00;00;02;14 - 00;00;32;04
Michael Hagan
Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast. I'm Michael Hagan from the Class of 2015, and I'm joined by producer Chris Judge from the Class of 2005. Our guest today is Dr. Dharam Aldouri, director of National and International Fellowships and Scholarships and associate director of the Center for Engaged Learning, who is also an adjunct professor of history. In recent years, Dr. Aldouri has had great success connecting students with prestigious fellowships and other post baccalaureate opportunities, thanks to her diligent work and guidance.

00;00;32;09 - 00;00;57;20
Michael Hagan
Providence College is a top producer of Fulbright Fellows. Today, though, we'll be discussing matters that fall under her academic interest as a scholar of political and intellectual history. In 2017, she spoke to the Providence Journal about political polarization in the United States, saying that as polarized as the country was in the aftermath of the 2016 election, it paled in comparison to polarization at other moments in history like the bitter build up to the American Civil War.

00;00;57;29 - 00;01;08;10
Michael Hagan
In this episode, we'll ask the question Have matters gotten worse? And what does history offer us to compare and contrast to our present situation? Dr. Aldouri, welcome and thanks for joining us.

00;01;08;19 - 00;01;10;01
Darra Mulderry
It's wonderful to be here. Michael.

00;01;10;21 - 00;01;30;21
Michael Hagan
So in July of 2017, as I said, you spoke with the Providence Journal about political polarization, and it was less than a year after the Trump election. And let's just recall those months the country was divided over border and immigration policies of the new administration. FBI Director James Comey was fired in May as allegations of collusion with or at least welcoming Russian meddlers roiled the administration.

00;01;31;02 - 00;01;50;23
Michael Hagan
A rising women's movement had just staged a large demonstration in Washington, while powerful men in politics, entertainment and other industries were taken to task for misogyny and abuse in the developing MeToo movement. Neil Gorsuch was named to the United States Supreme Court over much objection due to the Republican Senate's. The Senate's earlier refusal to consider President Obama's nominee.

00;01;51;08 - 00;02;13;00
Michael Hagan
Later that month, Republican campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act would fail by a single Republican senators vote. And in August, White supremacists would march through the streets of Charlottesville with one extremist killing, one counter-demonstrators and injuring dozens of others. This short summary only begins to capture the divided State of the Union in July of 2017. So now that was a mouthful.

00;02;13;27 - 00;02;24;05
Michael Hagan
But to the question, you said that you said that in 2017, that earlier moments of U.S. history were even more divisive than that summer. What moments or what moment or moments were these?

00;02;24;16 - 00;02;59;04
Darra Mulderry
Well, the one you mentioned is the big one, and that's the years the decade really right before the American Civil War truly was a much, much worse time in terms of tension and also acts of violence. There are other times that we're closer to. What I would say is the summer of 1968. And I really you could make an argument that really from 1968 into 73, 74 was as divided as time for the American people.

00;03;00;17 - 00;03;26;23
Darra Mulderry
Another contender would be the early republic, believe it or not. And then one more would be right around the time the U.S. entered the First World War. Up until the end of that war, that was a little different, though, because it involved a lot of government tension overtly with citizens. So I'd say right now is closer to the summer of 68 and the years just after that.

00;03;28;11 - 00;03;29;18
Darra Mulderry
Yeah. And here we are.

00;03;30;10 - 00;03;38;22
Michael Hagan
So since you spoke to the project in 2017, five years have, of course, passed. How has the state of political polarization in the United States changed since?

00;03;38;28 - 00;04;11;16
Darra Mulderry
In some ways it's gotten worse. I think the insurrection on January six, 2021, made it seem much worse to anyone living in the country. And in some ways, I think it's gotten better. I think that right now, people at the extremes have a clearer understanding of what the other side thinks, and I think that can be a good thing.

00;04;12;07 - 00;04;45;12
Darra Mulderry
I also think that the Dobbs decision in a really interesting way has prompted because of initiatives in different states around abortion policy. It's what's brought into the foreground that wasn't there before. This overturning Roe v Wade are is the complexity of opinion about abortion. Now, you know better what the middle consists of on that issue. And I think that that might I'm being an optimist here.

00;04;45;21 - 00;05;16;18
Darra Mulderry
We might end up with more bipartisan efforts on that issue and others. Another thing that I think is better than in 2017 is we have seen not much, but some bipartisan legislation in the past few years, especially on infrastructure. And and I just heard yesterday there's been some recent polling on how many Americans want more bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

00;05;16;18 - 00;05;32;00
Darra Mulderry
And I know that's just a big wish in a way. But of course, it's the vast majority of Americans that say they want that. And now they know a little bit of what it can look like even in this time of divisiveness. So I'm pinning some hope on that as well.

00;05;33;09 - 00;05;42;23
Michael Hagan
What are some of the biggest contributors to political division today? Like, what are the fault lines and how are they alike or different from causes of historical division that you mentioned in the first question?

00;05;43;19 - 00;06;26;07
Darra Mulderry
Well, I'm not original in saying this, but certainly Partizan Press is playing a huge role. This isn't the first time in U.S. history. That's true. But now it's it's television and then exams are debated by social media. And I'd say the popularity of television news outlets that are majority of the time openly derisive of the other side. I'd say one side it's it's acutely divisive.

00;06;26;07 - 00;06;57;21
Darra Mulderry
And the other side it's it's very smug. You know, I it's just Americans have moved away from watching things like the PBS NewsHour or Walter Cronkite in favor of much, much more partizan discourse. And it's on all the time. It's accessible all the time. I shouldn't even call it television that dates me. It's it can be viewed, you know, at any time on your computer.

00;06;57;26 - 00;07;31;13
Darra Mulderry
And these silos or echo chambers both really where fewer and fewer people read newspapers that we associate with an independent press and especially young people. And so they're communicating with those who already think like them. That, I think, exacerbates the divisiveness a great deal. What's interesting and we don't think about it now so much is that in the early republic, it was just that way.

00;07;31;14 - 00;08;00;13
Darra Mulderry
Right. Right. You know, it was just that way. And in fact, when we think of the majority of Americans seeking a more objective take on the news, it's easy to think it went back all the way to the founding. Not at all. It's truly a 20th century phenomenon. Newspapers in the early Republic were not only Partizan, they were part and parcel with the party or.

00;08;00;13 - 00;08;01;16
Michael Hagan
Party apparatus, right?

00;08;01;17 - 00;08;32;09
Darra Mulderry
Absolutely. There's there's a really wonderful book. It's not it's fairly new by a historian named Parsley. Parsley. Why? I'll look up the name by the end of the podcast. And he's done a fantastic job of demonstrating all this, that that these partizan newspapers and the party were communication networks. And really, I think we can think of what's happening today with Fox News and at least a big portion of the Republican Party.

00;08;32;09 - 00;08;56;29
Darra Mulderry
There's a communication network. I think the argument can be made that MSNBC and a good number of Democratic constituents are part of a communications network. Be really interesting to do a systematic comparison. As the 19th century went on, by the end of the century, there were some newspapers that aimed for an independent view like the New York Herald.

00;08;57;12 - 00;09;29;12
Darra Mulderry
But it really wasn't until the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, and then a chorus of blame heaped on the Hearst newspapers for perhaps having really spurred this assassin that you see a real shift towards more people paying more attention to newspapers that aimed for a more objective view. So I guess it's hopeful that we've we've really changed before.

00;09;29;22 - 00;09;31;03
Darra Mulderry
It certainly can happen again.

00;09;31;15 - 00;09;50;16
Michael Hagan
Yeah. With the with the Partizan press in the early Republic. I mean, just one of the facts that I think I learned it from you, actually, but one of the more interesting things that I've learned about the press in the early Republic is that, you know, they were so partizan that not only not only were they, you know, spouting, espousing partizan ideas, they actually printed your ballot for you.

00;09;51;11 - 00;10;11;19
Michael Hagan
The term ticket comes from the idea that you would rip out, you know, the piece from the newspaper that had the names of the candidates that you were supposed to vote to, and you showed up at the polls and you said, Here is my ballot. So that's yeah, there's nothing new under the sun in terms of the the partizan press and maybe maybe a new ethic of journalistic independence will come out of this era.

00;10;12;04 - 00;10;21;20
Darra Mulderry
Perhaps, and hopefully, hopefully it's not that we're just on a holiday. We were on a holiday from history for a century. No, I think we've had both.

00;10;22;17 - 00;10;52;24
Michael Hagan
So the the violent imagery and rhetoric that we see sometimes today, I'm thinking specifically of candidates placing crosshairs over their opponents or toting guns and ads, or for a specific example, Arizona Representative Paul Gosar sharing a video in which an animated depiction of him actually kills New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and wields a sword at President Biden. Is this kind of imagery, is this age old in American political media, or is this a newer phenomenon?

00;10;55;25 - 00;11;40;24
Darra Mulderry
Outrageous accusations. Outrageous imagery, at least in words, is not new. No. However, the the media for sending visual communications is much more ubiquitous. So there's it's easier to do and get it out to more people. A bigger percentage of people. You know, it really can make your stomach sink. Your heart sink when what ghosts are did happens and not every leader in politics condemns it.

00;11;41;08 - 00;12;15;27
Darra Mulderry
You know that that certainly makes me pessimistic. At the same time, many did condemn it. And I think if you if you watch what's happened between 2016 and now, you see that there's there's a proportion of supporters of Donald Trump, those who voted for him in 2016, who parted with him in 2020 and also parted with those like Gosar.

00;12;16;08 - 00;12;56;08
Darra Mulderry
And as best I can tell and and other observers, it's women they think, many in suburbs, many fairly well-educated, deeply dissatisfied with much of the Democratic agenda. But it seems that that's a population, that's a set of constituents that that pull away from Trump and others when this kind of thing happens, it's beyond the pale. So when it happens, it it it prompts some shifting, some thinking, some shifting.

00;12;57;23 - 00;13;18;09
Darra Mulderry
Of course, if it happened all the time and in a big way from people elected to office, I'd probably speak differently about it. It hasn't happened that much. There are few people who do it, but Gosar did lose his place on committees after that. I mean, and he was censured. So there are consequences.

00;13;18;28 - 00;13;45;23
Michael Hagan
I want to compare the the Gosar incident of you know, images of violence with with an with a notorious instance of actual violence that took place on. Was it on the Senate floor? Yes. And you know exactly where I'm going with this. It's the in the 1850s when when Preston Brooks attacked Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate, nearly beating him to death.

00;13;47;16 - 00;14;07;13
Michael Hagan
I mean, with Gosar, you mentioned and people say, you know, he's he's on the fringe. I mean, he's a fringe character. He does not necessarily represent the mainstream. How does a figure like Gosar compare to a figure like Preston Brooks? Was Preston Brooks himself on the fringe in the pro-slavery Democratic Party at the time, or was he was he more on the mainstream?

00;14;07;23 - 00;14;45;12
Darra Mulderry
He was less on the fringe than Gosar in what became the Confederacy and that caning of Charles Sumner. And it really was supremely violent and bloody. And he did almost die, happened a full five years before the Civil War started. Now, Brooks received loads of letters praising what he had done. There were many who celebrated it. He received many, many canes in the mail.

00;14;46;10 - 00;15;20;23
Darra Mulderry
Yes, that that's really cheering him on. He was also arrested. He was not sentenced to jail. He was fined. He was fined the equivalent of what would be about $10,000 now. So not all that much. But it did prompt a solidification of the Republican Party and did garner it more support than ever before it. I mean, no one views it as a good thing, but many, many Americans were horrified.

00;15;20;23 - 00;15;48;26
Darra Mulderry
Of course, Southerners were the minority. But yeah, it was it was really, really shocking. And the fact that the consequences were not that grave for this fellow. He did leave office but then was was reelected, I believe. Yeah. And. But never. Yeah, he was reelected, but then he died of bronchitis, basically, and never took his seat again. I would urge listeners to look that up.

00;15;49;02 - 00;15;49;12
Darra Mulderry
Yeah.

00;15;50;03 - 00;16;22;08
Michael Hagan
So there was, of course, just a midterm election, one that surprised many observers. And it seems clear that among a number of factors, youth turnout really tipped the scales for the Democrats in several decisive races. But it seems to me that the Democrat, the Democratic Party, has historically tended to have a fraught relationship with youth. And I'm thinking specifically you brought up the summer of 68, the party's electoral woes in 2016 had much to do with a failure to energize and mobilize younger voters after a bitter primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

00;16;22;21 - 00;16;29;24
Michael Hagan
Are there other times in American history when a party's failure to persuade and mobilize younger voters cost them at the polls?

00;16;30;21 - 00;16;41;21
Darra Mulderry
Yes. And of course, when we say youth now and we're talking about voters were thinking 18 to 29 year olds, which is a relatively recent.

00;16;41;24 - 00;16;42;04
Michael Hagan
Yes.

00;16;42;04 - 00;16;54;05
Darra Mulderry
Yeah, Yes. Because it's only in the seventies that the voting age moved from 21 down to 18. Well, you already mentioned the big one. Meaning 1960.

00;16;54;06 - 00;16;57;25
Michael Hagan
Sorry, that was a spoiler.

00;16;57;25 - 00;17;38;20
Darra Mulderry
Yes. In 1968. Young Democrats were very suddenly alienated from the party and many didn't vote at all. And I bet many listeners already know this. But in the lead up to the summer conventions where the Republican and Democratic parties picked their candidate for the November four major election in the lead up to that early in the primaries, Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota, ran in New Hampshire more or less, knowing he wasn't ever going to be the party's choice for president.

00;17;38;20 - 00;18;02;03
Darra Mulderry
And building that kind of base wasn't within his reach. But he got more than 40% of the Democratic vote in that primary, and he was an anti-war candidate. And the president at the time was a Democrat and very, very, very much a hawk in Vietnam. That was Lyndon Johnson. And that sent shockwaves through the party. And it was seen not that many weeks.

00;18;03;04 - 00;18;26;11
Darra Mulderry
Robert Kennedy jumped into the race and took on the antiwar stance as well. And he had the capacity to build a big base within the party very fast. And then Johnson decided not to run at all. Really unusual in American history for an incumbent as young as he was and who had won by a landslide four years before, to say, I'm not even going to go for it.

00;18;26;25 - 00;18;59;07
Darra Mulderry
And young voters, especially antiwar young voters, felt they had a candidate for them, not only when it when it came to the war, but also on anti-poverty initiatives. A lot of the Great Society initiatives Johnson had put forward were the kind of thing Kennedy stood for. And then in early June, just after winning the California primary, which would have sent him almost certainly to get the party's nomination, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the summer convention.

00;18;59;18 - 00;19;29;03
Darra Mulderry
The delegates who were moving towards nominating the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, a great liberal on civil rights, but someone who hadn't come out against the war. The delegates at the convention voted down the peace plank. So the party policy didn't shift into an anti-war zone. Young people who fully expected that were there. They were, you know, at least a good proportion of them were angry and alienated and then didn't vote that fall.

00;19;29;13 - 00;19;39;15
Darra Mulderry
And Humphrey, although he came out against the war a few weeks before the election and gained in the polls, did not squeak through and Richard Nixon became president and the war went on for years.

00;19;40;21 - 00;19;47;20
Michael Hagan
What do you find most interesting or surprising about the recent midterm midterm election, whether at the federal, state or local level.

00;19;48;19 - 00;20;23;04
Darra Mulderry
Here in Rhode Island? I wasn't surprised by anything. But like like most observers, a red wave that was predicted, although by some it was only predicted tentatively, it just didn't happen. And so that's that's the biggest surprise. I going into the election, I thought there was a chance the Democrats would hold the Senate. I did think the Democrats were going to lose bigger in the House than they did.

00;20;23;18 - 00;21;06;04
Darra Mulderry
That that truly surprised me. I was also surprised in the recent Georgia runoff that Warnock won as decisively as he did. I thought he might win, but we wouldn't even have the results for a while would be that close. And he won a little more decisively then than I would have predicted. Yeah. One comment on young voters. It's really interesting that even though the percentage of young voters, meaning 18 to 29 who have participated in presidential elections and midterm elections, has really gone up in the last few cycles.

00;21;07;00 - 00;21;26;16
Darra Mulderry
They're still voting in lower proportions than all the other age groups. I don't think it surprises anyone that they vote less than elders. Elders there are lots of reasons why they vote in higher numbers. Some of it has to do with time and living collectively and assisted living. Where all of this is made is facilitated.

00;21;26;16 - 00;21;27;22
Michael Hagan
Action is an activity.

00;21;27;22 - 00;21;52;12
Darra Mulderry
It is. It is a and and there are government programs that they're more dependent on and would be thinking about. But it's still lower numbers. But it puts puts really interesting is this isn't just a one off. I mean young voters have come out in the last few elections in significantly higher proportions than before. Yeah.

00;21;52;25 - 00;22;15;13
Michael Hagan
You mentioned the Georgia runoff now. One one thing that people have been mentioning, you know, and it's interesting, especially in the case where you have this runoff election between two black men, but the runoff election, the institution of the runoff election in Georgia is actually supposedly it's a vestige of the Jim Crow South and voter suppression. Can you comment on this?

00;22;16;05 - 00;22;51;07
Darra Mulderry
Oh, I mean, just describing what you just described is comment in itself. I mean, U.S. federal system is so messy, right? I mean, we have such diversity of how voting is arranged, how votes are counted. You know, you move from one state to another in the United States and you go from years of pulling little levers to walking into what seems like a shower stall and using a felt pen.

00;22;51;08 - 00;23;14;04
Darra Mulderry
I mean, it's just all so there are so many ironies as we move forward. But runoffs are like a penalty kick zone, right? They're not they're not in and of themselves corrupt. Even if they were put in place in order to create advantage for another group. This that kind of metamorphosis is pretty normal.

00;23;15;04 - 00;23;44;21
Michael Hagan
So out of necessity, because we're doing a podcast, not writing a book here. My question so far of use broad categories to group Americans like Democrats, Republicans, youth, other category is frequently discussed in American politics. Are women voters, Black voters, Hispanic and Latino voters, the quote unquote, middle America and more. None of these, of course, are monolithic. So what are the dangers politically and socially of treating demographic groups monolithically?

00;23;45;17 - 00;24;21;11
Darra Mulderry
Well, but of course, there are dangers because none of them are, although although some of those groups do, in fact, have tendencies to vote almost all the same way. And that makes it tempting to treat all groups as if they're potentially going to at least almost all vote the same way. Almost all women vote same way. Of course, the majority of those groups, you can break them down on different issues and they fall different ways.

00;24;21;17 - 00;25;00;26
Darra Mulderry
Now, currently, I would say that both parties are more or less aware that it would it would be very unwise to treat Latino slash Hispanic voters as a monolith. There are a significant proportion of the American population. They're still voting in lower proportions than all other racial, ethnic groups, but not by a lot. And they at least any study I've written, issue by issue, it, they do not fall cleanly into one party's agenda.

00;25;01;05 - 00;25;26;10
Darra Mulderry
And so that that's going to be interesting in any area where there are lots of Latino and Hispanic voters. And I think both parties are now on to that. I think the Democrats recently assumed that women would be moved by the Dobbs decision into voting Democratic in huge numbers. And there seems to be an uptick there among young women for sure.

00;25;26;23 - 00;26;02;00
Darra Mulderry
In fact, it's only in the 18 to 29 age group that that we had the majority of voters. So the majority of youth voters in this recent midterm election voted Democrat Party candidates. Right. Every other age group voted more Republican than Democratic, which was kind of remarkable. But the middle aged, it was almost even right. It's the older voters that that lean more Republican.

00;26;02;13 - 00;26;20;19
Darra Mulderry
But if you look at those youth voters, there were more young women than young men that voted. That's always the case. In fact, in every age group, a higher proportion of women vote than men. I don't know that that that's stated very often, but it was it was a little more extreme, at least in the numbers I saw.

00;26;22;02 - 00;26;35;04
Darra Mulderry
At the same time, if you look at women overall, that wasn't at all their only issue. So again, there isn't a monolith. And candidates who keep that in mind will, I think, do better.

00;26;35;23 - 00;27;00;27
Michael Hagan
In a similar vein, we often talk about, you know, deep red and deep blue states, districts, jurisdictions. But even in deep blue, Rhode Island, for instance, nearly 40% of voters voted for the Republican candidate in the recent gubernatorial election. And then there's the fact that in Rhode Island, you know, the Democratic Party label is a much more expansive spectrum of politics than than in many other states.

00;27;01;17 - 00;27;09;23
Michael Hagan
So what what are the challenges either in the way we talk about or and the way that we do politics of our country's general winner take all approach?

00;27;10;04 - 00;27;39;17
Darra Mulderry
Yeah, you know, Rhode Island's interesting because I'd say maybe the most of any state or at least competing with one or two others, there's still a New Deal coalition made in Rhode Island. You know, it's really pulsed forward from the 1930s. At the same time, because of that New Deal coalition hold, the Democratic Party stronghold that the state is.

00;27;40;11 - 00;28;08;13
Darra Mulderry
And I want to remind listeners that the New Deal coalition consisted of all age groups, working class unions, racial and ethnic minorities, as well as intellectuals. And when you put together who lives in the state of Rhode Island, I just named a lot of the people that live in the state of Rhode Island. But it's also tainted the Democratic Party in Rhode Island by being the party in power, by being the establishment.

00;28;09;12 - 00;28;33;19
Darra Mulderry
And so anyone who wants something new and different is going to vote for candidates that are opposing the mainline party candidates the Democratic Party puts forward. So it doesn't surprise me at all that 40% vote differently. But broadly across the country. One thing that's I don't know what we could ever do about this, the primary system as it is now.

00;28;33;19 - 00;28;44;03
Darra Mulderry
And as you know, Michael, because you're you're really up on U.S. politics, The primary system we have now that leads up to presidential elections was put in place in the 1970s. Yeah.

00;28;44;04 - 00;28;46;10
Michael Hagan
Oh, I'm getting excited. McGovern, Fraser, Commission.

00;28;48;03 - 00;29;17;13
Darra Mulderry
Before that, there were primaries, but they were they were held in much smaller numbers. Not every state had them, and they were used to test candidates and and to signal to party leaders who might do well with voters. But those party leaders were considering other factors all the time. Then who would please the voters they were considering, who's been a party loyalist, who has enough experience to actually get stuff done.

00;29;18;09 - 00;29;54;17
Darra Mulderry
You know, Jimmy Carter became the Democratic nominee under the new system, Everyone, hands down who observes American politics agrees. He could never have gotten the Democratic nomination under the old system because he didn't have a party history the way you used to have to. But today, with this new primary system where really candidates have to play to voters, what's happening is in both parties to make it through the primaries, you have to appeal to the extremes of your party because it's at the extremes that they show up and vote in primaries.

00;29;54;29 - 00;30;19;19
Darra Mulderry
So, I mean, I tend to think that's not a great thing because when it comes to the general election, people who appeal to the middle do much better. So, wow. So we have a gatekeeping system that that makes you fast dance for the extremes of your own party. But then who are you going to be to win the general election?

00;30;19;19 - 00;30;23;15
Darra Mulderry
And how do you do that with any authenticity? Yeah.

00;30;24;13 - 00;30;36;16
Michael Hagan
So what what role does gerrymandering or the practice of a ruling party drawing legislative districts most favorable to its own candidates? What role does that that practice play in exacerbating political division?

00;30;37;02 - 00;31;13;14
Darra Mulderry
Well, a big role, but it always has its legal as well. Let me take that back. It's partizan gerrymandering. I mean, openly redrawing districts to try to create advantage for your party is considered a game that is legal because both sides get to do it. It's it's just it's accepted as fair enough. Now what was outlawed was racial gerrymandering, right?

00;31;13;14 - 00;31;54;10
Darra Mulderry
Gerrymandering to put a racial minority at a disadvantage. But recently, the Supreme Court basically ruled that it's really tough to tell when when racial gerrymandering is happening and when it can be argued to be partizan gerrymandering. So now the ultimate effect of that decision on making this much more simple than it is, is that we're back to full on partizan gerrymandering without limitations from the courts and I don't like it, but I can't say it's new.

00;31;54;25 - 00;31;57;06
Darra Mulderry
It's it's happened throughout American history.

00;31;57;22 - 00;32;25;03
Michael Hagan
It seems. I mean, it seems that the only way to to to counter gerrymandering, it really must begin at the grassroots, because it must begin with the people who are empowered to begin to draw the lines in the first place. It's you know, once you're once you're voting in a congressional election, I mean, the you know, with the House of Representatives districts, those aren't the people making those decisions at state legislatures, state legislators, it's governors.

00;32;26;18 - 00;32;52;06
Michael Hagan
So the gerrymandering issue certainly remains as how important politics at the local and state level are. So getting to my last question here, you're a historian of American and political intellect or American political and intellectual history, as I mentioned. And I you know, I'll say to my listeners, I adored your classes. I they were some of the best classes that I took, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student.

00;32;52;26 - 00;33;13;14
Michael Hagan
And one of my favorite things about them was that so many of the texts that you assigned had this aspirational mood to them. They they put forward a positive vision of what American democracy could and should be. So what are one or two sources that you wish were more widely engaged that that could help us all be better citizens in a democracy?

00;33;14;11 - 00;33;51;17
Darra Mulderry
Well, I have I have an answer. But before I put forward a few texts that are political or philosophical texts that appeal to our founding principles in a modern context. One thing I would say is that in my classes, especially when I'm giving a survey of U.S. history and I most often teach surveys that begin just after the U.S. Civil War in the 1870s, and I teach many that go up pretty close to the present.

00;33;53;02 - 00;34;26;20
Darra Mulderry
I've I've wended my way in 20 years of doing that, to giving my students lots of memoirs and excerpts from memoirs. I want them to time travel as much as they can into lives and so that they get multiple perspectives truly from the inside. Because marrying those, those views that individuals have of themselves with these aspirational texts I think makes much more sense.

00;34;27;16 - 00;34;54;00
Darra Mulderry
And I'll give you an example. I'll be teaching this coming spring, a survey that begins in the 1870s and will only go through the Depression, the 1930s. So that's going to be a really cool, slow down for me because we can go so much deeper. And I'm opening the class with students, reading a good portion of the autobiography of Ida Wells, who was an African-American woman from the South who moved north.

00;34;54;02 - 00;35;22;21
Darra Mulderry
She was a progressive era activists in politics. She was very, at least at the time, she's considered middle of the road, moderate in many ways. But her great crusade was, you know, at the that really at in the face of death threats, her great crusade was against lynching in America, especially a race based lynching in America. But she has quite a journey to get an education to be taken seriously in many venues.

00;35;22;21 - 00;36;06;15
Darra Mulderry
And my students really respond to that kind of memoir. And at the same time, they read a pioneer white woman's memoir that she dictated because she really couldn't write. She dictated in the 1930s when she was 93 years old, the story of her going to the western white Mississippi frontier in a white enclave. MILLS And, you know, her casual racism is present in the text and at the same time, her struggles, her her hard work, all that she suffered personally, losing six or seven children.

00;36;06;16 - 00;36;40;29
Darra Mulderry
The students get her view of her own life from the inside. And they also read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, a big chunk of that very different life in that same period. And there's one more of that I won't mention here. Then they read one speech by Frederick Douglass. They read an essay on how American democracy can remain vibrant while being pluralistic.

00;36;41;15 - 00;37;14;22
Darra Mulderry
And that pieces by Jane Addams, you know, who ran a settlement house in Chicago where she met a diversity of Americans, some of them very new Americans, and then became a bestselling author writing about this mix of Americans. So Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass from the late 19th century W.E.B. Dubois, as I have them read, just ten pages of his essay on race in America.

00;37;15;05 - 00;37;50;13
Darra Mulderry
And I think my favorite piece to give students of U.S. history, no matter what age I'm teaching, are 30 pages of excerpts from Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and probably my favorite passage that I really want every citizen of the of the United States to read is when Tocqueville talks about something you've talked about, Michael, and that is civic participation at the local level and how the health of democracy depends on that participation.

00;37;50;27 - 00;38;16;01
Darra Mulderry
And Tocqueville is not pie in the sky romantic, assuming that all you have to do is is urge people forward and they'll jump in in order to virtuously help govern America. No, he knows that people are most likely to show up at a town meeting if something is bothering them. So he gives an example of a householder is thinking of men.

00;38;16;12 - 00;38;43;22
Darra Mulderry
A householder who finds out that the local town is going to cut a road through the back of his property. So he goes to the town meeting in order to protest this decision. But once at the meeting, he's in a forum where he hears all perspectives on this. He realizes the only way forward is to work out a deal with the group.

00;38;44;08 - 00;39;12;20
Darra Mulderry
But Tocqueville comments doing for many people much of the time becomes an activity that has its own kind of pleasure. There's a certain pleasure in cutting those deals. There's a certain pleasure in what Adam Smith called the pleasure of Concord. That you're in conflict. You reach some kind of agreement. And that in itself has an appealing moment, an actual pleasurable moment.

00;39;12;25 - 00;39;38;16
Darra Mulderry
You know, I don't know if anyone's ever noticed this, but when you see Nancy Pelosi walk by Mitch McConnell and I've seen this many times, the way they look at each other, the way they speak to each other, you can hear what they're saying. There's pleasure in Concord there. I'm not saying it's possible between everyone, every Democrat and every Republican, but every day there are those kinds of moments.

00;39;38;22 - 00;40;06;16
Darra Mulderry
Yes, they're combatants. At the same time, many, many, many of our representatives take pleasure in Concord and Tocqueville says, you've got to keep at it. Show up at the local thing and eventually you'll want to. And that's what's going to keep us going if we keep associating and keep hearing what the other is feeling and wanting will move forward better than if we don't.

00;40;07;04 - 00;40;27;15
Michael Hagan
All right. Well, Dr. Molder, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I've really enjoyed this conversation. It in many ways felt like being back in your U.S. history, 1900, to present the American Political Theory course, which, you know, again, are just some of my fondest memories of my undergraduate and graduate years. So thank you so much for coming on.

00;40;27;15 - 00;40;28;08
Michael Hagan
It's been a pleasure.

00;40;28;23 - 00;40;32;29
Darra Mulderry
Oh, you're welcome, Michael. And it's really been my pleasure. Thanks. This has been fun.

00;40;33;29 - 00;40;47;28
Michael Hagan
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