Heather Cox Richardson Joins The Best People With Nicolle Wallace (2026-07-26)

[Desk transcript — faster-whisper small, int8, captured from the channel's broadcast audio at 2026-07-26T02:36:35.217026+00:00. Not a broadcaster caption file.] necessarily the history so much as their connection to the people. Because it's not like Lincoln invented this out of whole cloth. The people invented Lincoln. The people invented William Henry Seward. And similarly, the people and his advisors, including his wife, made FDR. I mean, literally FDR was socially conscious. and pull back, because these are politicians. They're watching what people respond to. And that being said, the lessons of the past really matter. I mean, this is literally what historians study. How do you change society? What makes, where are the pressure points that change society? And if you look at somebody like Lincoln, or FDR or whomever, and you watch what they said and how they conveyed to people what the problems in their society were, and crucially when they did it, you can't come out too far in advance of the vast majority of people. You can get them there, but only in small increments. What the radical right calls the Overton window, right? If you watch them and you watch them as they are doing it, the people who managed to wrap all that together are becoming really good speakers. And as they do that, you watch people gravitate toward them. And that's exactly how it should be. That's the We're in a profoundly important moment in American history, and everything appears to way a democracy should work. And I actually find it very exciting to watch the new voices coming up. be proceeding as it does in a moment like that. Is it moving in a direction to get us out of this moment? Well, Nicole, I'm going to go back there to what I started with. If you believe that humans really are wired, if you will, to want to achieve human self-determination, then sure. I mean, we got a lot of things going on. We got the fact that with modern medicine and modern transportation, the people who are in Congress, many of them were born before the Declaration of Independence. I'm sorry, I'm being flippant, but come on. We got a lot of mechanics of our democracy that don't work anymore because they were frozen in a different time. I mean, there's a lot of things we will have to overcome. But can we do it? We've always done it in the past. And democracy had to adjust to the westward movement of the country in the 19th century. it had to grapple with industrialization. Does somebody like Andrew Carnegie really act as if he is equal to one of his workers in his factory? We had to deal with that. We had to deal with globalization that brought us to the great crash and the great depression.