In honor of Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance With Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. This week, Mandy is joined by historian John Meacham to discuss the Super Bowl halftime show, Bad Bunny, Kid Rock, and more.
00:09:32.080But we have to look at the past, you know, I think not with a censorious heart or with a kind of mindless celebration.
00:09:41.240But we look it in the eye, we realize that there were competing forces, our appetites and ambitions shaped us, and yet just enough of us at critical points fought for independence, achieved the end, finally the end of slavery, undid legalized Jim Crow, defeated Hitler, stood against Soviet totalitarianism.
00:10:06.220And it wasn't foreordained, but just enough of us did it.
00:10:12.520And so the question now, really, is will just enough of us say that this authoritarian adjacent administration and this movement that is more about, I think, identity and power than any actual ideological or policy agenda, will that prevail?
00:10:33.040How proximate is it to prior times in our history?
00:12:09.580It was the attempt to manufacture a crisis that, since we're going to dork out for a second, I'll throw this out at you.
00:12:16.920And if Mike Pence had not done what he did, you know, the plan, as they said, was to create so much chaos that the House would have to make the decision.
00:12:31.120If Trump had prevailed in the House in 2021, what do you do if you have a constitutionally sanctioned remedy for an illegal result?
00:12:44.740And what is, what I think is a particularly virulent and is going to prove to be particularly stubborn legacy of this movement of Trump and President Trump and the MAGA is this distrust in elections whose results you don't like.
00:13:07.900If you think historically, Adams didn't do it in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1824 hashtagged it.
00:13:18.280He branded it a corrupt bargain, but he came back to Nashville and ran again.
00:14:27.940But the problem is, of course, as you know better than anybody, his reality show is our reality.
00:14:32.920You look back, I mean, you're as a historian and you made the point about being a centrist and made the point about work you've done with the Bush family, notably George H.W. Bush.
00:14:45.480And I want to go back to that in a moment.
00:14:49.840Have you found yourself because of Trump to show more of your bias or do you feel your objectivity is still whole?
00:15:02.860They may come through the prism or the lens, which we see them as a little bit more partisan, but that they are sort of moored still in your objectivity as an historian.
00:15:11.700Yeah, so I have a slightly different view of this than a lot of historians do.
00:15:19.100I'm basically a biographer, and so I paint portraits.
00:15:23.360And so if you'll stick with this metaphor with me.
00:15:26.720But when you paint a portrait, you do it according to the light that's streaming in the window.
00:15:32.420So any story you tell in retrospect will be shaped by the time in which you find yourself.
00:15:39.560I have become much more, and President Biden was a friend and I helped him when I could, not on policy.
00:15:53.040But I believed that and believe that he was a constitutionalist and that the journey toward a more perfect union and the arc of a moral universe were in better hands in his, obviously, than the once and future incumbents.
00:16:14.140That said, I think it's fascinating that basically kind of Bush 41, even Reagan Republicans are now more center or even quasi center left because of the way the world has moved.
00:16:37.580They haven't, it's like what your predecessor, Ronald Reagan said, he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him.
00:16:48.460And in many ways, I do think that, I don't want to be overly grand about this, but I feel that too much is given, much is expected.
00:16:57.800I've been incredibly fortunate in my life.
00:17:00.280If I was born a citizen of the United States of America, I'm a boringly heterosexual white Southern male Episcopalian, you know, I'm good, right?
00:17:09.880And so I think if you don't call them as you see them, what's the point, right?
00:17:15.520If in this moment, one is not willing to say, you know what, a creeping to galloping authoritarian in the White House, playing on the oldest of American fears, if you're not willing to stand up against that, what are you willing to stand up for?
00:17:35.140And as you paint that, sort of try to paint that picture, as you described in that light, which I appreciate the visual of, and being a biographer, not just in a story in that context, how important is it to have some, the temper of time, meaning to reflect, not in the moment, in the hot take, but looking through the lens of history and having perspective.
00:18:00.420As my mom would say, seek first to understand before you're understood, to avoid the punditry as you're painting that picture.
00:18:10.360I, see, I hugely admire people who have the guts like you to go into the arena.
00:18:17.440I may not agree with everything people in the arena want to do, but I've never been on a ballot, right?
00:18:22.660And I, I think that what used to simply be a journalistic impulse to be kind of like Beavis and Butthead, just to kick people in the shins because you could, which was journalistic until the iPhone, and then everybody became that, right?
00:18:41.980One of the things I say when I'm lucky enough to give commencement speeches, which I love to do, and you're really addressing the grandparents because the kids are hungover, and this line has never failed.
00:18:54.540I say, just because you have the means to express an opinion quickly does not mean you have an opinion worth expressing quickly.
00:19:03.040And I really do think, when Musk bought Twitter, I got off everything, I am much more healthy in a mental way, I don't follow the minute to minute, and headlines in history just don't move in tandem.
00:19:22.440And the great examples of this are Harry Truman, who left Washington with a 20% approval rating.
00:19:30.400But by 1970, everybody wanted to be Truman.
00:19:36.220George H.W. Bush, 39% of the country, only 39% of the country wanted him reelected, but he died a kind of hero of the republic because people saw, sometimes, another little metaphor here,
00:19:50.940sometimes you can't really see a mountain until you get farther, far enough away from it.
00:19:58.340And I think it's really important to say, which I think is true, that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney could not be nominated by this Republican Party.
00:20:15.240And why that doesn't force my Republican friends, I call them Peter Millar Republicans, right?
00:20:25.440Why that doesn't lead to more of a coherent plan of action, I don't really understand.
00:20:33.380I mean, I understand the raw facts of it.
00:20:34.980I remember when this first started happening in 2016, I was at a dinner with a southern governor, a small state, and he said, you know, when you're the governor of a state this size, you know every precinct.
00:20:52.920In the Republican primary, it just happened.
00:20:55.040And when the results started coming in, the Republican presidential primary on Super Tuesday in 2016, he thought there had been a computer error because these precincts that had had 100, 150 voters had 500 and 600.
00:21:19.500And so Trump was telling a story that was resonating.
00:21:28.420To me, the central work of someone like me is to tell a story that can compete with a narrative that is fundamentally not about recognizing and living into the Declaration of Independence,
00:21:49.500but about exclusion and walls as opposed to bridges.
00:21:56.600And you reflected it in your opening comments, this shock and awe of Trump 24-7, dominating the news, dominating our conversations, dominating.
00:22:06.820I mean, the idea that we have a president who's showing up with this exception, curiously, didn't show up at the Super Bowl, but has shown up in every other sporting venue to sort of highlight his dominance in terms of the conversation.
00:22:20.060I mean, how do we start to reflect then?
00:22:22.540I mean, is it more than the sort of the 250th anniversary of that declaration?
00:22:30.220Should we situationally find ourselves engaged day to day?
00:22:34.880I mean, how do you, where do you find, I mean, you've been challenged with, you show up on Morning Joe consistently and you're sort of stuck in the headlines of the day trying to frame it in historical ways.
00:22:46.000But for the rest of us, perhaps, you know, what, what's, is there advice, counsel, is there perspective that you can offer at this moment and how you confront what is so often lies misrepresentations, omissions, and historic deviance?
00:23:02.420So one thing, this is pure punditry to answer your question after saying I don't do punditry anymore.
00:23:07.880One of the, did you see the New York Times story about Senator Britt from Alabama?
00:23:13.220Well, I've been, she's, she's been interesting.
00:23:18.120She's actually very, very interesting.
00:23:20.120She's an interesting political character.
00:23:22.160I've had her on my bingo card as one of the rising stars in the Republican Party before she showed up in the counter-programming of that State of the Union.
00:23:44.380The lead of the story is, and so it only came from one person, was the senator from Alabama sitting in her car texting.
00:23:53.440So who's the source to her staff who she'd seen that terrible picture of an ICE agent with a little boy and a Spider-Man backpack being put into a car.
00:24:09.060And she wrote saying, let's find out about this.
00:24:13.480And that a senator from Alabama feels comfortable enough receiving, let's be honest, the cultural approbation of the New York Times tells you something, right?
00:24:27.900It means that, and now I'm just speculating, but it means that maybe some fundraisers, maybe some donors are beginning to think, you know what, we got to think beyond the next 36 months.
00:24:43.380You know, every day that passes, President Trump's interests and the interests of Republicans who are going to be on a ballot again get a little farther apart.
00:24:51.540Um, so the power of that picture of that news picture tells you something and that, and so Senator Brett is willing to tell a story about herself, which is that she thinks that perhaps this is going too far.
00:25:13.320That's a story, and one of the hard things about, and what I think is in a self-solipsistic way, I think this is important for what people like me do, is so much of our public life is about a kind of common assent, right?
00:25:35.620It's about an ethos, and the ethos at our best has been one in which we obey the rule of law.
00:25:42.840If we don't like the laws, we try to change them.
00:25:45.960Um, we, uh, are trying to live into the declaration.
00:25:52.340If we have to amend the user's guide, the constitution, we do it.
00:25:56.300But that's been, and, and imperfectly, but it's kept us going, right?
00:26:01.400It's kept the experiment worth defending.
00:26:03.560The story we have to tell, because there has to be one, right, is ever harder for the lived experience of younger people, right?
00:26:17.900So if, you know, you and I, I think, are about the same age.
00:26:20.820So you and I grew up, we didn't fight in World War II, but our grandfathers did, right?
00:26:29.400Like, uh, our, you know, I grew up in the South adjacent to, I, you know, I knew John Lewis, you know, uh, we, we could, we had a tactile connection to the greatest moments in American history.
00:26:45.120The defeat of fascism, the defeat of Jim Crow.
00:26:48.760But if you were born in the 21st century, what have you got?
00:26:53.140You've got September 11th, the failure of the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, the Great Recession, a biographically interesting, but historically indispositive Obama presidency.
00:27:06.060You've got COVID, you've got COVID, you've got Trump, you've got January 6th, and in something that you'll appreciate that I, I don't think everybody and people who don't have kids, little kids at this point can appreciate.
00:27:21.280For more than 20 years now, we have explicitly told our children, by our actions, not our words, that we can't keep them safe in schools.
00:27:34.640We do duck and cover drills, not because of a foreign foe in Moscow, but because of what happens here.
00:27:43.840And one of the two places you're supposed to be safest, your home and your school.
00:27:47.740So why would you trust the grownups to do anything?
00:27:52.160That's why the story matters so much, is telling the story.
00:27:57.260The most important thing this country, I would argue, ever did was fight the Second World War.
00:32:06.500Listen to Boy Sober on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:32:12.600It's interesting when you talk about the party leaving Reagan and reflecting on his journey as Democrat labor leader to the Ronald Reagan we know today.
00:32:26.760The Ronald Reagan and I happened coincidentally today to be in the old Reagan mansion here in Sacramento.
00:32:32.980So the spirit of Reagan very alive in the walls surrounding me.
00:32:37.180But I will never forget, and it's been a speech that's been shown millions of times now over the course of the last few months,
00:32:45.340particularly with all the anxiety that we're experiencing out on the streets and sidewalks,
00:32:49.220that anxiety that showed up in the New York Times with that text from Senator Britt.
00:32:54.980And that is he ended his presidency and chose one speech.
00:33:01.260He talked about, you know, this notion of newcomers and this sort of, you know, remarkable speech about pluralism and what defines America and makes us unique.
00:33:13.940Now we have, obviously, what appears to be an invasive species, Donald Trump, in relationship to that.
00:33:23.800But what you just painted was a picture of, you know, of frustration of people that have not experienced what you and I referenced with our grandparents
00:33:36.180and experienced more of this historic project that obviously Ronald Reagan was a big part of as well.
00:33:41.540And doesn't it make then more sense that there was a Donald Trump, someone who's going to shake the machine,
00:33:48.500someone who's going to scratch the record, someone that was going to challenge those institutions that are failing our kids,
00:33:54.800institutions that I know are us, they're reflective of us,
00:33:58.360but institutions that are failing a generation of people.