Heather Cox Richardson’s wildly popular Substack newsletter, Letters From an American, achieves what historical studies do at their best: shed light on the politics of the moment by telling parallel stories from the past. As often as the word “unprecedented” comes up in modern political discussions, the comparisons it conjures are usually limited to living memory—which historians know to look beyond. In this episode of How to Save a Country, hosts Michael Tomasky and Felicia Wong talk with Richardson, a professor of nineteenth-century American history at Boston College and the author of six books, about today’s polarization, the last time anti-democratic forces threatened to take hold of Congress, and the unique dangers democracy faces now.
“We actually have people within our government
who are working against our democracy, and that is a whole different kettle of
fish than we’ve ever had to deal with before,” Richardson says. “Taking back our
country into our own hands is the first step, I think, to changing our
democracy.” Later, Richardson digs into the difference
between freedom from and freedom to, and explains why democracy and
capitalism are not interchangeable.
How to Save a Country is a production of the Roosevelt Institute, The New Republic, and PRX. Generous funding for the podcast was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of its funders.
Reading Recommendations:
• Check out the books talked about in this episode: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the
Continuing Fight for the Soul of America and To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party.
• Much has been written lately about
Reconstruction’s legacy in our democracy. The hosts of How to Save a Country recommend The Second Founding: How the
Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, by Eric Foner; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, which connects Reconstruction to the
Obama legacy; and “The Equality That Wasn’t
Enough,” an article by Jamelle Bouie that was published the New York
Times.
• For more analysis of how the
neoliberal regime conflated capitalism and democracy, see Suzanne Kahn’s More than Consumers: Post-Neoliberal Identities and Economic
Governance.
Michael: I’m Michael Tomasky, editor of The New
Republic.
Felicia: And I’m Felicia Wong, president
and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute.
Michael: This is How to Save a Country, our podcast on the
ideas and the people contributing to a
new political vision and a new economic vision for the United States. We
connect the economy, democracy, and freedom …
Felicia: Because progressives need a common purpose and a common
strategy to win.
Michael: Our guest
today is Heather Cox Richardson. You may know that name already if you’re one
of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers to her daily Substack newsletter.
It’s called Letters From an American, and it’s a guide to the politics of the
moment with prior context drawn from Heather’s work as a professor of nineteenth-century American history
at Boston College.
[Excerpt of Heather speaking]: I’m not Bruce
Springsteen. You know, I’m somebody who is voicing what a lot of people think.
I’m the voice of what I think is a political moment and a political movement.
Felicia: You know, I think we should say something right up top here in
this interview. Heather often jumps
around from talking about the nineteenth century to talking about the present day, which is
amazing but can be a little confusing. So as a reminder, the Republican Party of 150 years ago, which she refers to, that was the party of Lincoln. And after the North won the
Civil War, it was the Democratic Party that clung to the Confederate cause and
even promoted it within the halls of Congress, which we’ll get into.
Michael: What I enjoyed so much about this conversation is that every time we ask
her about this or that aspect of modern politics, she would give of course an
astute diagnosis of the current situation, but
then she would also turn around and rewind things and find a comparison to some
of the wheeling and dealing that went on in this or that decade of the nineteenth
century, and it’s just fascinating stuff.
Felicia: And as for why we wanted
to have her on this program now, you know, she’s particularly good at
explaining polarization. Heather has studied some of our nation’s most divided
times—the Civil War, Reconstruction—and so she has great insights about today’s divisions too.
Michael: Coming right up, it’s our interview with Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson, welcome to How to
Save a Country.
Heather:
Oh, it’s such a pleasure
to be here.
Michael: We’re thrilled to have
you. I want to start with a broad and rather grim question. How much trouble is this
country in right now?
Heather: A lot. Would you like me
to elaborate?
Michael: Please.
Heather: We are in
a unique moment because we have, certainly in our past, had plenty of times
when there were people who did not believe in the democratic experiment and who
were trying to impose an oligarchy or some form of a hierarchical government.
But this is the first time in our history that those people who wanted to do that have a
significant footprint within our government. We actually have people within our
government who are working against our democracy, and that is a whole different
kettle of fish than we’ve ever had to deal
with before.
Michael: It’s different even, I believe, from the
late 1850s. Would you agree? Worse. By different, I mean worse.
Heather: Well, there are a lot of
similarities. That is, during the 1850s, the large enslavers from
the American South did in fact take over the government. They took over the
Supreme Court, they took over the Senate, they took over the presidency, and it
really looked as if they were going to be able to take over the House of
Representatives as well and force their system of a hierarchical government, really an
oligarchy, on the rest of the country by spreading their system of enslavement
across the American West, and by simply outnumbering the number of states that
emphasized free labor. So it really did look as if that were going to be the
case, but when, in fact, Americans elected
Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860, those people took their marbles and
went home. So Americans were able to redefine American democracy during those
early years of the 1860s without
there being a group of people who were actively trying to destroy that
democracy. Now there was a moment in 1879—
Michael: After the
war, right?
Heather: Yes, when, in fact, former Confederates did stay in the government and did try to destroy
it from within, and they were quite thoroughly put down by the American people.
Michael: Indeed, a few
years after the Civil War and the defeat of the Confederates, that is the Democrats, the party threw up further resistance
from inside the federal system that they had just rejoined basically. Talk a
little bit more about that moment. What happened exactly?
Heather: At the
time it was a huge deal and most people, of
course, haven’t even heard about today. But what happened was that in 1874, the
Democrats take back over the House of Representatives, largely because there was an economic depression in 1873, and they were mad at
the Republicans about that, but the former
Confederates took that as a sign that in fact, Americans did not want to have Black rights, they did not
want equality, they did not want the
Republican program that was designed to help the American economy, that they
wanted to go back to the years before the Civil War. Then in 1878, the Democrats take
over control of the Senate as well, and what
that meant was when Congress was seated in 1879, they had Congress and they
decided literally to defund the government until the president, who was Rutherford B.
Hayes, did what they wanted—that is, removed
all the troops from the South—and at the time,
people recognized that that was essentially the resurgence of the Confederacy
within the government itself. And in fact, Democrats said so. They said, you know, “We were stupid to actually secede. We should have stayed here and did what we wanted all
along.”
When that happens, there is a real movement among Americans
to say, “No, this is just the Confederacy by
another means,” and this becomes this huge
popular moment. There are cartoons and there are poems and there are songs, and there are
articles in newspapers, and everybody’s saying, “Hey,
we fought this war once. We’re not going to
fight it again. We’re gonna put these people down.” The president, Rutherford B. Hayes, vetoes those demands, bills that went
through five times. The Confederates end up backing down, recognizing that there is an upcoming election in 1880 and
that they look like complete idiots.
Now, that was a long way to tell a really, to my mind, cool story,
but one that most people may not be as interested in as I am. But on
the heels of that catastrophe, if you
will, the Confederacy trying to take over the
government from within, the Democratic Party split, said, “We got a problem. We have to throw these former Confederates
overboard.” It’s at that moment that the
Democratic Party starts to focus on urban
workers, urban people of color, and tries to move the
country forward as an urban party. It’s a moment that looks quite a bit like
where we are, I hope anyway, today.
Felicia: Right, you see a
lot of this debate also amongst conservative, Republican-aligned thinkers. So are
you going to see, I think of it as, either a softer safety net, the kind of
family protections that Mitt Romney is arguing for? Are you going to see the kind of public investments that Marco Rubio is arguing for?
Heather: Well,
right, that’s the $64,000 question. The Republican Party coming out of the 1850s was
a true conservative party, and it took its cues from people like Edmund Burke,
although not deliberately name-checking him, with the idea that the government should protect instruments of stability. So
the idea of returning to sort of conservatism
within the Republican Party is a real mouthful
because the current-day Republican Party is no
longer a conservative party.
The Republican Party in the middle of the twentieth century really stood for that— Planned Parenthood, for example—to strengthen the ability of the family to plan its own future, and to strengthen churches, and to strengthen the ability of
people to feed their children, and all the sorts of things that one would associate with a Burkean conservatism in the twentieth
century. The modern-day Republican Party has gone quite far from
that. What has happened since the rise of
Donald Trump, who’s a symptom by the way, not
only a cause, the
Republican Party has really focused on their
base voters, and the base voters are being turned out by racism, anti-immigrant
sentiment, misogyny. They’re really the kinds of themes that people like [Prime
Minister] Viktor Orbán have pushed in Hungary, and they’re themes that frankly are what
helped the Nazi parties to rise not only in
Germany but also in other places in Europe and that people focused on in
America in the 1920s and the 1930s as well. Those are not things that will
attract that famous suburban woman, which is
what the Republican Party so desperately needs.
Felicia: I wanna ask about the Fourteenth Amendment,
which guarantees people equal protection under the law. It’s come up a lot in recent politics, especially
after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So what do you think? Is it alarming or encouraging that we are still talking about equality and equal
protection at this most basic level.
Heather: You know, I joke
sometimes that I stop people in the supermarket to talk about the Fourteenth
Amendment, but there’s a reason that the Fourteenth Amendment matters as much as it ever has at this moment.
After the Thirteenth Amendment
becomes part of our Constitution in 1865, the end of human enslavement except for punishment
for a crime for which somebody has been duly convicted, the Southern states
remand formally enslaved people to a system that is not exactly slavery, but it
definitely is second-class citizenship. What
happens then is a real revolution in the way they think about the American
government and the relationship of the states to the federal government. And what the Fourteenth Amendment does is it says that no state can take away
equality, no state can violate the equal
protection of the laws, that every American
citizen has equal protection of the laws, and that their rights cannot be taken
away from them without due process of those laws. So it puts the federal
government in charge of guaranteeing that no state can take away rights from
anybody within those states, any citizen within those states, and that becomes part of the U.S. Constitution in 1868.
Then, in 1870, Congress
establishes the Department of Justice to make sure that’s going to be the case.
Now that plays forward in the twentieth century, after people start to look away from what the
Fourteenth Amendment should be able to do, and there’s a couple of Supreme Court cases that say that in
fact, so long as discrimination is done by individuals, that the federal
government can’t step in to change that, but of course by the early twentieth century, we have a system
in which African Americans and Mexican Americans and Hispanic Americans are
living under systems of Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws that relegate them to a
second-class citizenship. The Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren begins to use the Fourteenth
Amendment to protect the rights of individuals within the states, and of course
it is those laws that now the current-day Supreme Court, under the radical
control of the Republicans that have been really put over the top by the three
new justices appointed by Donald Trump, are dismantling. They’re saying that, in
fact, that is not something that the Fourteenth Amendment should be doing and that
they will not use the Fourteenth Amendment to
protect individuals from discrimination at the state level.
We’re
really at a moment that looks very much like a period in which the
Confederates are gaining the upper hand. That
is, they are concentrating power at the state level and essentially
ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment. We’ve taken it
for granted, and it’s time to reassert what that actually means and why our
ancestors put it in our fundamental law, into
our Constitution.
Felicia: You know, one of the things that I think is distressing to everyone that I know or speak to is just how much appetite
there seems to be for conspiracy theories, fact-free
conversation, wild speculation everywhere in our politics right now, but let’s be honest, particularly on the right, the far
right. Is there any precedent for this much craziness in any political party? I know there’s a long history in American politics of
anti-intellectualism and leaning toward being attracted by conspiracy, but why
is it so
intertwined with one of our major parties right now?
Heather: Those are two different
questions. One, has there ever been a major political party that adhered to conspiracy theories and basically
lies the way we have now? And the answer to that is no. We’ve certainly had
plenty of politicians who were opportunistic
and told their followers things that weren’t true, but they were not major
political figures,
with the possible exception of Joe McCarthy, who of
course has a direct line to people like Donald Trump. Why is it so deeply
rooted in our society today is a really more
interesting question, and that is, first of all, like I say, the Republican Party, since at least 1986,
recognized that it needed to convince its followers of something that was not
true. Actually you can go back all the
way to Nixon, but really it was Ronald Reagan who tried to sell people on a
narrative that was not rooted in reality. If
you look at when Reagan was the governor of California, the reporters covering him
kind of thought he was a joke. For example, he
talked about how many lives he had saved when he was a lifeguard, and all the other lifeguards on the beach were like, “You know, the rest of us have been here and we’re not saving
anybody, nobody needs us.” And they thought it was just sort of a joke really, that
he would tell these stories that were creating a narrative of heroism, that were
not true. So you could push it all the way back to that.
You can see it in a number
of candidates nowadays, but certainly what
springs to mind is Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech, when he took the oath of office, in which he described an America
that was just a hellscape. And similarly, the idea
that in the summer of 2020, there were
literally cities that had been burned down, that
was just simply not true. So I think part of it is the bread and butter, at this
point, of the Republican Party.
Felicia: All right, we’re gonna
take just a quick break, and don’t forget that Michael and I will talk between ourselves about this interview
later on. Stay tuned.
Michael: And we’re
back with Heather Cox Richardson on How to Save a Country. Heather, I want to ask you a question about a word. The
word is freedom. You wrote a book called
To Make Men Free: A History of
the Republican Party, an excellent book and a
very fair and judicious book. You chose
that word in the title for a reason, and I’m guessing you, if you’d written the history of the Democratic Party,
you might not have used the word “free.”
Heather: Let
me just explain first of all why I used “to make men free” as the title of that. That was a bit of a tweak, if
you will, at the Republican Party because it’s a line from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle-Hymn of the Republic:” “As he died to make men holy, let
us die to make men free.” “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic” has been played at the Republican National Convention
every year until the year I wrote that book. I haven’t checked since. I did not
hear it at Donald Trump’s, but it was the song for the Republican Party,
and of course what they did is they made men free. Of course she wrote
that, she was up to something else when she wrote that. And since the rise of
Reagan, I believe that the Republican Party has very much worked to get rid of the idea of
universal human equality and replace it with an idea of a heteronormative
cowboy dad in charge of his women and children, and hence the focus on getting women back into the home, out of professional settings, even things like the prairie dresses that became so popular in the
1970s and into the 1980s, and by the way, are back today.
Felicia: I was going to say they’re back. The
prairie dresses were back.
Heather:
Which is, wow.
Fully shipped. Do you react the same way I do to those?
Felicia:
I do, yes. The ruffles are back.
Heather: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah,
holy smokes. But here we are in a situation: The Republican Party owns
this word freedom and owns this concept. It’s completely associated with the
Republican Party. They have their Freedom Caucus. They have freedom: this liberty, that. Yet their
definition of freedom is utterly perverse: the
freedom not to wear a mask and to cough on somebody in the supermarket and get
them sick. I think the Democrats have a real
failing here in having ceded this word, this
concept that is cherished by Americans, that Americans are taught to cherish
from the time they can cherish any idea. The Democrats have been very derelict
in letting the Republicans have that word and not having their own definition of freedom. I think in fact that these economic ideas have to do with the democratic
vision of freedom. These ideas, these programs, these supports, these
investments, will give people more freedom to fulfill their potential as human
beings and to live better lives. So this is a
pet peeve of mine about our contemporary political discourse and culture. What
do you think?
Heather: Well, I hate to do this
to you, but you sound very much like a nineteenth-century Republican.
That is precisely what Abraham Lincoln and Theodore
Roosevelt would’ve said. I will suggest, though, that there is embedded in the
concept of freedom a really important distinction between the freedom from
something and the freedom to something.
Michael: Sure.
Heather: And that
is one that I think the Republicans have exploited, the current-day Republicans, and I think that’s an
important distinction to make. The current-day Republicans, since the Reagan
revolution, are really very different than
traditional Republicans that they have celebrated with the freedom from
regulation, the freedom from having to share
civil rights with anybody who is not—fill in all the blanks—white, heteronormative, male, et cetera, but they haven’t talked about exactly what you’re talking about, the fact that both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, for
example, but then later on, FDR and Eisenhower focused on the fact that an
active federal government actually worked to create a world in which
individuals had the freedom to do things: to
be creative, to have jobs that would support their families, to travel, to be
healthy, to do all sorts of things that are part
of a definition of freedom that is far more inclusive than being a person of
privilege who has the freedom from things, but rather has the freedom to
things.
Felicia: I think that one of my hypotheses
about how the left lost the freedom narrative is that the
libertarian neoliberal, if you will, economists took it over, and freedom in the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s came to mean the freedom to transact, the freedom to hold
property, et cetera, narrowly, and therefore the left
lost the freedom that was part of the abolition movement, the freedom that was
part of the women’s liberation movement. The
activist in me, the earnest person in me, thinks that that means that freedom
is there again, to be expanded as a political
concept and recaptured, but it’s gonna take a lot of work to do that.
Heather: Well, I think we made a
terrible error, as well, after the fall of the Soviet Union, grabbing hold of the idea that democracy and capitalism
were interchangeable. The focus on capitalism
and the rise of capitalism standing for democracy, which was something of
course that had been pushed as far back as Reagan, and certainly before that: the Powell memo in 1971 and all the way, of course, back to William F.
Buckley in God and Man at Yale in 1951. That idea that as
long as you had capitalism, you would have democracy
has come home to haunt us because, of course, we now have proof that you can have capitalism and not have
democracy. You need to look no further than China and look at the rising forms
of capitalism there. At the same time, we very deliberately don’t have
democracy, and you have people thinking along those lines and trying to redefine
democracy as having stuff. That’s a real loss
because, of course, the whole concept of democracy and our democracy, American
democracy, is that all people are created equal and, crucially, that they have a right to consent to the government under
which they live. They’re allowed to have a say, and that idea of having a say we seem to be tossing over at a frightening pace, and you really can’t have the
one without having the other. I have a
theory about that.
Felicia: What’s
your theory?
Heather: My theory
is when Americans talk about socialism, they
think they’re talking about international socialism, which really takes form after 1917, but they’re not.
They’re talking about Black voting, and that
took place in 1871. Opponents in the South,
former Confederates, say, “Well, all they’re
doing is they are creating socialism. They’re turning this country into a
socialist country.” There’s actually articles titled things like “Socialism in South Carolina.” People in the nineteenth century put race and class together when
people started to talk about socialism, basically saying that if you let Black people vote, they would vote for things like roads and schools and hospitals, and that would cost tax
dollars, and since white people were the only
ones who had property to tax in the post–Civil
War South, that meant a redistribution of
wealth from white people to Black people.
You still see that nowadays when people talk about how the Democrats are dangerous, radical leftist socialists. I mean, it’s kind of a list of buzzwords there. But I
got thinking last year, I was teaching a course and wanted to talk about the rise of international capitalism, and I
thought, “When did Americans start
talking about capitalism?”
because Lincoln talked all the time about capital. In fact, during the 1860s, Lincoln and
people like him talked about capital and defined it quite literally as pre-exerted labor. They believed it was a product of labor. But
while they talk about capital in the 1860s and the 1870s, they start to talk
about capitalists, they don’t talk about
capitalism. So I actually did a word search and discovered that they talk about
capitalists as people who have money. It’s not an economic system, it’s an identifier of who people are who have money. So if
they’re talking about, for example, in New York City, a law that would help
people with money, they say the capitalists like it.
And then they start to use the word capitalism in America to stand
against the idea of socialism, socialism
being the poor people voting, immigrants in
New York is what they’re worried about, but Black
people in the American South, they start to say, “We don’t want a system of socialism. We want a system of
capitalism,” and
by that they mean that people with capital should be the ones who determine the
political system. If you think about
capitalism in the American context, not as being about an economic system but
rather thinking about it as a political system, it changes the entire way you think about the relationship between
democracy and capitalism.
Felicia: I want to turn now to talking a little bit about you, because
your work and frankly your popularity are kind of fascinating, so tell us a little bit more about your project, Letters From an American. How did it start? And say a little
bit about what you think your popularity means about the kind of political
analysis, historical analysis, that everyday people are really looking for
right now.
Heather: I’m
not Bruce Springsteen. I’m
somebody who is voicing what a lot of people think. I’m the voice of what I
think is a political moment, and a political movement in that people want to
have a government that works and that they feel proud of and that reflects them, and they are decent human beings. They’re also
talented human beings. I hear from a
lot of people, and there’s extraordinary talent in this country. I am literally just holding up
a mirror to America at this moment, and it’s a
mirror that I really like. I like the people I’m dealing with, and I think
people are eager to have a say in their government and to be able to
participate in it, and that’s really what I
do.
Michael: The show is called How to Save a
Country. So Heather Cox Richardson,
give us a couple ideas, concrete ideas for how to
save the country.
Heather: It’s worth
mentioning here that I am an idealist, by which I mean, I think ideas change
the way people behave. What I always tell people is the way you change this
country is you change the way you talk about it. You change the way you think about it, and you make it known that you feel that way and that you think that way,
and that you include people in your vision of the world to make it the way you
want it to be. So for example, if you
look at the rise of the John Birch Society, which was a right-wing society that really got its teeth in the country after Brown v. Board of
Education, the way the Birchers organized was literally by going out and talking to
people. That idea of changing our country by
talking to people about what this country could be, what you want our
government to do, whether or not it’s what I want our government to do, taking
back our country into our own hands is the first step to changing our democracy.
Then
there’s the other things, of course, that everybody talks about: Run for office, vote,
give money to causes, stand up for things you believe in. All those things are
part of participating in our political system. But the first of those to me is
speak up: Speak up to your neighbors, speak up to your local
newspapers, speak up to The Wall Street Journal when you don’t like
what it’s doing, take back oxygen from those radical
people who are trying to destroy our country. People tend to forget that when
in fact we embraced civil rights in this country in the 1950s, first with the
Civil Rights Act of 1957 and then in the 1960s, those were white men who voted for the changing laws, and they
did not do that because they suddenly saw the light and thought it would be a
great thing for them to give rights to Black
women, for example. It’s because people like the NAACP and the organizers with
them and Black Americans spoke up and said,
“This is not the kind of country we want to live in.” They were able,
as I say, to push that incredibly heavy boulder uphill. So we have precedent,
we have hope, and the way you participate in that
is simply by stepping up and starting to do it.
Felicia: I want to thank
you, Heather Cox Richardson, for your time on
this show. We have so appreciated learning from you today and learning from you
every morning at 3:00 a.m. or whenever I
receive your newsletter.
Heather: Thank you for having me. It’s been a real
pleasure.
Michael: Pleasure was
ours. Thanks so much.
Felicia:
Michael, what did you think?
Michael: I guess one of the main
things that I take away from this is the idea that political parties change. The
Democratic Party changed in that time
quite dramatically over the course of a couple of decades, and I don’t want
to overstate my optimism here, just the mere fact that it has happened in our history
means that it can happen again.
Felicia: Really what we’ve been
talking about this whole episode is about party instability. The optimist in me hopes that instability will actually lead to
realignment. But today the question for me is who
is going to be in what part of this
realignment? I really wonder how Black Americans and Latino Americans and Asian
Americans end up aligning with what party.
In my
perfect world, both parties would have the economic policies demonstrating that
they’re competing for the votes of people of color, kind of race to the top. That
is not what we’re seeing right now. And instead, our politics of race are
ugly within one party, and they’re at risk of being
somewhat dismissed by the other party. I hope that’s not going to happen, but I could imagine that happening. So instead, I
really fear a kind of race to the bottom, around
race, and whether that can flip is part of what
we’ll be discussing with the next two guests
on How
to Save a Country, Dorian Warren …
[Excerpt of Dorian Warren speaking]: There is
something really going on across the spectrum
in terms of one’s class, background, racial and gender background. This is actually an
exciting time for the labor movement.
Felicia: And Deepak Bhargava …
[Excerpt of Deepak Bhargava speaking]:
So why not
awaken the best parts of our national
identity, which admittedly we rarely live up to, but they’re there, of being a welcoming country.
Felicia: We’re happy to have them
joining How to Save a Country,
which is a production of PRX in partnership
with the Roosevelt Institute and The New Republic.
Michael: Our associate producer
is Alli Rodgers. Our lead producer is Pierre Bienaimé. Our executive producer
is Jocelyn Gonzalez.
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’s reimagining how capitalism should work. Learn more about their
efforts to recenter our economy around individuals, community, and societal
wellbeing 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. Learn more at hewlett.org.
Felicia: If
you’re not yet subscribed, please do it.
Michael: As you’ve
heard, on just about every podcast, yes, rating and reviewing us would definitely help the show. Thank you.
Felicia: Bye, Michael.
Michael: Bye, Felicia.
Michael: Yeah, and I love the fact that I
sound like Lincoln.
Felicia: Oh
yeah, Michael likes it even more than Baby Joe Biden would.
