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Title: Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer, Fault Lines (recorded live at the Decatur Book Festival) Episode: 66 Podcast: Half Hour of Heterodoxy Transcript Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer appeared at the AJC Decatur Book Festival this year to talk about Fault Lines: A History of the U.S. Since 1974. This was recorded on September 1, 2019 at the First Baptist Church of Decatur. [Applause] Chris Martin: Thank you, Debra, for that introduction and thank you all for coming today. As Debra mentioned, I’m affiliated with Georgia Tech. I also host a podcast called Half Hour of Heterodoxy. Both Kevin and Julian have been on that podcast. Kevin’s episode was shortly after New Year’s Day and Julian’s episode was shortly after Valentine’s Day. I also want to mention that we are recording today’s session so this will be an episode on the podcast soon. So the Q&A session will be recorded. If for any reason you don’t want your question featured on the podcast, you can talk to me afterwards and I’ll make sure it’s not on there. Both of you probably know this already about their background but they are both historians of Princeton University. This is Kevin’s second visit to the Book Festival. He spoke here about ten years ago about his first major book, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. He is also the author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, which was published in 2015. This is Julian’s first visit here. He is the author of five previous books including a 2010 book about Jimmy Carter named by the Washington Post one of the best presidential biographies and a 2015 book, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. His next book which we will touch on is about Newt Gingrich. Now to begin, I want to talk about … [Applause] Julian Zelizer: Coming soon. Chris Martin: Yes. Chris Martin: OK. Yes. So to begin, this book is based on a course that is taught at Princeton University. It’s a modified version of an older course that covered the middle of the 20th century. So Kevin and Julian updated the syllabus and changed it into a course about the last 40 years. 1 And I thought we talk about the Cold War because that’s one of the most important events of this era. The end of the Cold War is important. But you are teaching undergraduates who are born sometimes 10 years after the Cold War ended. How do you convey the seriousness of the Cold War and how influential it was in shaping our politics? Julian Zelizer: It’s difficult and it’s funny for many people in the room. It’s obvious what the Cold War was. And for the purposes of our course and the book, what it meant when the Cold War started to come to an end in the late ‘80s and really ends by the early ‘90s. And it’s difficult. And so in the course itself, part of what we do is we have a lot of video and audio not just to flourish the lectures but to actually try to show through images of the wall falling or coverage of Reagan’s negotiations with Gorbachev or showing and talking about conservatives attacking Reagan for simply having these kind of diplomatic interactions, the magnitude of what this event was. A little earlier in the ‘80s, we write a lot in the book and the course covers the Nuclear Freeze movement to try to really talk about in the early ‘80s the real fear that existed that nuclear war was possible and just how heated events had become. So we try many different techniques. And in the book, we paid great attention to that. And part of what we argue is in the end it doesn’t reshape politics here as much as you would think. But we are cognizant of the need to bring back what that were meant. Chris Martin: Go ahead, Kevin. Kevin Kruse: That was beautifully said. [Laughter] Chris Martin: And another shocking thing for many undergraduates is the party overlapped, the parties overlapped ideologically so you couldn’t – if you randomly picked a Democratic politician or Republican politician, you didn’t necessarily pick a Liberal or a Conservative. How do you convey that overlap and the change from that era to the present when you are talking about this? Kevin Kruse: Well, that’s really something. So you mentioned this course, I’ll back up a second, this course was one that I inherited when I started in Princeton in 2000 and it was a course that I think have been designed in 1960 and it was titled The US Since 1920. Well, as you might know, some stuff happened after 1960 and I’ve inherited this course that kept getting bigger and bigger and more crowded and more crowded. And when Julian joined the faculty a few years after me, we talked that we would finally cut it up. And so this post-’74 class became one that we co-taught together and the book came out of that, but Julian runs that on his own now and I have the – I did the 1920 to 1974 part. And it’s in that course that I really deal and dig into that issue of the overlapping ideologies or the parties. 2 And you are right, it is something that students and I think maybe many people in the general public take for granted that of course, Republicans are all Conservative, maybe towards the center. Democrats are Liberal, maybe towards the center. But there’s a clear ideological sorting. And of course, that’s not the way it was for most of the 20th century. I think today when people look back for that bipartisan age, they forget that they had to be bipartisan back then. If you were a Liberal, you had to find the Liberal votes in your party and the Liberal votes in the other party. If you are Conservative, you have to find them in your party and the other party. That’s how things got done. And so the sorting has moved a lot of that natural need for bipartisanship out of the process. But the way to really – to do that and talk about that is to bring some of these past figures to life to show them, yes, there were Liberal Republicans in the ‘60s. And yes, there were some Democrats who were Conservatives to really bring these figures to life and to show how that sorting out started from the ‘60s onward. Julian Zelizer: And it takes time for writing to younger audiences but also more mature audiences. We really forget how this evolution happened from the 1960s. I mean that has been part of our mission. And back to your – I’m going to think, back to the Cold War question, my first job was at SUNY Albany. I’ll never forget. I had a huge lecture on the US since the ‘30s. And I taught this great lecture I thought on the Cold War and I had all these things I learned as a graduate student. I gave this multipoint lecture with lots of examples about the Cold War. Finished. I was walking out. And one student nicely said, “Professor, can I ask you a question?” She was like, “What’s the Cold War?” [Laughter] And that always stuck with me and it stuck with me as we wrote this book, whether it’s about the end of the Cold War, whether it’s about how divided parties became pretty internally united that part of what we are trying to do with the book is recapture things we assumed we understand but actually were more dynamic, complex, and contested since the 1970s than we remember. Chris Martin: Right. I actually moved to America in 1995 and I remember when I moved here, a friend of mine tried to explain the difference between the parties to me and it was actually a complex discussion which it would not be that complex right now. Julian Zelizer: Well, Newt Gingrich ran – I mean he replaced John Flynt as some of you might remember was a Southern Democrat of a different variety than most current Democrats. And Gingrich was one of the people who understood the new possibilities, partisan possibilities that were unfolding in areas of the country like the South. Chris Martin: So one of the people featured on the cover of your book is Phyllis Schlafly. The peak of her influence was in the 1970s so she is another figure that younger Americans might not 3 be that familiar with. Yet, she was perhaps as influential as some presidents. Can you talk about her influence and why she is such an interesting figure? Kevin Kruse: Yes. Schlafly is really a fascinating figure for us. She really was a motivator for movement conservatism and really probably embodied better than anyone else the family values politics that rise up in the 1970s. And she is a fascinating figure because her life story is one in which it seems like a feminist success story. She is a lawyer, a mover, shaker in Republican party of politics, overshadows her husband in a lot of ways. But her politics are decidedly antifeminist. And so, she leads the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. And when Equal Rights Amendment came out of Congress in 1972, it seemed like it was going to automatically pass.

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