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How fundamentally wrong or right are the economic theories we use to design much of our social and governmental policy? According to Nick Hanauer, the Seattle-based entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate for fighting inequality, and Eric Beinhocker, an economist at the Blavatnik School of Government and executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford, they are, in fact, all the way wrong. According to the pair, the past century or so of scholarship in many different fields has proven just how wrong early economic thinkers were in their basic assumptions about how people think, how they interact with each other, and how societies grow and address human needs—and that should make us question the basics of almost all economic thinking. We should throw it all out, they say, and replace it with a new set of ideas they call market humanism. To do so would upend the neoliberal assumptions that have driven federal policymaking on both the right and the left for the past 50 years, and place human well-being and advancement at the center of our government’s economic policy.I spoke with Hanauer about his work, the book he and Beinhocker are currently writing, why they think our concepts of economics should be replaced by something new, and how this “comically ambitious” project can be achieved.[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]Who did you all write this for? Who are you hoping reads this, and what do you hope that they do with it? Is it policymakers, is it lawmakers, is it candidates?Eric Beinhocker and I are writing a book on all this stuff. We have a manuscript, but it’s 500 pages long, and it’s not done, and the world is on fire. We think we have something important and novel to say, so we scrambled to put together—we call it a booklet—aimed at the kinds of people who care deeply and think deeply about these issues, and that is policymakers, political candidates, policy professionals, journalists, people who take this stuff quite seriously.Part of your thinking is that the failures of neoliberalism have led to this rise of right-wing authoritarianism, but that’s not the only thing they led to. There has been a renewed interest in socialism and democratic socialism. I’m wondering if those are part of what you’re talking about, or if you see those as insufficient responses.Oh, definitely insufficient responses. I think we need to rip economics down to the studs. Economics is the operating system of the world, and it affects us in ways that we can both describe, and sometimes in ways that we are unaware of. It affects our culture, it affects our norms, it affects our sensitivities, it affects … the information that is around us, and how we see it, and how we process it. We have lived under, in my view, a paradigm that has produced a lot of toxic consequences because it was both based on a bunch of assumptions about how the world works that were never true, and it was weaponized to advance the interests of a very small group of people. Neoliberalism creates a permission structure for the worst kind of people doing the worst kind of things.When you say rip economics down to the studs, I’m thinking about how it’s been a really long time since I’ve read The Wealth of Nations, but you know, Adam Smith conceived his theories partly because he thought that it would make the world better for more people. We had an economic system before neoliberalism. I’m wondering why we can’t just go back to that?Because we’ve learned so much. I mean, there are elements of Keynesianism embedded in market humanism, for example, the commonsense notion that if nobody has any money, who will buy the stuff, correct? But Keynes, for example, didn’t have a twenty-first-century way of understanding what innovation was and where it came from. And he didn’t understand markets as complex adaptive systems, and didn’t have an alternative to GDP as a measure of welfare—and had not disentangled what Homo economicus was and implied relative to Homo sapiens, and what those differences imply with respect to policy. Keynes was more right than Milton Friedman, but both relied on an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understanding of the dynamics of human social systems, and I just think that the scholarship around this stuff has come a long way. We can now harness that scholarship and organize it into a coherent, internally consistent framework, which pretty accurately describes economic cause and effect in a twenty-first-century way.So you’re not getting rid of a lot of the useful components of economic theory, which is money and markets themselves?No, no, no, no. I mean, we are getting rid of some economic concepts which are not useful, but of course, money is an important social technology to enable markets to work, and markets, I would argue, are one of the most important social technologies human societies have ever created—but not for the reasons that the neoliberals tell you, which is that they are efficient allocators of scarce resources. That is not true. It’s just factually incorrect. What markets are, they are evolutionary systems in which effective businesses, which you can think of as organisms, compete to fill niches against organisms that are also trying to compete to fill those niches. What they enable is groups of people, people who are unrelated to one another, to cooperate at scale to solve complex problems.Solving human problems is what prosperity truly is. If you redefine prosperity as solutions—effectively the accumulation of solutions to human problems—then you can quite easily see that markets are evolutionary systems designed to solve problems, or should be. If they are well managed, they are designed to solve problems.The reason I think socialism is inadequate is: first, a political reason, which is, if you poll socialism outside of New York City or Berkeley, it’s a dead loser, and I want to win. And if you take the word seriously, it doesn’t mean what people think it means. It means state ownership of the means of production. While socialism answers one economic question—which is, “How should we distribute our prosperity?”—it has nothing to say about how we generate future prosperity, and that’s why I believe that Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, he is a market humanist. He just doesn’t know it, right?I can see how this would remake how people think about policy decisions and remake how they think about longer-term decisions about how to set things up in a lot of different fields and markets. But I’m wondering if you have ideas on how to translate this into retail politics? Is this something that candidates can use to pitch a whole different idea of economics to voters?Well, we’re in dialogue with a lot of candidates who are loving it.… So take Graham Platner, obviously, [he] is having a few issues right now, but if you focus on [his] narrative message, which I friggin love, all of it comes from this place of: “You have been screwed. This is unfair. We can have it better.” But the economic context that he is working within codes every single thing he wants to do as bad for the economy. If you look at the empirical evidence, everything he wants to do is actually good for the economy. I mean, there is a reason why GDP growth rates went from 4, 4.5 percent to 2 percent a year as soon as the neoliberals took over. Their policy agenda wasn’t good for growth, it was bad for growth—other than the bank accounts of the very rich.Here is a fact that animates a lot of our work. By a margin of about two-to-one, Americans believe that the purpose of economic policy is to grow the pie, not to cut it up differently. What that means is that if you do not have, as a political party, a compelling theory of growth, then you cannot durably lead. The Democratic Party hasn’t had a theory of growth in 50 years. For 50 years, Republicans have been saying, “We can grow the economy,” and Democrats have been saying, “We can make the economy fairer.” And the consequence of that extraordinarily stupid strategic decision was two things: The first is that you lost the debate two-to-one every time you did it, but worse, you ratified their theory of growth. And that’s why Republicans consistently outpoll Democrats on the economy. If the economy is the most important thing to most people by a long margin, that is not a great strategy. You have to own growth. And here’s the good news: All of the empirical evidence says we do, you just have to not believe the neoliberals. Now you get to make an argument that not only will we have a fairer economy that more fully includes everyone in it, but it will also grow faster for everyone.When you think about neoliberalism and Friedman-ism, it’s had a 50-year head start. And so, is this kind of a long project about explaining something new to people, and do we have time for it? Because you said the world is on fire right now.You know, Monica, I have been writing about this for 15 or 20 years. I can only do what I can do. I do not believe it is possible to build an economy that reasonably includes the majority of citizens in it, and can address other challenges like climate change, without getting rid of neoliberalism. The three challenges of our age are inequality, climate, and democracy, and neoliberalism is terrible for all three of those things. If we want to have a world that I think all of us would like to live in, you better change the operating system that defines how that world works, by ripping economics down to the studs. You may be right, this may all be for naught. We may be too late.I don’t know if we’re too late. It’s a big task, I think.Just to be clear, I am aware of the fact that this is comically ambitious. Comically ambitious. But you know, you have to start somewhere, right? Somebody has to throw down and say the emperor has no clothes. There is a better way.

In 2018, David Tyson Jr., an African American, sued Richardson Independent School District in Texas for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In the district’s 164-year history, Tyson was the only person of color ever to serve on the school board. Yet, at the time of the lawsuit, white students made up less than 30 percent of the district while Black and Hispanic students made up nearly 60 percent.When Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it gave communities the tools to combat these kinds of racial harms. Section 2 of the act outlaws state and local governments from enacting voting rules that result in racial discrimination. One of the undersung aspects of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais—for which there has been much hue and cry over the way it’s paved the path for right-wing state governments to draw majority-minority federal districts out of existence—is that it cuts away at this protection for local governments, as well, rendering it “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Kagan laments in her dissent.While the media has focused on Callais’s impact on Congress in the 2026 midterms, its darkest mark will be on local governments. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been most frequently applied to address and remedy local electoral practices, not state ones. Its use heralded diverse school boards and city councils where national minorities, by virtue of being local majorities, can govern.Through this phenomenon, diversity develops twice over. First, through representational diversity and second, through institutional diversity. Minorities can see themselves represented on school boards, county commissions, and city councils. And they can harness that representation to institute local governments that do not look like state or national government. These more representative governments are more likely to become local laboratories willing to conduct policy experiments or try alternative governance approaches that the broader polity dismisses or ignores. This is why diversity at the level of individuals and institutions cultivates a rich democracy. Callais endangers these sites of local democracy by hollowing out Section 2 protections.But back in 2018 when Tyson filed his lawsuit, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was still intact. We can look back in time to see its salutary effects. Tyson told a “tale of two districts,” where—unsurprisingly—a ceaselessly homogeneous school board had harmful consequences for the Richardson school district. Elementary schools where at least 70 percent of the students met grade level in two or more subjects were two-thirds white—and the vast majority were not economically disadvantaged. By contrast, the lowest-performing elementary schools were predominantly made up of Black, Latino, and economically disadvantaged students. Atop the startling peak of disparity was the 60-point achievement gap between the district’s highest-performing school, which was predominantly white, and its lowest-performing school, which was predominantly Latino.These racial inequities did not go unnoticed by the Black and Latino voters of Richardson. And yet, Richardson’s school board remained persistently white for one reason: the district’s voting practices. While white students constituted a minority in the district’s schools, white voters still comprised a majority of the district’s population. These demographics, combined with an at-large, district-wide voting scheme where every voter in the district voted in every school board election, meant that minority voters would never succeed in electing a candidate of their choice. The minority vote would always be diluted against the white vote. The school board—whether under the threat of ongoing litigation or by a genuine change of heart—agreed to end this pernicious status quo. In 2019, Richardson Independent School District settled. As part of the settlement, the district moved toward a single-member district voting model. Specifically, it instituted an electoral scheme that allows voters within a predefined border to elect a board member to represent them—similar to congressional districting. Two of the five single-member districts in Richardson were drawn to ensure that Black and Latino voters were the majority. Voters from these districts later elected Regina Harris, the first Black woman, and Debbie Rentería, the first Hispanic person, to serve on the school board.Richardson was not alone in making this kind of change. In response to immigration and changing racial demographics, the late 2010s saw a spate of lawsuits across school boards in North Texas alleging violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Many of these districts settled and moved to electoral systems that gave voters of color greater voice in their representation. Grand Prairie Independent School District, which has a majority-Hispanic student population, gained two Hispanic seats on its previously all-white school board following one of these lawsuits. Likewise, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, a majority-Latino district, secured its first Hispanic board member in over 20 years.   The Callais decision threatens to upend this progress. Callais began with the 2020 census, which found that Louisiana’s Black population had grown to nearly one-third of the state’s population. Despite this shift in the racial makeup of the state, Louisiana legislators voted to keep the state’s congressional district the same as the decade prior—with five majority-white districts and one majority-Black district. After a Section 2 lawsuit was filed against the state, a federal district court mandated that Louisiana redraw the map with a second majority-Black district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. In response, Louisiana changed its map by moving Black voters to create two majority-minority districts to reflect the census results, which involved, by definition, looking at voters’ race. Plaintiffs—describing themselves as “non-African-American” voters—challenged this new map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed. In doing so, it raised the bar of what constitutes a Section 2 violation. Previously, to prove a violation of Section 2, a plaintiff needed to satisfy the three-part test established by the 1986 Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles to show that a voting rule has discriminatory effects on minority voters. Callais contorted that test. While the court stopped short of holding that only intentional racial discrimination violates Section 2, the new evidentiary demands it has placed on would-be plaintiffs create that requirement in practice. After Callais, a plaintiff would need to prove that the redistricting cannot be explained by partisan affiliation. Because voting preferences often correlate with race, controlling for party affiliation and proving racial intent is a near-impossible feat. In more concrete terms, Black voters tend to vote Democrat and white voters tend to vote Republican. If a Republican-led state legislature gerrymandered Black constituents out of a vote, it would be extremely challenging to attribute this action to racial animus as opposed to partisan gamesmanship. Callais’s logic applied downstream to local politics makes electoral changes—like the ones in Richardson—impossible to imagine. Many local governmental bodies, like school boards and city councils, employ the same at-large electoral system that Richardson used. Half of Section 2 cases were brought against at-large electoral systems to push them toward single-member districting in an effort to undilute minority voting power. Now these localities face less legal pressure to change. Even more discouraging, districts like Richardson might revert to electoral practices that disfavor minority voters—and foster the achievement gaps that Black and Latino voters aimed to fix by winning a seat at the table.This will have devastating consequences for local politics. In the eight years since the Section 2 lawsuit was brought, Richardson has seen an increasingly diverse school board that added an African American Studies course for its high schoolers—even as Texas and national politics moved in a more conservative direction. While neighboring school districts descended into the culture wars and banned books about gender and race, the district took a more measured approach. Richardson is a parable with a simple lesson: When local governments look like the populations they govern, they can make policies that accurately reflect local preferences instead of parroting national or state politics. This makes Americans feel closer to the government that serves them most closely. Callais dismantles the legal mechanism that makes this form of democracy possible, and we are all worse off for it.

Republicans are about to inflict a rather strange vision of masculinity on America, one that is less the Triumph of the Will that they wanted, and more Idiocracy. The political messaging to their audience is simple: Democratic men are all gay transgender tofu-eating double-Communist weenies, and you don’t want to be that, do you?It’s been heading in this direction for a long time, but it came into stark relief when White House aide Stephen Miller accused Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico of being transgender. “He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.” This followed attacks on Talarico by his opponent, Ken Paxton, who called him “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “James Tala-freak-o.” Fox host Jesse Watters called him a “gay vegan.”To set the record straight, Talarico isn’t transgender, he isn’t gay, and he’s not even a vegan. Also, unlike Paxton, he isn’t a scandal-plagued attorney general who narrowly avoided indictments for securities fraud and bribery. Paxton let a child predator off with one day in jail and no sex offender registration because he was an influential Republican. Paxton has been involved in multiple cheating scandals, but to Republican strategists, the fact that Talarico once ate a meatless breakfast wrap and doesn’t promise to eradicate transgender people makes him less of man. Accusing Democratic politicians of being transgender or transgender allies has deep historical parallels with Nazi Germany. Nazis routinely accused political opponents of being Jews, having Jewish blood, or being “friends of the Jews.” Today, Republicans use transgender people in the same way. They present 0.5 percent of the population as simultaneously a dire threat that is destroying the country and pathetically weak and disgusting. They promise that only when “those” people and all their supporters are gone will the country truly be great again. Indeed, both Project 2025 and the Republican legislative agenda, Project 47, bear eerie similarities to the past. Republicans offer a vision of manhood that is meant to look like a parade of Aryan Übermenschen but instead comes across as a depressingly absurd circus sideshow. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does push-ups and pull-ups badly, while bench-pressing what appear to be fake plates. His performative masculinity in his speeches makes it clear why he was forced out of the National Guard before he could be promoted beyond the rank of major. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes all-beef diets, raw milk, and shooting up on steroids, while looking and sounding like a Tom Waits outtake.For a group that actively reviles gay people, the Republicans and their influencers are surprisingly averse to women. Fascist influencer Nick Fuentes has a lot to say about women, despite being a virgin, never having been in a relationship, and insisting that “having sex with women is gay.” Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate argued that any sex with women strictly for “feeling good” without the possibility of procreation is “super gay.” He has also suggested that “true alpha” men shouldn’t waste their time with women for physical release. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has promoted getting a suntan on your scrotum and perineum as a way to increase testosterone for “real men.”™Even Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville recently got in on the “it’s gay to have a girlfriend” narrative. He declared on Fox News, “They’re now called the socialist, globalist Democrats, and it’s just unfortunate.… They’ve left their base of middle-class and union workers, and now, their new girlfriend is illegal aliens and women.”This cavalcade of over-the-top performative hypermasculinity ends up looking a lot more like Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy than anything depicted by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Idiocracy captures this current trend, with characters who are moronic describing the one average-intelligence, non-moronic human of “talking like a f-g.” In the movie, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho (played by a jacked Terry Crews) is a pro wrestler who randomly sprays the air with machine-gun fire during his State of the Union speech while promising to fix everything. The character highlights how a society stripped of critical thinking elevates leaders who perform “strength” over those who possess actual competence. The performance of power has become the definition of power.Idiocracy—which, remember, came out 20 years ago—depicts a trashed White House with a destroyed East Wing, inhabited by a cadre of unqualified idiots and in-laws working for a “five-time ultimate smackdown champion” and porn star president. In the real world, the East Wing is a smoldering wreck, Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is reduced to an outdoor strip-mall food court, and an Ultimate Fighting Championship fighting ring is being built on the grounds to honor a president long associated with World Wrestling Entertainment and Jeffrey Epstein. Idiocracy repeatedly highlighted how frighteningly dumb over-the-top masculinity was and what it would look like if it came to power. The answer was a society that thought it was a good idea to water your crops with a sports drink (Brawndo), leading to famine. According to the movie, this world where famine was a result of stupidity wasn’t supposed to exist until 500 years in the future. But today in real-life America … well, have you seen the price of groceries lately?  Performative masculinity relies on emotional reactivity. Whenever the future society in the movie faces a problem, their instinct is to shoot a gun into the air or scream, mimicking an angry toddler. Now, anytime something doesn’t go President Trump’s way, he threatens to have people imprisoned via angry rants on Truth Social, occasionally coating the walls of his home in ketchup in a fit of rage.Poe’s law is an internet adage stating that without a clear indicator of the author’s intent (like a winking emoji or tone indicator), it is virtually impossible to distinguish a parody of extreme views from a sincere expression of those views. Today, I’m not sure how you could parody how the United States has descended into a form of performative weirdness that was considered too over the top just 20 years ago.Perhaps the saddest part of this for me is remembering how masculinity used to be idealized in movies. I grew up with The Right Stuff and Chuck Yeager as the pinnacle of what an American man should be. He was portrayed as unpretentious, honest, confident, intelligent, competent, brave, calm, and dedicated to his wife. He stole the show in a movie that was theoretically about the Mercury Seven astronauts. Today, that form of masculinity seems positively anachronistic.More’s the pity.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. Kathy Roberts Ford is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she’s been a frequent guest. We’re going to talk about some of the questions about—she writes about journalism and its connection to democracy, and we’re going to talk about that and a few things that happened in the news the last few weeks. Kathy, welcome. Thanks for joining me again.Kathy Roberts Ford: Oh, so great to be here, Perry. Appreciate it.Bacon: So I want us to talk first about the 60 Minutes story, which has become personalized in a certain way—it’s Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley, and those are important people in the journalism world. But what I want to ask you is: What should we think of 60 Minutes, this venerated news program, having its top producers and three correspondents leave in the same week, a new person put in charge who doesn’t seem to know much about television news? How should we think about that in the democracy context, as opposed to the Bari Weiss versus Scott Pelley framing?Roberts Ford: Yeah, I really like the way you’re framing that, Perry. I think it’s really easy for those of us observing to fall into the personnel drama and the personal drama of it all …And not just Scott Pelley, but all of the employees and producers and folks at 60 Minutes. It’s really personal, and it’s incredibly hard, and there is all that drama and deep personal experience. But at the end of the day, what matters most here is that CBS News and 60 Minutes are being recruited into the federal administration’s authoritarian project. And that’s really a huge problem for the news today and the press writ large.60 Minutes has incredible symbolic value among journalists in this country and among the older generation of news consumers, because it has such a very old lineage and an incredible reputation for doing really hard-hitting, elite public affairs journalism with a focus on politics—and not just politics, but a strong focus on and access to some of the most powerful political operators and players and leaders in the country’s history.So when you have these mergers and the ownership being used by the federal administration as a way to control CBS News and 60 Minutes—with Bari Weiss installed there, and the new executive producer, I’ve forgotten his name—Bacon: Nick Bilton.Roberts Ford: Yeah, that’s it. This is a recruitment and an attempt to capture independent, hard-hitting, truth-telling journalism that holds power to account—for the service of what I view, and maybe many of your audience does too, as an authoritarian project.Bacon: Let me—you said CBS is being used in service of the authoritarian project. Connect the dots here a little bit. Donald Trump is not calling CBS and saying, Air this and not this. And if you listen to Scott Pelley, what he seemed to be saying was that Bari Weiss interjects to make programming a little bit more pro-Trump than it would otherwise be. So talk about how exactly Trump connects to what CBS does each day.Roberts Ford: Yeah. I think certainly in the 60 Minutes context, what we’re understanding—or at least what we think we know from the witnesses and those who are in the middle of it, reporting out—and I think the most recent revelations in the New York Times daily podcast interview with Scott Pelley—by his account, what we have learned or think we know is that Bari Weiss was asking 60 Minutes to change its coverage of the ICE raid in Minneapolis.And that in fact Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes to make the protesters look more violent—make the point that Renee Good’s car was driving directly at the ICE officer, which, based on the evidence that many of us have seen, does not seem to be accurate. So there was an attempt to match the narrative coming out of the federal administration—that the Minnesota protesters, and Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were in fact being terrorists, in their words.Bacon: Yes.Roberts Ford: That may not have been Bari Weiss’s point—the terrorist thing, exactly—but there did seem to be, according to Scott Pelley, an effort to change the narrative and shape it so it fit the Trump administration’s narrative more closely.Bacon: You said 60 Minutes has a lot of respect among the older audience particularly. I think that’s correct. So talk about network news in this era, because I think one thing I do want to emphasize is: Why is network news important? My guess is a lot of people, particularly under 40, do not consume 60 Minutes this week, any of the Sunday shows, any of that stuff. Does that stuff—do we in the media think—are we in the media and people who are over 40 thinking about 60 Minutes too much, one? And do these shows still matter at all, two?Roberts Ford: Number one, they’re incredibly symbolic to the older generation, and they matter in the political sphere.Because no matter what the reality is about viewership, it does matter to politicos and policy areas—being on these shows and having public discourse happen through the mediation of broadcast news, and in particular 60 Minutes, and cable news, of course. I do think also that our information ecosystem—it may not be that we have viewers tuning in to 60 Minutes, but we do have clips that are circulating broadly all over social media. And it may be that the outrage algorithms feed them into certain audiences’ feeds more readily, but this is still a really powerful way in which these broadcast news programs get circulated. They still have—I think—and we don’t have a really great way of measuring yet how they circulate—Bacon: They have impact. They set the agenda. The pure ratings are not a good way to think about these shows.Roberts Ford: I agree.Bacon: Let me ask—I wrote last week after this happened that she’s very wisely trying to turn CBS into a polite version of Fox News. And then I read another piece saying what the real goal is is to make it anodyne—the political pieces less hard-hitting—turn 60 Minutes into CBS This Morning, which is a very good program but is not as hard-hitting and not as investigative. So what is your sense of what she’s trying to do with CBS? Do you have any assessment of that? Because I think Fox News, but lighter—there are elements of that, but that’s probably not exactly right.Roberts Ford: I am really not sure. I think it’s still too early to tell. I think the fact that you’re having this framing disagreement with someone else who’s a really close watcher of the news is indicative that we’re not quite sure exactly what’s playing out and how, and what the outcomes are going to be. But the stakes are high—I think we know that much.And when you have the independence of news organizations and a program and journalists like 60 Minutes being dismantled in this way, it’s not a good sign and is in fact something that we should be concerned with.I’m very interested in—I think we in America, as news consumers, do not have a very good understanding of the U.S. experience with authoritarianism in this country. We have long experience with it. It just wasn’t at the federal level—it was at the state level. And this is what happened across the U.S. Southern states after Reconstruction. You had overthrows of legitimate, elected state governments. You had violent overthrows in many states by the party of white supremacists—Democrats. But what you got at the end of the day was racial authoritarianism and these Jim Crow orders, one-party rule. You had authoritarian governance at the state level.And the press—the white Southern newspapers that were aligned with the Democratic project—they were part of building that. They were active political players.Roberts Ford: Yeah. And when we think about the authoritarian project today happening at the federal level and some states— Bacon: Some of these same states from before, in some ways. Yes.Roberts Ford: Yeah! We have to understand: The press is not simply a referee. The press is not a neutral bystander. The press is not simply a chronicler. It’s not just calling balls and strikes. It is a political player.Even those press institutions that don’t want to be connected to a project of any kind—either a MAGA project or a pro-democracy project—they want to somehow stand apart from it. But none do, at the end of the day. The press has First Amendment protections so it can be that fourth estate—it can play its role in public discourse and in public life.And so it’s a dream—it’s an absolute fantasy to imagine that the press isn’t itself a political player. It’s something we need to account for and think really carefully about: think about in what ways certain norms and professional standards of the press can be inadvertently not up to the charge of the moment? Which is what I think the press should be doing—a kind of pro-democracy journalism. What that means is incredibly contested. We haven’t quite figured it out yet.Bacon: We’ll get back to that.Roberts Ford: You do it well. Other institutions do it well. But a lot don’t.Bacon: So the Southern analogy—the post-Reconstruction analogy—is interesting: The Southern newspapers participated in the political project of white supremacy. They were not—the owners of those papers were not necessarily picked by the government, right? How were they—how did the owners—what was the line between the governors in the Southern states and the politicians and the newspapers? How did that compare to today? Were they formally aligned, informally aligned, not at all aligned? Did they have the same goals, or were they working in concert? How did that work?Roberts Ford: Yeah. In many cases, they might have had a formal alliance with the Democratic Party—Bacon: The Democratic Party in the South, just to be clear.Roberts Ford: Yeah, the Democratic Party in the South during this period—Bacon: The early period, like nineteenth century—the racist party.Roberts Ford: Not today’s Democratic Party at all, to be clear to everyone. But it was largely just coalitional. These were collaborative projects, in which politicians—governors, state legislatures, representatives, and senators to the U.S. Congress—worked with business leaders. And, by the way, newspaper editors and their owners were business leaders. They worked collaboratively together on a single political project. Not that their interests were always closely aligned, but they were broadly aligned. And they worked really proactively together on all kinds of projects that built authoritarian rule in the South and that excluded a huge portion of the population—Black Americans.Bacon: You were referring to the media wanting to be neutral, and it made me think of that Jay Rosen phrase, “the view from nowhere.” A lot of news outlets want to say, We don’t have ... our ideology is nothing. We just cover the news. “All the news that’s fit to print” is a version of that—that’s the New York Times slogan. And I guess the point you’re making is: Covering the news is inherently a political act. How you cover it is a political act. And the question is, are you going to be MAGA, pro-democracy, something else? Your point is that news organizations in some ways have to think about their own values and what values they’re espousing—not necessarily partisan values, but democratic values.Roberts Ford: Yeah, democratic values. There’s room enough in this world of news, the news ecosystem in the United States, to have some partisan news organizations. But when that partisanship leads to disinformation, spreading disinformation; when it leads to ginning up violence, political violence of some kind, or giving a permission structure for political violence; when it leads to any of the things that we understand to be—Bacon: Democracy-eroding or—Roberts Ford: Yeah. Trying to undermine democracy. Trying to dominate certain groups within the United States political body or the public. When it’s actively doing things that are harmful to the public good and to the creed of the Declaration of Independence, or when they’re against the rule of law—all these things tear us apart, and neutrality doesn’t serve us.And a bothsidesism kind of journalism—journalism that has a pretense toward being objective and detached and removed and calling balls and strikes—we need a journalism that is covering the power structure and covering what actors are actually doing and what they get out of a conflict.Bacon: And again, I think people always think that means partisan, but in reality, in most small cities, there are a few business owners who have a lot of control. It doesn’t matter what party they’re in—there’s often a power structure in cities or states, and that’s what we want the journalists to be policing. And you would say they should police the Democratic versions of that, capital D, and the Republican versions of that too. Journalism should be scrutinizing the powerful—all powerful people, right?Roberts Ford: Yes, all powerful people. And this is also part of the problem with the journalism that we live with today—so much of it is corporatized. Especially broadcast and cable news—it’s owned by major corporations that have other … tech companies, digital platform companies, entertainment companies. And the news itself is not a big moneymaker.So what this means is the ownership—these big conglomerates that own these news companies—they have other interests that they’re trying to protect in a federal environment, a regulatory environment, against litigation. And some organizations are beholden to shareholders too. This allows the powerful to exercise levers of control and recruitment in order to shape what the news actually covers, instead of there being true independence in a journalistic outlet. And this is why having truly independent journalistic outlets really matters—and we don’t have a lot of them.Bacon: It’s worth knowing that the people who own CBS—one of the Ellison family—one of the people involved in the Ellison family was a big donor to Biden in 2024. So part of what’s going on is it’s not clear that they’re archconservatives so much as they are people who know the government in charge has power, and they’re trying to make the news coverage more favorable to the government in power because of the corporate financial interests. I think what you’re getting at is the financial interests are driving this as much as the ideological. Those are related, but the financial interests are driving a lot of what’s happening here. The media companies that are so big and want to make themselves bigger—skewing the coverage for Trump may help them get mergers, which is where the real money comes from.Roberts Ford: That’s exactly it. And right now, two of the biggest dust-ups we’ve seen with CBS News have to do with mergers from their parent company. You had the Skydance merger with Paramount, back last summer, and Trump was suing CBS at the time for however many million—I can’t remember how much—over the Kamala Harris edited interview, which he was calling election interference. And Paramount just wanted that to go away. And so there was a settlement.Bacon: And the journalists were not happy about that, but as you say, the journalists have a very small financial piece of the company, and they’re not a profit center.Roberts Ford: That’s right. Not a profit center.Bacon: They’re often a profit loss, even. Yes.Roberts Ford: Exactly right. The news oftentimes is getting subsidized by the highly profitable other arms of these conglomerates.I think the lesson for us all is that we need very different ways to finance news in this country. News is a public good—it’s meant to serve the public good, meant to serve democracy and the people at large, hold power to account, cover governments, and help us do the work of being democratic citizens. And preferably help us be democratic citizens in a multiracial democracy, where everyone has equal access to protection of the law and equal access to voting and political power and economic opportunity—all of that. And yet that’s not what we’re often getting.Bacon: I want to switch topics a little bit. There was an interview that NBC News’s Kristen Welker, the host of Meet the Press, did with the president. And it went viral because the president stormed off the interview—which actually lasted a long time if you watched it, about half an hour before he leaves. But anyway, he said two things. One, he said, “Meet the Press is crooked. So is ABC, CBS, and CNN.” So CBS apparently has not sucked up enough, it seems. And then he says at the end, “A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”What do you think about the president of really any country calling the leading four networks crooked and saying the press is dishonest? How should we think about that—really the president of any country, on some level?Roberts Ford: Yeah. We’ve seen this in other countries that have been in the ascendancy in terms of authoritarian power—attacking the press, attacking universities, attacking the judiciary, attacking law firms, attacking all the institutions of accountability and truth-telling and knowledge production, institutions that truck in some form of fact-based reality and reason-making and decision-making and collective work together based on those values. To have the leader of a country attacking those very institutions is a classic authoritarian move. It’s part of a very classic authoritarian playbook, and it’s dangerous territory.We’ve been here for quite a while. We’ve been here since Trump 1.0, and here we are again, Trump 2.0, with these attacks on the press that have only, it seems to me, accelerated. And this administration has been, even more recently, able to recruit or gain some type of leverage over different news institutions.Thank goodness there are still plenty it doesn’t. We have a robust, critical, independent press in this country still. But these are long-standing, highly respected news organizations that are being attacked in these ways—and individual journalists too, especially women and especially Black women, which we all have watched with deep consternation and outrage.Bacon: Connect the—you said earlier the media reaction to these kind of comments has generally been to say, We are neutral, we are not biased. And to play into the thing you were talking about earlier: The media’s reaction to him calling us biased is to emphasize We have a view from nowhere, we are not biased. What would be an alternative reaction from the press when it’s attacked?Roberts Ford: Yeah. How do we think about what the press can do better?Bacon: I don’t know if it’s a matter of coverage, as much as the rhetorical argument. He’s saying, You are biased. Their reaction is to say, We have no views, we are objective. And you’re saying that’s not going to be that helpful. What is maybe an alternative response to that?Roberts Ford: One thing Kristen Welker did was she fact-checked him in real time—and then her network came up behind her and also provided a contextual fact-check after the interview. And that’s not enough, though.Bacon: The thing is, he said something like, Kristen, you’re a liberal crazy, and she said, No, I’m not. What should she have said? Not I am a Democrat, not I am a Black woman. What would a useful response be—“My role here is not to be partisan, my role is...” what? Because I don’t think she had a good active response to that.Roberts Ford: What do you think she should have said, Perry? I think that’s a really hard thing.Bacon: I’m not criticizing her at all. I’m just trying to think about the—Roberts Ford: No, I know you’re not. I don’t know what she could have said other than, I am simply attempting to cover the factual record and the shared reality, and provide the American people with— But all of that takes so much to say. And the ad hominem isn’t going to be really effective here, obviously—No, you.Bacon: I guess—forget about the live thing. I think there’s something to say, which is: “You’re saying we are biased toward Democrats, but we are not biased toward parties. We are biased toward facts, democracy, holding the powerful accountable. We do have values, and those values often mean we’re going to criticize you. But we also asked Joe Biden hard questions, and we criticized him a lot, too.Roberts Ford: That would be a great response if you could get all those words into a conversation with Trump. He was just speaking over her, as he always does.Bacon: But when news executives are asked in forums where it’s not people like Donald Trump, they often still lean into this sort of, “We have no views, we are...” And even in slow-motion forums, they reflexively go into this neutrality language that I think is damaging.Roberts Ford: They do, and it doesn’t work.Bacon: It doesn’t work. It is not appealing to anybody.Roberts Ford: It’s not. And it’s not accurate, is it?Bacon: It’s not accurate. It might be—there are some places that want to just publish the facts. I think that’s probably true. Some AP stories are just recitations of what is happening. And I think that’s what the push is for—you cover a speech, Barack Obama said X, Mitt Romney said Z. But I think that’s not really journalism. That might be news in a sense, but that’s not really journalism.Roberts Ford: It’s news of a certain kind, and of an older period, it seems to me. “He said, she said”—politician X said this, and politician Y said this, and they’re on two different sides, and we need to cover this conflict between the two of them. But oftentimes what’s more important is the stakes of the conflict, not the conflict itself—and weighing the evidentiary basis of the two different arguments in that conflict.And I do think that this kind of journalism that tends toward the profoundly neutral and detached often misses the importance of the stakes and the importance of naming the structures. What is really going on here in this disagreement? And that requires a kind of interpretation that sometimes takes reporters outside their comfort zone. But I do think that what is necessary in a moment of authoritarian threat is exactly that.Bacon: In the period you write a lot about—the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow period—there are Black newspapers and Black editors who are obviously writing in contradiction to what the Southern government was saying. There’s also, at some point, The New York Times and the big institutions start covering the civil rights fight, and probably with certain values—they are saying, in some ways, that the South is being racist and dictatorial. So there have been periods in which the media has expressed some values, right?Roberts Ford: Yeah, of course.Bacon: And so we want to get back to that—is that the idea?Roberts Ford: Yes. And during the late nineteenth century and across the twentieth century, up through the moment of the Civil Rights Movement, you had a very active Black press that was doing pro-democracy work. The Black press was very clear on documenting the facts—everything that happened, events, issues, et cetera. But its framework was also—Bacon: Jim Crow’s bad, slavery is bad. Lynchings are bad.Roberts Ford: Yeah. But also: We are working to build American democracy. We are working to ask the country and the states to live up to the promise of the democratic creed, to what self-governance actually is, and to inclusive citizenship. And that means access to the courts, access to justice, equal treatment under the law. It means inclusion—not segregation, but inclusion. It means not being made to be economically subordinate, having economic opportunity. It means all these things that citizenship means for us. It’s not just about voting. It’s about everything that makes us American and gives us access to—Bacon: And the news outlets actively said that in their coverage. I have not read a lot of Black newspapers in the ’40s, but—Roberts Ford: You probably have, actually. The Black press was—it was so much. Not every single one, but collectively, when you look at the Black press from the late nineteenth century all the way to the moment of the Civil Rights Movement and throughout the Civil Rights Movement, the Black press was leading the way on doing a kind of journalism that many white Americans and white newspaper leaders believed was biased.Bacon: Sure. And it was biased for democracy and for the rule of law, right?Roberts Ford: Yes. And it was very clear on calling out the self-dealing and the corrupt practices of the United States’s exclusionary federal and state-level approaches to citizenship for Black people and people of color and other groups.Bacon: Where do you see that kind of journalism today?Roberts Ford: The New Republic. But truly—you do it incredibly well, Perry. You know that. But also, I think ProPublica does an extraordinarily good job. I think a lot of smaller places are doing it best. I think we see it on Substack—there’s just a lot of great work being done there. And you see it in pockets on television news, cable and network, as well. But I think the really best stuff is coming from progressive news outlets. The Guardian, I think, does a really good job.Bacon: And this is, you think, tied to the corporate ownership of most other outlets?Roberts Ford: Oh, yeah. Don’t you?Bacon: I don’t know. I think there are two issues. There’s the corporate ownership, but I think it’s also just the norms in the news. I assume the Black press in the 1940s would not necessarily have been read by—. The media’s in this moment of wanting to reach everyone, and every outlet should reach everyone. I assume the Black press in the ’40s was not trying to reach white pro-segregationists. They didn’t assume that was necessarily their target audience, and they weren’t trying to have the Black readers and the white segregationists equally like the paper. And that’s the current goal of most news outlets.Roberts Ford: That’s for sure. But let me tell you—the white segregationists, those in power, did read the Black press because they outlawed it all over the place in the South. Which of course is another major First Amendment violation that was allowed to stand.Bacon: Yeah. The actual goal of journalism—they seem to be defining neutrality as Do we have equal approval ratings among both parties? And not even parties—Roberts Ford: Yeah. Which is—Bacon: Let me do two more things, and we’ll close out here. The first is the White House Correspondents’ Association has decided to have their dinner again—I think it’s going to be next month. The dinner got—there was an attempt of violence against the president, and the dinner was canceled. But I wanted to ask you what you think about this dinner overall. I’ll admit I’ve gone to it before—I went to it last year, in fact, when I think about it. It’s considered a prestigious thing to be invited from your organization. There are senators in the room. But I get the critique that it’s a celebration of insiderdom, and it’s even weirder when you have a president who, as I said, calls the media dishonest almost daily. So how do you view this dinner and the role of it?Roberts Ford: I have complicated feelings about it, and I think probably a lot of people do. On the one hand, it’s an organization that has historically overseen how the press pool works in the White House. And of course, the White House has now infringed on that historic role and is now choosing the White House press pool in certain ways. So that’s a problem—a significant problem. Some of its power has been removed from it.And yet here it is acceding to Trump’s demand, really, that there be a follow-up dinner, and that it be held at the hotel of his choosing—I think the Waldorf Astoria—and that he be allowed to make comments, which he has already previewed. At the first dinner, there were going to be nasty comments about the press, and now will they or won’t they be? We don’t know. Bacon: But the press is holding a dinner where the president who hates the press can attack the press. It’s a very strange dynamic.Roberts Ford: And I’m not a fan of that. I’m not a fan of there being this big gathering. The White House Press Association says—it seems to me like it’s too easy to view it as, OK, this is a form of keeping our access and building good relationships with our authoritarian-minded president. We need the access, so we’re going to do these things, and he’s asking for it, and so yes, we’re going to do it. That may not be fair—it probably isn’t fair. The White House Press Association talks about this dinner as promoting the First Amendment, celebrating the First Amendment, celebrating the role of the press in democracy. They raise money for scholarships for students to study journalism. So there’s some good there.But there seem to me to be other ways to do that. It doesn’t have to be this dinner. There will not be a comedian there because—my goodness—the comedian might possibly roast Trump or say something—we all know the history of that.Bacon: Last thing. How do you view Graham Platner running for Senate in Maine? The New York Times did a story—Roberts Ford: Yeah, the primary is today, I think.Bacon: Yeah, the primary is today. The New York Times did a piece about the various accusations, or how he treats women. It was a well-reported story—I’m not trying to criticize it. How do you think the press should cover a candidate like this? Because it’s not just the treatment of women. A lot of his Reddit comments—he has no—you can’t cover his record because he’s never held office before. He’s voted in public, but he’s never held office. How do you think we should—it seems like a lot of voters like him because he’s gruff and because he’s an outsider, but I wish I knew what he would do as a governing person. It’s nice to know if they were on the City Council or something.How do you view what the press should do? Because if you remember Zohran Mamdani—whatever you thought about him—was a state representative at that point. You could see his record. He had run campaigns. Having somebody who’s come from nowhere and is now running for the U.S. Senate is actually a very challenging thing. How do you think the media should think about covering him?Roberts Ford: I think it’s really hard. He’s an insurgent candidate. He doesn’t have the record that you speak of. And vetting candidates is what the press does—it’s a significant role for the press to play. I certainly don’t criticize the press for doing this kind of work. Why would one? It’s an important role.But I do think the same scrutiny that is being given to Platner’s candidacy—it’s a really important one. That Senate seat is a really important one. It’s important for the Democratic Party, but whatever one’s political orientation, if you care about elections and their being fair and open, we want there to be scrutiny of all candidates. And so for me, it’s a little bit about proportionality and even-handed scrutiny.And also, stories could be a little—some of the stories about these matters could also describe what’s at stake, what he says his policies are going to be. I don’t know if they should only be about the vetting—the Reddit comments, the tattoo, the Nazi symbol tattoo received while he was in the military, the sexting. I don’t know.Bacon: I like what you said, in part because we’ve had a few House members in either very red or very blue districts who miss work, don’t show up—one in New Jersey was missing for a few weeks—and we don’t cover them at all because they’re not in a contested race. But in reality, I think it’s important to say they all get a vote in Congress too. And so I wish we spread the attention.We get a lot of attention to Talarico in Texas or Susan Collins. There are a few members in Kansas we cover extensively. But in reality, even though South Carolina is not a swing state, the governor of South Carolina—who will be basically nominated today, because that’s when the primary is—influences the six or eight million people, whatever the population of South Carolina is. That person has a lot of power, and we should probably cover them too.And I do worry if we cover only swing states because they matter for the electoral map. But most people—you live in Massachusetts, I live in Kentucky—most people don’t live in swing states. And so it might be worth covering the politicians well who are going to keep getting reelected but still have a lot of influence.Roberts Ford: Yeah. Agreed. And I think we should be deeply concerned not only about who is going to be in office in the federal government, but also who’s in office at the state levels—and what are they up to? What are they doing?We have, as I said at the top of our time together, states that are deep into their own authoritarian projects, and they’re working collaboratively with the federal government. What’s going on? What can we expect? In what ways are people’s freedoms being curtailed? And what are the justifications or manipulations being handed out to voters that allow voters to accept that?And to me, it seems like there’s a kind of bait and switch. I don’t want to say that voters are being truly manipulated, but you’ve got a lot of oligarchs, a lot of people of extraordinary wealth—the billionaire class and more—who have some access to political power, and they’re running as if they’re on a populist platform with populist policies. And we don’t really see much in the way of economic reforms, efforts, policies meant to help everyday people with inflation. We don’t see policies trying to address wealth inequality. And instead, what we’re getting is the Voting Rights Act being gutted, tariffs, and another war—without these being things that people are being consulted on.Bacon: I’ve written a lot about how the big organizations—The New York Times, the Post—should have more people at the state level covering politics, particularly the states you’re talking about. But I think that collides with the neutrality problem. If you have a bunch of reporters covering Alabama’s government for a while, it would make the Republicans look worse because they’re in charge, and the Republicans in Alabama are not doing a lot of good things right now in terms of solving problems, as you say. So I think part of it is the neutrality project and also the corporate project.There’s not a ton of corporations in Alabama. The Bezos types who want to cover Silicon Valley—there’s a lot of money there. A lot of the big problem with the news organizations is that a lot of funding is concentrated in D.C., New York, and San Francisco, because that’s where the financial wealth is. You can have events, you can raise money, you can charge a very high subscriber price. But in reality, those places are—what, 5 percent of the American population?—but they have 25 percent of the journalism spending, or something like that. That’s a real thing to think about.Roberts Ford: Yeah, it’s a huge thing to think about. And in the meantime, local journalism is just in such retrenchment. We’ve had hedge fund companies and corporate entities that have gutted them. People seem more interested in national news than in their local news. And this is a real problem for local self-governance and state-level governance, as well.Bacon: Are you in the area where the Boston Globe would be the paper, or is there an Amherst paper that’s bigger?Roberts Ford: We have the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which is a very historic newspaper, and it’s hanging on.Bacon: Is it owned by Gannett or Knight Ridder, or is it independent? How’s it structured?Roberts Ford: It’s in a smaller ownership body. Regional.Bacon: Good. I think this was a great conversation. Thanks for joining me, as always.Roberts Ford: Thanks for having me. Good to see you.Bacon: Take care.Roberts Ford: You too.

Heather Cox Richardson is one of today’s unlikeliest social media stars. The Boston College historian has been teaching and writing about 19th-century America, Reconstruction, and the Civil War for decades. But it was only in 2019 that her work took off when she began writing her daily newsletter, Letters from an American, a no-nonsense analysis […]

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