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Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal,

cullagullagull, love the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government. Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on American politics and policy. I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael Baranowski. My guest today is Heather Cox Richardson,

Professor of History at Boston College, who most of you probably know from her very popular

letters from an American substaff. She's also the author of Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State

of America, which has recently come out in paperback. We talked over a year ago,

and I am very happy to have her back. Heather Cox Richardson, welcome back to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here. So when we originally talked, this is a little bit over a year ago,

and it was just after Democracy Awakening came out in the hardcover. And I hope that everyone,

to anyone who hasn't heard that, will check it out. I'll make sure to put a link in the show notes. I don't want to try

to recreate that conversation, but I thought it might be helpful for listeners to have a sense

of what the book was about, kind of a sort of an overview sort of thing for people who didn't hear us back then,

or maybe just as a refresher for people who did.

So I was hoping you could kick things off by sort of going over what you feel to be some of the key points in the book.

Well, the book was originally designed to be an answer to a lot of the questions that people ask me all the

time, you know, like, do we live in a democracy or a republic? And when did the parties switch sides?

And what was the Southern strategy? But what I realized pretty quickly was that the question that

...