#1605 America at 250: A Conversation with Richard Slotkin

And I just have to say, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I've had access to some of the great minds of our time, and there will be more. We're just getting started here. We need your help. Truly, we need your help.

And if you're willing to help, that's what we're going to do with it. I want to talk with all the best thinkers in the country, historians, novelists, essayists, policy people. There's a centrist politics to what we're doing. I think some of you would think centrist with a left-leaning centrist, but it's not far left at all. I'm a very conservative person in some important respects, and as a humanities scholar, I'm not interested in an echo chamber of the so-called enlightened ones.

But these people are world-class historians, like Richard Rhodes, who wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and I'm going to be interviewing him again early next week. And here's Richard Slotkin. And we have David Dick Andriy, who's now written his most recent book on what happened after Captain Cook with respect to the search for the Northwest Passage. And so this is a golden time. I couldn't have imagined this even five years ago, but now these technologies allow us to cross space at low expense, to talk to extraordinary people who then bring their insights and their wisdom to us.

And I find that just unbelievably satisfying. So, help us. We need to have some research assistants. We need a producer for this program. We need someone who will make cold calls.

I'm terrible at that. But to contact people and say, would you be willing to come on? And frankly, not everyone at this point would be willing to come on the Thomas Jefferson Hour, because it's Jefferson, and Jefferson is in the minds of many sort of toxic. But the new moniker, Listening to America, is, in my opinion, absolutely perfect because it allows a very wide range. And it also is bigger than the founding fathers.

In some respects, the founding generation is a trap. And although it's glorious to think about it, write about it and debate and reevaluate, it locks us into a kind of a mythic past. And Listening to America is meant to be open to the world today, but with a strong historical base, and, frankly, a Jeffersonian politics. And by Jeffersonian politics, I mean this, civility, the free marketplace of ideas, good, bad, and otherwise, respect for the other, a commitment to certain ideals like equality, access, dignity, the capacity to earn a living with a living wage, the belief that everybody has to be at the table, that new voices are absolutely essential, that there is room for reform in all institutions, whether from Congress or the church, but also to the way our academies, our universities, are operating. So that enlightenment package of tolerant, but rigorous, evidence-based discourse, emphasizing civility, with an open mind and curiosity, that's the purpose.

That's what I'm trying to do. And I'm the luckiest man in the world, because I love to be the interlocutor, but I'm more satisfied when I'm asking questions of extraordinary people and then listening carefully and teasing out follow-up questions and bringing some humor to it and bringing some irony to it and adding bits of my own historical understanding and then having them take it farther or tell me that I'm full of beans, whichever it is. That's my chief joy, and I want to do much more of it. I'd like a bigger megaphone. I'd like to share these great thinkers with more people in the country.

And so, if you can help, that's what we want to do with it. This is a labor of love. I take nothing from it except psychic satisfaction. But the psychic satisfaction is gigantic. And today, my library downstairs, as you know, huge, 20,000 volumes, which are straining the woodwork, that library has three or four books by Richard Slotkin.

I've been reading him all my life. To tell you the truth, I would not have interviewed him about his book Regeneration Through Violence, although it's fascinating. But this book, Great Disorder, the minute I saw it, it just automatically I push purchase, because this is exactly what I'm trying to address. My question is this. Who are we in 2026??

What's our national narrative? What parts of the American idea do we still agree about? How much, if life is Venn diagrams, how much overlap is there between the view of the left and the view of the right, the view of the liberals and the view of the conservatives, the view of the Whole Foods people and the view of the Cracker Barrel people, the view of the urban Americans and the view of the heartland Americans? What's the overlap? And I believe there is a strong but damaged overall consensus about America.

Just this morning to be sitting here at my desk with a relatively inexpensive recording device, listening to one of the great scholars of our time talk in a relaxed and fluid way about a massive book that he wrote, and his sense of humor is really delightful. And he wasn't one of those people where the interviewer just tees it up and gets out of the way. He wanted a conversation, and we had one, and that was very, very refreshing for me. So let's go to the program, but you take my point. And if you can help us, please do.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. I have the great honor today of talking with Professor Richard Slotkin, Emeritus Professor of History at Wesleyan University and the author of a number of really important books, beginning with Regeneration Through Violence in 1973, but others, including now, most recently, A Great Disorder, National Myth and the Battle for America. Welcome, Professor Slotkin.

And these occasions invite us to step back and evaluate where we are, how we got here, what we stand for, a national origin story, how well things are working. It gives each of us an opportunity to assess America and America at a quarter of a millennium. And I'll tell you candidly that I'm worried about the 250th birthday. It feels to me like it's going to be a cultural bloodbath, that the fissure that's at the center of American life now is going to play itself out in some pretty uncivil ways when we approach 2026. And I'm hoping you can provide some clarity about what weight should we give to the crisis that we're now in?

So pick it up from there.

Some people do, but there's no mass movement to say, oh, let's all unionize or something like that, or let's all cut off all trade with the world. I don't think there's anything that clear. I think the issues that get people riled up and ready to participate in politics are cultural issues, questions of belief and the practice of belief that are really critical.

He was willing to use the IRS and the FBI against political opponents, whereas Trump doesn't have that level of competence. But Nixon was still committed to certain fundamentals about the way that the country worked. And let me just use the word consent. But he understood that leadership in a republic depends on the consent of the governed and that he had lost the consent of the governed, as expressed through his party primarily, but in general, through the people's representatives. And lacking that consent, he couldn't continue.

I don't think Trump cares about consent. He'll manufacture consent. If he loses consent, he'll claim he had it anyway, as he's done already. And it makes me more frightened than I was under Nixon. Nixon, I had this weird attitude of, OK, you've got the White House horrors or something.

Bring it on. Let's have it out. I don't feel that way now.

He invoked executive privilege. But in the end, he turned over the tapes. When Barry Goldwater and others of the establishment came over to the White House in that famous moment and said, you're done here, you've got to go, Nixon left. He was an institutionalist, a corrupt one, but he was an institutionalist.

And I think it's a serious movement. I think it's got a popular base. I think it lends itself to clear programs in certain areas and just a general attitude towards governance, which is full of possibilities for civil violence.

You say he's sui generis, by which you mean he's sort of a unique figure. But behind him is this movement of grievance, of desire to live, sort of in a pre-1960s Aussie and Harriet America, with echoes in it of white supremacy and white nationalism, and some of the lingering apartheidism in the American South, and so on. So this phenomenon is much bigger than Trump. Trump's political genius, if you want to call it that, was to recognize it and tap it.

Originally, it was kind of a blank screen onto which you could project any kind of anger that you had, almost any kind of anger that you had, if it was connected with ethnicity, ethnicity, with immigration, with race, with government regulation, then he was, you know, he was, he was your voice.

Now, couple them with the emerging technologies of our time and the threat of AI and so on, social media. I think that millions of Americans have a legitimate reason to feel anxious, right? And that that anxiety doesn't necessarily need to be rage.

So that you get a kind of mismatch between the two. And I really locate the 1990s as the turning point. Pat Buchanan's speech in 1992, which inaugurates the idea of culture war, where he says Reagan didn't do anything for conservative culture. He did great stuff for the corporate economy, but he didn't do anything on abortion. He didn't do anything on homosexuality, blah, blah.

He didn't do anything against affirmative action. And now it's time to act on the cultural agenda. And I think that our own culture war really begins to begin at that point.

I'm talking to Richard Slotkin. Let me ask you another question before we go to our first break. Why did you write this book? Why did you write A Great Disorder, National Myth, and the Battle for America?

And now I actually, and I'm sure you wrestle with this all the time. Some days I think, oh, no, we muddle through. We'll get through this. The balance will be restored in some way. This is just a kind of an American intifada and it will fade.

And then we will not maybe be the same, but we will return to constitutional norms. And then other days, I think this thing could collapse, and there are signs that it will. How do you wrestle with your own historical knowledge and insights, and also your own concerns as a citizen and a human being in the year 2024??

What's the left answer to the Confederate battle flag?

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm talking to Richard Slotkin about where we are as a nation as we approach the 250th birthday of our republic, born on the 4th of July, 1776, and now edging in on the 4th of July, 2026. And the country seems to be diseased, disintegrating, disturbed. All sorts of bad energies seem to be floating about. It doesn't feel to me that there's a great deal to celebrate at the moment.

And yet, of course, there is. We're the richest country in the world. Our fabulous innovation in the United States, for the haves, at least, and most Americans are essentially the haves. It's never been so good. We have access to more tools, more mobility, more gadgets, more entertainments, more access, and, I think, truly more equality than ever before in the history of the country.

So there's a lot of good news here. But the country's in a bad mood, which I find so startling. You know, Harold Macmillan told the British people in the early 1960s, we've never had it so good. You've never had it so good. That's how I feel about America in many respects.

That doesn't mean there aren't unresolved issues to continue to approach. But why do you think we're so grumpy? Why do you think we're disturbed in this way?

And what happens? The government bails out the bankers. And I won't say doesn't relieve the distress of Main Street, but stints on the distress, the relief of the distress of Main Street. And barely are we beginning to come out of that. Then COVID hits and plunges us back into economic and social disarray.

So there are things that have happened that have caused us to question whether our government knows what the hell it's doing. And to think that maybe it doesn't. And I don't know what takes its place, but certainly rage and the sense of grievance. The disaffection with government begotten by those real world events, plays into the cultural discontent that comes from the unresolved cultural developments, changes from the 60s. That, in fact, the cultural liberalization of the 60s left a lot of people out and left a lot of people behind and scared a lot of people that they were losing their cultural position, their cultural authority, and the values that they wanted to protect, preserve, and pass to their children.

So it's a multi-level crisis in that sense. But I really see it as this mismatch between culture and politics.

We're probably not going to return prayer to schools. It's too late for that. We're not going to rebuild the family, no matter how much we wring our hands about the disintegration of the family. In other words, as you said, there's been a kind of a progressive, leftist movement dynamic in the culture, and it continues. It doesn't seem to be slowing down.

And politics is sort of running behind it, trying to figure out what to make of it. But that's not going to stop, is it?

Well, I think Louisiana has given it a shot and Alabama is going to give it a shot. States are thinking about banning contraception. So I think that things are reversible at the state level. And here's again where the interplay of culture and politics happens. If politics leaves culture alone, its tendency has been to liberalize.

But if you get control of enough political structures, you can use the power of the state to impose cultural change. Now, it may not be positive cultural change. It may just be destructive. You can impose the end of abortion rights. You can't necessarily impose what follows abortion rights.

But you sure as hell can change the material conditions under which cultural life proceeds by exercising your power in that way. And the way states, I mean, the way people think about their lives and their bodies, and pregnancy and family life in Texas, if the current legal structure hangs on there, is going to be very different from those same things in New York or Maryland, where I am now, California.

And it seems to me that if Jefferson were in this conversation, he would make a kind of a Gulliver argument that the people are like Gulliver, they're sort of being tied.

It's that the people who belong to that majority, it's not important enough. And the question is which cultural issue that is being shifted to the right on? this is so important that you will, in fact, get out and vote. Gun rights is another one of these things where there's an overwhelming majority in favor of things like universal background checks and red flag laws. But people don't vote that.

They vote something else. They vote. Donald Trump is a strong businessman. They vote, I don't like paying high taxes. Democrats will tax me.

That majority doesn't express itself politically.

They didn't use that knowledge to change zombie laws that were on the statute books. I mean, yeah, I think that's true. On the other hand, to turn it around, the Supreme Court's attack on the Voting Rights Act in Shelby case, that was out of the blue. There was no way to anticipate that that would be done. And what you saw there is that once the political power gave permission to get out from under the scrutiny of the Civil Rights Act, Shelby County went back to good old white supremacy, Shelby County, with voter restrictions.

And nothing will happen to reverse the Shelby decision.

I mean, you can own any kind of gun you want, as long as the law says, yeah, but you can't, you know, walk down Broadway with the thing or walk into a schoolyard with the thing. People, people, objected to it. There's an outcry against it, but there's no, there's no movement against it. There were local, there were local movements, but nothing that really turns an election on that issue.

And, and the Aeneid turns out to be the myth of Rome. in the post Republican period. It worked. It seems to me that we now lack an American narrative, that you have 340 million Americans. It used to be something like this.

The pilgrims came, other people came to different parts of the country. Unfortunately, there's slavery, but, but don't hold that against us. The westward movement, which is one of your greatest areas of interest. Yes, there was the civil war, but afterwards we bound the country back together. In the 20th century, we were sort of forced into becoming the most important nation in the world, which we did with great reluctance, but that we use our power on the whole benevolently, et cetera.

You know that myth. That's, that's, that's the story, right? But that story is no longer agreed upon by something like a consensus.

But one of the things that happens to stories is that every time you deploy a myth, you test it. And the good war myth was tested in Korea, tested in Vietnam, tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people have become skeptical of it. So that you get, although it's still a very potent myth, particularly with liberals, it is a lot of suspicion of it on the America first side, on the, on the right, a lot of skepticism, for example, about applying the good war analogy to Ukraine, where it would seem to be most obvious. And as, as Biden actually did in his speech today.

And we, you know, we talk about anger as a mood, but put anger together with a rationale rooted in history to use violence. And you've got something which is profoundly threatening to civil order.

Defended the reign of terror. He's their guy, right? I mean, Patrick, Henry and Thomas Jefferson are the founders who invoked the uses of violence and extremity to, to produce the right ends.

He says, when an issue has been fairly decided by ballots, there is no excuse for a resort to bullets in a free government. And if you want a free government, you renounce the use of bullets. And they're not renouncing the use of bullets.

That's absolutely brilliant. That's my favorite paragraph in your book. I want to ask you about that in a minute, but fat chance, Rich. I mean, fat chance, right? A shared understanding of national myth, a new consensus, an agreement about what went wrong and what should be done about it.

That's where we aren't.

There has to be a possibility for future action, or what's the point of writing anything? And so, yeah, I go beyond that to suggest what such a new vision might and a new program might look like. But I do not see that as ready to hand.

We need to take a short break. Fascinating conversation with Professor Richard Slotkin. His new book, A Great Disorder, National Myth, and the Battle for America will be back in just a moment.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm with Richard Slotkin in his home in Maryland, Emeritus Professor of History at Wesleyan and one of my favorite authors. You know, you've written about the frontier. all of your life. I live on the frontier in North Dakota.

That myth is a very potent one. Here, its version is essentially the little house on the prairie myth that these people from all over the world, but largely Nordics, came out onto the Great Plains. And thanks to the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroads, they got their homesteads and they assimilated into the culture. And they became the kind of the rural backbone of virtue in the United States. But here's what's happened since the 1960s.

We now pay attention to Native Americans. Back then, the story was largely a triumphalist story. No responsible historian today can tell a triumphalist version of the frontier myth any longer. We know of the cost of empire to the land, to minorities, but particularly to Native Americans. The Cultural Revolution of the 60s forced us to look at things that we didn't previously give much weight.

And now that we have to look at them, it's almost impossible to maintain the energy of those old mythic structures. But there's not exactly an alternative yet that has emerged that we can feel good about. And you have to be able to feel good about your national narrative, don't you?

You can tell the story of the Indian Wars, truly, as long as you give the Indigenous side an equal voice or a comparable voice. As long as you recognize that, well, William Henry Harrison, old Tippecanoe, was a patriot, but so was Tecumseh. There was a valid set of values, a valid culture that the Indigenous warriors were defending against the settlers. The outcome is the outcome. The way it was conducted is the way it was conducted.

You can deal with the way in which the settlers and the settlers' nation betrayed promises made in treaties. But think about it. Can you imagine, was there some other way to arrange that treaty so that it was more equitable? There was an actual degree of fairness. Treat history as a species of moral inquiry and ask, what could have been done better?

Not to say they were evil people because they didn't do it. They had the blinders on. That's why they didn't do it. But can we imagine some better way to do it? And is that a lesson that we can apply looking forward?

And lastly, in every phase, I mean, Lincoln said it with the Declaration of Independence, that it is a moral charter to which we labor and struggle and maybe don't ever perfectly realize, but we're trying. That's a way to tell the story. There has been a struggle from the start to see if you could include everyone who belongs, who is in the society, in the political society, make them all citizens, give them all the rights that are enjoyed by those who are full members of the society, define the society in that way. And we can tell the story in terms of that struggle in which there will be periods of desperate defeat. Jim Crow is a defeat following the Civil War, treated as such.

It's not that the history can be positive without being a straight line. going up, can be a zigzag line, with a tendency to go up, something like that, bending the arc, as Obama liked to say.

You know, we could have honored permanent Indian territory in Oklahoma. We didn't. In other words, so many people, and I'm one of them, of course, in most moods, you think, oh, isn't this sort of inevitable, a land hungry, advanced European culture with incredible weaponry and technology, meets a culture that is a steady state, in some ways, I won't say primitive, but a fundamental culture. Inevitably, this leads to the loss of lands and so on of Native people. But is that really true?

I mean, as you know from your work, choice after choice, after choice after choice, has been made in American history to violate important American principles in order to get the gold out of the Black Hills, in order to take lands from Native peoples for other projects, and so on.

But if you treat the history as a good novelist, would treat a story, as a good storyteller, would tell a story, as a series of choices with consequences, choices and consequences, it seems to me. you humanize the story, you make it relatable, and you can also make it, as I said, a species of moral discourse. You can apply values to it. The facts are the facts. But what you make of the facts is essentially a matter of moral choice and moral interpretation.

But it didn't really percolate into the full narrative. But at least it was there. It was a politics of greater inclusion. But if we now believe that everybody has to be at the table and the narrative is, yes, America is an extraordinary experiment, but it's been characterized by darkness, racism, sexism, environmental extraction from the beginning. And that while this doesn't discredit America, it casts a cloud over any totally positive view of our history.

Good luck selling that in 2024 as the narrative of the United States. You know that when Barack Obama went to Egypt and said the slightest thing about American mistakes, he was assailed. No one apologizes for America. How dare you apologize for America? So if you're a novelist, how would you begin to create a consensus narrative for the country now?

there's nothing to be done about that. And my theory of myth is stories are told by lots of different people from lots of different perspectives. And you have to see if the public will adopt them or not. You'll get blowback. But tell the story, tell the story anyway.

I think the deeper problem is if I couldn't imagine writing an American history textbook covering the whole damn thing at this point, it's just, it's beyond, it's too complex. But I can imagine the retelling of key stories in such a way that you alter the structures, the larger structures, mythic structures, of which those stories are a part. You mentioned the Great Sioux Reservation. So retell the story of the Custer, Custer's Last Stand and the Great Sioux War, of which that was a part in such a way that Red Cloud and the Sioux and Sitting Bull get equal time with Custer and Grant and the Northern Pacific Railroad, and see if that changes, see if that how that plays into the rest of your teaching about about westward expansion. I don't think this is something that can be done in one fell swoop.

I think it requires the choice of particular episodes and the redoing of them.

It doesn't say, oh, my goodness, now we're going to have to rethink policy and we're going to have to find a way to to harmonize with the native resistance and to make sure that it's constantly central at the table in any story that we tell. I think I think we're willing to address these on a piecemeal basis, that a certain thing should not have occurred. And this is a really, really unfair question to one of America's most eminent historians. But in your work, which is amazing, have you moved the needle outside of academic circles?

No single book can affect the necessary transformation of American culture and American myth that one might desire. But if everyone writes books, if lots of people write books, if readers who read the book tell the story to other peoples, then the story multiplies and picks up and may acquire the kind of authority which something like the lost cause or the frontier myth has acquired over time. It's the multiplication of stories, not any one story that tells you. And that's like voting, you know? That's like the people choosing to read and accept a story rather than blow it off.

And it turned out it was worse than what was reported in Sinclair's book, The Jungle's Silent Spring.

And so, in other words, this happens. But the second point is that a book like yours, a marvelous tome, well-written, accessible, clear, doesn't have the same chance in 2024 that it might have had in 1974.. That the way that books, the way that we apprehend culture, the way we absorb information, the way we figure things out, has changed so dramatically that books have in some sense been demoted from their centrality, don't you think?

And some of those will have the kind of effect that you've described for Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath. You could throw in there, too. How does it play into the long-term effect of the culture? Uncle Tom's Cabin did great things for the cause of abolition, but not such great things for the restructuring of American concepts of race.

What would they have done with that very viable economic unit of territory that they had there? Also unknowable. But if you take them seriously as a people, as a political and economic unit, there was a potential history there. It might have been. That's maybe worth imaginatively exploring.

Let me go back to storytelling, because you mentioned Steinbeck. He thought that there were only a handful of stories. The storyteller creates the myth of people. And this is what all we're doing is running variations on it. now.

I think he was right that you can make an argument about global climate change. It may or may not have traction. But a story, a compelling story about these things really can attract human attention, empathy and commitment. And I think you're right. The Republicans are good at telling a story.

In my opinion, the right, I'm not talking about mainstream republicanism, if there is any, but the right wing of the Republican Party tells moronic stories like everything was OK in 1950.

. That's nuts, but it works. They have the myth of the founders. In other words, the right tells a series of nostalgia stories, highly distorted and selective, that suggests there once was a kind of an American paradise that has been destroyed by feminists and environmentalists and so on. But it works.

That's the point. Their narrative works to get about 70 million people to endorse it.

The next one was the lost cause, the Confederate flag or Confederate iconography, which is really about not just about defending slavery, but more than that, it's about overthrowing, Reconstruction, which is the regime of liberals and blacks, and reestablishing white, Christian, male supremacy in the South and using extraordinary violence to achieve that end. You're justified. And then, finally, the myth of the frontier, coonskin hats, cowboy hats, no regulation, exploitation and vigilantism. Those three myths are very traditional. They go back to the origins, really, of except, well, lost cause, not quite, but do look back to the origins of the country.

They concern race. All three concern race and all three justify the use of violence to achieve a political end. That's the core of each of those three stories. And that's why it's such a dangerous movement, why violence is at the core of the movement. And it's also the secret of its appeal, because it's the difference between a rom-com and an action movie.

And the thing about myth is it's not just a way of thinking about the past. It gives you a script for responding to something that's going on in the present, something which resembles what went on in the past. Those three things, they've really got that going with MAGA.

Greta Thunberg, of course, become politically active out of that experience is an extraordinary thing and a very hopeful thing. And I would rest my hopes there with the people who have that kind of orientation.