How would you mark America’s first 250 years?
That’s the question I asked historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson on this week’s episode of America, Really – and the question I ask myself.
All grades are subjective, and the rubric for whether America gets a passing grade is a matter of chance and perspective, but the best I could come up with was a B-/C+.
The enduring structure of multi-ethnic democracy, however fragile at present, deserves praise. So is the long list of American inventions and academic institutions, and the cultural impact of American music, movies, and sports. With some flaws for the persistent lower-class capitalism it requires, injustice here and abroad, and a preference for the wrong kind of football, the passing class seemed fair enough.
In our interview, Richardson said that he sees the country entering a period of great change, especially as President Donald Trump continues to reshape our government to meet his high-profile demands. And since we’re focusing on post-Trump America, and toward that point in these upcoming elections, I asked how much democracy Richardson feels we really have — and pushed the question of voters’ commitment to preserving it, given the outcome of the 2024 election.
Read on for a snippet of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full show — we’re writing a new charter for America’s next 250 years, listing values that will earn the country an A+ for the next grading period — so. listen America, Really wherever you find your podcasts or watch them Vox’s YouTube channel.
As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you argued that the country has reorganized itself every 80 to 90 years from the start of the Civil War to the New Deal.
I was wondering how you thought about that invention. What forces created them, and are we in a period of reconstruction right now?
I’m not sure I’ve ever used the words reinvention, because the way I think about it is that the country has to deal with new challenges all the time, and because we had put in our foundation a series of principles that at the time were limited in terms of what people could address, but were broad in what they could address, we’ve been able through our history to address new challenges – like the expansion of the west, like the expansion of American nuclear weapons, like the industrial expansion of the United States. democracy to pay closer attention to those basic documents.
So are we in such a time now? Absolutely.
What forces create these types of shifts in the country? If we think about those times when we face new challenges, how can we gather that kind of creativity and what seeds should we be looking for right now?
There is a whole lot in that question. And one of the places that I want to start is that the seeds of innovation, I think, come from art. They come from music, they come from art, they come from new languages and new styles of clothing and sculpture, and all kinds of new ways of looking at the world through our imaginations.
And we can talk about the end of the 19th century, for example, and how creative that time was, and so on. Those ideas, I think, come from there, but that is not enough. I think when you see reinvention, you see Americans going back to their stories, to their traditional history and places where they can see other Americans have used their agency to make our best traditions law, or at least put into practice.
It is a very sad time for us to talk about this because on April 12, Hungarian voters put. a large number of opposition leaders for Viktor Orbán to come to power in their parliament, and of course they will have a different prime minister.
And one of the things that they seem to have done is to go back to the history of Hungary and say, listen. We may disagree on immigration and financial issues and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country up instead of tearing it down.
And that struck a chord with me because that’s what the Republicans did when they formed in the 1850s. That’s what many partisans and Democrats did in the 1890s when they organized themselves against the looters and then included progressive Republicans. It’s certainly what we saw in the 1920s and 1930s, what we saw in the 1950s, and I think what we’re seeing again in America today.
I wanted to ask about today. The basis of this show is to try to get Trump out of the center and see the country out of his eyes, but embedded in it is the question of whether he is a piece of deviation in American politics or he reflects the system and will have to live with Trumpism for a longer time than even an individual.
Trump is the result of at least 40 years of right-wing rhetoric that has been adopted by the Republican Party, which set the stage for someone to come in and remove the dog whistles and call out the sexists who had entered the Republican Party after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, creating a sub-Republican party. it depended on the votes of those racists and sexists to stay in power.
What he did was reverse the text. He nodded to establishment Republicans who wanted tax cuts, but he was capable of racism and sexism and America-Firsters and so on. And so he is very much a product of that.
But he is also something different because by empowering them, what he did was turn democracy not only into freedom, but into personal freedom. It is a kind of, in a way, a further step of fascism that we can talk about – an idea that wants all the power, but also wants power not for his party and not for his followers, but for himself.
Now there is a bigger question, as I say, it has gone into what you said, and that is, the system of the United States of America is seriously flawed to begin with that we were waiting for Trump?
And to that, I would say no. I’m saying that most of us dropped the ball after the 1960s and 1970s, with the idea that we were finally able to create a new kind of American government that was based on reality rather than preconceived images of American life.
By that I mean that it was a government that recognizes the value of individuals. It didn’t necessarily protect individuals the way the government’s policies suggested they should, but it recognized their value in a way that the government before 1965 and before the General Assembly under LBJ did not. And so for a lot of people, they thought, oh, we’re on this path toward a liberal democracy that will actually recognize the value of disabled Americans and older Americans and so on.
And as a result, we stopped considering the importance of liberal democracy. But what it did was enable the radical right to intervene and give people a sense of a national narrative that made their agency feel very important to them — that they were the ones protecting America in a way that people like me weren’t.
Because immigrants are taking your job, because people are coming and representing a kind of imminent threat.
That is true. And you know, one of the things that always comes to me is Lauren Boebert, the representative from Colorado, on the morning of January 6, 2021, (tweeted) to the people, “This is 1776” – the idea that they were the ones who were really protecting America.
One of the things that I think Trump has done for us since his inauguration in January 2025 was to make it clear that our democracy and the principles of our democracy that many people believed to be unassailable, Trump just tore it up.
And with that, a lot of people who somehow think that the guards were there go into the fight and say, well, I didn’t think that I would have to get involved in politics, but obviously I do, and here I am.
That kind of involvement in protecting American democracy is the kind of thing we’ve seen in the past – in the 1850s, 1890s, and so on – restoring that democracy and, very importantly, adapting it to new conditions that are challenging it now.
