[Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jefferson Cowie on the deep,
twisted roots of American oppression ]
[[link removed]]

THE SCARY THIRD MEANING OF FREEDOM  
[[link removed]]


 

Felicia Wong, Michael Tomasky, Jefferson Cowie
June 22, 2023
The New Republic
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jefferson Cowie on the deep,
twisted roots of American oppression _

George Wallace of Alabama campaigns for president In 1968., GBM
Historical Images/Shutterstock

 

Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie has written several highly
influential volumes in his career, including _Stayin’ Alive_, about
the 1970s, and _The Great Exception_, on the New Deal. This year, he
struck gold with his newest work, _Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of
White Resistance to Federal Power._ In April, it won the Pulitzer
Prize for nonfiction. It’s a historical look at Barbour County,
Alabama—the birthplace, as it happens, of segregationist Governor
George Wallace—and how the white people there imposed their will on
Native and Black Americans. We know the two standard definitions of
freedom or liberty—“negative” freedom (the right to be left
alone) and “positive” freedom (affirmative rights guaranteed by
the state). Cowie identifies in Barbour County’s history a chilling
third definition: the freedom to oppress and dominate. Its relevance
to our time should be obvious.

Presented by the Roosevelt Institute, _The New Republic,_ and PRX.
Generous funding for this podcast was provided by the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed in this
podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its
funders.

JEFFERSON COWIE: Unlike freedom, democracy requires institutions, it
requires compromise. It requires the sacrifice of a certain amount of
freedom in order to live in common with your fellow citizens. So I
would like to see us push for democracy rather than freedom. And I
think honestly that if fascism comes to America, it’s going to be
marching under a banner that says freedom. 

FELICIA WONG: That is Jefferson Cowie. Jeff’s here to talk to us
about freedom.  

MICHAEL TOMASKY: How it was conceived, at least by some people, as
something tied to oppression and against the federal government.

FELICIA: How we progressives can reclaim freedom.

MICHAEL: And what the role of a historian is in this moment of
rupture.

FELICIA: I’m Felicia Wong, President and CEO of the Roosevelt
Institute.

MICHAEL: And I’m Michael Tomasky, editor of _The New Republic._

FELICIA: Welcome to _How to Save a Country,_ our show about the
ideas and the people behind a progressive vision for America. 

FELICIA: So, Michael, you talk a lot about the word freedom and when
you do, what’s there for you? What does it really mean?

MICHAEL: What it means to me and the definition that I tried to
advance in my last book, _The Middle Out,_ is giving people the
tools to fulfill their greatest potential, because by doing that, they
can live the freest lives.

FELICIA: I think maybe some of the freedom we are fighting for and
the freedom that the Freedom Caucus is talking about, they’re pretty
radically different. 

MICHAEL: Like 1000% different. I’ve been hammering at this for a
couple of years now, but we need to reclaim and redefine the word.

FELICIA: Yeah. Well, I’m really curious to see what Jeff thinks
about all of that because that is the subject of his Pulitzer
Prize–winning new book, _Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White
Resistance to Federal Power._ And Jeff actually writes about a pretty
different freedom, one that we don’t often like to think about, but
one that he argues has been used since the very first days of our
republic. It’s the freedom to enslave. It’s the freedom to
dominate. It’s the freedom to oppress other people. He says that
there’s a really long historical trajectory to that meaning of the
word.

MICHAEL: Jeff takes us to one place, Barbour County, Alabama, to tell
that story. It’s a relatively small county with a population of
under 30,000. So people probably aren’t very familiar with it but I
would imagine people listening to this show have heard of George
Wallace.

FELICIA: George Wallace was the four-time governor of Alabama. He was
a staunch, vocal segregationist, and he also had a number of different
unsuccessful bids for the presidency of the United States.

MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. One of his most famous speeches was from his
inauguration for his first term as governor of Alabama, where he said,
“segregation now, segregation tomorrow”—I tried to throw a
little southern accent in there—and “segregation forever.” And
he really shaped politics in the South at that time. So we’re going
to talk with Jeff all about Wallace’s political beginnings.

FELICIA: Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of
history at Vanderbilt University, a position he took after nearly two
decades of teaching at Cornell. He’s one of those historians people
turn to in order to make sense of the present moment. He’s the
author of several books, and one of his earlier works that I really
loved was _Stayin’ Alive_
[[link removed]]_,_ which
focused on the labor movements and the cultural upheaval of the
1970s. 

MICHAEL: Yeah, that was great. And another one of his books, _The
Great Exception_
[[link removed]]_,_ made
a really big impression on me and reframed the way that I thought
about the New Deal in history.

FELICIA: Yeah, we’ll put those titles in our show notes if our
listeners would like to check them out. They really are must reads if
we want to understand the story of labor and class and capitalism in
the U.S.

MICHAEL: Jeff, welcome to the show.

JEFFERSON COWIE: Thanks for having me on. 

MICHAEL: You’ve been praised because of your writings on history,
labor, class, capitalism. So start things off by telling our listeners
a little bit about yourself, your background, how you got interested
in these things.

JEFF: Wow. So going deep, I grew up in the Midwest. I was the son of
a janitor. Not just any janitor, but the janitor at my high school. So
I lived in the context of how class worked in a daily way; that had a
pretty profound impact on how I saw things in my hometown. And I put
that on the shelf, eventually went to college, went to Berkeley. It
wasn’t until after about four or five years, I began to think, maybe
that hidden transcript that I had observed as a kid was actually a
really important thing to think about. So I began to think about class
a lot and most of my books are really about how class works in the
U.S., and Mexico to a certain extent. But this new book is really
about how race works.

FELICIA: We talk a lot on this show about freedom and you have a
notion in the book of a freedom that goes beyond the “freedom
from” and “freedom to,” this Isaiah Berlin notion of freedoms
[[link removed]] that
Michael often brings up: freedom to be left alone or freedoms that are
a launching pad forward. There’s another notion of progressive
freedoms that many people today talk about, related to FDR and his
four freedoms: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of
speech, freedom of worship. But your notion of freedom in the book is,
in a way, deeper. It’s about the freedom of some people to be able
to do violence to other people. I really want you to talk about that.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s a bit of a critique of that Berlin dichotomy that
I think we all rely on. And I did too. So, no insult to Michael or
anybody else who uses that framework. And “necessitous men are not
free men,” as FDR put it
[[link removed]]. 

FELICIA: I use that all the time, I say that all the time.

JEFF: Right, of course. You are not free to fulfill your sense of
self and your family security and who you are in society if you are
not materially taken care of in some capacity with good wages and good
benefits and housing and cities that are safe and flourishing, right?
I began to look at people who invoked freedom, and I realized I
disagreed with a lot of those invocations of freedom.

FELICIA: What did you disagree with—specifically? 

JEFF: Yeah. OK, like the Freedom Caucus. The Freedom Caucus is
antithetical to everything I believe in, but they use that word
freedom. What’s going on there? And by the end of the book I was
like, Oh, the Freedom Caucus is perfectly named. They’re not using
freedom as window dressing to get something else. They’re actually
practicing a deeply embedded version of American freedom that has been
there since the earliest settlements. 

FELICIA: What is that in two sentences for our listeners?

JEFF: In two sentences. Right. So I use Orlando Patterson’s idea
of freedom
[[link removed].].
He’s a historical sociologist at Harvard, and he says it’s more
three pieces. The freedom from, the civil liberties version of
freedom. Number two is the freedom to build your own political
community however you wish to participate in that. And the third,
going all the way back to Athenian democracy is the freedom to
enslave, the freedom to oppress, the freedom to dominate. He says that
freedom is deeply, profoundly part of the Western tradition. And of
course, the American Republic is based on Athenian democracy, which
was also a slave society. I really look at that darker version, that
third note, what he calls a “court of freedom,” and if you put
that in a settler-colonial, chattel slave society then that grows very
large, that freedom to dominate, the freedom to dominate others.

MICHAEL: So how did you settle on Barbour County, Alabama as the
place where you wanted to locate this story? Is it because George
Wallace was from there, or was that a coincidence?

JEFF: Completely coincidental. I had two or three questions. One,
what is American Freedom? Two, why is this anti-federal tension a
constant? Why do local people fear and even hate the federal
government? I was trying to figure out how to explore that, what would
be my method? And I began to think maybe one place, one local
situation might allow me to write it better and really dig into that
local concept and how localism is set in opposition to federal
authority. And I happened to find Barbour County, because we were
driving down to the Gulf Coast and we drove through it and I was just
blown away. 

FELICIA: You drive through a lot of places. What struck you about
Barbour County?

JEFF: Yeah, right. So, we got off the highway and you drive in and it
was like this moonlight magnolia set with these trees, arcing over
two-lane boulevards and these antebellum-style mansions on either side
of the road. Just an amazing set piece. And then you cross over to the
other side of town and it’s whitewashed windows and mom and pop,
failing places. And I said this place is interesting. My spider senses
went off like, Oh, what’s going on here? And I turned to my wife and
I said, “What is this place? I’ve never heard of it.” And she
looked it up, and this is Eufaula, Alabama. And she said, “Well, I
don’t know, but they didn’t have their first integrated high
school prom until 1991.” And I’m like, Oh, OK, That’s a story.
Yeah. So, which raises a possible question, which is, Is this an
extreme example rather than an illustrative example? So I just went
back into my office and started looking backward. Finally I realized,
Oh my god, George Wallace is from this county! And I had spent so much
time with Wallace in _Stayin’ Alive_ and in _The Great
Exception, _I was like, This is fate. This is just complete fate. 

MICHAEL: Yeah. So the first episode you discussed has to do with
treatment of Native Americans, some of which was unspeakably savage.
Talk a bit about that.

JEFF: Right. So we all know the Indian dispossession removal story,
or elements of it in the Trail of Tears and all of those things. But
what was interesting to me in this case was one, this is the frontier
of the cotton economy. The cotton capitalism expanding into what was
then the Southwest, on the other side of the Chattahoochee River from
Georgia. But what had happened was a treaty had been signed to protect
this last nine county area for the Muscogee Creek people.

FELICIA: A treaty between who and who? Between the federal government
and the Creek Nation?

JEFF: That’s correct. Between the federal government and the Creek
Nation, but what happened is once that treaty was signed in 1832, all
these white settlers known as the intruders at the time flooded into
this area to try and stake a claim. And then the shocking thing
happens is Andrew Jackson, the person we associate with a white
supremacist, expansionary policy, pro-slavery, anti-Native American,
actually sends federal troops and marshals in to remove white
intruders from Native American land. And this goes against the whole
story of American history. That Jackson paves the way, which he did. I
mean, let’s not get the…  He’s still got Tennessee, Georgia,
Alabama. But this one area he was going to protect. 

FELICIA: Did that surprise you? When you—Did you first learn that
through your research on this book? 

JEFF: Oh. Yeah. People who studied this whole region are like, what?
I had to write it so boldly in proposals and in books and in the
manuscript. People would read the opposite of what I was writing even
though I was saying explicitly that Jackson was protecting the Native
Americans from white intruders.

MICHAEL: So these people went too far for Andrew Jackson. That tells
you something.

JEFF: Right, right. And so what this means, and this is deeply
problematic for our shared project on this podcast is the white
intruders were actually worse in a lot of ways than Jackson. That
Jackson was tapping the brakes on the very process, which was all
about opening up the continent to white settlement, beyond a doubt,
but he wasn’t doing it fast enough, and quickly became the enemy of
the people. Alabama turned against him. They’re talking about civil
war already in the 1830s. It’s truly a remarkable tale and it really
made me think a lot more about freedom because land, at this time, is
freedom. And they made this case against the indigenous people on the
grounds that their right as free men included the right to take Native
American lands.

FELICIA: So that was the argument that the white settlers, the white
intruders made against “federal tyranny,” in air quotes. So in a
way, the story you tell in the book locates this white Southern
resentment of hatred of the federal government in that historical
moment. After all of the work you’ve done on this book, is that how
you see it?

JEFF: Yeah. The main town, Eufaula, was burned down by federal
marshals before it had barely started. So it begins in opposition to
federal power because the marshals destroyed the cotton warehouse and
all that stuff downtown. And what the settlers call on, or the
intruders call upon is the Jeffersonian tradition based in the early
Republic… 

FELICIA: Yeoman farmer. 

JEFF: Yeoman farmers, access to land. 

FELICIA: That form of freedom.

JEFF: “The Empire of Liberty,” as Jefferson called it
[[link removed]].

FELICIA: Yes. “The Empire of Liberty,” which has an almost
Tocquevillian romance in a way. 

JEFF: Oh, yeah, I’m named after the guy. 

FELICIA: Right. There you go. There you go, Jefferson Cowie. Anyway,
it is fascinating to think that this federal conflict and this cry of
liberty against the federal government is located, before what some of
us think about, and what is the next episode in your book, which is
about reconstruction. I think progressives these days talk a lot about
reconstruction. Talk about the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth
Amendments and I think a lot of people today who think about race and
racial justice think about reconstruction as a lost opportunity.
Bishop William Barber, who’s from North Carolina and is the leader
of the Poor People’s Campaign, often talks about the need for a
third reconstruction. But tell us about the story of reconstruction in
Barbour County. What did you learn there and what did you learn about
the role of the federal government in that story up until 1877? 

JEFF: The short story is that after the Civil War, Republicans who
are the good guys in this story and African Americans wanted federal
citizenship. They wanted to get as far away from local and state
citizenship as they could. And this is a core theme. It’s what the
Native Americans wanted too. They were writing Jackson saying, Protect
us from state’s rights. Protect us from local rule. And it’s the
same thing for the freedmen after the war. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments rebuild the constitutional structure and
especially the Fourteenth Amendment, try to federalize citizenship,
which was not the case prior to that. This local-federal struggle for
classes that are trying to dominate, they want local rule for
freedmen, who want their specific democratic participation type of
freedom. They want federal intervention to protect them. That’s the
nature of reconstruction. We can get into policies and things like
that. But what that unleashed was this long-term struggle on the local
level between Black Republicans and their allies against the
Democratic machinery, locally and on the state level, to try and
either kick out or enforce federal power.  

FELICIA: Yeah, that makes so much sense because a lot of times it’s
governors and other people at the state level, state legislatures
where you do see a lot of these fights about federal power, local
power. And of course, we should probably talk about George Wallace
because he is from Barbour County.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I’d like you to talk about Wallace in this tradition
but I’d also like to ask you about the period after Wallace. So
Wallace late in life dropped his segregationist stance, and the South
at that point seemed to be moving in an accommodationist direction.
There was talk of a new South and all that. Did that really happen?
And what cut it short?

JEFF: Well, if I could take your question more broadly about the
potential of a different freedom emerging at multiple points, because
you see it in reconstruction where interracial democracy is
flourishing, and then whites essentially shoot
[[link removed].] Black
voters in the streets in Eufaula. Then the populist movement comes
along in the 1880s and 1890s and they’re building toward a biracial
system. But then the 1901 Constitution has passed and becomes a reason
for segregation. Then we have The New Deal. But then this Wallace
period, Wallace is working it out early on, the white South is
conflicted and Wallace runs as a fairly progressive figure in the
early ’50s.

FELICIA: That was actually surprising to me in the book. He felt a
little bit like a political opportunist. He was going to go where the
wind was blowing. Right? On race? 

JEFF: He’s more than an opportunist. He’s a political genius. I
think he’s like—

FELICIA: Maybe one in the same. 

JEFF: Yeah, right. But, oh my god, my favorite quote about him is,
“Anti-communist to the core, but if you dropped him into the
Albanian countryside, he’d be head of the politburo in six
months,” because he’s a political animal. He’s a great way to
think about these things because he’s such a wonderful conniving
figure to figure out what the lay of the landscape is. And so he wants
to build better roads, he wants trade schools. He’s a moderate on
race. But then after _Brown vs. Board of Education_ in 1954, he sees
the writing on the wall, he’s like, No. And he gets beat by a
vicious racist. He runs as a racist, but not just a racist. He brings
in the racists by running against the federal government. They’re
going to come no matter what, but you can build a coalition by running
against federal power. And so always on the horizon in Wallace’s
world are federal bayonets about to descend from the hillsides onto
your community. That means you’re going to get tax people,
regulation people, people who are worried about Blacks voting, people
who are worried about housing, integrating neighborhoods. That becomes
his M.O. and he runs for president several times in ’64, ’68,
’72, ’76. He’s a little different because, and now we’re
getting into the period that Michael’s asking about finally, in that
he is trying to bring the South to the North rather than the Southern
strategy of bringing the Republican party to the South. I actually
call the chapter “The Northern Strategy,” as a sort of way to
think about that. And the more that ’70s progress, he begins to pull
away from race, but he still has it in for the feds and that still
becomes the glue for how he can push forward by saying your freedom is
an opposition to these meddling federal bureaucrats who can’t park a
bicycle straight. And so that becomes really where he wants to be.
Now, in the long run, he ultimately, and maybe this is where you’re
really going, he apologizes for the whole thing. And he feels
terrible. 

FELICIA: Was that legit? 

JEFF: I think it was. John Lewis prayed with him, Jesse Jackson
talked to him. He looked at what he had done and, and was actually
afraid. Now, it also served his political interest because Black
people could vote, right? So—

MICHAEL: Right,

JEFF: —to the sense he’s the bellwether we’re looking at, he
also understood the lay of the landscape and actually ended up being
fairly popular among African American voters in Alabama.

MICHAEL: It’s so tangled and I just think that no sooner did we as
a country make this progress in the 1960s and seventies than there was
a backlash just immediately and we’re still fighting that fight of
the 1960s and ’70s in so many fundamental ways.

JEFF: Right. Well, so my argument that I don’t develop in this book
is, thinking about the post-60s era as the long redemption. And
redemption is a very problematic word, but it’s the—

FELICIA: I was going to say, are you using it literally the way they
did in the nineteenth century? Like the redeemers? 

JEFF: Yes. Right. So after reconstruction, white Southerners felt the
need to redeem the South from meddling with federal power and bring
back the racial hierarchy, exclude federal authority and try and
maintain democracy at the local and state levels as much as possible.
That was called redemption. And this was built on the myth of the lost
cause and all these things that, and so while you talked about Barber
wanting to make this a third reconstruction, I’m 100 percent behind
that project, but what we see so far really is a second white
redemption against federal power, being used after the Civil Rights
Act and the Voting Rights Act, and the Housing Act and other things
like that. We see this slow clawing of federal power back away from
the defense of the political rights of minority people. I’ll give
you an example when I got to the civil rights section in this book,
Hosea Williams was the guy who was trying to register voters, organize
the registration campaign after the Voting Rights Act. He was Martin
Luther King’s key lieutenant on this question as they were going
into the ’66 midterms, which is the first elections after the Voting
Rights Act. He’s trying to figure out why some counties have good
registration numbers and some don’t. Finally, he figures out
there’s one variable that explains why any county in the South had
good registration numbers, and it was this: whether there was a
federal registrar on the ground ensuring democratic rights for local
people. You could have a great campaign, you could have great
leadership, all that stuff. But unless there was federal force there,
the numbers didn’t bear up.

FELICIA: To me, that story speaks about race very specifically as
such a unique force in American history, in a way that’s different
than gender, as important as gender is, and different than labor,
different than class. Jeff, your new book is so much more about race
than any of your other books, which dealt more with labor history. So
how do you think about race?

JEFF: I spent so much time thinking about class, and subsuming other
things into the question of class, like women’s rights, vocational
and occupational rights that that would solve a lot, Black, immigrant
rights. If we could subsume that into class, we can get somewhere.
I’ve become more critical of that, a lot more critical of my
original, almost naive assumptions about how race might work. I do
think that race is an extraordinarily powerful driver of American
history. And that it’s going to be difficult to make progress in
those other realms without first making progress on questions about
race. I really do think it is, as much as I believe in all of these
other issues, and this is what happened to me in my commitment to
class and labor stuff, I kept coming across this question of race, and
it seemed to be the one that needed to be dealt with before we could
create other forms of solidarities. 

MICHAEL: I want to jump to today and ask about definitions of freedom
and the fight over freedom. We talk about it a lot on this show, and
it’s our view, my view, our view that we have to reclaim the word
freedom and that we have to redefine it along the lines that governor
Josh Shapiro did last fall in that last speech he gave before the
election, where he said freedom is giving that girl in North
Philadelphia the tools she needs to fulfill her potential. Do you
think that’s a winning argument? Not only just politically, but
historically, is there enough historical ballast there for that
argument to take hold eventually?

JEFF: Right. So what is the value of freedom today, especially for
progressives? It’s a great question. And if we look back over the
history of social movements, acclaim on freedom has often been part
and parcel of that. To get rid of it is problematic, but I think to be
specific about it is really helpful and to say what that means, and to
emphasize the other dimensions of freedom besides this freedom to
dominate. Because I do think in fact the Republican Party has a lock
on that brand. And I think it’s really problematic. 

FELICIA: Do you think the Republican Party… is that shifting at all
in your, I’m asking you now to be a political strategist and not a
historian, but do you think that that’s shifting at all?

JEFF: Well, Biden’s campaign launch of course was called Freedom,
his little video. But what was interesting about that, and this
presages where I’m going, is while Biden said, Here’s the name of
my campaign and it’s “Freedom.” He was talking about something
else for the most part, as far as I could tell. And that’s
democracy. And my argument is I think we need to push democracy.
Unlike freedom, democracy requires institutions, it requires
compromise. It requires the sacrifice of a certain amount of freedom
in order to live in common with your fellow citizens. So I would like
to see us push for democracy rather than freedom. And I think honestly
that if fascism comes to America, it’s going to be marching under a
banner that says freedom.

FELICIA: So you don’t think that progressives can reclaim a freedom
that would maybe be coextensive with equality or coextensive with
democracy? Would you weave freedom in somehow if you were writing the
speeches for the candidate? Or do you really think that democracy
itself is going to be enough of a rallying crime? I mean, democracy is
a process. You and I serve on the board of a small college that is
democratically governed, and we know that—Deep Springs College for,
since we could just do a little plug for Deep Springs here on this
podcast—but at any rate, we know that sometimes democracy’s
challenging. So you really think that democracy in and of itself is a
great sales tactic? 

JEFF: Let me first concede, democracy is messy, but that’s also why
I’m in favor of it. Some of it could just be empty breast beating.
So much of freedom is in fact that. So that leaves us in a fork, and I
think we need to take both. One is a more didactic version of freedom.
When we say freedom, they mean burning textbooks. When we say freedom,
we mean the security offered by health care.  Maybe do something like
that to be absolutely clear to, to unpack it and to— 

FELICIA: Don’t leave the word hanging, but actually say this is
what we mean. This is what we want for all Americans. OK.

JEFF: That’s one fork. The other is this idea of pushing democracy,
because I strongly believe that the fate of democracy in America
requires pushing so many of these questions, including voting rights
to the federal level. And that’s my biggest takeaway from this. When
you start making the argument that voting rights need to be taken away
from local and state authorities and put at the federal level, the
argument against that is going to be you’re taking away my freedom.
Making a case about the institutions and governing structures and
civic dimensions really of what this is about is really important.
It’s not a panacea. It’s not the silver bullet that’s going to
save progressives, but I do think there’s a lot of traction for what
we want that freedom doesn’t necessarily offer. We can make an
argument about the right to choose and that that’s a freedom. Great.
The majority of people are pro-choice. It’s not an issue. If they
had the Democratic means to assert their interests, that’s a
foregone conclusion. We all know that the Democrats won every
presidential contest in terms of the popularity of the vote except for
’04, which is a product of 2000, since the ’90s. The institutions
are in terrible, terrible shape, and that’s what really needs to be
rebuilt. And the stronger you build them, the more people are going to
scream freedom. And I think we just need to be able to push back on
that.

FELICIA: Withstand that, right. Prepare for that and withstand that.
I think that’s really interesting advice. Obviously the work
in _Freedom’s Dominion,_ I think your work on the New Deal, your
work on the 1970s, it feels like all of this work is just so almost
scarily timely. And obviously for your latest book, we’ve seen this
wave of anti-statism, anti-federal governmentism from a number of
far-right groups. Obviously January 6, the armed protests
[[link removed].] in
the Michigan Capitol. Like as a historian, what do you make of these
movements?

JEFF: I’m scared. 

FELICIA: You’re scared as a historian?

JEFF: I’m scared as a citizen. 

FELICIA: OK. OK. OK.

JEFF: If I understand your question, you’re not really looking for
my say on how I am feeling about this? 

FELICIA: Oh, I want both. I want to know how you’re feeling as a
citizen, as Jeff Cowie, but I also want to know how you’re feeling
as historian Jefferson Cowie. I would like to know both. 

JEFF: I like that distinction. Thank you, Felicia. That was, that’s
useful. The thing that pops to my mind immediately is continuity
versus rupture. If you look at my history of freedom, this is a
continuous story. That was the first question my editors asked, “Is
this a story of change or is this a story of continuity?” It’s a
story of rough continuity with a lot of changes. We have this rupture
at this moment, this very specific crisis inflection point since the
election of Donald Trump, which is a failure of democratic
institutions. I will reiterate. 

FELICIA: So we’re living in a moment of rupture.

JEFF: I think so. Yeah. But it’s building off these continuous
trends. It’s not like this emerged from nowhere. But these themes
that the Trumpian right has been working with, run through Wallace,
and they run through Father Coughlan, and they run through Tom Watson
and they run through Andrew Jackson and backward. They’re a sort of
preexisting condition with a massive flare-up that is made all the
more complicated by global warming and the weakening of civic rights
and duties and, maybe now A.I. after the report of those A.I. leaders.
But I don’t think, I think we do ourselves as a disservice to say,
these people don’t understand America. That’s not American to say.
What Trump says is an American, the Freedom Caucus says isn’t
American. No, it’s deeply, problematically American. This is the
fight amongst American historians right now is what are the most
enduring elements and this is the 1619 argument and others. 

FELICIA: Versus 1776. This is shorthand for the argument that the
historical historical community’s having right now. 

JEFF: Kind of, yeah. 

FELICIA: Tell us more.

JEFF: There’s all sorts of shades of gray in there. I understand
the 1619 group, but I would put myself in a more nuanced position than
they are, even though I appreciate the work that they’re doing,
because then it becomes, OK, who are the heroes of the Republic? Are
they the Andrew Jacksons of the world, or are they the people who have
this long history of resistance and bringing the promise of America to
more people? When Barack Obama gave that speech at the anniversary of
the Edmund Pettus Bridge march, he essentially made the case that the
heroes of America are those who sought to expand democracy, to deepen
democracy, to bring freedom to more people not have a defensive
version. That remains, even in the most sophisticated,
historiographical debates, the essence of what we’re talking about
oftentimes. How much power and transformation social movements have
actually delivered over time? What’s enduring and what can change?
How pessimistic, how cynical should we be about American institutions?
How much elasticity and acceptance have they shown over time?

FELICIA: Well, I do think, on the 1619 question, much of what Nikole
Hannah Jones [[link removed]] and others that she’s
working with, she’s a journalist, not a historian of course, but
what they’re trying to say is that there is a way to take some of
that hope, take both the pain of the Black American experience and
actually look at it as a drive for perfecting what we claim we could
stand for or do stand for. So I think there’s a way to look at 1619
that way. But anyway, we don’t have to go there. I have another
question for you about being a historian. What do you believe the role
of a historian is in today’s social movements and at a time of
rupture and when democracy is so fragile? What do historians need to
do today?

JEFF: That is like a deer in the headlights question for me. 

FELICIA: I wish our listeners could see Jeff right now sitting on the
video. His eyes get really big. But yeah, that’s a very serious
question actually.

JEFF: It is and I want to take it seriously as well. I mean it’s
hard. Historians were once in policy circles on a regular basis. They
are no longer—

FELICIA: Yeah. Now you got all those economists. 

JEFF: Exactly. Yeah. Right. 

FELICIA: That’s not a joke.

JEFF: No absolutely, 100 percent. The closer you are to a certain
sort of econometric framework, the more legitimacy you have, even
among historians now with the history of capitalism. There’s a lot
of frustration there amongst historians and even though history
continues to be among the more popular disciplines for general
readers, what should we be doing? This is an all hands on deck moment,
and I think we all just need to be doing our jobs as well as we
possibly can. I think why I’m having trouble answering your
question, Felicia, is I talk to young activists and they’re like,
“We’re going to do this and we’re going to do that and we’re
going to do this.” And I’m the cynical old historian going, “Eh,
we did, we tried that. We did, here’s the obstacle of that, blah,
blah.” And what I’ve learned to do in those situations is to be as
positive and encouraging in the right direction as possible. Because
as we’ve discussed, this is a moment of flux. We don’t know where
things are going to land, and I think we need to leave our cynicism
behind and let as many flowers bloom out there as we possibly can. And
historians can be a cynical group of people because we feel like,
through the archive, we’ve seen a lot. And it’s easy to get a
little dark about potential. And so, I hope people will read our
stuff, they’ll read our op-eds, they’ll listen to our podcasts and
things like that, but not feel as hemmed in as many historians do
about the past. This is why, say the DNA metaphor that you see in the
1619 project, if it’s DNA, it ain’t going to change. That if this
is locked into who we are, we have even bigger problems than we
thought. So we need that youth, we need that vitality. We need that
sense of can, that anger. And not just say, been there, done that. 

FELICIA: I was leading the witness a little bit here, Jeff, ’cause
I have been spending a lot of time with historians lately.

JEFF: Sorry. 

FELICIA: No, no. And here’s the thing, here’s why I love talking
to historians. First of all, it is a fascinating narrative and it’s
just great to learn because there’s so much to learn. But also,
historians remind us that things can be different. Historians remind
us that we haven’t always lived with the social structures that
we’re living with today. Sometimes they were a lot worse, but that
also tells us that things can be better. 

JEFF: The past is full of all of these wonderful lost opportunities
too. It’s not just what actually changed, but all these voices out
there that said, It doesn’t have to be this way! 

FELICIA: Yeah. Examples of courage. 

JEFF: Just absolute courage. Exactly. 

FELICIA: Right. I don’t know. It’s just at the FDR library, we
just opened an exhibit on the Roosevelts and Black Americans,
Roosevelts and the Civil Rights movement. And Mary McLeod Bethune,
come on, just like amazing courage as the sort of Deputy Director of
the National Youth Administration during the mid-to-late 1930s. So
many people who did so much, that’s what … Maybe I’m just glass
half full, but I take a lot of that from history as well as the sort
of been there, done that, seen it all sort of—

JEFF: Yeah, and I think historically there’s a drifting problem of
historians getting a little too locked into their own story of, “it
was always thus.” It used to be the old story moving out of the new
left in the ’60s and ’70s was, Look what social movements can do!
And they went back and looked at all the social movements and showed
their change over time. And then since the ’90s, and especially now,
it’s been a lot more about structured limitations and I think we
need to bring some of that energy back. 

FELICIA: Agency and structure. Have got to have both. Have got to
have both. Boy, that was like a nerdy reference. So, Jeff Cowie,
here’s my final question for you: How would you save our country?

JEFF: I think it goes back to that story about Hosea Williams. The
number one thing I would look at is finding ways to expand voting
rights and make voting rights legitimate because, and this is where I
believe in the power of the people of this republic, something
that’s a little unfashionable right now, but I actually think if the
structures of democracy worked, the majority would do the right thing,
but they’re very restricted right now. Elites have been playing with
ideas of freedom as they have all the way since the beginning of my
book. And selling a bill of goods to a lot of people, that regulatory
oversight of the election process and getting rid of gerrymandering
and all these things that are very big, complicated questions is
really the direction I would like to see as much of our energy put.
I’ve become so radical in this question, I’m ready to get rid of
the states altogether. 

FELICIA: Not just getting rid of electoral colleges but getting rid
of—no more state legislatures! You heard it here first, folks
on _How to Save a Country._

JEFF: Breaking news. 

FELICIA: Jefferson Cowie wants to get rid of all state legislatures.
No, but you’re serious that absent obstruction, the people would do
the right thing.

JEFF: I do think so. 

FELICIA: That’s what you’re really saying. 

JEFF: And right now, the electoral college and gerrymandering and
horrible limitations and the right to vote, restrictions on access to
the right to vote are blocking that. The more we think about getting
rid of those, the better we’re going to be because that will
actually restore this faith question that we’ve been struggling with
here, that agency-structure question, because I think there’s still
a lot of really positive energy in the country with regard to this.

FELICIA: Yeah, that is a great place to leave this conversation. Jeff
Cowie, Jefferson Cowie, thank you so much for joining us here on _How
to Save a Country.  _

JEFF: I appreciate you having me on and I’m sorry I couldn’t
singlehandedly come up with an answer for saving the country!

FELICIA: Oh, I think we just do what you said and we’ll be good. 

JEFF: Done and done. 

FELICIA: So Michael, I know how much you love thinking about freedom
and you have hope for freedom. In fact, just a couple weeks ago when
we talked to Danielle Allen on this show, you said that if you and she
were in Congress together, you would be chairs of, or leaders of the
Freedom Democrats. So how does Jeff’s whole take here about freedom
maybe not being the answer or not being central to an answer. How does
that strike you?

MICHAEL: Well, I disagree about not fighting for the word freedom. I
think it’s wrong to cede that concept to the right and to not fight
to advance our definition, and it’s been a mistake for 40 years to
do that. I think we have to start offering an alternative definition.
It’s a word that’s really not just a word, but a concept, an idea
that’s really important to every American, every living human being.
I mean, everybody wants freedom. And if you have a set of political
actors using the word and defining it for people. And another set of
political actors not even trying to confront that definition and offer
a different definition, I think you’ve just lost a really, really
important fight. Having said that, I take his points about why
democracy is important too. And I would never say that we shouldn’t
make democracy preservation and protection and expansion of democracy
central to our arguments. Of course we should! I mean, it’s been my
argument, throughout this show and in my last book that progressives
make a mistake when they silo these concepts off and talk about
economics as one thing, and democracy as another thing, which only
comes down to voting rights and gerrymandering and a few other ideas
like that. And then freedom is a third thing or even a thing that they
don’t even really discuss at all. I think all of these things need
to be discussed in tandem. Economics, democracy, freedom. It’s all
one argument. Our economic ideas will help strengthen democracy and
help expand human freedom. 

FELICIA: Michael, this whole conversation of freedom being so dark,
it’s pretty scary. So come on, give me some good news to end this
episode with.

MICHAEL: Well here is my stab at some good news, which has to do with
everything that we talked about with Jeff. I’ve been thinking about
the Trump indictment, in a lot of different ways. But one thing that
stands out for me and that is important I think in the context of the
kinds of things that we talk about on this show, is that this really
is a win for democracy. The most powerful person in the country who
says he’s above the law, and whose statement along those lines is
unfortunately, occasionally a little bit backed up by certain
precedents that have been said in this country and certain Department
of Justice rulings that say a sitting president can’t be prosecuted
and so on and so on. But anyway, no, he’s not above the law and the
law is catching up and his bluster, which has gotten him through a
hundred shady real estate deals and stiffing those poor vendors who
supplied pianos to his hotels and stuff like that, you can do that as
a private citizen, and if you have money and very little conscience
and great lawyers and patience, you can win those things as a private
citizen, unfortunately. But once he became president, a new set of
rules applied. It took a while and it’s taking a while, and of
course he may still be acquitted. But at least, there is a legitimate
effort to hold him to account. Obviously there’s some percentage of
the country that’s furious about that, but I think it’s something
that most Americans, whether they hate Donald Trump or are indifferent
to him, ought to be glad about. 

FELICIA: Yeah, Michael, you’re right that this indictment is a win
for democracy. And I understand that we imagine sometimes that
presidents are above the law, but we also in real life also understand
that it takes a lot to indict, obviously a sitting president, a former
president in this case. What’s so striking to me about this
indictment is that, as far as I understand it, of course there’s,
I’m not in the middle of the documents, but if the reporting is to
be believed, this is a matter of grave national security and we should
not let that behavior go unremarked on, unpunished, or at least
unprosecuted. So that’s the good news, or at least the news. No,
it’s good news. And I have more good news because next week,
Michael, we don’t have a guest. It’s just going to be you and me.
We thought it would be fun to end this season by going head to head on
some of the debates, some of the disagreements even that the two of us
have had. Is it liberal or is it progressive? Should we use middle out
economics to describe what we’re for? And we can talk more about
freedom too. We haven’t really had enough time to just duke that
out. Let’s do that next week.

MICHAEL: I can’t wait to have the middle out debate in particular.

FELICIA: 
 _How to Save a Country_ is a production of PRX in partnership with
the Roosevelt Institute and The New Republic.

MICHAEL: Our script editor is Christina Stella. Our producer is
Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe. Our lead producer is Alli Rodgers. Our
executive producer is Jocelyn Gonzales, and our mix engineer is Pedro
Rafael Rosado.

FELICIA: 
 Our theme music is courtesy of Codey Randall and Epidemic Sound with
other music provided by APM. How to Save a Country is made possible
with support from Omidyar Network, a social change venture that is
reimagining how capitalism should work. Learn more about their efforts
to recenter our economy around individuals, community, and societal
well-being at omidyar.com.

MICHAEL: 
 Support also comes from the Hewlett Foundation’s Economy and
Society Initiative, working to foster the development of a new common
sense about how the economy works and the aims it should serve.

How to Save a Country
[[link removed]]

Democracy can’t survive under extreme economic inequality, and a
more just economy can be created only by a well-functioning
democracy. _How to Save a Country _hosts Felicia Wong and Michael
Tomasky invite guests to explore how we got into this mess—and how
we get out.

_FELICIA WONG is the president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute,
where she directs the organization’s mission, vision, and strategy
in pursuit of a high-care, low-carbon economy that works for all. She
was the US representative on the G7 Economic Resilience Panel in 2021
and served on the Biden-Harris administration transition advisory
board. _

_Prior to joining Roosevelt, Felicia ran investment services for the
Democracy Alliance. She also ran operations and product development at
a venture-funded, labor union-aligned education services company. Her
public service includes a White House Fellowship in the Office of the
Attorney General and a political appointment in the Office of the
Secretary of the Navy. She serves on the boards of the Economic
Security Project, Deep Springs College, and the immigration policy
group America Is Better. Felicia holds a PhD in political science from
the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation on
the role of race and framing in K-12 public education politics
received the 2000 American Political Science Association award in
Race, Ethnicity, and Politics._

_MICHAEL TOMASKY is an American columnist, progressive commentator,
and author. He is the editor of The New Republic and editor in chief
of Democracy. He has been a special correspondent for Newsweek, The
Daily Beast, a contributing editor for The American Prospect, and a
contributor to The New York Review of Books._

_JEFFERSON COWIE is an American historian, author and an academic. He
is a James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University;
a former fellow of Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science
at Stanford University; a fellow at the Society for Humanities at
Cornell University, and at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC
San Diego._

_THE NEW REPUBLIC was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission.
Subscribe to The New Republic [[link removed]]_

* freedom struggle
[[link removed]]
* federal government
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Native Americans
[[link removed]]
* African Americans
[[link removed]]
* Reconstruction
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]