America's long history of political turmoil

Corruption. Yes. Allegations of dismantling or undercutting the Constitution, of being treasonous, all those things played out. While the ink was still drying on the Constitution. Yeah. So should that, Greg, make us feel inured in these times that feel troubling or tell us what? Should we just check out and say, oh, it's been bad, we've been fine, so never mind? Or-- No, no, this is absolutely comforting if the American people continue to do the work that they have done to date, right? So there are two different ways that you can cut history or that people often do. There's this rah-rah version where we pretend everything's just always great, and we romanticize the past. Oh, if only the media was as great as it was in the past. If only our politicians agreed as they used to. Then there's the other side where we can really get into just beating ourselves up to the point that we are discouraged. To me, the hope is actually in realizing, oh, you know what? We have always been just as stupid and intelligent, beautiful and ugly, kind and generous and selfish all at once, so that all these aspects of our species have always been playing out. When you have government by the people, for the people or public that brings everyone into play, you're going to see it all there.

And when you think about the origin story for this country and the spark of genius that was this idea, not a monarchy, but a republic in which the people are sovereign, there are going to be problems. Federalist Number 10,James Madison, or Little Jimmy, as I prefer to call him-- that was his name, after all-- That was what they called him. --he makes a very "it should be so obvious to us" point that you cannot have liberty and not have partisanship. These things are hand in hand. The moment you give people the freedom to have an opinion, you're going to get two opinions, at least. So he has this analogy where he basically says that just like it'd be stupid to get rid of oxygen because you don't want to deal with fire or the problems that can come with fire, you can't get rid of liberty to get rid of partisanship. You have to accept, partisanship is a part of liberty. So if we can make peace with that first, I think that's an important, initial step. But then we get to the second part, Little Jimmy's next little nugget of wisdom, and that is we do still have to control it. So that is all part of what I'm trying to tackle in the book, is, first of all, reminding Americans that, one, this is a part of having a republic. You want the liberty and freedom that comes with a constitutional republic, you got to deal with the partisanship. That's going to be there. But second is, that doesn't mean it has to go off the rails. If we can stick with James Madison's comparison, fire can either illuminate the night and cook our food, or it can burn our house down. That is up to us.

What's your best favorite story of "been there, done that" to help someone now concerned about what we're dealing with maybe get a sense contextually of a dark time?

Yeah, you're asking me to pick between my children here.

Yes, I know. I know. But I'm going to go with-- I'm going to go with Chapter 7, the election of 1876. You have-- A practical meltdown of the entire-- Everything-- everything. Yeah, I mean, murder. South Carolina cast 101% of its votes.

Right. Not easy to do, folks.

Yeah, I'm a historian. I live in the humanities, but I can handle that math. I know something's wrong there, OK? And then you've got four states that send-- so we're not just talking about Congress questioning the electoral returns. We're talking about Congress having to assess which set of returns because four states sent more than one set. Florida sent three. Of course it's Florida.

Right, exactly. Lots of Florida men there.

Oh. [LAUGHTER] You can listen to my full and very animated conversation with Greg Jackson on your favorite podcast platform.