- [Presenter] This program was funded by the following.

Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America, and also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(grand orchestral music) - The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12.

- We are reinforcing democracy.

We are the ones who get to choose our future.

- Democracy is a fragile thing.

It has to be defended and it always has to be defended.

- Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we'll explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary, but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people and the formidable challenges we face today.

Our guest tonight, Julian Zelizer, is one of our nation's leading historians.

A Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a political analyst for CNN, and a regular guest on NPR, he is the author or editor of over 25 books that document our history.

Tonight I ask him to put the turbulent and consequential times in which we're living into historical context.

Julian Zelizer, welcome.

- Thanks, it's nice to be here with you.

- So, you wrote in "The Atlantic" recently that there are words that you've heard from historians in this current environment that have become, in your words, "cliched shorthands or tropes."

And one of those words is unprecedented.

So how would you describe the current environment in which we live?

The political environment in which we find ourselves today.

- Well, it's fast, it's dramatic.

Events happen all the time that are somewhat shocking to many people following and so I think there is an inclination often for the reporter to ask the historian, "Is this unprecedented?"

And often the historian says, "Yes."

And I think it grows out of a time where things happen that you don't think should happen.

A lot of that was with former President Trump during his administration almost every day, but even since then, I could pick a million stories and each one would be the kind of story that 10, 15 years ago would be exceptional.

Today it's just the norm.

- If you look at the currents of history, is there a period that resembles the one that we're going through right now?

- Well, nothing resembles anything perfectly.

Obviously you can go to the middle of the 19th century before the Civil War where the democracy was under strain and you could see, where you could see in retrospect all these problems that were bubbling up and not allowing the system to deal with the moment.

And obviously you can look at the 1960s and the kind of divisiveness over core issues that was emerging in the body politic and see semblances of some of the divisiveness we have today, but nothing's a perfect match, and there's distinctions, but those are the things I tend to think about.

- So to put the crisis of democracy that we're seeing in the country and in the world, to a large extent, into some kind of context, Julian.

- Well, I think the mechanisms of the democracy are not working as smoothly as we hoped.

One of the issues that emerges in 2020 is how many points of vulnerability there are in the basic process, that if someone wants to exploit the democratic process, it can be exploited.

And I think this is something we're seeing in other countries.

It's not about a civil war breaking out.

It's not about a total collapse, it's an erosion.

And you start to see voting rights not being upheld the way they had been upheld since 1965.

All of a sudden we're not even talking about is the electoral college good or bad, we're talking about can votes from the electoral college results be flipped unjustly, and this is something we're seeing for different reasons.

There's different factors behind polarization and the way the media works globally is becoming a challenge, I think, for democratic debate, and you see autocratic forces gaining hold in many countries, including here in the United States, that, you know, pose a challenge to what we hope is the core of our system.

- Democracies are inherently messy.

- Yep.

- Is this a natural part of the cycle?

As you look at democracies, healthy, full-fledged democracies, are these ebbs in the cycle sort of inevitable?

- Yeah, no, they're not inevitable and democracy's messy, democracy is contentious.

I've always argued democracy's never easy.

We have a nostalgia for the last period and the last period that happened often is quite difficult as well.

We think of the 1960s, for example, the era of Lyndon Johnson as this era where Congress worked very well and people got along and they'd argue in the day and have a beer at night, but if you actually read the coverage of the early '60 and mid-'60s, people are talking about how dysfunctional Congress is, and they're talking about how difficult it is to get anything done.

But just because it's always challenging doesn't mean this could be a moment where the challenges are more severe than at other times, and so going back to 2020, that wasn't a normal messy moment for democracy.

That was a dangerous moment for democracy 'cause you weren't just talking about working out differences and contentious politics, you're talking about will the election results be upheld?

And so I think that's one example.

A second example of what makes this different is we live in a era of disinformation because of the technology of media, in part that is different than what we had 30, 40 years ago.

There's less of a filter, there's less control over the information that is out there and that makes debate and deliberation often almost impossible because there is no shared set of facts.

So that is different than just messy democracy.

- You've written or edited over 25 books, so you know a fair amount about American history.

I'm wondering as you look back, is there a time when the American experiment worked particularly well?

- Yeah, I don't think there's an era where it works well, but there are moments when it worked well so I've taught a lot about Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic Congress and I do think you have those years from 1964 to about 1966 where you see the government producing answers to some of the questions of the day.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, in my mind, is clearly a moment where the democracy worked.

Activist pushed the system to address a rather severe problem of disenfranchisement, and in the end, Congress and President Johnson responded with real legislation that would last for decades.

I think of the New Deal as a moment that worked.

Here we are in the 1930s in a severe economic crisis, forces of dictatorship autocracy are taking hold in very serious ways in Europe and Asia and the United States with Roosevelt as president is able to put together legislation that deals with the crisis, it alleviates the crisis, and it ultimately protects the democratic foundation of this country, so there are lots of moments, even in recent times.

I mean you can point to COVID and there's lots that went wrong for sure, but look at something like the vaccines.

It's a pretty remarkable moment that that was produced and produced so quickly and got us out of what could have gone on for years, if not decades, so I always can see, you know, good moments even in a difficult political system and in a difficult era.

- You recently edited a book called "Myth America," in which you look at the myths that have sprung up around American history.

What do you think the biggest myths that we hold as as Americans are?

- Well, the list would go on too long for a television show, but look, one, related to what we're talking about, I do think there is a big myth in this country that government just doesn't work.

That government never works.

It's always a failure.

It always leads to unintended consequences.

And I think in the last few decades it's really taken hold in a lot of the country, even among many liberals who are kind of skeptical that you can deal with problems.

And we have chapters in that book on the New Deal in great society that look at what happens after and what's remarkable is a lot of those programs are incredibly effective.

Look at a program like Medicare.

There was a crisis before 1965 where elderly people did not have access to hospital insurance and to physician's insurance.

Where we are today, that's not the same kind of problem.

It was alleviated.

So that myth of government failure, I think, is really pervasive and really dangerous.

- So does this age where we can so easily propagate misinformation and disinformation allow for greater mythology as it relates to our country and our politics?

- It does because it's very easy to spread whatever you want at this point, or for an average person to just throw something into the media ecosystem and all of a sudden it travels with the speed of light and it's hard to take back, and when we were doing this book, there were debates I remember about monuments and taking down government monuments and there were all these historians who tried to explain why those monuments were put into place.

They were not meant to commemorate actually the South.

They were meant as a form of opposition to civil rights in the 20th century, but it's very hard to get that kind of argument out there.

There were people explaining the literal history of these monuments, but it doesn't break through, so I think it's a challenge for historians, politicians, citizens.

You know, I tell students sometimes that in the 1960s the debates were about should we be in Vietnam or what to do in Vietnam, whereas today the debate could very well be if we were in that situation, are we even in Vietnam?

And there'd be a lot of the population that didn't believe we were there and that becomes very damaging and very hard to talk about history in that context.

- You and I both participated in a 2021 C-span poll ranking all the presidents from George Washington through Donald Trump, and Donald Trump came in fourth from the bottom next to James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce.

The difference is that afterward you got a call from Donald Trump in which he defended his presidency.

Talk about that call and how it came about.

- Yeah, it was a surreal moment.

I edited a book about the Trump presidency.

It's a series I've been doing.

When each president finishes their term, I get some of the best historians together and they try to put the president in some kind of context and look at the different issues that shaped the administration, so I did that with him.

And we had a conference, just the authors, and the New York Times decided to write a piece on what we were doing.

How do historians take a first cut on this very divisive president, and so they published the article in the art section and evidently he read that article and so he had one of his top staffers call me and say, the president, former president at that time, this is 2021, wants to meet with you, or meet with your authors and get his side of the story.

And we talked for a while back and forth, and ultimately I decided to do it.

We did it on Zoom.

I thought this was worth recording, and if we were in a closed room, we couldn't do that, so this could be there for history.

And so we did it and we set it up and it happened to take place right after the night, the morning after, I believe, if I remember, that poll took place, so here that poll came out.

He does pay attention to this and there we were having a conversation for an hour about different elements of his presidency.

- So did he give a cogent defense of his administration?

- He had a presentation for about a half hour.

It wasn't a cogent defense, but there were several themes that he really wanted to talk about and it was pretty deliberate.

I mean, he wanted to talk about his skill in diplomatic relations, which no one appreciated and tried to tell his stories.

He didn't think people knew about how good he was as a negotiator, how tough he was as a negotiator.

He clearly wanted to emphasize his connection with average Americans and he told stories that all revolved around that, and I think part of it was giving us a message that the best and the brightest don't always know what they're talking about.

And so he went through that, in the second half he took questions and answers, and a lot of what he said, not all of it, but a lot of it was what you hear, in a very different demeanor though, much calmer.

But the questions ranged from what are his impressions of how law enforcement and kind of intelligence institutions treated him, to questions about what his biggest missteps were.

- So this is relating to your book, "The Trump Presidency: A First Assessment."

What is your assessment of the Trump presidency?

- Well, I think a lot of what I did and the authors in that book do are try to argue that he is a consequence and a product of an era, not just a cause.

I think that's really an important theme.

He doesn't come out of nowhere.

And that ranges from how did the Republican Party change in the decades before him that set up a possibility for someone as unconventional as him and divisive as he is to win the nomination, to win the presidency.

We had other authors look at immigration, for example, and where did his positions on immigration come from?

You can see changes in the GOP since the 1990s where the party became much more hard line than it had been under Reagan, for example.

And so that is why, in part, his message from day one, a very hard line toward immigration resonated with the electorate.

We have another chapter on the media and both the polarization that you see in the media, as well as the spread of disinformation and filterless conversation and then it makes sense why could he do what he did, so I think our assessment isn't good or bad, although everyone clearly has their opinions, but I think that was really what we wanted most of the authors to put forth.

- So given the trends in America, was a Donald Trump, if not the Donald Trump, an inevitability?

- Not inevitable, nothing's inevitable, and historians will always tell you that.

That's almost a default answer and I do believe that, but I do think a lot of what he was doing, a lot of the kinds of politics that he promoted, they were already there, so if you look at the Tea Party for example, which takes place in 2010 to 2014 roughly, you see a lot of the kind of rhetoric he's using is already out there.

You see the birther movement and disinformation taking hold.

You see very radical approaches, for example, from the GOP to what is permissible in politics.

So in 2011, House Republicans are willing, they get very close to not raising the debt ceiling, which would send our country into default, radical thing to do, and all of this is kind of what he is going to do in his own way.

So I think the kind of politics he practiced was coming, whether it was him or not, but it does make sense ultimately why a politician, a reality star who ultimately argued that we are a divided country and he was going to play to the division rather than try to work around it, that was coming at some point.

Wasn't inevitable it was him, but it was gonna be something like that.

- Julian, you may have just answered the question, but I have to ask this.

We have seen since Donald Trump's presidency, four indictments, of course, we saw January 6th before he left office, and yet the former president remains enormously popular.

How do you explain that?

- He's popular, so that's the first answer and I think it's something pundits have to reckon with.

Republicans, a large part of the party likes Donald Trump.

They may say they don't like his style or whatever the other part of the comment is, but poll after poll and over time shows his standing is not diminishing at all and the indictments don't really matter.

They see him as someone who has a message that fits what the party is about.

They see him as someone who delivers in terms of judges and policy.

And I think all of that makes him very appealing.

But he also crafted this message.

It was his basic message throughout that he's an anti-establishment figure, and his fight against the establishment is the voter's fight against the establishment and everything else is corrupt in some ways.

When he won in 2016, he was talking about how the election was rigged, even though he won.

It's kind of remarkable to look back on that.

And I think that narrative insulates him, to some extent, from indictments and criminal investigation because his supporters, and again, it's not just the base, it's a lot of Republicans watch this and they're skeptical and they see him as fighting the system and it's not about someone who's indicted and possibly convicted, it's about almost a political warrior going after a broken system so it's a combination of those two and it's not simply his opponent's skills, I think.

I just think they are facing someone who has enormous standing within the party.

- Historians need a perspective in order to make a dispassionate analysis of a president and his administration, but from what you are seeing from Joe Biden's presidency to this point, Julian, how would you assess the Biden presidency?

- Well, if you're a historian who takes legislation as a mark of does a president change the country or not, not even is it good legislation, but is it consequential legislation, the marks are high.

I mean, it's been a remarkable few years.

The number and volume of bills that have gotten through Congress is pretty remarkable.

Three landmark bills, and then smaller policy changes that have happened.

And some of those bills, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, which is really a climate change bill, as we're seeing what it does, it's incredibly dramatic, the kind of shifts in investment it's causing away from traditional forms of energy to new forms of energy and so if that's the mark, I think he certainly is consequential.

People are gonna have differences if they like it or not.

He also promised when he ran to stabilize governing again and I think in that respect, he has offered a model that is antithetical to former President Trump and is much more traditional in what we expect of presidents.

He meets with people, deals with governing.

You don't hear from him all the time, you hear from him at big moments, and so there he has delivered as well.

He hasn't changed public opinion that much.

He hasn't changed the Republican Party.

I don't think he's changed the way the democracy is working right now, but those first two changes I think are significant.

- So we tend to scrutinize our presidents, and in doing so, lose the forest for the trees.

And frequently when we look back at a presidency, we realized that we missed big things that we should have gotten at the time.

What might we be missing about the Biden presidency in the current moment that we'll appreciate in retrospect?

- That's a good question.

I'll repeat the point 'cause I do think the shift in energy is really important.

I don't think most people have a sense of what's going on right now in terms of this federal investment in energy of the future, which is such a big issue and it's one of those issues people feel pessimistic about for a long time, like we're never gonna deal with climate change, we're never gonna really shift to a new kind of energy economy and it's happening to some extent below the radar and I think that's very important.

I think it's right in front of our faces, but the fact that the economy, we do have inflation and that's a problem.

The fact you have these low unemployment numbers and a pretty robust economy after what we went through where the economy was literally shut down for a long time, it's mentioned as we look at the economic news, but I think it's a very important part of his presidency that he's been able to, through government help that happen.

We have a robust economy and many middle-class Americans, even as they struggle with prices, still spending a lot, they have jobs, and I don't think people are really talking about that or he's not able to get attention for that and I think when we look back, that transition out of covid into this moment of the economy is gonna be incredibly important.

- I can't help but to ask this as a parting question, Julian, since you're a fellow presidential historian and have written about so many presidents through your work.

If you had an opportunity to carve one more president on Mount Rushmore, who would it be?

- Oh, that's a good question.

I don't have a great answer for that.

I'm fascinated with Lyndon Johnson, obviously, but you know, I don't know what gets you on the monument.

I always say with Lyndon Johnson, he did all these amazing things and had such an impact, but the other part is Vietnam and it's not a but, it's part of the same person, and so, I don't know, just not in terms of Mount Rushmore, but how you think of a presidency, they're always that complicated.

I think Obama, though, is coming to my mind simply 'cause of who he was, and put aside all the debates about what he ultimately achieves, but we often forget 2008 and the fact this country where race and the history of slavery and racial inequality is so embedded in this country, the fact he won the presidency should be on a monument.

It's remarkable and it didn't solve so many problems, but it was still a historic turning point and I think it would be great if we could remember that part, which often we've kind of moved on from, so I guess it would be him and I guess that's the reason it would be good for the country to celebrate that moment again.

- My guess is that Lyndon Johnson would've liked your first answer better.

- He would like two monuments.

- Exactly.

Julian Zelizer, thank you so much for being on "Live from the LBJ Library."

- Thanks for having me.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] This program was funded by the following.

Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and Family, BP America, and also by... And by... A complete list of funders is available at ATPonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(lively flute music) (gentle music)