From BillMoyers.com:
Julian Zelizer studies America’s past, but he plays a big role in
its present. A professor of history and public affairs at Princeton
University, Zelizer is a frequent commentator and guest on the media and
writes a weekly column
for CNN.com. He is the author of numerous books about American
politicians and the American political system, including studies of the
presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and, most recently, Lyndon
Johnson. Recently, he stopped by the offices of BillMoyers.com for a
conversation about this year’s presidential campaign. The transcript has
been edited lightly for clarity.
Kathy Kiely: So, has there ever been a campaign like this in American history?
Julian Zelizer:
No. Usually when I’m asked that as a historian, I can think of
something that was pretty much like the campaign that’s taking place, or
closely resembles it. In general, this is pretty distinct — obviously
as a result of Donald Trump. I think there’s elements of it that we’ve
seen in different ways in the past. In 1968, the third-party candidate
was somebody named George Wallace, who was the governor of Alabama, and
he appealed to white Democrats to join him, through similar appeals
based on race — rather than issues of immigration, for example — that
we’ve seen emerge again with Donald Trump in this conservative, populist
rhetoric that has been very central to his campaign.
In 1964, you
saw Republican Barry Goldwater, who wasn’t considered to really be
integral to the party at that point, who was far off-center, and was
someone who was going to inevitably lose, in the mind of many
Republicans — and so there’s an element of that going on today. But it’s
very peculiar mix, given his own background professionally, given the
media environment in which he’s really thrived, and given his own style,
his own political style, which is really quite different than, I think,
anything we’ve seen in mainstream, in the two big parties.
Kathy
Kiely: Let’s unpack what you’ve said, because you’ve said a lot. One,
let’s start with what we’d call the “dog whistle” appeals on issues of
race, immigration — class, too. We’ve seen that before, as you’ve said,
in American politics — and even, we could go back to the Know-Nothing
Party. Why does that keep happening in US — why can we not slay that
demon?
Julian Zelizer: Well, there are
many social divisions that are deeply embedded in American political
culture. Race is one of them. Ongoing nativist sentiment is another. And
these are issues that, even with a lot of progress that we have made,
remain pretty popular with parts of the electorate.
Part of it is
just historical — it’s actually part of American culture at this point,
even though we don’t want to admit it. And part of it is a political
creation, meaning it’s often employed by politicians as a way to appeal
to constituencies, often targeting people who are angry or frustrated
about something else, and this becomes an easy way to try and win them
over. But it’s very old, and again, people watch Donald Trump and then
hear him talk about the wall, for example, to keep Mexicans out — and
the way he describes Mexicans, or the way he talks about racial issues
that have been taking place around policing, and his calls for law and
order — and that’s something you can find in many campaigns, either
explicitly, like a George Wallace, or more implicitly, like Richard
Nixon in 1968.
So it’s really a key part of our fabric, and that’s
why, you know, many people were cynical in 2008, even though we had
this historic moment on race and an African-American president, there
were many who doubted whether the country had really changed. And I
think many feel, eight years later, that it didn’t change quite as much
as some were hoping for.
The roots of voter anger
Kathy
Kiely: Do you, from your perspective as a historian, notice any trends
or trigger points that cause this type of politics to be more successful
or to bubble up at particular times, and if so, why do you think now
it’s become so salient in this campaign?
Julian Zelizer: Well,
the one that is a constant is when there’s economic discontent, there’s
a lot of room for these kind of appeals. And so whether you’re talking
about the Great Depression in the 1930s, or whether you’re talking about
situation like today, where you have structural problems in the economy
— middle-class insecurity, for example — even if the economy is doing
much better than what happened in the 1930s, that’s a time where there’s
a lot of room for politicians to find an explanation for it in
something other than the most direct causes, that are going on with the
economy.
Part of it, today we’ve had a huge influx, since 1965, of new peoples into this country. It’s not unlike the turn of the 20
th
century, when you had immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe
coming in in huge numbers — and that makes people who are already here
anxious. Not everyone, but some, and that’s why you can appeal to it.
Kathy
Kiely: And people think about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but in many
ways the immigration bill that [President Lyndon] Johnson signed was
perhaps even a bigger change in the United States, no?
Julian Zelizer: It
was a very important piece of legislation. It wasn’t really focused on
in 1965; it was often legitimated the same way civil rights had been.
The supporters, like Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, or Emanuel Celler of
New York, both saw this as an extension of the same kind of liberalism
that was leading to desegregation through the Civil Rights Act.
But
at the time, most people thought it was abandoning restrictions that
were put into place in the 1920s for Europeans — and what they didn’t
see was the way it would open the door to new groups, and as those new
groups came and as the country became — and in many ways, as the
liberalism of the country toward immigrants allowed popular culture to
change, allowed neighborhoods and cities and suburbs to change — there
were pockets who resisted. So sometimes the resistance comes because
immigration has such a big effect all over the country.
Kathy
Kiely: The election of Barack Obama and the nomination of Hillary
Clinton — both trailblazers: one, the first African-American president,
one potentially the first woman president — certainly the candidate who
has come closest to breaking that barrier. Has that intensified the
nativist, reactionary sentiments, do you think? Those back-to-back
trailblazing decisions by the Democratic Party?
Julian Zelizer: I
think it has. The only cautionary note I would say is that social
scientists who study polarization in the electorate have looked at how
this polarization has been taking place, really since the ’70s, and so
the animosity that you see on one side toward the other — and
particularly with Republicans toward Democrats — didn’t all start with
Barack Obama. And so, a quick history of the Bill Clinton years finds
similar kinds of rhetoric. It’s not racially tinged, but conspiratorial
arguments about him — such as when Vince Foster committed suicide — and
obviously his impeachment in 1998.
So the kind of heat that we
feel today exists before these two candidates. So part of it is a result
of the polarization in the electorate, and part of it is about
particular changes in the Republican Party that’s led many voters to be
more ideological, to move farther and father away from the center, to
listen to conservative news outlets in ways that Democrats don’t tend to
do, according to the recent studies. But then you have that
infrastructure, that foundation, and then comes an African-American
Democrat, followed eight years later by a female Democratic nominee. So
they are not the cause of this, but certainly it took that very volatile
feeling in parts of the GOP, parts of the electorate, and seemed to
confirm some of the warnings that conservatives had been talking about.
Some
of it is explicitly racial, some of it is explicitly sexist. Some of it
isn’t. It’s simply that those changes are part of a mix, I think, that
voters see about the country becoming very liberal or “politically
correct” is the terms that’s often used. So there’s different factors, I
would say, for different voters. We don’t want to put them all under
one category.
Kathy Kiely: The animus that you identified
is really interesting. I was at an event a week ago or so, at the
National Press Club It was a fundraiser for a journalism organization,
and it was a spelling bee — kind of a tradition that the politicians
face off against the press. And there were a lot of members of Congress
there to spell, but there were no Republicans, and I thought that was
really striking. Why do you think that has happened? And is there any
historical precedent for that kind of political polarization, where
members of Congress aren’t associating with each other, in past history?
Julian Zelizer:
It’s certainly gotten worse. The divisions between the parties or
between different factions of the parties, is always part of American
politics. So, in the 1950s and ‘60s, it wasn’t Republicans versus
Democrats, but the animosity between Southern Democrats and Northern
Democrats could be very intense, over big issues like race relations.
And in the 19
th century, we had pretty intense partisanship.
That
partisan or intra-partisan division has now, on top of it are the kind
of personal relations that you’re talking about — the acrimony between
members of Congress — and that has certainly been getting worse since
the ‘70s and ‘80s, so it makes those divisions worse. There are
structural changes that probably fuel it. Again, certainly the media has
been very important in why some of the relations between the parties
have severed.
Some of the demands that legislators now face for
fundraising is another factor people talk about, where there’s literally
less time for legislating — even if they’d like to meet each other,
they really can’t, and so they’ll naturally spend the limited time they
have with members of their own party. The parties on Capitol Hill got a
lot stronger in the past few decades. They created political action
committees, for example, the leaders, so that they could make sure that
everyone voted the same way, and when you have that, it’s going to have
an effect on the culture of Congress.
So there’s a lot of changes
that have been going on. And the second thing is that, since 2010, the
Republican Party has moved rightward on Capitol Hill, with the tea party
— which is now called the Freedom Caucus — it is not, people say it is
not the same in both parties. What you’ve seen is, the shift has been
more dramatic in the GOP since 2010, and that also is fueling this kind
of discord on Capitol Hill.
The role of Congress
Kathy Kiely: Do you think that the next president will be able to work with Congress?
Julian Zelizer: Doubt
it. Certainly, if you have divided government, it’s going to be, in
either scenario, very hard. It’s inconceivable, almost, to imagine a
Republican Congress working with Hillary Clinton on most issues, once
she was in. It’s not as if Barack Obama governed as a leftward Democrat
in his first years, and even on the stimulus in 2009, he could barely
get any Republican votes.
So many years later, as the polarization
has become worse, there’s not going to be a lot of Republicans who want
to cut deals with her. They will be frustrated, they would be angry
about how this election unfolded, and my guess is what you see with
Supreme Court nominations, what you see with the budget in the last few
years — where things are not done on purpose, for political reasons —
that will continue.
You know, the question some people have is,
what would Donald Trump do as president, if he won with a Democratic
Congress, or even with a Republican Congress and a larger Democratic
minority? Some say he would be willing to cut any deal, and he’s not
loyal to his party at all, and he’s not loyal to conservatism on most
issues. So the only possible scenario some outline is that, that for his
own preservation, for his own success, he’s willing to cut some deals.
But it’s still very unlikely. I mean, I think the odds are for gridlock,
as we’ve seen.
Kathy Kiely: Can you think of any past president who’s had a personality like Donald Trump’s?
Julian Zelizer: No. I can’t.
I
mean, the one comparison people make — although the personality is very
different — is Reagan, in that he was very conscious of the public role
of the president — not as an entertainer, but as a celebrity of sorts.
He was very conscious of how things looked and how it would play to the
media, that interested him. He was less interested in the party than
appealing to the people that brought him to the White House — and I
think there’s some of that in Donald Trump.
But we have not had
someone this brazen in the White House, this polemical, this openly
angry, in some ways, and willing to be vicious in their rhetoric, that I
can think of, certainly in modern times.
Kathy Kiely: And
do you think the structure is there in Washington, were Donald Trump to
be elected, to contain him? That’s what some of his backers seem to
say, is, “Oh well, you don’t have to worry about impulsivity, because a
president is surrounded by checks and balances, constitutional and
otherwise.” Do you think that’s true?
Julian Zelizer:
Well, it is true that presidents don’t have a free hand, and it’s true
that when everyone enters the White House, whether you’re Donald Trump —
possibly — or whether you’re any of the presidents we’ve had recently,
you quickly find all the checks that exist. Even in an era when we talk
about “imperial presidents.”
It’s true that Congress still has a
lot of power to impeach, to oversee, to generate scandals through
hearings and to withhold budgetary money. It’s true that the courts can
still be very powerful. Look, Barack Obama has learned this every step
of the way, how limited his power is, even after being re-elected and
being very popular. But presidents can still do bad things.
Executive
power is pretty significant in this day and age, and in matters of war
and diplomacy, Donald Trump would still have a lot of leeway to at least
start things, even if there’s pushback. And even on domestic policy, on
issues like immigration, the president has power to increase
deportation — as Barack Obama has done, he could do it even more
dramatically. So there are checks, there are constraints, there are
limits to presidential power, but there’s still power there, and so I
think it’s a mistake to say he can’t really do anything once he’s in
office.
Kathy
Kiely: Given what you’ve said about the limits on presidential power,
do you think we pay enough attention to congressional elections?
Julian Zelizer:
We don’t. We never do. The only time we pay more attention to it,
certainly, in the media, is usually the first midterm a president faces,
because it’s often a rejection of what the president has done, so
there’s a kind of drama to the story that’s difficult with congressional
elections. They’re messy, there’s lots of them, a lot of them are about
local issues, they’re all over the place.
So it’s easier to talk
about the president — two people, head-to-head, one outcome. But it’s
all decentralized and fractured, so generally congressional elections
don’t get as much attention. They have had a little more in recent years
because of this first midterm backlash, which is an important story —
but I think people should pay more attention to them, because what you
see is the composition of Congress has a huge impact, really significant
effect on what a president can or can’t do, and with all the attention
in 2008 to Barack Obama and to the significance of his victory, I don’t
think there was enough attention being paid to some what was brewing on
Capitol Hill.
Obviously Democrats had a majority, but that eroded
right away, and no one saw what was coming, I think, in terms of the
ferocity of the Republican opposition. No one saw the tea party — even
though you could see a little bit of it running already in 2008 — and so
if you missed the congressional elections, you don’t think of both who
has the majority or what kind of minority you’ll have, you don’t have a
really good sense of what a presidency is going to be about. So I’ve
always been a big proponent of looking at Congress, of focusing on
Congress, but congressional elections are a big deal.
And it’s
interesting — Hillary Clinton has cared a lot about throwing support to
Democrats who are running, and I think it’s in part because of her
experience. She understands that she will need very strong support on
the Hill to overcome the resistance she will encounter from Republicans,
so she’s been trying to win some of that loyalty during her campaign.
Whereas, in the primaries, Bernie Sanders didn’t do as much of that, and
Donald Trump certainly isn’t doing that for the GOP.
Kathy
Kiely: Do you think we’re at a flexion point in our democracy, where
some enormous changes are going to have to be made? Whether it’s with
traditions like the electoral college, or the way our parties are
organized, or even one party changing, morphing into something else? Are
we there?
Julian Zelizer: I’m not sure.
Of all the issues where there seems to be a real need for change, in
the short term, it’s money in politics. And that’s not simply because
voters don’t like money in politics, but there’s many politicians who
don’t like money in politics. That’s what’s striking when you talk to
members on the Hill.
And when you have that, that’s when there is a
potential to change. If something happens, if there’s some mover —
whether it’s a scandal or whether it’s some entrepreneurial president or
legislator who figures out how to do that. I think that’s an area where
the problems caused by the political process are severe, the impression
that the process gives to voters is consistently bad, and it keeps
getting worse and worse. It’s not a problem that’s basically where it’s
been — the influx of money is just becoming quite astounding. And so
that’s the area where I keep thinking there’s potential for something to
happen.
The Electoral College, I don’t think is going to change.
If it didn’t change after 2000, it’s going to be hard to change now. And
finally, do the parties change? I don’t think you’re going to have a
third party.
I think the parties are still very strong
institutions, because of the organizational capacity, because of their
ability to deliver money — but you know, the business/Wall Street sector
has had a huge influence in the GOP, and it is conceivable that some of
their clout diminishes if Donald Trump were to win. They might go to
the Democratic Party — you might see shifts, like in the ‘70s, the
Democrats and Republicans remain the parties, but the South went to the
GOP after civil rights. There was a shift. And I could imagine something
like that, but based on class and economics, as opposed to region.
Will millennials vote?
Kathy Kiely: You teach millennials.
Julian Zelizer: Mm-hmm [yes].
Kathy Kiely: What’s their attitude about the election, and are they going to vote?
Julian Zelizer: I don’t know if they will vote.
They
were very engaged in the primary. That was striking. And it was because
of Bernie Sanders. I had a few people who really loved Hillary Clinton,
but not many. And so I think Sanders brought them in. I don’t know, I
think it’s going to be a competition between how much millennials
dislike and fear Donald Trump, versus how uninterested they are in
Hillary Clinton — as opposed to Hillary Clinton really energizing them,
as some people keep saying she’s going to do. I don’t think that’s going
to happen.
You know, I’m not sure their sense of the potential
dangers that some people see from a Donald Trump presidency are as great
as older voters. In some ways they’re so cynical, millennials, about
the process — not about politics, but about the political process — it’s
not as if he’s the reason that this is broken. That there’s bigger
issues we have to deal with, which isn’t that totally inaccurate.
Kathy
Kiely: And what do you think the chances are that those bigger issues
do get dealt with in the next four years? And what would you say are the
top three?
Julian Zelizer: Well, the
top one is middle-class insecurity. That is, I think that’s the issue.
It’s not about a recession, it’s not about economic growth versus slow
growth, fast growth — it’s about how do working and middle class
Americans regain the security that they felt in the 1950s after World
War II and at the height of union power? Can they achieve that again? So
that they don’t feel that they might have to have three or four jobs or
that their job might be gone within a week or two, or that they would
have no savings or no money to pay for their kids’ education. That’s
issue No. 1.
A second issue is race, and I mean, after what we
have seen in the last few years, this country still has a big problem
with race. And the issue of policing and race is right now at the top of
civil rights agenda. And I don’t think it’s clear how we get out of
this, but it’s clear we can’t — this isn’t sustainable, and ultimately
it’s not simply because of the impact on African-American communities,
but the police will lose their authority and stature, if this continues.
So I think that’s a second issue that we face.
And I think
immigration is the issue that obviously brought Donald Trump to this
position, but we have millions of people who are living in limbo right
now. And so part of it is about the wall or no wall, but I think the
real immigration issue that neither Obama was able to solve, President
George W. Bush couldn’t solve, was what happens to the, whatever, 11
million people who are living in this country whose future is uncertain.
I think we have to have a resolution to that. It’s a human rights
issue, and this isn’t something we can keep doing.
Kathy
Kiely: Do you think the emergence of Donald Trump is going to make
Republicans on Capitol Hill more likely or less likely to want to get
things done?
Julian Zelizer: That’s a
good question. So, if he became president, where would the Republicans
be? There would be incentives for them to do something — the problem is,
if it could converge with what he wanted. Meaning, if he won, the
Republicans would feel happy. They would have regained control of the
White House, but I do think many of them wouldn’t like the image of the
party that has now emerged.
I think there are many Republicans,
even very conservative, right-wing Republicans, who are upset — not
because of the policies, but just the image he represents and some of
the kinds of rhetoric that he has used. That’s not the party they want
to be in the long term. And they understand the difference between
someone who, in the short term, might have a window, versus someone who,
in the long term, has a vision for building a durable coalition — like
Democrats had in the 1940s and ‘50s, or Republicans had for much of the
‘80s and ‘90s.
So why would they want to move forward on
legislation? They could define their party as something other than
Donald Trump. And other than the next candidate, that’s the way you do
it. They would want to be the party that delivered, you know,
legislation on something. But it would be hard, it would be hard
because, again, it’s not simply the tension between Trump and the GOP.
It’s the tension within the GOP between the tea party and other parts of
the party, and on issues like climate change, immigration, there is no
agreement. So, they’ll want legislation, but I don’t know if it will
actually emerge.
Kathy Kiely: And have you ever seen a
time in history where a party has been under that kind of internal
stress? And is there anything we can compare it to that might give us
some insight as to where this is going?
Julian Zelizer: Sure,
in the ‘50s and ‘60s, race, ‘30s through ‘60s. Southern Democrats, by
and large, were adamantly opposed to any federal effort to obtain civil
rights legislation, voting rights legislation. Northern liberals, whose
numbers were growing and who were becoming more prominent — people like
Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota in the Senate — they are really more
angry about the Southern Democrats than they are about the Republicans,
because they’re the ones with power, the Southerners are the ones
holding up the legislation.
And you have really fierce encounters, not unlike what you see on immigration today within the GOP.
So
in 1948, Humphrey is running for the Senate, and he famously makes a
speech at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, where he tells the
Southerners that it’s time to, you know, abandon this states’ rights
idea — which is a way to block civil rights — and move into a new moment
of human rights. And tells them, “If you’re not with us, leave.”
And
some Southerners, like Strom Thurmond, do, and they’ll actually have a
third party challenge. And you see this fight over and over again, until
many Southerners decide, en masse, to leave the Democratic Party. So
those were really bitter fights — so I think that’s an example that is
comparable to what we’re seeing today.
Kathy Kiely: And do you see a Republican equivalent of Lyndon Johnson, whom you wrote about?
Julian Zelizer: Not
right now. You know, I think certainly Donald Trump is not that person.
It’s not clear he would be able to bring the party together.
In
part, Lyndon Johnson was at the core a Democrat. He’d been part of the
party, he was loyal to the party — he was unusual in that he was loyal
to a lot of the liberal ideas from the New Deal, but he also had a
relationship with the Southerners. He had deep experience on the Hill,
so people knew him, they liked him, whereas Donald Trump is a total
outsider — to Congress, for sure. He’s not necessarily to loyal to
anyone within the Republican Party, so no one totally trusts him. So
Johnson famously, in 1957, Robert Caro writes about how he won over
Southern support for a — to allow a really watered-down bill to pass,
based on the idea that in the end, Johnson was protecting the party, he
was going to protect the South from something more stringent.
Whereas
Donald Trump doesn’t have that kind of clout, and the Republican
leaders in Congress have been consumed — as Speaker Boehner was — by
this tea party faction. So right now, it’s not clear who that leader
would be, or who that figure could be in the party.
Kathy Kiely: So in some ways, is this
unprecedented? For the party, I mean, having something so outside and so
foreign to the party buffeting the leaders? It’s out of their control,
right? Is that what you’re saying?
Julian Zelizer: It
was, but if we think back to the ‘60s, the solution wasn’t just Lyndon
Johnson, it was the civil rights movement. So what’s remarkable about
the early ‘60s is how the movement ultimately forced the issue to be
resolved, regardless of all these fights the leaders were having.
Johnson was really important, and he was instrumental, but it was a
grass-roots change that happened.
And so, that could happen again.
I mean, the immigrant and pro-immigration community is very strong,
very well-organized, and it’s been fighting. It takes time, it’s not
going to happen in a couple years. But it could be that ultimately the
tensions are not solved by anyone in Washington, that grass-roots
politics ultimately forces this off the agenda. And ironically, the
party could then reconstitute itself.
The role of the media
Kathy
Kiely: Okay. So, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the media,
because you talk about that. How do you see that playing — the changes
in the media — playing into this year’s campaign? And again, is there
any precedent in history?
Julian Zelizer: So,
the media is very important. I’m not someone who thinks the media
created Donald Trump. I don’t believe that, but I do believe he’s
exploited the media very well.
And we’ve seen politicians who, at
key moments, get how the media’s changing and use it well. So, the most
famous example is FDR in radio, with his fireside chats — and he
understood that allowed him to communicate directly to the public. Sen.
Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, the late 1940s, understood the way
journalism was practiced through objectivity gave him space to say
whatever he wanted and have journalists repeat it, without feeling the
room to be inquisitive, and he could get his charges out there.
Jimmy
Carter in 1976, during the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primaries —
this unknown governor from Georgia — understood how the new media was
becoming very influential in that part of the selection process, because
the party bosses lost their power. So, you know, he dressed in jeans
and overalls and he sold himself, rather than him being a Democrat — and
he was pretty masterful at it.
And Ronald Reagan, of course, was
one of the best at understanding how television was now working. He and
his team would, for example, use the line of the day, when he was
president — where the whole day would be orchestrated around a single
theme, so that reporters would have something to write about that would
match what they wanted to get out there. So this isn’t the first time —
Kathy Kiely: And of course, Newt Gingrich, with C-SPAN.
Julian Zelizer:
Newt Gingrich brilliantly understood — both in the ‘80s and after he
was speaker — C-SPAN, this channel that not a lot of people watched,
compared to the networks, but still had a big viewership, offered a
great opportunity for someone, even before he was the leader, to just
get on and make these one-minute speeches. And he even understood the
theatrics, that all you could see was the speaker, so he could — the
person speaking — so he could make all kinds of outlandish charges about
people in the room, who weren’t actually in the room.
Donald
Trump comes out of that tradition. I do believe that is somewhere where
he is skillful. You might like him, not like him, but he’s understood
what Twitter offered, and no one saw that before this campaign. Not that
Twitter was important, but that a candidate could directly communicate
with people at all moments, in an informal manner, in a manner aimed at
generating readers, that with 140 characters, you could run a campaign.
And I think he’s part of that tradition. But there are also changes in
the media that are disturbing to many observers. That in this new
24-hour media — that’s not new anymore, we’ve really had it since the
1980s — but in the age of cable television, internet news and more
partisan forms of news delivery, that there was room for someone who was
theatrical and whose words and statements were often aimed at winning
over coverage, constant coverage, there’s — Trump people, for example,
so they understood that the new media needs content. That there’s just
so many outlets right now, and they’re looking for news all the time,
that they would produce the story, and that kept him in the game.
So
the nature of the news is part of why Donald Trump, I think, is doing
so well. He’s been able to work very well in that environment, and the
partisan news — so you have the 24-hour news, and then you obviously
have, since the 1990s, more partisan outlets where news is told in a
particular way, and that fuels the kind of polarization that Donald
Trump has done very well exploiting.
Kathy Kiely: And it
also, doesn’t it, allow for propaganda to be presented in a more
effective way? For example, the birther lie had legs for a long time —
would that have been possible in an earlier era?
Julian Zelizer: It
would be much harder. So the birther lie could be compared a little bit
to some of the McCarthyite attacks, where he would say things, and his
colleagues would say things about Communists being a part of government,
that had no basis in fact, and it made the mainstream news.
So
there was always room for lies, but there’s a lot more room today than
there used to be, and part of it, I think, is just the space available.
So even in the 1950s with McCarthy, you still had a few major city
newspapers that really shaped the news, you had three networks were to
form, and that was it — with their evening news broadcast, which was
about 20 minutes, after advertising — and that’s it.
Whereas
today, you have so many outlets, there’s many places to get
misinformation out in the political sphere, and the editorial controls
are just much weaker, because news isn’t going through several layers of
editors and producers. It can instantaneously be sent out there, so I
think that creates a more volatile environment. And finally, because you
have more partisan outlets — both networks, such as a Fox, that are
partisan, or even smaller websites — there’s more places that are
willing to put things out that work for partisan purposes, like the
birther argument, even if it’s not clear they’re true, or it’s clear
they’re not true — they can still find space. So I do think we’ve seen
an intensification of falsehood in American political rhetoric, which is
a problem when you have fact-checkers — but I’m not convinced they
really have a big effect, because once a story is out there, it’s out
there.
Kathy Kiely: I sometimes tell students, “Now that you’re all publishers, you need to learn to be reporters.”
Julian Zelizer: That’s a good line.
Kathy Kiely: Do you think we need to educate younger people about media consumption in different ways?
Julian Zelizer: I
think that would be fantastic. I mean, unfortunately, my guess is, you
could only reach a limited part of the population if you find the
teachers who are willing to do that. You would have to do this very, you
know, significant level to really educate the public. But I think it’s
true, because it’s hard to see how the structure of news delivery
changes.
You could have more websites, for example, that produce
good, factually based news, and hire the best reporters in the country,
but they will have to compete in this environment.
And news
organizations are less important, because now the news also can get out
from an individual — someone puts up a website or tweets things out —
and we’ve seen they can be a major voice, all of a sudden. So the
education is going to be really important, in terms of consumption. But I
don’t know, you know, clickbait works because people want clickbait.
And so it’s education, but it’s ultimately, at some point, readers and
watchers and listeners having the feeling that this is not beneficial to
them or to their democracy, that you’d really have a change.
What historians will write about us
Kathy
Kiely: So, last question is: Fast-forward 100 years or 200 years, and
there’s a young Julian Zelizer out there writing a book. Who of our era
is that young historian going to be writing about, do you think?
Julian Zelizer: That’s
a good question. I’m not sure they’re going to write about a person as
much as the culture and the system. I think, you know, what’s
interesting about Donald Trump, in the long term, isn’t simply him. It’s
the, it’s what produced him, what allowed this to happen. What allowed a
change in American politics to take place, where someone such as Donald
Trump was able to win a major party nomination? And so my guess is, 100
years from now, they’ll be looking at why were the forces of nativism
and racial backlash so prevalent in 2016, that you could have a
candidate not disassociate themselves from David Duke, and have it be
okay?
They
will be looking at the kinds of things we talked about with the media,
and how the media was changing so drastically, that in some ways he was a
perfect person for the moment. He will be less interesting than the
media world we had. And finally, we’ll also have people 100 years from
now trying to understand how did the electorate become so polarized that
voters were just not willing to switch from one side to the other? And
that even if someone ran on ideas that didn’t fit with a lot of what the
party wanted, and even if someone had no connection to the political
party, much of the party would still throw their support behind him,
because that’s the world we live. So I think those will be the
interesting questions.
And the other sets of questions — less on
why the system allowed him — will be the problems in the electorate. So,
he and Bernie Sanders, and other candidates keep talking about this
economy and this structural problem that many people are yelling and
screaming about, desperately. That all is not good.
And I think in
the same way that we look at the ‘70s, for example, to understand the
end of the manufacturing sector of the economy and the rise of
high-tech, I think historians will be trying to understand what was
going on now — and I don’t know where this all goes — and how that
affected the politics of the period. I think that’s going to be a
fundamental question, and related to that will be, how did the political
system become so dysfunctional? Because a lot of what gives rise to
insurgents is a feeling in the public that the system isn’t working
anyway. So with Hillary Clinton, her claims are always undercut, because
she can say, “I have experience,” she can say, “I know what I’m doing,”
but no one believes Washington’s going to work anyway. So I think there
will be people 100 years from now looking at, how did polarization
bring the system, in some ways, to a state of gridlock that was this
frustrating to voters, that they were willing to go into a very new
direction?
Kathy Kiely: Okay, well, in the time capsule where we put this, somebody will find their dissertation topic.
Julian Zelizer: I hope so.
