Voices In My Head Podcast Episode 308: Fault Lines with Kevin M. Kruse and Julian Zelizer

This is Rick Lee James, and the music you are hearing is from my new album, Thunder. The title track, Thunder, is a never-before-released song by the late Rich Mullins. There are also 12 other tracks made up of original music, hymns, and readings to guide the listener on a journey. You can buy Thunder today on clear vinyl and CD, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Music, and almost every other music streaming service. Thunder, hear it today at rickleejames.com. This episode of Voices in My Head is brought to you by Podbean. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. Visit podbean.com/voices to find out more. That's podbean.com/voices. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head. Welcome back to the Voices in My Head podcast. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm very glad that you could be here with us for a very good conversation today. I find myself this afternoon in the company of a couple of people of great renown in the field of history. Kevin Kruse is a professor of history at Princeton University, and Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs, also at Princeton. Together, they have co-authored Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, published by W.W. Norton Company. To say the least, this is quite an interesting 45-year period, and I'm thrilled to be discussing it with my guests today. Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Well, Kevin, we'll start with you. We tend to think of history as sort of a long term, Affair. And so I want to ask the question you are probably asked right at the beginning every time you do an interview, but I'm going to ask it anyway for our listeners. Why did you decide to only cover a 45-year period when talking about the United States history and the fault lines within?

Well, one of the reasons was that this book came out of a course that we taught, um, that, that really originated with the idea that this period is a big enough period that we need to start thinking about it as, as history. Uh, you know, when I started, uh, college in 1990, uh, World War II, the end of World War II was 45 years ago. Well, 1974 is 45 years ago, and, uh, and just as much as World War II was real history for me back then, I know that the 1970s are, are real history for our students who were, you know, were born in the 21st century, most of them. Uh, so it really was an effort for us to to start treating this period as a discrete, distinct, and important period in and of its own right, and really to think about it not as an afterthought to 20th century U.S. history, not as a kind of a coda or a postscript to that mid-20th century story, but rather as a period worthy of discussion in its own right.

Sure. Well, Julian, let me ask you, are we in a better place now than we were back then, or do you feel like it's sort of the same song, second verse, and ways. And what I mean by that is we just came through a time very recently of 800,000 people being out of work and without pay from a government shutdown. And several things, you know, I mean, we could just make a list of things right now. I mean, it seems bad. So, so in asking the question, what do you think? Are we in a better place now, or what are your thoughts?

Well, it really depends how you define better. It's clear that at the starting point of our book in the early 1970s, the situation was not good in the United United States. We start with the president resigning in the middle of his second term. We start when the economy is in the process in the 1970s of undergoing a wrenching series of changes that will leave Americans with high rates of unemployment and high rates of inflation at the same time, and also facing gas lines and an energy crisis. There are all sorts of social divisions in the US on issues like race and gender that are really starting to rip the country apart. So we don't really start in a great place, and we arguably don't really end in a great place. So it really does defend— depend on, on better. What we try to change— trace is the way in which our politics, our economy, and our culture change in between 1974 and the current period without really reaching a conclusion of whether things are better or worse.

Sure. Well, this question I'm going to address to Kevin, but certainly either of you feel free to answer it. I'm always curious when it comes to people who are experts in their field, when they're researching something, was there anything that you found in your research that just kind of surprised you? And it may be an interesting thing to think about with history because sometimes I wonder if we can be surprised by certain aspects aspects, but I just wonder what your thoughts— was there anything that kind of surprised you in the research?

Yeah, there were a lot. Maybe Julian has an answer here too. I mean, some of the things were little things. You know, every now and then you'll— when you research something you think you know, you go looking for evidence that will illustrate a theme, and we came across some really surprising quotes that we hadn't found before. Jan Wenner, the head of Rolling Stone in the late '70s, pining for a conservative news network. He wants news networks that'll appeal to different people across the board. So he's basically begging for Fox News. I think if you give him that quote, uh, uh, 30 years later, he would have been, uh, a little reluctant to agree with his past self.

Wow.

So the way in which certain things take on a new light. So, you know, uh, a part of this, uh, both Julian and I were, uh, were born a couple years before this book picks up. So we're really writing the story of our lives. And the lives of a lot of our readers. And so things that we kind of thought we knew, uh, we found we didn't really know that well. So say MTV is something that I, I'd grown up on, and I certainly remember the music videos, but I hadn't thought about the way it transformed, uh, uh, American media. MTV pioneers, uh, what they like to call a narrowcasting rather than broadcasting that reaches out to a wide range of Americans and brings them together. Uh, rather, we're gonna slice and dice that audience and go after just one narrow band. And that's something that is replicated across cable TV and then really finds its way into, uh, into the, uh, the news networks on cable television, uh, but then really becomes amplified with, uh, the internet and social media where you can find your own little bubble, uh, no matter where you go. So that was something that I never really thought of MTV in those terms as having that kind of transformative impact. But that was something that really was an eye-opener for me.

Certainly.

For me, I'll jump in that, look, the least surprising kind of stuff that we write about, probably for each of us, has to do with the world of politics just because we study it so much. So even when you're putting it together, there's not that same novelty. But, but I must say, as we finish this and added a chapter after President Trump was elected and tried to deal with the various kinds of tensions we talk about today on a daily basis. It was interesting just to look back, uh, at least for two decades and see how many times these have been playing out. Uh, really fierce debates over issues like immigration or questions about how, uh, political polarization was affecting the media. Uh, and so looking back from the perspective of today, even though it was familiar material, was surprising. But for me, the biggest surprise was just watching how slowly the personal computing revolution took hold. Because obviously now we're in the middle of it and it's totally familiar and we all have our iPhones and computers and we can do this on computer technology with great ease, meaning record a podcast like this. But we try to trace how this happens and how we move away from an era where really in the '40s, '50s, and '60s you had mainframe computers that were for businesses and government. All of a sudden the personal computer is introduced. And things like in the 1980s we write a little bit about the mouse and why that idea was so novel and diminished the barriers that were required to use these computers. And the introduction of internet services that allowed for what we call email now and different kinds of bulletin boards. Doing all that and watching the evolution. It was both rapid— within 2, 3 decades we remake fundamental parts of our communication— but it's also full of contingency and it's kind of a slow process where you see the twists and turns as the country figured out how this was all going to work. So that was really fresh, I think, for me to study.

Yeah, I'm trying to think just now as you mention those things, it's hard to imagine, even though it's not been around very long, kind of a world without Twitter where someone constantly posting something. And both of you are quite entertaining, actually, to watch in the Twitterverse. And seems like, Kevin, you've been in a feud with Dinesh D'Souza for a while, you know, the last few days. And I wonder how different the Twitter world would have been if we would have had it back then in those times. Very interesting thoughts to think about, for sure. But thank you for sharing those insights, though. I'm always interested to find out things that can surprise us a little bit about history. Well, you know, we live in a time where where bipartisanship, it really seems to be nonexistent almost. I'm sure it's there, but at least from what we see on a daily basis and depending on where we consume media, it just doesn't feel like it's there. And it seems like in my history classes, as much as I remember whenever I had history years ago, that the resignation of Richard Nixon and all that went on with that, it seemed like history remembers it anyway as sort of an example of this bipartisan, you know, coming together because we all need to be, you know, together on this. But was it really that way, or am I misremembering?

Well, in a lot of ways there is some truth to that, but it's true simply because the nature of the parties used to be much more ideologically diverse. So really until the kind of the sorting out process of the '60s and '70s, you really had a Democratic Party that was ideologically diverse. You had Southern conservatives and Northern liberals. You had also a Republican Party that was ideologically diverse. It had Northeastern liberals and Southwestern conservatives, and they coexisted in those parties. And as a result, no matter where you sit on the ideological spectrum, if you wanted to get something done, if you wanted to get the votes to get a bill passed in Congress, you had to go looking in the other party because if you were a conservative, there were conservatives in your party but also in the other one. If you were a liberal, there were liberals in your party but also the other one. And so there was almost a forced need to be bipartisan just to get anything done. In the last few decades though, we've had much more of an ideological sorting. And so the world in which, you know, our students might take for granted in which Democrats are largely arrayed on the left and Republicans are largely arrayed on the right that's actually a fairly recent invention. And so there isn't naturally as much bipartisanship simply because the parties themselves have been radically changed. But also, as you know, there are, there are incentives that work against bipartisanship these days. The media really drives both sides to their corners. Gerrymandering has picked up with incredible speed, and so you find ideologically homogeneous districts. And so there's no reaching across the aisle is actually seen as a bad thing in a lot of these places. How dare you compromise with the other side? We've seen in recent years the rise of the so-called RINO, Republican in name only, as, as members of the far right lambast Republicans who would dare to compromise or dare to vote for a Democrat bill at some point or another. It really has become starkly divided.

Wow. Yeah, well, let me ask you then, Julian, were the '70s a time when people began to develop a different and more skeptical view of leaders in their government, do you think?

Well, that's for certain. You know, all these decade markers are a bit artificial, and so it clearly starts with Vietnam, and polls show that the decline of trust in government starts in the late 1960s or mid-1960s and rapidly accelerates with Watergate and Richard Nixon. And you have— and you can see this not only through polling but even films and television depictions of politics and popular writing on politics— less confidence in the idea that government leaders could be trusted to do the right thing and less confidence that the institutions we had and had depended on for much of the 20th century would still work. People had been traumatized by the war. They had been traumatized by Richard Nixon. And there was a lot of reevaluation about government that was going on as distrust increased. And, and one response was partisanship, meaning one of the big critiques of the '70s was that bipartisanship wasn't a good thing. That the bipartisanship Kevin talked about, these alliances between Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans and this phenomenon of the parties working together in closed doors wasn't always the best thing for the country. And the argument was on both among liberals and conservatives, we needed more robust political parties, parties that were stronger, parties that each clearly stood for something different. And parties that didn't move to the center. So you have a whole decade of reform where we change a lot of our political process to favor partisanship over bipartisanship. And you had figures from, from liberals in the Democratic Party who, who, like, like the Watergate babies, who are busting open the old system and trying to create stronger democratic mechanisms to figures like Ronald Reagan, who in '76 challenges Gerald Ford, the president, in the primaries and says, we need a Republican Party that stands for something. And so that very much captures, I think, a lot of where the decade progresses.

Wow.

Well, thank God there's only been one president that ever abused power, right? No, I'm just kidding. No, I, you know, in some ways the book, it deals so much with presidents and sort of the way that power has been abused over the years. And some of it I remember because, you know, I was a teen in the '90s, and so part of the book I remember. Some of it was new to me, but so much was enlightening about it. And I have a question that's going to move us really up to the '90s quickly because I know we don't have all day, but I wonder, Kevin, why do you think it was that Bill Clinton was able to survive his impeachment and Nixon was not able to?

I think a real part of it is that Clinton's impeachment really was seen by the public at large as an overstep. That the Republicans had been searching for years to find anything they could take the president down on, almost as retribution for what the Democrats had done with Nixon and Watergate. And the public just wasn't convinced. The polling number was never there for it. In fact, you see right after the House Republicans impeach him in 1998, first of all, there's a midterm election in which they're basically running on this issue and they get hammered. And then they actually lose seats in the midterm, which is rare for a president's second midterm election to lose— for his party to lose seats. I'm sorry, for his party to gain seats. The Republicans take a hammering there. But then also after they actually do impeach, Clinton's poll numbers jump up 10 points. He reaches his all-time high as president comes after he's impeached because the public sees this as a real overreach. They believe that whatever the wrongdoings of the president, whatever his personal failings, it did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense. That's not true with Nixon and Watergate. Mm-hmm. Public really does come around on this, and they really do believe that the President has committed some wrongs. Not everyone. Nixon is still polling about 25% approval even through his resignation. But there really is a sense on the part of most of the country that the President has done something wrong enough to be removed from office.

Hmm. And that's fascinating to me. And just as I think through it here, because I remember in the '90s, and of course, Kevin, you wrote a book on the rise of the religious right. And I grew up in a pastor's home, and I remember there being such outrage at Bill Clinton. And it's, it's so odd to me now that I don't see the same kind of outrage with, you know, even just yesterday with the Cohen hearing and, and things that continually come out about the immorality of the president, president. And then not— doesn't seem like the outrage is there anymore from the evangelicals. It's just interesting to me the way that that times have changed in that way. And all along it wasn't about a religion, it was about power. And I just, I find that to be fascinating as we have these conversations as to what seems to really drive us, unfortunately. Julia, let's, let's talk for a second about the rise of political extremism and the way that maybe the media has, has worked together with it. And it may be sort of a chicken-egg question as we think through it, but did it— the political extremism, do you think it grew as a result of the media feeding it, or do you see them kind of working together?

Yeah, I think they work together, and if anything, the changes in politics come first. So just in terms of the electorate, the hardening of the red-blue electoral map that we talk about has been happening for some time. It's actually starting. You can see elements of it in the '60s, but certainly by the 1980s when Reagan is in power, you, you have in 1984 the last real landslide election that we're going to have. And you enter this period of real intense partisan competition, which will leave both parties on edge. Changes in politics that favor what we call the base activists, start in the '70s and '80s. For example, in presidential campaigns, the reforms that the parties undertake to favor primaries over conventions naturally lead activists— whether you want to call them extremists or activists, that's up to the observer— but it gives them much greater power in determining who politicians will be, who will represent the party, than the party bosses used to have. So a lot of the changes are already taking place. We do talk about how in the Republican Party you can see a shift to the right taking place pretty clearly by the 1980s with figures like Newt Gingrich and even in many ways Ronald Reagan himself, who are, who are pushing the party farther and farther from what had been considered the center. Layered over that, though, are the changes in the media. First with cable television, which creates a 24-hour constant news cycle, then with the partisan media after the Fairness Doctrine is dismantled in 1987. You have conservative talk radio and then you have Fox News in 1996, and liberals have some efforts to replicate that. And finally, the Wild West of the internet in the 2000s. All of that is layered over this kind of move toward polarization, move toward partisanship that had been taking hold. And together it's a pretty explosive combination which I think brings us today. I think it's hard to sort at this point which causes which, but it's possible to say they work together perfectly.

Yeah, well, that's fascinating to me. Well, we're gonna fast-forward again through time because we just can't cover everything I want to in the time we have today. But I wanna, while we're on this sort of topic about the bipartisanship and partisanship. And I think about President Obama. And so, Kevin, I guess I'll ask this question to you. You know, I remember him, and you talk about it in the book, even proclaiming, "We are one America," and he always wanted to sort of talk about the things that would unite us. And at least it seemed like he really tried to reach across the aisle on some things. But how did that work out for him?

Not well. I don't think he was sincere in trying to reach across the aisle. You can see this in how he constructed his administration. He had two Republicans who were cabinet secretaries. He tried to get a third. Judd Gregg was going to originally be on for Commerce, and then he reversed course when his Republican colleagues pressured him. And that would have set a modern record. It would have been higher than what FDR had during World War II in terms of a bipartisan cabinet. His policies were largely bipartisan. The stimulus package was made up of one-third of tax cuts that Republicans had previously proposed. And at the same time, the— what we now know as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, was really set up based on a model that was advanced by Republicans, whether it be Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts or the Heritage Foundation's idea for an individual mandate. So he started out really trying to bring Republicans in and bring Republican ideas into his administration. What he found is that it's one thing to reach across the aisle, someone has to be there to take that hand. And what Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor realized, and what they said quite explicitly to their caucuses in the House and the Senate, was that the best way to defeat Obama would be to deny him any kind of bipartisan success.— right?— would be to refuse to give him any votes at all on any of these things he wanted, and that he could therefore be denied any win, and that if they didn't vote for a bill, the bill would therefore technically not be bipartisan and Obama would look like a partisan president. And that's what they did. And so you only had a couple votes by Republicans for the stimulus. They immediately get villified as RINOs.

Hmm.

Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Arlen Specter leaves the Republican Party, becomes a Democrat. Uh, Olympia Snowe retires from politics altogether, citing the poisoned atmosphere there. Uh, and then with the Affordable Care Act, it's a strictly partisan vote. Uh, and so these things that had been meant to be bipartisan outreach, uh, come to be seen as these, uh, partisan, uh, efforts.

Hmm.

Well, you know, as we fast forward one more time to another president, and we're just going to deal with the current president right now, Trump. I know you started writing this book, Julian, before the era of President Trump, but, but where do you put Trump in all this? Because obviously when we talk about fault lines, we certainly are a divided people on President Trump.

Well, look, he's both predictable and exceptional. So he's predictable in that the underlying foundation that allows for a lot of what he does to be tolerable and for him to take often very radical actions, either through his words or through his policies, and yet not really make a huge dent, for example, in the support of his own party. Part of that is just a culmination of the trends that we've been talking about. So if you think about President Trump, one of the real sources of strength that he has, that he depends on, is the fact that most Republicans, not just the base of the party, but most Republicans would rather have him in office than a Democrat. That's partisanship at work. Right. And so that gives a president, even someone who's really far off, a lot of flexibility and room to maneuver in what they're going to do. A lot of his most controversial policies are not novel to him. For example, his very hardline immigration views, we've been seeing this has been taking hold in the Republican Party since the 1990s, and he's just expressing them more directly and embracing them more than previous Republicans. George W. Bush didn't subscribe to that. And he depends on a media universe, a conservative media universe, which is not his creation. This has been discussed for a long time, and we trace how this really goes back decades. And yet it's really essential to why I think he is where he is today and has a possibility of winning again in 2020. But there are also— it's important to note things that are different. He's— there is partisanship, there's intense partisanship and extremism. Yet we've seen parts of his presidency— the way he communicates on Twitter, for example, is a prime example of a style of presidential rhetoric we have not seen until this point. He's also, you know, either retweeted or made statements that connect him not just to the base of the party, but to really extreme organizations, such as after Charlottesville. And this is different than we saw, certainly, in Republican presidencies before, the way in which he does that. So, so it's— in general, we treat him and see him as a product of the era we've written about, not as a cause of everything. But at the same time, in that final chapter that we added, we're trying to tease out where is he doing things that are also different. In scale and scope than what's come before.

Yeah, and he certainly is different, that's for sure. Well, our time is getting close to the end today, so I want to ask a question, and this can certainly be answered by both of you. I know that you are both incredibly brilliant in your field, and I've loved, enjoyed— I've enjoyed reading works from both of you. But I want to ask a question just about your thoughts, maybe about the future. A little bit. And I don't know if it'll be in, in the next couple of years or several years down the road, but I certainly think a post-Trump America will look a little different somehow than it did pre-Trump. And so the question for both of you: what do you think the next president, whoever that may be, do you think the next president will be able to win an election without Twitter? Or, or just what do you see sort of the next president possibly being like? Because it seems like to me we sort of ping-pong from one extreme to the other oftentimes with people who may be elected. So I'm just kind of curious about what your thoughts are on a future president.

Well, again, as I like to say when I got asked these kind of questions, our training as historians is in hindsight, so it's difficult for us to make predictions, not just because that's not generally the direction we think, but also as someone who studies history, you know all the people who made the wrong predictions and you don't want to be one of them yourself. That said, I think it really is up for grabs as to what the next president could be. We could see somebody clearly trying to pattern themselves on Trump, if not ideologically, at least in terms of the style of really bringing Twitter into this. At the same time, I could easily see somebody being very popular and winning on a promise that you will not hear about me every single day. I will not be in your face nonstop. You will forget who the president is for several days. I could see that taking off. So it's really hard for us to say.

I'd say— I'll say that it is very possible, whether it's who succeeds President Trump or President Pence, that you'll have a very different style of of leadership, but you won't see a total reversal of some of the basic mechanisms that he has used, or even some of the ideas he's put forward. Very infrequent is it to see total retrenchment of what has been building from previous presidents. And so, you know, we could have this part of the conversation looking back to Nixon, where the fundamental question that emerged with Richard Nixon was, has the power of the presidency become excessive and have we built what was called by Arthur Schlesinger an imperial presidency, where in being enamored with what presidents could do in the 20th century, we handed over too much power? And that was the question on the table. That was what Nixon was really accused of. And for a while after his presidency, there was an effort to restrain presidential power. Through legislation, and even Presidents Ford and Carter in some ways stepped back from the grandiose vision of presidential power that Nixon had embraced. That said, look where we are today. Presidents still have a lot of power. We've seen presidents, as we talked about earlier, abuse their power, flex it very aggressively, and so we never really took apart what was at the core of the problem that was exposed with Richard Nixon. And so I imagine that will probably be where things go. Uh, stylistically have a different president. We might have someone who tries to kind of calm down some of the excesses, but it won't be remade. Twitter, for example, or whatever replaces it, is here to stay. And I think even within the GOP, he has put forward some policies like hardline anti-immigration, which aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

Hmm. Well, it's fascinating to hear both of your perspectives. And listeners, we've been talking today to Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer. Their new book is Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974. I really recommend this book, and I hope all of you will go out and get a copy. It's a, it's an awesome read. And so both of you, thank you so much for your time and for your comments today, and I look forward to the next book whenever that arrives, and thank you for being Voices in My Head this week.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks so much.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit Spirit, you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.