Progressive Era

So I do think that that was very deliberately designed and installed was my impression.

I think you're definitely correct for the progressive era.

And in the progressive era, the view was and the fear was that, oh, we need to beat both the robber barons and the unions, right? And the unions today, we don't think of them that way.

But at the time, they were considered a dangerous form of mob rule.

Well, at the time, they were, you know, the literal bomb throwers who, you know, they'd be going up against, you know, the factory owners would, like, hire a couple of thugs with, like, you know, most of them would be coming and carrying bats, and one would have a machine gun, and then the unions would get together and, like, burn down the place in the middle of the night when the goons are gone, and, yeah, it was much more, it was...

It's, in a way, we both talk about this as sort of the culmination of everything we think we know about the presidency and can document.

And what we try to do in the book is to provide, uh, an explanation of the vast expansion of presidential power throughout all of American history, but with special attention to the modern era, which basically, you know, you can define it differently, but it starts, uh, during the Progressive Era around 1900, uh, and comes up to the present, um, and how this, uh, expansion of presidential power ultimately, uh, gave rise to a strongman presidency whose power was, uh, so expansive, um, and whose violation of, uh, the rule of law and fundamental norms of democracy was so egregious that, uh, it threatens to bring our democracy down.

And when we're s- when we're talking about this concept of the strongman, which is usually a term that's applied not to the United States, but to other countries, for listeners who are not as familiar as presidential scholars might be, um, or scholars of executive might be, can you define the sort of idea of the strongman, particularly in this context?

Well, I think, uh, Trump himself put it nicely, you know, when he said, "I have an Article Two of where I can do whatever I want." Right? So he thinks the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants, right? And this is, uh, what strongman leadership is all about.

A- and it gets worse, you know, because it also involves the, uh, um, uh, uh, enlistment of violence on occasions, as you can see when, uh, ICE agents are tackling people in the streets and sometimes killing people, you know? Um, so this is what it's come to, and I think this is what you can expect from a strongman, uh, who sees himself as unconstrained by democratic, uh, um, uh, norms and traditions, uh, but also simply by the law, right? If the law gets in his way, he ignores it.

Yeah.

And, and certainly this is the case that we are seeing in lots of ways, um, around the Trump administration, particularly the Trump administration 2.0. Um, but you all also go back to, um, the Progressive Era, um, and, and you do a lovely job in this book.

I very much appreciate the historical background of a sort of tracing the rise of an expansion of presidential power along with the expansion of what we know of as the administrative state.

It goes back many decades, just as most referendum provisions in state constitutions do.

The referendum device whereby voters weigh in after the legislature has passed a law- It is one of a number of devices that some states, tending to be west of the Mississippi, injected into their state constitutions around 100 years ago during the Progressive Era, in the first decade-plus of the 20th century.

So it's no coincidence that a lot of the states that have the most potent direct, direct democracy devices, the initiative, the recall of public officials, the referendum, a lot of them tend to be west of the Mississippi, so California, Washington, Arizona, Oregon.

Missouri happens to have a somewhat robust direct democracy provision in its constitution in the form of this referendum.

In Ohio, the elected lawmakers had redrawn the congressional district lines.

The Ohio Constitution in 1912 had put in a referendum device.

I said it was during the Progressive Era.

That was smack dab in the middle of the Progressive Era.

and we got politics came up inevitably politics comes up at every you know event and um it actually came up originally and my brother talking about the financial system in the us and i went back to the federal reserve and was teaching him about

the reconstruction era and how it transitioned into the progressive era and uh woodrow wilson and and the 16th 17th amendments the destruction that that did to our nation the federal reserve and just giving them that kind of history level uh

lesson broad like overview and from there like i i gotta say i was i was I was pleasantly surprised by some of the admissions from my TDS family member, but at the same time, it made more obvious than ever, it highlighted more than ever the tribalism in know politics and and so when i when i have these conversations and i apologize for going off on this little you know anecdote here but when i have these little conversations i always especially when it's somebody that's coming from trump derangement syndrome i try and navigate it without first bringing up trump because you know this is something i've talked about with with with ash and some others that the massey mtg tucker op i think is fracturing from trump still all the same policies as trump right if you went back and watched that that brandon struck a walk away debate which was absolutely stupid so bad so bad but all they were doing was literally arguing about who's more maga than the other it's just the other side's branded america first it's literally what the whole thing was And so when I come at somebody that has Trump derangement syndrome, I try and do it without bringing up Trump.

i let them talk and then i just you know kind of fire back at them but you know like one of the things that came up we were talking about vaccines and and my brother who's really based my brother's incredibly based um you know he was like well vaccines should should be a choice or whatever well there's been a hundred measles deaths you know so far in the united states because of these vaccines and and and the the hesitancy around vaccines and i had to cut in there And this was like, you cut in and hold on, hold on, hold on.

There would be promises of reform.

And that actually did slowly kind of move things forward to the point where we reached, in the progressive era, what they called industrial democracy, a feeling among progressives and even government officials that there must be a better way to do this.

It's hurting productivity and profits.

And also, it's just we don't want to have this kind of... large group of unruly, angry people in our nation's

But, you know, the, the mythology anyway is that in the Gilded Age it was really the market and p- entrepreneurial monopoly capitalists that had control over the direction of production.

That's the Progressive Era.

Mm-hmm.

But the progressive era, the reforms don't really start happening until kind of late in that era.

So they start happening with Theodore Roosevelt.

Right.