At a moment in America where the future seems fractured, uncertain, and tenuous, we need to look back at our collective history and learn from it. The problem, however, is that a segment of the nation does not agree on what the true history actually is. Or worse, they are actively attempting to erase it.
As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, Princeton History Professor Kevin Kruse joins Tim Dickinson to discuss MAGA’s ideology from a historical perspective. Although things look rough now, it’s important to remember that “we’ve managed to pull ourselves out of bad situations before.” We just need to keep fighting.
Kevin M. Kruse is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He studies the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America. Focused on conflicts over race, rights, and religion, he has particular interests in segregation and the civil rights movement, the rise of religious nationalism and the making of modern conservatism.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Tim Dickinson
Hey, this is Tim Dickinson for The Contrarian. Our guest today is an esteemed historian to talk about America at its 250th birthday. Princeton Professor of History, Kevin Kruse.
Kevin Kruse
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tim Dickinson
It’s great to have you. As we look at the 250th, America’s in this reactionary spasm. And I wonder if you can point to, over the last… 50 years, sort of the span between Knicks championships, or since the bicentennial? Like, what was the progress there as in a story that you saw that the MAGA movement is a reaction to?
Kevin Kruse
Yeah, great question. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, that 50-year span is one of really reversing a lot of the changes, and the triumphs of the mid-20th century, or at least what we would see maybe from a liberal perspective, kind of the accomplishments of the New Deal era, and a multiracial democracy with a civil rights movement, and all of that. And it was very much what we saw in the last 50 years was an effort to push back against that. And at every level, right? So if you think about that earlier period is one in which Americans were coming together on a variety of fronts. When the federal government was becoming a stronger force in people’s lives and erasing wide levels of economic inequality and essentially building up the middle class in the post-war period, when the culture was one in which Americans were largely bounded together by a few mainstream media publications. three network television programs, a couple big city newspapers.
We were all kind of on the same page there. Foreign policy was largely a period of triumphs before then. It went into a period of dissolution afterwards. There were general agreements on social issues that started to fall apart in the early 70s with things like Roe v. Wade, affirmative action fights. So there was this period in which we’d been coming together across the mid-20th century, and in the early 70s, you start to see things move in the other direction. Right? So the media landscape becomes much more diverse and divided, and now, instead of having kind of a common national narrative, we’ve got thousands, if not millions, of different competing voices and perspectives out there. Foreign policy isn’t this thing that we rally around, as we see from Iran in our own time. It’s increasingly divisive, increasingly something that divides Americans. Social issues are certainly, dividing us more and more.
The federal government has been a target of ire from conservatives, something they wanted to work against. To tear down, in the words of Grover Norquist, to get it so small they could drown it in a bathtub. Well, they’re drowning it right now, right? So, all of these things that we’re seeing from Trump aren’t new, they’re certainly heightened to a new level, but they’ve been building on trends that have been in place for, for decades and decades now.
Tim Dickinson
And when we think about MAGA, it frames itself as a restoration, right? And it’s sort of a mythical restoration, and so I wonder, can you talk a bit about you know, how far back do they want to go? Where in our history did they think that America had it right? And if they’re putting the record needle back, where are they aiming for?
Kevin Kruse
They’re very vague about this, right? And I think intentionally vague. And this is something we’ve seen before, when the immigration restrictions in the 1920s and the Kuka Plan were talking about making America great again. They, too, were a little vague about it, right? And you have to be, that’s how nostalgia works, right? Because… There’s no fixed point in the past in which they would really want to go, right? You get a sense that as they’re resegregating the federal government and things like that, that they want to go back to Pre-Civil Rights era, maybe the early 50s, right? Well, that’s a period in which the New Deal state is incredibly strong. marginal tax rate under Eisenhower gets no, short of a 92%, right? So this is not an era in which I think they would be totally comfortable, like, on the racial picture, on the image of what the, you know, a normal family would look like, certainly with marginalized women and gays and lesbians, they’d be fine on that.
Thinking about what the government does, what the government did at home and abroad, they’d be really opposed, right? So, it seems like Trump is constantly trying to go back to the Gilded Age, increasingly seems. Like, the point of comparison, because that’s a place in which there’s massive immigration restriction. get free reign. The country is one kind of rigidly organized. He thinks this was a golden age. Historians would beg to differ. It’s not really something we should be striving to get back for. And you can see this, you know, in his talk about tariffs. Tariffs worked really well for the very rich. They did not work well for the country as a whole. That’s why we got out of them. It was a horrible economic policy, which didn’t really lead to widespread economic prosperity. That’s not his concern, though. He wants to get back to the place in which robber barons like him ruled the day and did quite well. So I think that’s maybe as close as we can get back to, you know, maybe going back to the 1890s? Sounds about right?
Tim Dickinson
I’m struck in my own life, and you and I are of similar vintage, I think, that, you know, coming out of that civil rights era, and the Vietnam, and the Watergate, and it was a real contested period. But despite that, there really was a lot of progress, you know, gay rights, women participation in the workforce. And it seems like that meritocracy that really, you know, sort of found its apogee in Obama and then the Biden years is also what’s so contested right now, right? To move back from this idea that, like, hey, we could have an African-American Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, to now Pete Hegseth is in charge, despite his loudish dope, you know? And that that’s a restoration of a hierarchy that America, you know, a certain brand of Americans think is proper.
Kevin Kruse
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, in a lot of ways, and I would see it the same way you would see it, as this is really a system we had, which was a meritocracy, and all the civil rights laws did, was open things up so, anyone could have a chance. There’s a great, Archie Bunker line about how, you know, no government program helped me get my job, and Eva says, yeah, that’s right, his uncle got it for him. And then that’s the old system in which these people think, you know, that was the way things worked, is that people who were in power helped people who look just like them, other white guys, get power, and that was the natural way to work things. And somehow it’s been a subversion of that. to have racial minorities or women, gays and lesbians, have an equal foothold.
And the Hegseth thing is the perfect instance of this, in which that man who, you know, was a Fox News weekend host with a spotted military career, had the nerve to tell four-star generals that they hadn’t earned their position, right? Really kind of a true slap in the face to people who work themselves up in one of the true meritocracies in American society, the U.S. military. So, yeah, we’re absolutely seeing this, and they are framing it as… a restoration of an earlier glorious age, but it really is a restoration of their own considerable privileges and their own considerable rigging of the system. A fair democracy, a truly equal society where everybody has a chance Is not one in which they can compete, so they need to get back their special advantages.
Tim Dickinson
And it’s interesting, and thinking about the Declaration, and that we’re all created equal, and that we shall all have this pursuit of happiness, that really seems to collide with this idea that, you know, for many, that there’s an in-group and an out-group, and that those are privileges for the in-group, and not something to be guaranteed of the out-group, and in fact, the out-group just needs to suffer the consequences.
Kevin Kruse
Yeah, and then that way, it’s a rollback to the earliest American ideas. You know, we’re going back to a way in which, you know, white male property owners might be the only ones who are allowed to vote. That’s their idea of equality, in which the vote is not something that all Americans should have. As a right, but it’s a privilege. We keep hearing this language, and one that they can, a gift they can grant us or rescind at their will, because they know best. It’s a highly kind of paternalistic every '‘istic’, misogynistic adjective we want to throw on there. A system, again, in which they have decided, that they are the truly, you know, maybe everyone’s created equal, but some people are more equal than others, right? I’m not sure they loved Namecheck Orwell, I’m not sure they’ve actually read that book, but that’s one.
Tim Dickinson
I’m struck at the coarsening of America. We recently saw a UFC fight on the lawn of the White House. And Trump, obviously, does not hold himself, or is not held to the standards of previous politicians. And, you know, in some ways, this reaction to the Obama years, like, Obama was so buttoned up, and Biden, too, the White House functioned at a very high, familiar level of, like. this is what a professional politics looks like. Right. And then Trump is just so messy, right? And so in your face about, we’re gonna have you know, motorbikes flying over the White House. Can you talk about that sort of coarsening of American politics? And the sort of collapse of shame as a governor?
Kevin Kruse
It’s really remarkable to hear you describe Obama in those terms. That’s not how the Trump era saw them, right? Obama had created incredible… and I’m glad you’re sitting down for this, Tim, because I’m going to relay some of the gross sins of the Obama era. He wore a canned suit to the office one time. There was an image of him putting his feet up. on the Resolute Desk. there was once a, what Fox News called a hip-hop barbecue. on the White House grounds. And all of these grievous, grievous sins debased the office and paved the way for its restoration by the dignifier-in-chief Donald Trump. And Trump… again, no contest has… he wears a suit every day, a really poor-fitting, saggy suit with his super long tie. He wears the suit every day, that’s true. But the total disrespect he’s shown for the office has been remarkable.
And the cultural stuff, the outward trappings has been, I think, just the most obvious manifestation of this. I mean gilding the Oval Office, that stupid wall of presidents outside that reads like something from a junior high comedy magazine. It’s all really gross. But the real defilement of the office has been what he’s done with the powers of it, right? He is a grifter who has enriched himself in ways that would have normally made even conservative Republicans, Blanche, and yet they’re all on board with it now. And it is the, a massive abuse of power. It is, every complaint they made about, former Democrats being egotistical, being out of control, is, a thousand times worse in his hands.
We have to remember, this is an office which, when Obama was in power, Republicans complained that he used the pronoun “I” too many times in speeches. And now we’ve got Trump putting his name on federal buildings, his face on federal buildings, plastering it everywhere possible, trying to get his face on money. It’s the level of egotism that I think, at a fundamental level, most Americans really recoil from. That’s been one of the real bright spots. Of these last 6 months, as much as the lick spittles and lackey around Donald Trump are letting him… get away with every possible bit of ego puffing and ass-kissing that they can abide, the American people aren’t really on board with this, right? The hardcore base, I think, is fine with this, but I think a lot of people in the middle are really recoiling from this kind of presentation as a monarch.
Tim Dickinson
I wanted to ask you, as a historian, we’re seeing history itself very much in the contested sphere, right? That, you know, there’s placards coming down, memorializing slavery, part of this DEI push is really about what kids get taught in school, about American greatness. As a historian, what does that tell you about Why this movement needs to sort of have its own sanitized version of history, or its own fuzzied-up, gauzy, gauzy, greatness history.
Kevin Kruse
Yeah, because they mistake what really makes America great. They are assuming that America is and has always been perfect. And that’s a story that simply doesn’t fly. It’s not a story that’s built up by history, it’s a story that’s informed by propaganda, right? A history in any country is one that’s messy, that’s convoluted, that shows the flaws as well as the strengths. What they’re pushing here is propaganda, in which they ignore the problems. But in doing so, they ignore what, again, what makes America great. American greatness comes not from being born perfect, but from constantly striving to what Lincoln called a more perfect union, right? I find the genius of America is the ability to whether it wants to or not, to have to reckon with new problems, to reckon with new issues, to broaden its conception of who counts as an American, of who gets to decide what America is gonna do and gonna be, and that constant opening up, that expansion, that is what has made America unique and attractive across the globe for centuries, has been a beacon for immigrants wanting to come here to find their fortune, to find religious freedom, to find political expression, to find something.
And they believe they can find it here, because this is a place that is able to grow and to learn from its mistakes, right? And yet this version, it’s not history, it’s propaganda, that the MAGA folks want to put out, is one in which everything used to be great, and suddenly we’ve run into these problems, and they’re going to fix it. They’re just going to roll back the clock and get rid of all the people and problems that I think are actually what makes this country great.
Tim Dickinson
Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, has talked about this as a we’re entering into a second American Revolution, and I wonder how seriously we need to take that. Like, here we are at this hinge point in 250, Where do they want to take us, and what does that second revolution If we take that seriously, what does that mean?
Kevin Kruse
Well, see, and this is a good example of what I was just saying, is the way in which they’ve ignored the changes in the past, right? When historians talk about a Second American Revolution, we talk about the Civil War. Right? We talk about a third American Revolution. We talk about maybe the New Deal or the Civil Rights Era, right? These are things that have truly transformed the country in meaningful ways. They wouldn’t ignore all of that and say there was just the first revolution, and now they’re here about to bring about the second, right? And it’s less a revolution than it is a kind of deconstruction of those previous revolutions, both the Civil War and the post-Civil War amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which truly made America into a fully realized racial democracy, and then the Civil Rights Era, which actually made America a full-blown, in practice, racial democracy, and really made this country one that was open to all, elevating African Americans to full-class citizenship, and through the Immigration Act, reducing the old strictures there.
So, those are truly revolutionary changes. What Kevin Roberts is talking about now is either rolling back the clock on that, or erasing those from existence, and pretending that they are doing something more in line with the visions of the founders, right? And it’s a reactionary movement. And these are often framed as backlashes. My colleague at Cornell, Larry Glickman. has done some great work on this, that allowing people like Trump and MAGA to think of this as a backlash, lets them off the hook, right? They are agents here who have responsibility for what they’re doing, or the backlash frame is to seem like someone else got out of control, and they’re just reacting to that. They’re correcting it, right? This isn’t a correction. This is a wild deviation that they’re making. And, I think Roberts is right on this. It is revolutionary, in the sense that it would be a sharp break with the historical norms of the country and the laws as laid down in the Constitution. So it would be something that would be. Revolutionary in terms of ending one government and starting another.
Tim Dickinson
We have seen, reactionary swings in this country before, no doubt. As a historian, what breaks the fever? Where does that pendulum stop? And are there things about our current media economy, or our actual economy that make putting a brake on that pendulum more difficult?
Kevin Kruse
It’s certainly more difficult now. Again, the kind of the reactionary push we would have seen in earlier eras could be tamped down by, more responsible media voices, more responsible political voices having the megaphone. With the media landscape fractured, increasingly under control of the president’s allies, and the president, of course, having the biggest megaphone in the country, it’s really hard, I think, to push back and break this fever. Ultimately, what I think is helping in this case… is what had been Trump’s strength in the first term. The inability of anyone to control him has become his weakness in the second term, right? And that he is surrounding himself with, again, a set of yes-men and henchmen who are willing to enable and encourage his worst instincts, right? And refuse to push back and put any check on that. And that’s let the unfiltered Trump come through, right? the unfiltered Trump is not somebody who’s necessarily an ideologue, he’s a narcissist, right?
And so, if this were an administration more under control, I think you might see the Voughts and the Carrs and the Roberts and the Miller, those folks would have a clearer path to doing the damage that the right wing wants to do to the federal government. Instead, what we’ve got is Trump’s voice being the loudest, so the conversation is about the UFC fight, and his face on money, and the triumphal arch, and painting the reflecting pool, and all of the weird interior decorating dreams he has, that move to the forefront, and that stuff is deeply unpopular with the American people. And at its worst and most dangerous expression, Trump’s kind of unhinged impulses are what got us into the war in Iran, right?
And that is what is really I think putting the curve on. Both it’s a violation of the promise he made to his base that he would not start any wars. Also, it’s a fundamental mistake of ramping up gas prices, the number one thing that make American voters wake up and care about an election they might not have cared about before. So all of that, I think, is going to combine here. It’s hard to point to comparisons of the past for when this kind of reactionary moment fell apart, because I think we’re in such a unique moment now. But I do think we can see the wheels are starting to come off. The courts have pushed back in a couple important ways, the public is pushing back. I think the Republican Party is kind of locked into what’s become a murder-suicide pact with Trump for the midterm elections, and now it’s just a matter of seeing what’s still standing by the time we get to the midterms.
Tim Dickinson
As a historian, you probably don’t, look into a crystal ball very much, look forward. But I wonder, do you find yourself optimistic? Do you find yourself pessimistic? What is your prediction here as we mark this just grand birthday?
Kevin Kruse
I often say, I often warn, you know, my training is in hindsight. That’s what my professional degree is in. So it’s dangerous for me to make predictions. And also, as an historian, we often make fun of the people who made bad predictions about the past. The guy who says, you know, the stock market’s not gonna crash, the guy who says, you know, Vietnam’s easy. These are our punching bags, and we never want to be them ourselves. That said, part of being a historian is, again, having an awareness of just how bad things have gotten in the past, right? And this is something I constantly find students are refreshed by as I teach them kind of the horrors of 20th century history, whether it be the chaos of 1919, with the Spanish flu, and labor strikes and the bloody summer, or 1968, King and Kennedy assassinated, and the Tet Offensive in Chicago, and all the chaos there. We’ve had really bad years before. We’ve had really bad decades before, right?
But the country has managed to pull itself out of that. And this is not unique to America, just I teach American history, but we’ve managed to pull ourselves out of bad situations before, right? I’m writing a book, I just sent it into the press today, about the building up of the Civil Rights Division in the 60s, right? And the story there is one of. It started from scratch. It was dismissed as a nothing, and in several years’ time, it becomes this powerhouse institution that’s making a real impact on the ground, right? So, we built up from scratch before. We’ve rebuilt time and time again, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Era, again, are these remarkable moments of expanding not just the state, but who makes up the state, what they can do, what America is. And I have confidence that America can still do that again, right? And as daunting as it might seem right now, it certainly seemed daunting during the Civil War, during the Great Depression, during World War II, We have done hard things before, and so that’s where, ultimately, knowing how bad things have been, and kind of wobbling in that pessimism of the past, makes me a little optimistic about the future.
Tim Dickinson
Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, let me, shift quickly to my colleague’s question. They’re interested in the lost cause and the threat to democracy when a political movement is built around a mythologized version of the past. And so the question is, are there parallels between the post-Reconstruction era And the current moment that we’re finding ourselves in?
Kevin Krus
Yeah, I mean, your colleague is right to worry about this, because one thing we learned from the lost cause, and my friend Karen Cox has done brilliant work on this, with her work on it, one of the things we learned is that America largely let the Southern lies go unchallenged, right? So as the lost cause perpetrators started to reinvent what the Civil War was actually about. It wasn’t about slavery, it wasn’t about racism, it was about states’ rights or economics or something like this. This was a noble war fought by noblemen on both sides, right? That sets the stage for all sorts of horrors in the 20th century, right? The movie Birth of a Nation, people forget, is about the modern American nation being born when the white South and the white North put aside their silly differences over African Americans and learn to get along together, right?
And so, this is a story that is taught all across the country. John F. Kennedy learned it at Harvard, right? The Dunning School, it’s called, was named after a professor at Columbia. And so this is a story that, sadly, Americans North and South let take hold, and the damage there was that it provided a base of resistance across the country when the civil rights struggle happened, because the lesson that Americans took, and this went, again, went to the highest levels of power, John F. Kennedy was one of these. The lesson they learned was that, well, the last time the federal government tried to intervene in racial relations in the South. Things went horribly awry. Because Northern Liberals didn’t let white southerners do what they wanted, and they pushed too hard. Well, we shouldn’t do that again, right? And that’s the lesson that Eisenhower takes, that’s the lesson that John F. Kennedy takes until he finally sees it with his own eyes and realizes what a lie it is, right?
And so that kind of bad history about the past can hamper and hinder and hold back the country when it needs to move forward in the present and make plans about the future, right? So this stuff is vitally important. And so I think the difference now is that, unlike historians and politicians on the left and center who let that lost cause prosper in an older era, we are now vocally holding a line, and I think to my profession’s credit, not propagating these lies, instead debunking them. And so they can’t take hold, right? And it’s very important that we don’t let this kind of revisionism, whether it be about Trump’s first term or January 6th, or whatever, take hold in this moment, because the cost will be not just In terms of forgetting what actually happened, but forgetting what should happen next.
Tim Dickinson
Well, Kevin, thanks so much for your time. I really, I really appreciate this conversation. I’ve learned a lot.
Kevin Kruse
My pleasure, man. I was gonna say, always good to talk to you. First time talking to you.
Tim Dickinson
First time on camera. I hope not the last.
Kevin Kruse
Keep up the great work, man. You’re doing awesome out there.
Tim Dickinson
Alright, appreciate you. Thanks so much.
