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This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, DC and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is one of those special podcasts that we do every so often when a book comes along that we think that all of you folks ought to be reading.

And this book is particularly special because I think the author is particularly important. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College.

And she also writes a sub stack that's one of the most popular and thoughtful ones out there called letters from an American.

And she's written a new book called Democracy Awakening notes on the state of America. Welcome Heather.

Oh, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

I really admire what you've been writing. And I think the best place to begin with this book, which places this moment in a historical context is maybe to place it in your own context, which is at what point in the recent madness. Did you say I have to write this book?

Well, about about a year and a half ago now, maybe two years. And the book was originally intended to be a series of short essays answering the questions that my readers ask me all the time because literally every day somebody asks me what was the Southern strategy.

How did the parties change sides? What is the electoral college, you know, sort of those basic questions that that are so important to where we are right now, but that not a lot of people have ever had explained to them.

So it was originally just intended to be kind of a what what one editor referred to as a American history for dummies, you know, and as part of that series, not implying that the people who read it were dummies.

What happened was that as I began to pull those essays together, it became clear to me that there was a larger argument that I wanted to talk about in terms of how a democracy can be at risk from an authoritarian like why would people give up on democracy.

So the book divided itself fairly naturally into three sections of short essays, one on how we got here, the next one on where here is and the final one on how we get out and I wrote the essays and then I took about three months off. I got married, I, you know, got ready for the semester did a bunch of things.

And when I went back to reading the manuscript, it what jumped out was an entirely different book than the one that I thought I had written and the book ended up being an argument about the use of language and history to both undermine democracy and to rebuild it.

And once I saw that it almost felt as if the chapters have been chatting with each other when I wasn't looking much as my students do, by the way.

And what I ended up doing was rewriting about 80% of the book. So what has emerged is something that I think I look at a bit like a parent who has a child that they used to call a sport somebody that you can't tell where on earth it came from, but it seems to be doing something on its own that looks pretty interesting.

And that's kind of the way I feel about this book unlike the other ones where, you know, you know what she set out to write and you write it and it is what you expected about 80% of what you expected and you call it a day and move on.

This one seems really to be much more reflection of my readers and of this moment that I ever thought I could write.

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