The Two American Reconstructions: An Appraisal, Reflection (Half the Answer #86, with Thomas Zimmer)

What was the first American Reconstruction after the Civil War? Why are some historians suggesting we just left a second sort of Reconstruction era?

Join Caitlin and Trent as they get into it all with historian Thomas Zimmer, going from the first period of Reconstruction, across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before pressing through this second Reconstruction, which Thomas considers as being from 1965 to 2026.

They then turn their attention towards what lies ahead for the United States, as well as why some Germans just don’t care about what’s going on across the Atlantic Ocean.

Half the Answer can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Resources

Thomas Zimmer's website

Transcript

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:30]**
Well, happy days are closing in, we might say. Every day, every day is a bit better — methinks, me hopes. And well, you know that understanding a question is half of an answer, and this is, of course, Half the Answer, with your co-hosts Trent R. Nelson and Caitlin M. Green.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:00:36]**
Boy, you're trying — oh, come on, Trent, you're killing me. What an intro, Trent.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:00:48]**
Well, you know what we get into. I am a writer — sometimes, I'm actually mostly on camera now — editor, and love philosophy and history, love to talk about all those things. And Caitlin, well, she actually has a doctor in front of her name — we don't like to talk about that — but she's a linguist, she is an artist, a visual artist, she is Madre, Chief Madre, to be sure. Well, Caitlin, every day is a winding road. That sounds like song lyrics, but it is actually also true. We've had such lovely guests on — it feels like for, I don't know, over 80 episodes consecutively, and we are fortunate for that. This episode is not going to disappoint, although the topic that we are going to get into is disappointing, to be sure. Caitlin, who are we chatting with, and what are we covering on this day?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:01:45]**
Well, let me just say, I am so glad that you've transitioned to being in front of the camera, because the world needs to see that beautiful face and those luscious locks. That's right, they deserve it, and they need it, and now they have it. So, yeah, my daughter would be so jealous of those waves. She wants waves so bad — she has straight, straight hair, like me.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:02:10]**
She's got to braid her hair every night. Tell her to braid her hair every night. She'll be in good business.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:02:18]**
That's right. Well, yeah, that's her only real recourse. So, Trent, today I have brought you a historian, a writer, a speaker — Thomas Zimmer — who recently put out a lovely two-part essay series on the first reconstruction and what we're going to call the second reconstruction, meaning the post-civil-rights-struggle era, and why they both kind of got cut off before achieving their ultimate fruition. Which is endlessly interesting to me, because I would like a third reconstruction starting yesterday, and I think the rest of us would too. So, Thomas, thank you for coming. How are you?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:03:08]**
I'm doing well, thank you. I'm very excited to be here. I am a big fan of the podcast, big fan of Liberal Currents, and I'm very grateful for the invitation. And I'm glad I got one of those very poetic podcast introductions — this is probably the podcast with the most poetic introductory chatter. So I'm glad to witness it. I don't know if it's a reputation — it's my impression.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:03:40]**
Wow, I didn't know we had that reputation. Well, the problem is that, once upon a time, Trent was thinking about launching a podcast for Liberal Currents, and then he just happened to call the lady who's a certified yapper, and that just doesn't shut up. And so here I am, ready to not shut up for an hour to two hours with you.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:04:00]**
Hey. Yeah, yeah. Yes — absolutely, let's go, let's go. We are the podcast with the nice poems.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:04:08]**
That's what podcasts are for, right? We're doing a lot of yapping, so hopefully by the end of it, people will, I don't know, feel like it was worth it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:04:18]**
Yeah, I get it all done now in a huge burst, and then I go and sit, and I crochet something in total silence, because I'm out of words. I spent them all.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:04:35]**
It's true. And well, Thomas Zimmer, again, we are grateful for you, grateful that you came on the show as well. You hear the word reconstruction a lot as it concerns American history, but not everyone, surprisingly, actually understands or knows what reconstruction is, knows how long it went for, the sort of processes that were ongoing during it, as well as — and I think this is important — the incredibly liberal nature of the individuals attempting to bring this forth in American history after the Civil War, a time in which current Republicans would blush at how liberal some of their counterparts were, to be sure. But it died out unceremoniously, and of course we can look at 1876, 1877 as a good marker, but it was dying before then as well. So, what was reconstruction, sir? And what was the process like after the Civil War?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:05:50]**
Yeah, you know what, let me maybe first say — because you said in the beginning, we are using these terms. These terms are now everywhere, floating around, especially since the Supreme Court came down with the decision in *Louisiana v. Callais*, which is — people like me call that basically sort of the end of the civil rights era, the end of the voting rights era, and the end of what you might call America's second reconstruction. And then people say we're now into the second redemption. We are using all these terms, and I think they're useful, and I think they really do capture the moment, but we should also remember that these are not necessarily terms that are accessible to everyone. Not everyone is like, oh yeah, sure, I've read ten books on Reconstruction, on the post-Civil-War era. So I think it's really worth — especially if we all agree that this is an era-defining moment in American history, in the history of American democracy, and we do think we're justified in using these kinds of terms — that should be a reason to actually take the time and reflect on what are we actually saying here, what are we trying to say here.

Broadly speaking, Reconstruction is, in short, America's first experiment with biracial democracy after the Civil War — a short period of time. Usually we say 1865, so the end of the Civil War, through 1877. Although, as always with these kinds of periods in history, in some parts of the United States what you might call Reconstruction started before the end of the Civil War, whenever Union troops would capture or conquer Confederate territory. And in some parts of the South, Reconstruction, or the effects of Reconstruction, lasted well beyond 1877 and into the establishment of the Jim Crow apartheid state. Right, so you might have these democratizing effects in some parts of the country, in some places, well into even the 1880s.

But broadly speaking, we're talking about that period, a little over a decade after the Civil War, when — based on the amendments to the Constitution that were passed in quick succession after the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments: abolishing slavery, establishing birthright citizenship, formal equality before the law, and also basically prohibiting denying a citizen's right to vote on the basis of race — America is embarking on this breathtaking experiment at actually doing what the country had always pretended: to be a democracy. But of course, until the Civil War, it was entirely reserved for white people. And in that short period you have this breathtaking experiment at biracial democracy that was comprehensive and breathtaking in effect, even if it was quite limited in duration.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:08:35]**
So what were the mechanisms that kind of constituted it? There were the amendments that were added into the Constitution — was there sort of cultural or other legislative systems in place to help create this kind of new order of biracial democracy?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:08:50]**
Right. So, I mean, on paper, with these amendments, America became a biracial democracy, right? Well — limited to men, right, but by contemporaneous standards, if you compare it internationally, that was just a remarkable step of democratizing the country. And there was legislation passed by Congress that went with it. And then you have the question of how do you actually implement that in the South, right? And there you have both, right from the start.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:09:48]**
On the one hand, it's really hard to overstate how much of a revolutionary change this was in the South. I mean, famously, the historian Eric Foner has said this is so much of a reconceptualizing of what the country is supposed to be that we should call this a second founding. This is not just, oh hey, we're amending the Constitution — this is basically refounding the Constitution. This is basically an attempt to take a country that was founded on racial hierarchy and refound it based on the principle of equality. That's basically what's happening here.

And in practice, you have this enormous surge of voter registration — black voters registering to vote. By 1867 — so this is really within two years of the end of the Civil War — you have about 80% of black men registered to vote across the South, which is just absolutely remarkable. It's an influx of over half a million African American voters, who, I think at that point, basically outnumber white voters across the former Confederacy. You have an explosion, an absolute explosion, of black political representation as a consequence of that. So you have this whole new electorate, and they're voting for black people, and all of a sudden you have about 2,000 black men elected to public office — mostly on the local level, but also on the state level, and even on the federal level. So you have Mississippi sending two black senators to Washington. South Carolina — this is always the one that, I remember hearing this for the first time, or reading this for the first time, it completely blew me away — South Carolina, the heart of the former Confederacy, they elect a majority-black state legislature in 1868. It's absolutely remarkable, right?

And you also have this blossoming of African American social and cultural life. This all goes hand in hand, right? It's not just one thing. It's black people registering — by the way, white people were not expecting this at all. Even the people who supported the general idea of biracial democracy were like, oh, let's see if black people actually want to vote, or if they know what to do with it. Turns out — no, if you actually let people participate in democracy, they will come. Absolutely, they will come.

So this is what happens here. But at the same time, from the start, there's never a period where you have a calmly unfolding democratic experiment. Right from the start, you also have what you might call backlash — or I think counter-mobilization is probably a better term — where the people who very much are not on board with this idea of biracial democracy, of extending the democratic promise to black people, are mobilizing against it. They're mobilizing politically, but they're also mobilizing by just unimaginable levels of white supremacist violence. So right from the start, you have both of those things across the South.

Now, honestly, I think the Reconstruction period is the most important historical reference point for our moment today, because I think there are some really valuable — it's always difficult to say what you can concretely learn from history, right? There's never an exact lesson to be drawn from the past — that's not what I'm trying to suggest. But I think there are some really striking implications here, and one of them is: every democratic progress in American history, every attempt to extend the promise of egalitarianism beyond white people, is inevitably met with a massive, comprehensive counter-mobilization. It happens every single time, and it happens here. And again, the level of white supremacist violence that unfolds here — I think the official numbers, and these are just the official numbers, about 2,000 African Americans were killed between 1865 and 1877. Again, that's just the number of officially documented victims.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:12:58]**
So you're saying not everybody was totally excited to have black legislators working on their behalf in the government. That's so weird. So how were they organizing? Were these just, like, an alumni association of neighbors? Was this a social organization, or was there any infrastructure behind them? Who were the people doing these white supremacist violent actions?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:14:16]**
Thousands more were very likely murdered, tens of thousands attacked and beaten and raped and forced to flee — just an unimaginable level of violence. And this is even while there's technically martial law across the South and the Union Army is technically an occupying force in the South — although it was about 15,000 Union soldiers across the South, it's not like they're everywhere, right. But again, even during this period that we call Reconstruction, that is the level of white supremacist violence in response to these efforts.

Right, so initially it's always both. Initially you have white politicians passing a series of laws called Black Codes that the state legislatures basically passed before you have an influx of black political representation. And they call this whole thing redemption, right — that's where this term comes from: the South has to be redeemed from this unjust occupation, from these foreigners and strange people, people who have no right to tell the South what to do, and we need to redeem the South. So redemption is a term which should always be used in inverted commas, not affirmatively. This white supremacist redemption — there's a legal or parliamentary arm of it, and that is the white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party. But then you also have these terrorist groups who are springing up across the South, the biggest of which was the Ku Klux Klan — that's where the Ku Klux Klan comes from — and they're basically serving as the redeemers' paramilitary arm. And that always goes hand in hand. These paramilitaries, violent militias, they assault black lawmakers, they assault black voters, they target biracial local governments and legislatures. And you always have this going hand in hand — and that, I think, also goes into the end of Reconstruction. That's also the mechanism by which they officially end Reconstruction: it always is a combination of facially or ostensibly race-neutral laws combined with just astonishing levels of white supremacist violence.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:17:02]**
Not to jump too far forward into the future, but as I told you before we started recording, I do live in Oregon, and so this is all just sounding a little close to home. Because we are known for our really cool clubs of young men — who are not actually that young, who should be doing something more useful — but who are instead choosing to convene in the park at night with their bottles of liquor and think about just messing up some antifa. That's just a reality that you have to live with — they still do this, right? They still have these drinking clubs, free speech clubs, whatever, but they're always actually these white supremacist terrorist groups.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:17:50]**
Well, and of course, you have a government now that is also using certain parts of the federal government as basically a paramilitary arm to enforce its vision of the country in the streets, right? I mean, that's basically how the Trump government uses ICE and Border Patrol — as a kind of paramilitary force. The most striking example, obviously, in Minneapolis at the beginning of the year.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:18:15]**
Right, yeah, yeah. Well, and there is nothing more embarrassing than watching in person, as I have, these members of these white supremacist groups, the clubs, just bow and scrape in front of these ICE agents — just like, "You're so amazing," like they've met Superman. "Oh my gosh, I can't believe we're so lucky that you're here." And they have banners printed up that just say, "We love you, ICE." Like, you have got to calm down.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:18:45]**
It's just an astonishing combination of violent and pathetic, you know, these people. It's kind of hard to — I sometimes almost find it disorienting, being confronted with, on the one hand, this level of violence and authoritarian desires, and then on the other hand, just ridiculousness. And Trump obviously is the best example of both of this, right? It's a clown show, but unfortunately, it's also very dangerous, and ideologically driven.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:19:10]**
Yeah, it really is. There's a real danger in it lulling you into a sense of false security, where you're like, well, I don't have to take this seriously — look at it, it's ridiculous. But you do.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:19:31]**
You do, you do, you do. So, Thomas, we spoke about *Callais*, and we're of course going to get more into that as we come into the modern times, but I would, I think, be remiss if we did not hit two more marks in the 19th century. Can you talk about the Slaughterhouse case, and how that began to sort of disassemble what was already only created about eight years before? And then, well, since you brought up the political violence in the South — not all of our listeners or viewers are going to be acutely aware what happened in 1876 and 1877 that led to the disintegration of Reconstruction in the macro sense that we often think of.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:20:23]**
Yeah, so I mean, I think two things are important here. So the end of Reconstruction is tied to what happens after the end of the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant basically was kind of on board with enforcing Reconstruction, right? That's why he sent the US Army. Again, it's not like the entire South was fully militarily occupied — it was 15,000 people, and a lot of those were fighting Native Americans in Texas. But still, there was a serious or sincere effort to actually impose Reconstruction in the South. But that ends when the 1876 presidential election ends in kind of a chaos, and it's somewhat unclear who actually comes out winning that election. And there's a deal between Democrats and Republicans. The deal is, okay — we let Rutherford B. Hayes be president, but only if you agree to end Reconstruction and martial law in the South and pull back the Union Army.

And the broader — at that point, what happened here is basically that Reconstruction ends because the forces who were behind Reconstruction in the North had kind of lost interest in Reconstruction, really. That's basically what ends here. That has a lot to do with the industrial elites in the North — initially they were behind Reconstruction because they wanted to break the power of the Southern agricultural elites, and once they saw that that was actually kind of done, that they had achieved their goals, they lost interest in imposing voting rights for black people, that sort of thing. And so the forces in the North are no longer behind Reconstruction, Grant is no longer president, the Union Army gets pulled back, and immediately you have the Southern states basically realizing: oh, cool, no one is going to seriously impose Reconstruction anymore. We can now go to a different phase — which, again, is once again just astonishing levels of violence, but also basically the entire South, all these Southern former Confederate states, they're enacting new state constitutions that are establishing what we come to call the Jim Crow apartheid states. Full, strict segregation of all spheres of life, basically, combined with completely excluding black people from political participation. In practice, they're almost entirely excluded from political participation, and all spheres of life are segregated.

The other thing you mentioned there is important: right from the start, the Supreme Court acts as kind of attempting to interpret the Reconstruction Amendments as narrowly as you possibly can. And this is a theme in American history — with the exception of the 1950s and 60s, the Warren Court era, where you have a liberal majority on the court — at every other point in history post-Civil War, the Supreme Court looks at the Reconstruction Amendments and looks for ways to impose limits on them and interpret them in narrow ways, and make it harder to impose them rather than help imposing what they're trying to do. And that's what happens right after, like immediately after, these amendments were passed. And so you have, right from the start, this biracial democratic experiment not just running up against white supremacists in the South, but also running up against a waning interest in the North, a Supreme Court that is at the very least more sympathetic to restoring these racial hierarchies rather than imposing Reconstruction. And so by 1890 or so, you have again a racial apartheid state in the South, and no one in the North making any serious effort to dismantle it.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:24:40]**
Like the federal legislation, and just anybody who could have kind of stepped in. So what was it that, in their minds, justified letting this happen? The Supreme Court, for one — just said this is not what is intended by those Reconstruction Amendments?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:24:55]**
I mean, the serious answer is that most people just didn't believe black people had any sort of right to be treated as equal citizens. But of course, that's not what anyone — I mean, that's not what the Supreme Court says. The Supreme Court basically finds ways to side with the states over the federal government — that's usually what happens.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:25:20]**
Yeah, yeah. Oh, and they're always trying to get back there, aren't they, with their off-the-grid compounds and things.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:25:25]**
And so that argument is facially one about the relationship between the states and the federal government, which is quite interesting, because that is another theme that emerges here. Democratic progress, or any attempt at actually realizing the democratic promise, really depends on enforcement from the federal government. That doesn't mean the federal government is a force for good in all areas and throughout America — that's not what I'm trying to say. But I think wherever and whenever democratic progress happens or has happened since the end of the Civil War, it's happened because the federal government has actually made some serious effort to impose democracy against the enemies of democracy. And that is another theme that emerges — that is the same thing that happens in the 1950s and 1960s. You cannot have any kind of practical realization of whatever is in the Constitution, or whatever law Congress passed, unless someone actually imposes it. That is the other really, I think, very much relevant implication here: you must impose it. You must impose it by force. Force doesn't necessarily mean military force, but someone has to impose this democratic experiment against the very, very serious resistance — and who but the federal government can actually do that? And so, whenever and wherever the federal government is actually serious about enforcing this stuff, you have serious democratic progress. But wherever and whenever the federal government does not impose it — well, you have the opposite.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:27:16]**
Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's important to remember that leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists were not looked at as incredible people in either the South or the North. They were in fact despised in both places for this sort of — what we would now call, I think, race baiting. But in reality, we lose sight of this because of the miraculous nature of the Civil War and what we have taken it to mean in an emotional sense. But Caitlin, I think that when you bring up the West, right — the West often gets forgotten in this discussion over regions. In the Civil War, we talk about the South as this slave oligarchy horror, and then the North — the North sort of gets, obviously, because they won the war, they got to write the history — the North gets a lot of this "look at what they did, and look at the beauty of this victory," right? But the North and the West were full of people who were like, yeah, this is morally repugnant and we don't like it, to some degree — and also, these people wanted to separate from us over this thing. Like, rude. Absolutely rude as shit. But we forget that in the West, in places like Oregon, in places like California, they were trying to get away from black people — they didn't want black people to be anywhere near them. They got all the way to the West to try to get away, and then they got there and they're like, oh man, there are natives, and also Chinese and Japanese people — this is terrible, we hate this so much. And that has to be remembered in the story of America, in the story of the Civil War. It's not that one group is pro-everyone and has this high moral compass.

And I think, Thomas, you rightly note that a lot of this can be understood as an economic battle, right — the forces of free wages and capital versus a slave oligarchy, which doesn't need to develop locally. Which is why even during the Civil War, there was this marvel at the lack of infrastructure that existed in the South. They had all of these resources, and yet they were never worked, because there was such a communal conception of how we can just run everything on our plantations — towns don't really need to develop in the same way that they do in the North. And I think a lot of that often gets overlooked in this discussion.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:30:00]**
I mean, I think these different stories — one is about socioeconomics, an economic history here, and a class struggle history. And then there are civil rights, ideological visions of what the country should be, different forms of nationalism struggling. These are not separate stories — they're never separate stories. And I kind of get really frustrated when people say, "Oh no, it's actually all about class." I'm like, okay, do you understand how these things are inevitably intertwined? I think maybe we'll get a chance to talk about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — what that actually meant in practice. Because the effects of something like this — when I say democratic progress, this isn't just, oh, on paper people can go and vote now, but it doesn't change anything else. No. Once people can vote, they are a constituency that politicians have to reckon with. They acquire political power, they acquire economic power because of that. Public goods are distributed in different ways. All of these effects, they're intertwined. It's never just one thing. And I think that's really important. What we talked about here is comprehensive change — not just, on paper, people acquire rights. No — if you actually impose this, if you actually impose the right to vote — and that is why I think the Voting Rights Act is the most important law ever passed in the history of the country — once you actually impose the right to vote in practice, a lot of stuff follows from that, including different policy outcomes, different distribution of public goods, different distribution of economic resources, economic power. All of that follows from this.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:31:34]**
Right. And again, that's sort of why we look at even the 1957 Civil Rights Act — it's a much weaker, it's essentially the 1964 Civil Rights Act with only one of the rights being maintained, right? But Johnson — he's the Senate Majority Leader at the time — he is convinced that although we can't get the whole package, fighting for voting rights is going to do exactly what you said, Thomas. It's going to allow for people to be represented and to represent themselves, and to therefore create better progress towards pushing for people who will then be able to get 1964 and '65 taken care of. So we end the Reconstruction in the books, in the textbooks, in the academia, in 1877-ish, thanks to Rutherford B. Hayes and, of course, many others. I believe a rookie congressman, Thomas Brackett Reed, was also a member — he was actually one of the lead lawyers for '77 — and we'll see him later when he gets rid of the filibuster in the House of Representatives, which is another momentous occasion in American democracy that we will talk about one day, but not this day.

So what then occurs, if things are not so wonderful after 1877, as it concerns us? What happens between 1877 and, let's say, 1957 and 1964? What sort of world do we have? You mentioned Jim Crow — this is another term that our listeners and our viewers — it's a long time to suffer, right? What sort of environment replaced this Reconstruction environment?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:33:35]**
That's a long time. My history is fairly rusty, but I think there might have been some geopolitical events in between the late 1800s and the mid-1900s.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:33:49]**
Yeah, so obviously we're going to go in very broad strokes here. I think, to me, what is important is — you know, this thing where sometimes you see this on social media: hey, what is one thing that in your specific area of expertise, or in your professional circles, is totally — everyone knows this, it's consensus, it's common sense — but outside of your professional circles, people are like, what? That can't be. And I think sometimes amongst people — all three of us are professionally tasked with thinking about this stuff all day and writing about this stuff all day — we kind of forget how the things that we probably accept as the fundamentals in our thinking about US history are maybe not so. Not everyone has a clear understanding of this.

So to me, the key thing is this: the fundamental reality in US history is that before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the American political system was fairly democratic, by contemporaneous international comparison, if a person happened to be a white Christian man — but it was something else entirely if they were not. So it's not a thumbs-up, thumbs-down democracy. Democracy can mean many different things at many different points in time. The idea of what democracy is, and what counts as a democracy — that changes over time. And the question we should be asking, whenever someone says "democracy," is: what kind of democracy, how much democracy, and for whom? Who is included in that democracy, and who is not? And again, before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, it's fairly democratic if you happen to be a white man, and something else entirely if you were not.

That's obvious — until 1920, women don't have the right to vote, at least not in most parts of the country. Native Americans are entirely excluded from citizenship and basic civic rights until at least 1924, when on paper, at least, they gained the right to citizenship — but in practice it's not the case. And then the most — I'm not going to say the most extreme case, but the most striking case, perhaps — is the complete exclusion of black people from political participation in the South. And I mean, we talked about the explosion of political representation and of people registering to vote in the South during the Reconstruction period — that all goes away entirely. It's absolutely remarkable. From around 1900 or so until the 1970s, the former Confederate states don't send a single black representative to Congress. That all goes away.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:36:10]**
So how did they achieve that, like, materially? How did they get that done?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:36:20]**
I mean, mostly they passed voting laws that disenfranchised black Americans via, usually, poll taxes, literacy tests, or property requirements. And the way this worked is — all of those would probably also disenfranchise poor white people, but how you get around this is either on the ground — these rules need to be enforced on the ground by people, by officials, right? And so they have leeway in how they enforce those.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:37:31]**
By people, yes, yes. Yeah, oftentimes, just to your point, oftentimes you would get a literacy test, right, which is like, "read the preamble, and tell me what the first sentence means," right? Whereas somebody who they did not want would get "explain section three of article" whatever, right — and that stuff gets hard and in the weeds, and there are many people who have educations who are not able to follow those things. But you know, Garry Wills famously said, if a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery, right? And this is what I think Thomas is meaning when he says we have to appraise democracy in its time period, to really understand what we're talking about in each situation.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:38:26]**
No, absolutely, yeah. The hurdles to democratic political participation for white men were relatively low by international comparison in the United States, whereas if you were not a white man, you were almost completely excluded. Or they come up with something like a grandfather clause, which basically means, hey, you are exempt from these rules if, say, your grandfather was already eligible to vote.

And again, as a result of these kinds of shenanigans, voter registration rates among black people, black turnout — that all plummets from around 80% shortly after the Civil War to somewhere in the zero to 5% range of black people even being registered to vote. That remains there until at least the 1940s, and then it picks up a little bit after the Second World War. But even by early 1965 — so this is right before the Voting Rights Act, basically — only about a third of eligible black Americans are registered in most states across the South, and sometimes, in Alabama and Mississippi, the rate was vastly lower than that. There's a massive gap in voter registration rates between blacks and whites. So this is not a case of, oh, maybe people in the South were just not registering to vote — that's not the case. There's a massive gap in registration rates between blacks and whites.

And then there's also — after 1881, the South did not elect another black senator until 2013. That's Tim Scott. And after 1901, no Southern state sent any black representatives to the House until 72 years later. So black political representation — and that is just the congressional level, but we have to always remember that that's also true on the state level, and especially also on the local level. So it's not just, okay, no more black senators, no more black House representatives — no, it also means no more black people on city councils or school boards and everything, all these institutions and places where, again, the distribution of resources is being decided on the local level. You have a complete exclusion, basically, of black people, and that goes all the way through right until 1965 and the passing of the Voting Rights Act.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:41:00]**
Right. Yeah. And that, Thomas Zimmer, is where we leave our dreariness of 1877 to 1964, and we come to what you, as well as some other historians, have labeled a second reconstruction — or Reconstruction Two, or however it would like to be framed. We did it, guys, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:41:09]**
Or if you — wow, no, Trent, no, not that one. If you ask a Republican or a centrist, that's the time when we fixed racism forever, and we don't have to worry about it anymore, right?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:41:25]**
That's exactly right, and that is something we really need to talk about. Because I think there is a general narrative — and not just amongst Republicans, by the way, I think this is fairly entrenched in mainstream American discourse, let's say, including very much the liberal mainstream — this idea: okay, so yeah, it was not 250 years of perfect democracy. I think most mainstream people, liberals, kind of understand this, right? But there is still this idea that, okay, but in 1964, '65 — that's finally when we reached, supposedly, this democratic consensus. We did it, right? And from that point forward, not everything was perfect, but at least everyone was now finally on board, and now America would finally be serious about realizing its democratic promise. So you have this tale that says: the answer to the question, should America be a multiracial democracy at all, a pluralistic democracy at all, yes or no — okay, so there was no consensus in 1876, maybe there was also no consensus in 1865, but 1965, that's when we reached a consensus. And everyone who was not on board with that was damned to the fringes of American life and American politics — okay, so they still exist, but they're basically fringe people, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:42:41]**
And we all agreed, yeah. Yeah, right. He should be lonely and friendless out in the elephant graveyard with all the other children's movie villains.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:42:55]**
And that tale — there's this thing where, if we — historians, or not just historians, all of us — if we tell stories about the past that couldn't have possibly led to the present that we are experiencing, then we have a problem, right? Because that story that I just outlined — well, how is that supposed to get us to Trump? In that sort of story, Trump has to be some kind of weird accident, a weird departure. And his rise to power would necessarily be something like accidental, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:43:15]**
Yeah, because who would be there to help him? Who would be central to power enough to pull the levers to help him achieve greatness?

**Trent R. Nelson [00:43:23]**
Well, as Whitney Curry Wimbish said in our last episode, right — fascism is just something that white people are now discovering in America, but for many other groups of people, this has been the circumstance to some degree for 50, 60, 100, 250 years, 400 years. This is a condition that we are now fighting against, which many of our black and brown comrades are being like, yeah, you're late to the party — we've been trying to fight this forever, and a lot of folks that talk like you actually have been aiding the people that we don't like, with your sort of wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed responses to this type of bastardization of the American ethos in the democratic way.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:44:45]**
Yeah. I think the thing that we need to grapple with is that what we're experiencing now — the end of this second reconstruction — is the result of a decades-long, comprehensive counter-mobilization that started the second we got the second reconstruction. And that's really important.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:45:06]**
Immediately, yeah. Yeah — and the only reason why it was able to happen is that a lot of people snapped into action to figure out ways to undo the effects and also legislatively undo the actual act itself, right? We know that. And I was gonna say — the other really fun thing about this image of the civil rights era, as, you know, "things were bad, and then some people took some really serious personal risks and made some really beautiful speeches, and then everything was fixed," right? That kind of story is the reason why, a couple of years ago, I had to sit in that Zoom meeting with all of those professors at Stanford and listen to them talk about the protests on campuses. And one person actually asked in this conference, "Hey, how come you don't like the protesters now, but you think that the 1960s was a good time for protesters?" And I think it was Jonathan Haidt who literally just said, "Well, in the 60s they actually had something to protest about, and that's why it was okay, and now it's stupid." And that is exactly the attitude that I met when I was a teenager protesting the Patriot Act — with all these grown-ups with their gray hair and their pigtails and everything — because we were all hippies, obviously, we were all on the street corner with our signs, being like, this is fascism, we can't have this, right? And getting laughed at, because it was like, "What do you think — you are Martin Luther King? Come on, go home, relax. We handled things."

**Thomas Zimmer [00:49:37]**
But I also want to say, just for the record — because I encounter this sometimes when I write, when I say something like, hey, the 1960s civil rights legislation was a massive, era-defining event in American history, and from that point forward America became something — not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but something that was worth calling a multiracial democracy — again, not perfect at all. And then people say, oh, but are you saying that everything was perfect after the civil rights era? And — no. No one needs to pretend that the Voting Rights Act fixed everything, that it turned the United States into some perfectly fair democratic utopia. Let's not be stupid, right? But I think the kind of descriptive representation — that's the term, when the demographics of elected officials, and thus the parliamentary chambers, correspond to the demographic makeup of the electorate, so basically when your political institutions kind of look like the actual society — that descriptive representation the Voting Rights Act enabled, and everything that came with it in terms of different policy outcomes, different distribution of public resources and public goods — that was not some magic bullet that solved all problems. But I think there's no question that the combined impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the structural conditions under which the struggle for equality played out were so significantly altered by this legislation, the playing field became vastly more conducive, at least, to a truly democratic politics. And I think that's why it makes sense to say, look, with the Voting Rights Act, America finally turned into something that deserved to be considered at least a multiracial democracy, however flawed it certainly remained. And if we don't understand that, then we also can't understand why the *Callais* decision of the Supreme Court from late April is really another era-defining moment in American history — because it basically turns the clock back to before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So if we don't grapple seriously with the incredible impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we have no chance of actually understanding what just happened.

Right — and the entire reactionary centrist set never grapples for a second with the fact that they all want to claim the democratic progress of the 1960s and never grapple with the fact that, if we all did what they recommend, we would have never gotten any of that. I mean, there's no question how they would have reacted to the protests and the activism of the 1960s.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:49:45]**
Correct. They all — but they were always — they've always been here, right? This is something we get — the same people that we yell about. And I love that term, reactionary centrism. Me agrees with it, right? They've always existed. They are perennial, they are eternal. They were making fun of Abraham Lincoln during the early moments of the Civil War, they were chastising FDR. They're always there.

**Caitlin M. Green [00:49:52]**
Right, they would have been back there going, "Who do you think you are, Abraham Lincoln? Calm down." "Who do you think you are, George Washington? Calm down." Right? Yeah, they would love for me not to vote, and I'm a white woman. Come on, I should get at least most of the rights that the white men have. Yeah, I see it. I definitely see it.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:50:40]**
And now that we're in the second Reconstruction, as we're communicating about it — we spoke about the counter-forces during the first Reconstruction. Can we get into these counter-forces that began immediately after the Civil Rights Act is signed? I mean, Johnson is famous — whether apocryphal or not, he actually thinks it's not apocryphal this time, right — to have said, you know, there's a big chance we're gonna have lost the South for many decades. And we see that with the movements of the old-time Southern Democrats — the Democratic caucus, the famous Democratic caucus run by Richard Russell of Winder, Georgia, but with so many all-stars, Bilbo and Harry Byrd — I mean, there's a whole list of these people. And you start to see this sort of movement, right, this diaspora from the Democrats — which, in fairness, I believe you can trace more accurately to Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. There's already a sort of understanding that the Democratic Party is moving too far liberal for many of these hardliners. And so what happens in the later 1960s into the 70s that starts to see this transition that now is fully, you know, born?

**Thomas Zimmer [00:52:30]**
Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, on the political or partisan level — the thing to understand is that before the 1960s, the Democratic Party exists as two parties in one, basically. It's a very weird something that can only be explained by rather contingent historical circumstances, right? This coalition between fairly liberal-ish, broadly speaking, Northern Democrats, and then the Southern Democratic Party, which entirely exists to perpetuate white domination in the South — they have erected this one-party authoritarian apartheid regime in the South, and somehow they exist within the confines of one party. And — very broad strokes here again, obviously, because these are some of the most consequential developments in recent American history, and you can read a lot of books about those — but broadly speaking, what happens is: the more the broadly liberal forces in the Democratic Party come to define the general trajectory of the party, the more the Southern Democratic segregationists — because that's basically what they are, segregationists — kind of struggle with their political home, and they're looking for a different political home.

Now, party identity changes very slowly. It takes a lot of time for party identity to change. And also, if you are in Congress, for instance, you're going to be very reluctant to switch parties, because that comes with a lot of loss of power — you accumulate power over time. So you've been a Democratic senator for literally decades, you have accumulated so much power, and you're going to lose all that if you just switch parties. So sometimes these segregationist Democrats stick with the Democratic Party, even after a Democratic president, in Lyndon Johnson, pushes through the civil rights legislation. But broadly speaking, you have what we call a party realignment, or partisan realignment, where — and this is not just elected officials, but also voters in the electorate as well — broadly speaking, the people who are at least broadly on board with extending the democratic promise beyond white people tend to find their political home in the Democratic Party, and the people who are at least skeptical, let's say, towards this kind of extension of the democratic promise beyond white people, they tend to find their home in the Republican Party.

And it's really important — this drives me nuts, when people say, oh, the Republican Party has always been exactly what it is today. That's just not true, right? By the 1950s and 60s, there is no liberal party, there is no conservative party. There are two big-tent parties that are just ideologically covering the entire spectrum. Literally, the entire spectrum.

**Trent R. Nelson [00:55:02]**
Absolutely, yes. 1957 is such an important year, not only because Johnson passes that first civil rights bill in eight decades, almost nine decades, but because he beat the Republicans to doing it. And Richard Nixon, who was the sitting vice president, wanted Republicans to be able to take back the black vote, which had been lost to Democrats since 1932. And so that's sort of the last hurrah in terms of the strategy that Republicans were using — still, to sort of be, as you noted, Thomas, this broad big-tent party coalition, some conservative members, some very liberal members still, of course. And we start to see what ends up taking place. And when Caro writes about 1957 — Robert Caro — it sort of strikes you as this moment in which, had situations played out differently, we might be experiencing a different America in terms of how political parties operated and moved after that.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:56:34]**
Yeah. Right, yeah. I mean, I think that's fair, in the sense that there is agency here, right? There are Republican politicians who have agency, and same for Democratic politicians who have agency, and they could have made different decisions. Although the general tendency — that black people, for instance, are no longer voting exclusively for the Republican Party because it was the party of Lincoln, but start to move towards the Democratic Party — you see this at least since the 1930s. That has a lot to do with the New Deal, because they rightfully understood, hey, this reconceptualizing of liberalism that FDR suggested, basically, in the 1930s — which is to say, liberalism is not "the state stays out of everything"; liberalism is "the state has a responsibility to create the conditions under which individuals can actually thrive" — I think that is something that black people rightfully understood as potentially, at least, very helpful in their struggle for freedom and economic rights. And so you have this — again, this is not something that starts in the 1960s, but the civil rights legislation kind of really speeds this process up.

But even — I mean, I think around 80% of Republicans in Congress vote for the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Already, you can tell this is not the same Republican Party as we have today. What happens there, broadly speaking, is that the Republican Party over time becomes the parliamentary arm of the American right, and it becomes the parliamentary arm of this counter-mobilization against multiracial democracy. And that is just not what the Republican Party is in the 1960s — but that's what it becomes. Because it is what we call modern conservatism, or the modern conservative movement, which becomes this defining force within the Republican Party. And the more this modern conservative movement becomes the defining force within the Republican Party, the Republican Party becomes the parliamentary arm of this broader counter-mobilization against multiracial democracy.

**Thomas Zimmer [00:58:32]**
I think that's broadly speaking what happens there in the second half of the 20th century — to the point where today, obviously, the Republican Party is entirely devoted, entirely devoted, to rolling back whatever progress towards multiracial democracy — and not just multiracial, but also gender-egalitarian, ethnic pluralism, religious pluralism, all those wonderful things. They're entirely devoted to rolling all that back. That's the Republican Party that we have today. But that is a process that takes decades to happen. I mean — the whole "repeal the 19th Amendment" thing, that's definitely on the upswing on the American right, right?

**Caitlin M. Green [00:59:56]**
They're gender obsessed, and that's one of the things — when you talked about, you know, saying it's all about class, or all of this is kind of a front to push through simply class-based things — it's like, I want you to look in Pete Hegseth's eyes when he talks about masculinity, right? I want you to look — and muscles, and not being fat, and being lethal, and all that gendery stuff. I want you to look in Stephen Miller's eyes — I know it hurts, but look in his eyes — when he talks about Somalis or Mexicans, or anybody from any other race, and really look at what's behind there. Because it is not just money.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:00:10]**
No, I'm absolutely — I think that is where, in our conversation today, we're focusing very much on race as a kind of organizing principle in American society, but it's not the only one. It is absolutely a defining organizing principle, but it's not the only one. If you look at the right today, gender is obviously the other defining organizing principle. They are at least as opposed to gender egalitarianism as they are to racial pluralism.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:00:20]**
He called James Talarico a transgender person the other day — like, literally. Absolutely deranged.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:00:33]**
Yeah, yes, that's the attack line — he's "vegan and transgender." Yes.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:00:42]**
What a freak. He's so weird. And the fact that — vegan and transgender, because he ate something with egg and cheese in it? Like, that's not vegan, sir.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:00:51]**
I mean, I think this is so important, and it's really frustrating sometimes when you encounter this on the, very broadly speaking, left — this attempt to say it's got to be either class or race, or it's got to be either class or gender, or it's got to be gender or race. No. I mean, look — here's where I will say the right has a much clearer understanding sometimes of what this struggle is all about. They have absolutely no doubt what this is about. This is about: should the United States of America be a country, a society, that has very strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth — or should it be a society in which the individual's status is not determined by race, gender, religion, or wealth? And they will look at you like — what do you mean, it's just about wealth? No, no — it's also about race and gender and religion. We can do all of those things, right?

And so I think we, on the other side of this equation — the broadly speaking small-d democratic camp, which I think we can probably all identify as members of — we need to operate from an understanding of the political conflict, and also the stakes, that is equally holistic and comprehensive, and not be so myopic about "no, it's got to be just class." I'm not sitting here saying this has nothing to do with class. I'm just saying, look — the right thinks about this stuff comprehensively. When they say "we want to restore" — they talk a lot about the natural order, quote-unquote "natural order" — what they mean by that is a society with very strict discriminatory hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, where those dimensions determine exactly how resources are distributed and who has the right to be at the top, who has the right to determine the boundaries of what is America, the boundaries of who gets to belong. It's all determined by race, gender, religion, and wealth. And if we don't, on the other side, understand this, and also think about the conflict equally in holistic terms — then I think we are not going to win this.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:03:09]**
Yeah. And they utilize — they're very strategic in who they target, and in which order they are doing the targeting, right? So right now it is lots of black folk, lots of brown folk, transgender individuals, gay individuals. And you see that they have a backing of people who eventually will be their targets — but not yet, not wholly yet, right? There are whispers of "women shouldn't be voting and doing this," but we still need the women to be supporting all of these anti-black, anti-transgender movements, right? They just don't understand that eventually they are next on the list. Once we get rid of these individuals from being prominent in civil and social society, then we can move to push back women's voting, and women's sports, and women working, and women doing anything that is not 19th-century-pilled. They want — they're gonna — we won't let them, Caitlin. We won't let them take your podcast.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:04:02]**
Right. Right, they're gonna take my podcast away. No — you can pry my microphone out of my cold dead hands.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:04:15]**
That'll be a big episode, Caitlin. Well, that'll be a big one for us. Yeah.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:04:30]**
We've had years of this whole discussion over, "Oh, Trump is building a multiracial coalition — how could it possibly be about white domination and race if his support amongst Latinos and black men is rising? How can you say it's about race?" And I'm like, okay — there are certain elements of this broader reactionary agenda that appeal to certain black men, for instance, right? That could be the anti-feminism. Or amongst Latinos — the Trump support is heavily concentrated amongst evangelical Latinos, and people with very conservative-to-reactionary understandings of, for instance, gender relations. And so they are attracted by these parts of the broader reactionary agenda. This is not — if you think about it for two seconds, it's not that complicated. Unless you start from this weird idea that all black people are super liberal — how could they possibly vote for Trump? Like, no — all black people are not super liberal. That's not how it works. A lot of black people are socially conservative, in whatever way. And the reason why they still vote for the Democratic Party so overwhelmingly is that black people understand that race is a defining issue in this conflict between the parties. And so even though they are socially conservative, and they may think that maybe socially, culturally, some elements of the Democratic Party are too progressive, they're still overwhelmingly going with the Democratic Party, right? So again — let's not play dumb here. We can think about the political conflict in more than one dimension at the same time.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:05:34]**
Right. That's right. Well, and Trump has spent, what would you say, the last 40-plus years building a brand of himself as being synonymous with wealth, right? That's so powerful — to be like, I'm the guy who's money. There's literally song lyrics about Trump being a synonym for wealth. You're not going to get a better kind of brand if you're looking for who's going to get me ahead. I think if I vote for the guy who is wealth personified, then I will get wealthier.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:06:19]**
1,000%. Hustle culture is another thing that the Republicans play off of, right? There's constant capitalism — businessman, you're a businessman, you're an entrepreneur. They're constantly playing to those feelings inside of people's minds, right? That I don't need a state to support me. I work three jobs, and I do this, and I do that, and I'm a big, powerful capitalist in my own right. And this guy understands me, this group understands me. They're not worried about welfare and supporting people who don't work as hard as I do. I work really hard. I identify with the winners, right? And not these people who always try to help other people — why don't they help themselves, like I did? Right? They play on all of this vanity.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:07:36]**
That's exactly right. I was going to say the exact same thing. This is such a big part of Trump's appeal, right — he can build on this prosperity gospel. A lot of people see Trump, and they mostly see someone — hey, I know that guy is rich, and he's famous, so that means he knows how to be rich, and he knows how to get famous, and that appeals to me. And I'm dumbing this down, of course. But all of these things — this is also a reason why it has been so difficult for anyone else on the right to kind of replicate Trump's formula. Because Trump's formula only works — or a big part of why it has worked, unfortunately — is his kind of celebrity. His rich-business-celebrity thing, that's a big part of why it works. And that's why it's not clear to me if anyone on the right, anyone in the Republican Party, can just take Trumpism and make it work, even as a kind of electoral proposition.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:08:19]**
Yeah, right. That's a longstanding brand. He's put the time in. Yeah, he's got a story. And well, as the resident white lady podcaster, I also would point us to cults as an example as well. Because whenever there's a cult that is going strong, and their leader dies, and the second-in-command takes over — things immediately fall to pieces. And it's because, even if that second-in-command has been there from the start and really thinks they have a handle on things, things just get weird. They get weird and dangerous, and people start drinking poison out of little cups.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:09:10]**
So many of these people that we look at — and we say, look at this cult of personality that they have constructed for themselves — I'll use a few, right: Trump, Mao, Hitler, Stalin. These are people who have unique backstories, which help to promulgate this vision that people have of them. Stalin being the poor Georgian; Mao being this reasonably well-educated individual who still reflects back; and then Hitler, right, the former corporal from World War One — as he puts it, in I think 1941: who was I before the war? Nobody, right? A nameless person, a lot of people, probably right. And this story is sort of infectious, it's sort of intoxicating. I agree with you, Thomas — I don't think that you can replicate these people, and I think that when they go, the movement starts to deteriorate, because the movement is them. It is incredibly personalist, right? But this transcends to: how do we move forward with this? It's never going to be the same without that individual.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:10:35]**
No, that's right. Love that hubris, yeah.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:10:45]**
Sure. Not everybody can be Brigham Young, right? For every Brigham Young, there are thousands who fail, to be sure.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:10:57]**
Yeah, no, absolutely. Although it is interesting that there are — I think it is interesting, if you look at these elite defections from MAGA that we've seen over the past few months — it's interesting that some people seem to think — someone like Tucker Carlson seems to think — that he could replace the kind of personalist charismatic rule. Because he probably thinks he has his own audience, which is true, right? He has millions of people listening to him, so he has his own kind of fan base and his own kind of audience. And it seems very clear to me that he is trying to bring himself into position to kind of pick up the mantle as the next populist leader of the MAGA movement after Trump. And he therefore dares to go kind of openly — he's been very open about it, in certain areas, going against Trump, which other people don't do. And I think that is something that very much distinguishes him from, like, JD Vance, who doesn't have his own fan base and his own kind of audience devoted to him, and also is not very charismatic — but he has the institutional support of the Republican Party, probably; he's very well connected in a kind of post-liberal reactionary intellectual scene. So we'll see who comes out of this kind of thing. But it is interesting — these very different personalities, in very different positions, and all of them probably at this point realizing, well, the end of the Trump era is definitely coming at some point, right? And so they're all kind of trying to bring themselves into position to be the next leader of MAGA, I guess.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:11:48]**
Right. Someone needs to, yeah, right. I mean, JD Vance — nothing makes me shudder harder than him getting up behind a lectern and being like, "White women, please get pregnant. I need you to — please, each of you, please do be pregnant as much as you can." Like, that just makes me want to jump off a bridge. It's rough. He's not charming. I know — and I always say, I think I fell just short of my requirements, because I only had two children, so that's only replacement level. Yeah, I should have had at least one more, and yet it's not happening.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:12:30]**
You only had a replacement, yeah.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:12:33]**
It's your — that's your service to the homeland, I guess, right?

**Trent R. Nelson [01:12:37]**
So, *Callais*, of course, as we have mentioned here, during this episode and during previous ones, has been a major blow to our second reconstruction efforts — as you noted here, essentially ends it, as you write. But well, after the first reconstruction, we had over 80 years of what we might call bad times. What do you suspect, with your foresight in hand — what do you suspect the end of Reconstruction Two will leave for us? What sort of world have we entered, whether we recognize it or not?

**Thomas Zimmer [01:13:45]**
So I think what's happening now — the reason why I think it's justified calling it the end of the civil rights era, or the end of the voting rights era — is that we have the combined effect of the dismantling of the civil rights infrastructure. That's what the Trump administration is doing, right? They're basically dismantling the federal civil rights infrastructure. Since they got back to power last year in January, the first thing they did was, like, hey, here's an executive order that basically says we're no longer enforcing key civil rights provisions — and we're also dismantling the civil rights infrastructure that was built at the federal level, and what's left of it, we're going to use to actually go after "anti-white racism," or whatever they call it. So you have that — that's the dismantling, basically, of the Civil Rights Act. And then you have the de facto nullification of the Voting Rights Act in the *Callais* decision. Obviously, it took them several decisions — that starts with Shelby County in 2013, which nullifies the Section Five preclearance, and now what was still left of the Voting Rights Act is basically nullified in *Callais*. So it's a long process, right? But now that process combines with the Trump administration dismantling the civil rights infrastructure at the federal level.

And if you take that together — it doesn't mean that the struggle for democratizing America, for finally realizing the democratic promise, is over. But it does mean, I think, that this battle will now have to be waged under far different conditions — far more difficult and far more unfair conditions than previously. That's what's happening now. That doesn't mean it's going to take us another century, like after the end of the first reconstruction. That's not what it means.

And I also think — I understand, I get this reaction, I shouldn't say a lot, but some people are, I think understandably, frustrated when someone like me comes along and I write these super long essays where it's all very dreary and kind of doomy and gloomy, and they're like, oh man, this is just so frustrating, this is too depressing, right? I'm not trying to spell out the disastrous effects of all of this to say, well, it's over, it's just gloom and doom now. I don't think any of this is now guaranteed to happen. It's not guaranteed that we are going to lose all of the progress that was made post-1964, -65. That's not guaranteed to happen. But it is now a very, very real threat, and a very concrete threat. And I think the reason why we need to grapple with how fundamentally the conditions have changed and the structures have changed is so that we have an understanding of what the challenge is — so that we can come up with answers that are commensurate with the problem. Because if you understand how fundamentally the struggle for democratizing America is now a different struggle today than it was two years ago — because of the combined efforts of the Trump administration and the legal or judicial arm of the counter-mobilization that has taken over the Supreme Court — because that is the best way to think about the Roberts majority on the Supreme Court: the legal or judicial arm of this broader counter-mobilization, and they have turned the Supreme Court into the spearhead of this counter-mobilization. If we understand what a fundamental, era-defining moment we are experiencing here, then we can come up with answers that are commensurate with the problem.

And the answers, I think — they're not even, like, super — it's fairly clear to me what has to happen. We need a new, robust Voting Rights Act, and we need robust protection against racial discrimination.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:17:54]**
We need to outlaw partisan gerrymandering, and we need a structural reform to implement some form of proportional representation — whatever form that takes — which most other modern democracies in the world already have, because it's just a far fairer system. The problem is, however, that none of that goes past this Supreme Court majority. None of this, right? None of that goes past the Roberts majority. And so you have to handle that — you have to find a way to defang the Roberts majority on the court. So this is what needs to happen, and this is going to be very, very, very difficult, right? But those would be answers to the problem that are commensurate with the challenge.

And so we can sit here and say, oh, let's just turn the clock back to pre-Trump and restore — any approach that thinks in terms of restoration, just restoring the kind of pre-Trump reality, is just fundamentally not commensurate with the problem. We need to think about transformation. And I think that is one other big lesson that this whole story, this whole struggle for multiracial, pluralistic democracy in American history — that is another big lesson that comes out of that for me, another big political implication: you should think about transformative change, and not just careful reform, or whatever. Because if you understand that every democratic progress in American history will inevitably lead to this comprehensive counter-mobilization, and every democratic promise will have to be imposed against resistance — it's not coming through persuasion, it's not coming through "let's just talk to one another," it's not coming through consensus, it's not coming through unity and bipartisanship. Every democratic promise in American history was imposed against resistance, by people who understood that only transformative change, a leap forward, was the only real, holistic option to impose democracy, multiracial democracy, in America. And if you understand that, then you have to understand that that's what we need to be going for. Not restoration, not meek reforms, not "everything is just, oh, we fear backlash, let's anticipate the backlash," whatever. No — transformative change, imposed against resistance. Understand that you're gonna have to impose it against resistance. That's how you need to think about this kind of stuff. And I know you at Liberal Currents, you all do this already, so I'm not telling you anything new — I'm agreeing with you very much. But I think if you look at the Democratic Party, that's obviously the defining fault line within the Democratic Party: precisely between people who think you can still do politics as usual, and restoration, and that sort of thing — or people who say no. Yeah — "oh yeah, let's not be divisive, yeah, let's not be polarizing," you know?

**Trent R. Nelson [01:18:56]**
Yeah — a "restorative" change. Yeah. You heard it here first, folks. What are we trying to restore? What was it that was good before — or was society still unequal? We got to get away from that cliff, goddammit. Absolutely.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:20:29]**
Right, right, yeah. Yeah, right — we don't want to alienate any voters, you know, by having all these really high-minded ideological positions, and being divisive and disruptive. That would be very dangerous, right? Not be polarizing, yeah, right. Well, yeah — if you're on a path that's headed off a cliff, you're not going to fix your problem by backing up a few steps before you start going forward again. You need to turn around, go somewhere else. And you have to know you're going to make some people really angry, and that's fine — just be angry, go. This should be obvious. At this point we have enough people with a lot of power speaking out loud, saying, "Excuse me, I do not think that non-white people should be equal participants in our democracy." When you hear that, it should tell you — oh, I'm going to have to go against the beliefs of some of these people. I'm gonna have to make them mad. Like, more, more, more.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:21:35]**
Restoring a situation that got us to Trump in the first place is very evidently not going to be good enough, right? But again — maybe one last time we can go back to Reconstruction, because the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments, they understood this so clearly. They were not going for reform, they were not going for restoration. They understood precisely that what they were doing was nothing short of revolutionary. They were going for the second founding. They were going for revolutionary, transformative change, because they understood that was the only way forward — and they understood it would have to be imposed against resistance.

Yes — I mean, you have to understand that there is no consensus over whether or not America should even be a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. You will not reach consensus. You have to impose it, right? You have to impose it. But I do think, in that sense at least, something like the Supreme Court's decision to nullify the Voting Rights Act — and then the reaction from Republican elected officials, who are just so excited to extinguish black political representation, just rushing to extinguish black political representation across the South — at least it clarifies both the nature and the stakes of the political conflict.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:23:12]**
The question at the core of this struggle is: can a society built on racial hierarchy, and gendered hierarchy, and religious hierarchy, and hierarchies of wealth and class — can that be transformed into a multiracial, pluralistic, egalitarian democracy? Yes or no. That's the question. Must we forever be defined by these strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth — or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism? That's the question. Let's not get distracted — that's the question. The other side understands this precisely. They understand that that is the question, and that is the conflict, and they don't get sidetracked from that. And so we shouldn't either.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:23:51]**
They are more consistent in so many ways. They have taken the advice of the Catholic Church. They heard what Joseph Goebbels said, right — we must repeat the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And they do, and their messaging is more consistent as a result of that. They repeat the same thing over and over and over again, and it works. And in this whole discussion, therefore — we need not expect to have better states until we have better men; till then, all changes will leave every essential thing unchanged. And we must become better. And I know that's a long process, certainly one that takes decades, centuries perhaps even, but we cannot allow for these significant blips to derail us from our mission, from our journey. Multiracial egalitarian democracy is good, and we have to be brave enough to say it.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:25:01]**
And make it happen, regardless of who's upset about it.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:25:10]**
Well — don't care, just got to keep on boogieing. Well, historian Thomas Zimmer, friend of the program — unfortunately, we have to let you go, because, well, you are a busy individual, educating everyone: the state of Germany, the nation of America, everyone in between and around. Certainly, we appreciate you so much. Well, can you tell us a bit about Democracy Americana? Can you tell us about your Steady — not Substack, Steady, it used to be on Substack? Tell us about all of those things. Tell us about your Bluesky. Tell us all the places that people can find you, where they can contact you. They crave the knowledge, and we would like to give it to them, please.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:25:50]**
Oh, yeah. Well, I write a newsletter about American history and politics — basically all the good stuff we talked about here today. It's called Democracy Americana, and I try to provide the kind of big-picture lens, put the current political conflict in perspective, reflect on where we are in this broader struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America. And I do that in the form of long-form essays that I publish every week — so these are not quick reaction shots; there's about one long 4,000-to-5,000-word essay every week, trying to put in perspective what's going on. Again, it's called Democracy Americana, and it's hosted on a platform called Steady — it used to be on Substack, yes, it's hosted on Steady — and everyone can subscribe, if that is something that people find interesting. I try to step back from the noise, from the constant outrage and noise of the Trump era. It's so easy to get distracted by the latest thing the Trumps say — and it's also outrageous, and I share the outrage, I'm not saying it's not outrageous — but I do think it is important to take two steps back and reflect on where we stand in this broader struggle, very much like what we tried to do here today. That's what I try to do in the newsletter. So yeah — you'll find me on Bluesky, that's mostly where I am active on social media, but my main hub is the newsletter. And since I am now an independent writer full time, that's kind of what I devote my work and life to, I guess.

**Trent R. Nelson [01:27:05]**
We appreciate it so much. Yes — come back.

**Thomas Zimmer [01:27:15]**
Anytime, anytime. Thank you so much.

**Caitlin M. Green [01:27:22]**
That's right. Amazing. Well, we are big fans. So glad you could come on today. Hopefully we'll see you again soon. Yeah — well, this has been Half the Answer, where understanding your question is half the answer. Until next time — we love you. Bye bye.