhetoric on the— that has been adopted by the Republican Party that laid the groundwork for a man to come in and essentially get rid of the dog whistles and call to the sexists and racists who had ended up sliding into the Republican Party really after 1965 and the Voting Rights Act to basically create sort of a libertarian, small-government elite in the Republican Party that depended on the votes of those racists and sexists to stay in power. But what he did was he sort of flipped the script. He nodded to the establishment Republicans who wanted the tax cuts, but he empowered the racists and the sexists and the American firsters and so on. And so he is very much a product of that, you know, that moment. But he is also something different because by empowering them, what he did is he turned a democracy in not just to an autocracy, but to a personalist autocracy. It's sort of, in a way, a step beyond fascism that we can talk about.

But, you know, personalist autocracy.

Yes. So the idea that he wants all the power, but he also wants the power not for his party, and not for even his cronies, but for himself. But he's certainly a product of that 40 years. Now, there's a bigger question, as I say, embedded in what you said, and that is, is the United States of America's system so deeply flawed to begin with that we were waiting for a Trump? And to that, I would say no. I would say that we, uh, many of us dropped the ball after, really after the 1960s and the 1970s, and the idea that we had finally managed to create a new kind of American a government that was premised on reality rather than on the previous images of American life. And by that, I mean that it was a government that recognized the worth of individuals. It didn't necessarily protect individuals the way the principles of that government suggested they should, but it recognized their worth in a way that the government before 1965 and before the Great Society under LBJ had not done. And so for a lot of people, they thought, "Oh, we're on this trajectory toward a liberal democracy that is, in fact, going to recognize the worth of—" you know, disabled Americans and elderly Americans and so on.

And as a result, we stopped focusing on the importance of democracy and of liberal democracy. But what that did is it enabled the radical right to step in and give people a sense of a national narrative that made their agency feel deeply important to them. They were the ones protecting America in a way that people like me weren't.

Because the immigrants are taking your job, because folks are coming in. And represent a kind of imminent threat. That's right.

And, you know, one of the things that always jumps out to me is Lauren Boebert, the representative from Colorado, on the morning of January 6th, 2021, texting to people, "This is 1776." Yeah. You know, the idea that they were the ones who were truly protecting America. And one of the things that I think Trump has done for us since his, you know, retaking the oath of office in January 2025 was to make it clear that our democracy and the guardrails of our democracy that so many people believed couldn't be challenged. And Trump just tore them up. Yeah. And with that, a lot of people who sort of assumed the guardrails were there are stepping into the fray and saying, "Okay, I didn't think I was going to have to get involved in politics." Yeah. "But clearly I do, and here I am." And that kind of engagement in protecting American democracy is the sort of thing that, as I say, we've seen in the past, the 1850s, 1890s, and so on, to reclaim that democracy and crucially make it adjust to new conditions that are currently challenging it. Like in our lifetimes, the internet, climate change, artificial intelligence, things like that.

I mean, I think your point is very important because it lays out that, you know, Donald Trump may have not been inevitable, but he did kind of— he was succeeding on the ground the Republicans have been tilling for a long time. I wanted to ask about nationalism specifically. You know, it can sometimes feel as if Democrats or American liberals can be running from the shadow of America, can sometimes feel like a little awkward about embracing a positive story about America. I wanted to ask about that. Like, is some of what the right has been able to do in terms of seizing the flag and draping themselves in it been made easier by a liberal distance from it? Even though I know that's not how you come to your work, it sometimes has felt as if Democrats haven't been willing to, you know, drape themselves in red, white, and blue or tell a positive story about America like some Americans want them to.

Okay, that's too broad a brush, I think. And I want to be careful with the word Democrats because in this moment, of course, when as many Americans identify as being independents as identify as Republicans or Democrats, it's important, I think, to look at the American population as a whole. Yep, fair. And in that case, I think one of the things that you are identifying is the 1960s and early 1970s and the broad-based opposition to the Vietnam War meant for a lot of people that the trappings of that war, the American flag and so on, had taken on negative connotations. And that was something, by the way, that the radical right grabbed hold of and really ran with. So there is that for sure. But I want to be careful to say that, you know, if you look at what Donald Trump and the radical right is doing now, is trying to reach back for a past that was perfect. And that's an authoritarian and even a fascist move. The idea that somehow there was a perfect past back there. And I always like to say, "When?" Yeah, yeah.

I ask that on the road too. When people say they're looking back to make America what it once was, I say, "Name me the time." Yeah.

Like the date. Like, was it February 2nd, like, 1954? Yeah. You know, because there is no perfect past. But there is also no exclusively negative past because humans Americans are gonna human. That's what we do. And what I love about America is that I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand that, uh, those principles to include more people. So if you think about democracy as being a process rather than a place, or a time that there was a certain kind of achievement, you recognize that what Americans have done to each other and to others is horrific in our past. We have done horrible things. But other Americans have stepped in to try and mitigate that trouble and to move the ball forward. Yeah. And that is as important a story, I think, as the horrors. And one of the things that I really hope that we can reclaim is a recognition of the clear view of our past, both of the horrors of it, and yet, Also those people who have said, "We as human beings don't have to live like this, and we're going to make the situation better." Mm-hmm.

It's also a view I think based in reality. I mean, when I think about my travels across the electorate, people ask me, "Is the story of America as polarized or as entrenched as we sometimes say in political world?" And you can kind of say both sides of the coin. I could rattle off a whole bunch of wild stuff that's happened and people throwing you out of rooms and slur or this or that. But you also, to your point, have people who care in the middle of that, have people who support you in the middle of that, have people who connect with you across demographic types and differences in individuals that I think often could tell a very positive story about the country as well. So both of those things exist right next to each other. The last question I wanna ask you is really about your work. And as we kick off to a little game I'm gonna play after this, you know, when we look back to the founding documents of the last 250 years, Is there a piece that you think will have the most relevance for going forward? Is there something that you look back to and you say, hey, uh, uh, uh, this clause, this thing, this is what I think will be the kind of key for our efforts of perfection moving ahead?

Gettysburg Address. Interesting. I'm surprised. Yeah. Why?

Because the, you know, and I'm having the, obviously I'm a big fan of the Declaration, uh, because it establishes the foundation of American democracy, even though the country was not a democracy at the time. Mm-hmm. The idea that you must be treated treated equally before the law, have a right to equal access to resources, and to have a right to have a say in your government. That's what a democracy is, right? So that is crucially important. But with the, the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln, I think, emphasized, you know, think about it: fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. You know, when the, the founders put in the Declaration, they said these are self-evident truths. By Lincoln's time, he's saying it was a proposition and it's being tested. And that, I think, is really the heart of what it means to be an American, is that there is this proposition that it is possible to create a nation that has the principles that the founders put down on paper, But that principle is always going to be a proposition.

And he says, listen, we're here to honor these men who died in this horrible battle to try and make that proposition come true. But there's really nothing we can do more than what they did to make that happen. And the proposition that he actually explains at the end of that speech is that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. That to me is the marching orders. If the Declaration is the, is the plan, the Gettysburg Address is the marching orders.

I like that framework because it speaks to the unfinished work and the work, uh, to be done going ahead. Okay, Heather, I would love to do an exercise with you and rethink how we should talk about our historical founding documents. But like any good history lesson, we're gonna need some classroom tools. So hold on a moment.

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Alright, we're back, and thank you to everyone for joining us. I am here with Heather Cox Richardson, and we're gonna try a little bit of an exercise. So for those listening, I am currently seated next to a whiteboard where we are going to write a founding document together. Thinking about America's next 250 years, what can we take from things like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence? What things aren't in there that might make us a better democracy going forward? Heather, is there something that comes to your mind initially?

Okay, so I'm just gonna be a jerk here because I'm a historian. So we don't have to write this now, but we have to have a prolog explaining, you know, "We the people," or "When in the course of human events," or any of that.

You know, I do still remember from Schoolhouse Rock. I should just, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice," what is it?

"Ensure domestic tranquility." The reason I'm being such a jerk about that is because I think the key, one of the key things in this moment is to make sure we grab the idea of agency, of everyday people having agency. So in terms of values, they gotta have a say in their government. They gotta be able to vote. So we gotta protect the right to vote.

Let's start there. We the people.

But we have to make sure that they have a free, that everybody has a free and fair vote.

Yep. One person, one vote.

Yes. For real. Like, can you write that in really big letters? For real this time? Seriously. Okay. Not messing around.

You know, I had this on my list also because I was thinking about things like the Electoral College and gerrymandering and even how the Constitution, you know, says that Congress shouldn't infringe on someone's right to vote. But in our new founding document, we're going to give people an affirmative right to vote. One person, one vote, and making sure we're leading from that place of equity.

Okay, so we'll start with that. Now, the next thing I want on there is we must protect the environment.

Okay, that feels like a fundamental governmental role.

And I don't care what language you use that with. I don't just mean we're protecting, you know, the Grand Canyon. I mean that we have to have clean air, clean water, and we have to take care of the climate.

I was saying, what about public funding of elections? You know, like thinking about something that could get money out of politics or things that I hear about all the time. I'll put that one as part of my list. Yeah, definitely getting money out of politics. Funding. How about you next? Education. What do we want to say about education? Like that, that is part of the government's fundamental role. We think about public education and things like that.

Yes. And I'll tell you why. It's, we have fundamental public education at, and we could actually argue about what ages that goes to. But the reason that that matters in a foundational document is because if you think about democracy, A democracy depends on an educated populace. It just has to have one. And one of the ways that our democracy has been hamstrung is by the destruction of public education. So this is not like saying, you know, this is not a luxury, which is one of the ways that the radical right has framed it. It's actually a necessity in a democracy to have robust public education for everybody. Yeah, I think that's a great point.

I mean, when I talk to— again, where people bring their cynicism into government, a lot of times the roots of that are in poor public education, about people thinking as if government in cities or in rural places have not provided their first function. So let's put that on there.

And, and that, of course, is going to cut deeply into the whole right-wing voucher movement, which is designed to destroy public education and which is getting real teeth in a number of Republican-dominated states.

100%. There has been a movement to privatize— we know the Department of Education, things like that. But, uh, To your point, it is something I hear about a lot in terms of government providing that role. Can I say maybe a little bit of a controversial one? I was thinking like, you know, since we have an age floor for president at 35, I could get down with an age ceiling, particularly out of the last couple years, something like maybe 80 for things like Supreme Court, president, or Congress. What do you think about that?

I'm less keen on having a year, a year because people are so different. What I like is the idea of having terms, a certain number of years.

We can agree on term limits for sure.

Well, not term limits, but terms for in the Supreme Court. Because remember, there were de facto limits when they set up the Supreme Court because you used to have to ride the circuit.

Can you explain that a little more for folks who don't understand that?

So literally, you had to ride a horse to the different or get in a carriage or whatever, which was no picnic to the different courts. And so judges used to be young because you didn't want to have to ride around on a horse to do all this stuff. And until we get World War II and the incredible ease of transportation and of really good medical care, both being in, in national government and being on the Supreme Court was generally a pretty young person's game. Interesting. Because you, you wouldn't, you know, you weren't going to fly home to California every, every night.

Right, right, right. You were constrained by the, by the means of getting around itself. And by your own health. Terms. How about let's do terms. Supreme Court. We all agree on that.

Supreme Court's power.

Give me, give me, give me one more for you. Healthcare. Healthcare. Now what does that look like? Are we, are, is when we think about the government's role or in kind of establishing a new social contract, are we talking about universal healthcare? Are we talking about things that should be guaranteed as a human right?

I think people should have basic healthcare and, And I want to be really clear about this. These are not things that I personally— I mean, yes, they are in a way. They are things that I personally want people to have. Yeah, but you're talking about a foundational document. So I'm building a document that will protect American democracy. Yeah. And one of the ways that you weaken a country is you make people sick. I mean, I'm sorry, but that's just like rule number one. You want to really hurt a population? Make sure mothers die in childbirth. Where are we right now? Mothers are dying in childbirth.

The last one I will add, and I'm interested in your thoughts of here, is somewhat based on my own experience. I did City Year National Service Program, and I really think a year of national service changed my life personally. I would be in favor of a year of national service for young people. 2 years. 2 years. Okay.

I only did one. Because, well, because I used to be a— I mean, used to be— I am a college professor, and it really takes— think about, you went to school, think about freshman year. Yeah, like a lot of people are spending at least half that freshman year getting used to dealing with people they don't like or figuring out whether they like to drink or whatever. And they're really not hitting their stride until like March of their first year. So you want to give them a full— you want to let them screw around for a year and figure out who they are, and then you want them to have a year where they can get their feet under them.

I hear that because I certainly didn't really know what I was doing until about that March time. Same. Is there anything else you would add to our list?

Probably, but I want to point out something. That list that we just wrote looks extraordinarily like the list that Theodore Roosevelt put together in the early 20th century to protect American democracy. So this, you know, one of the things that gets me about the moment we're in is people who have been sort of sidetracked by our construction of American politics since the 1980s, look at a list like that and says, oh, it's far left. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. This is so far from being far left. It was actually proposed by a Republican. Yeah. More than 100 years ago on the grounds that not of individual rights, which he was less into than people are today, but on the grounds that to preserve American democracy, you must have these things. What should we call this document? Oh, that's a good question. 'Cause what kind of a document is it? It's not really a Declaration of Independence.

It's not necessarily a Declaration of Independence. It's a— you got it? Manifesto. Oh, I like manifesto. Yeah. Manifesto works well too.

Can we do manifesto?

I like manifesto. Let's definitely do this. This is the America Actually Manifesto. There you go. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we really appreciate your time. Uh, have a great rest of your day.

You too. Thanks for having me.

America Actually will be in your feeds every Saturday with an interesting interview in culture or politics. You can also watch these episodes on the Vox YouTube channel. Just go to youtube.com/vox or click the link in the show notes. The best way to support this show is by becoming a Vox member. Members get a bonus segment on Patreon every week, and they make our work possible. Go to vox.com/members to join. That's vox.com/members to join. This show was edited by Kasha Bressalian, fact-checked by Esther Gim, and mixed by Shannon Mahoney. Christopher Snyder is our video editor, and Koon Louie is our senior art director. Our executive producer is Cristina Vallis, and our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Additional support from Miranda Kennedy, David Tadeshore, and Nisha Chittal. I'm Aastead Herndon, and this is America Actually.