Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Sarah Marcus, assistant professor of English at Notre Dame University, and the author of a new book, Political Disappointment, a cultural history from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. Professor

Sarah Marcus, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs today. Thank you for having me.

I'm pleased to be here. So one of the things that I hadn't thought about until I received your

book and started reading your book is that the history of politics

really is a history of political disappointment for the most part. There is a lot of disappointment,

isn't there? Yes, there is. And one of the reasons that I focus my book on the 20th century and the 20th century, which I have

as beginning sort of in the aftermath of reconstruction, right?

At the end of the Civil War, there's this opportunity, which to all observers at the moment

was a real opportunity, to have a do-over with the United States.

And say, okay, we had that's that

early part of the history of this country, it's based on slavery, based also on, you know,

colonialism, settler colonialism, genocide of the original inhabitants and so forth. That wasn't really

addressed in the wake of the Civil War, but the question of racial equality of this country

as a multiracial democracy, there was an actual effort, an actual legislation, rewriting of the

Constitution to change in what could have been, like, very strongly determinative ways, the

whole makeup of this country and the whole

basis upon which its promises of you know liberty equality freedom and so forth and so on

were predicated and in the aftermath of reconstruction that seeming opening shut back down all right and

that to me is a kind of inaugural disappointment that

sets in motion, this cyclical thing that goes on throughout the course of the 20th century and whether

it goes on into the 21st is beyond the scope of the book, but I'm happy to get into it in the

podcast and we should talk about it. But this cycle throughout the 20th century of, oh yes, can this

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