Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it.

I recently started mentioning that the show is turning 20 years old in January, so I've been thinking about milestones in general and thought that were probably overdue to replay an episode from a previous milestone.

Back when I was approaching episode number 1500, I thought I'd try to do something a little bit

different by compiling a sort of greatest hits list of all the best things I'd learned

from producing 1,500 episodes of the show over the years.

That episode also happened to land on the 4th of July, so it seemed like the best time to lay out a sort of introductory course for understanding America. So that's what we're going to be hearing today. And one last thing, if you'd like a 20% discount on a Best of Left membership or gift membership, or if you'd like to send a message about our 20-year

anniversary, or if you're doing some other holiday shopping and need links to things like

our merch or audiobook and physical book and e-book stores that we like, all the information

you need is at best of left.com slash 20. That's 20. So go there for all the details.

That's best of the left.com slash 20. And now on to my collection of all the best things I knew as of

July 2022. I've probably learned more things since then.

I want to start with the big picture first, or at least the medium picture, because I'm not going to go back to Columbus,

who kicked off the genocide of the native peoples of the Americas and the clearing of the land on which we now reside,

although that would also be a good place to start. For today, to understand modern politics, let's begin by touching briefly on the fallout

of the Civil War. The fallout of the Civil War in one sentence is, the North won the war,

but the South won the peace, and we are still living with those consequences today. Reconstruction, the period just after the war, but the South won the peace. And we are still living with those consequences

today. Reconstruction, the period just after the war, is one of the parts of American history

that we generally skip right over. It's that period when the Union occupied and managed

the affairs of the former Confederacy, without making a direct comparison between the Confederacy and Nazis, although

the latter took a lot of inspiration from the former. Think about the end of World War II

and how the Allied forces needed to occupy Germany for a good long while until basically

the next generation of Germans could be trusted to take back the

...