Hey everybody, welcome to today's Firelight Chat. I'm talking to author Nancy McLean.

She wrote a very important book, something that gives the stunning insight to how we got

to where we got in this country. That book is called Democracy in Chains. Nancy is an award-winning

scholar and professor of history and public policy at Duke University. Her research focuses

on race, gender, labor history, and social movements in the 20th century US history with

particular attention to the US South. Her work has received more than a dozen prizes and awards.

It's been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learning Societies, the National

Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation,

and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation. Her books include, Behind the Mask

of Chivalry, the Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, that came out in 1995, and Democracy

in Chains, the Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America. That came out

in 2017, and now there is an updated version in which Nancy has included some of the

chapters of our history that have unfolded more recently since 2017. So we're very fortunate

to get to hear from her today, and I want to ask Nancy, how did we get here? And the

implication, of course, is, what do we do now? Thanks. Nancy McClain, thank you so much for

being with me on Firelight Chat. It's great to see you again. It's wonderful to be with you,

thanks, Marion. Thank you. When your book Democracy in Chains came out, I remember being kind of stunned

by it. That was what, in 2017, that that book came out? It was, yes. So at that time, it was like

radical new information. And now there has been, I think, a gradual awakening among the American

people so that now you are the primary articulator of a conversation that more and more people are

open to. I remember when I first read the book, basically what we're talking about here is,

how did we get here? What was the actual systematic strategy that really caused such a movement

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