Introducing: Government That Doesn't Suck! with Professors Greg Jackson and Lindsey Cormack

Episode 1: We The Founders (The Constitution) | Introducing Government That Doesn’t Suck Follow GTDS on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/government-that-doesnt-suck/id1896938110, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/033ABGLmH2FyHIjcnM6fNc?si=92847624a41e4b88&nd=1&dlsi=3d23d70e389d48bc, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@governmentthatdoesntsuck or wherever you listen. What if the Constitution isn't a dusty relic, but a living document built to be argued over, amended, and improved by every generation? In this debut episode, hosts Greg Jackson (creator of History That Doesn't Suck) and Professor Lindsay Cormack (author of Been There, Done That and How to Raise a Citizen) introduce their new podcast with a simple mission to understand the history and structure of the US government so that we can all work to make our union more perfect. Learn more at: HTDSpodcast.com https://www.htdspodcast.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jackson?

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• 0:44Greg Jackson?

  They even offer the same incredible quality in bath essentials, bedding, and home furnishings. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know that it was history that doesn't suck. It's the best way to support the show. Support for HTDS comes from Square. Like most any college town, food trucks have become a big thing in my neck of the woods. Some use cash, but who carries cash these days? That's why many of them use Square for quick tap-to-pay with your credit card or phone. But Square isn't just payments anymore. They've added smart AI that breaks down

• 1:28Greg Jackson?

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• 2:10Greg Jackson?

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• 2:23Greg Jackson?

  Hello my friends, it's Professor Jackson and I'm happy to share the premiere episode of our new spinoff show, Government That Doesn't Suck. This new podcast has its own feed, which you can find on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. New episodes will be released every other Monday between new episodes of History That Doesn't Suck, but we will only occasionally drop those episodes here within HTDS, because they are two different shows with two different goals. History That Doesn't Suck is, as you know, a legit, seriously researched, hard-hitting history of these American states, told through entertaining stories. In HTDS, we're telling

• 3:01Greg Jackson?

  a decade-by-decade history of the US. Government That Doesn't Suck shares some DNA of HTDS. It's a seriously researched history and it'll be entertaining. However, GTDS will time hop and will focus on topics about how our American system of government works or doesn't. Look, our recent Pew Research poll revealed that eight out of 10 Americans have little or no faith in their government to do right. It doesn't matter if the opinion is right or wrong, the sentiment matters, because the power of our government is granted by the people, as stated in the US Constitution. Quote, "To provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the

• 3:42Greg Jackson?

  blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." Close quote. This show is not a love letter to government. No. It's part history telling and part conversation about how things work, or don't, and why. So give a listen to this first episode and then search for and follow Government That Doesn't Suck in your favorite podcast app, or go to htdspodcast.com. Next week, we have another new storytelling episode of History That Doesn't Suck, right here. We're back to World War II island hopping through the Pacific.

• 4:22Greg Jackson?

  Welcome to Government That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And I'm your professor, Lindsay Cormack.

• 4:27Greg Jackson?

  And today is episode one of our new podcast. Before we go any further, maybe we should actually explain who we are to new listeners. I'm Greg Jackson. I am best known as the creator, head writer, and host of the podcast History That Doesn't Suck. I am the author of Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome. And I also teach at Utah Valley University, where I'm the America 250 Professor in the Center for Constitutional Studies. So I am a complete nerd. That is, I think that's pretty much what I just said.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Well, I guess I'm equally nerdy. I'm Lindsay Cormack. I have a PhD in government from NYU. And I'd say I'm best known for a little database that I've been running since 2010 called DC Inbox, which is every email that every member of Congress sends in their official capacity to their constituents' e-newsletters. But more recently, I wrote a book called How to Raise a Citizen and Why It's Up to You to Do It. And I'm at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

• 5:33Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, yeah, we're nerds. It's February 11, 1972. We're in Elkins, West Virginia, where college student Ella Mae Thompson is waiting for her ride. Outside, the thermometer is hovering around freezing, and a few inches of snow still cover the ground. In other words, it's a pretty typical winter's day around this mountainous part of the country. But hey, it's Friday and the start of the weekend. And for Ella, this particular day promises to be anything but typical. The freshman is on her way to the county courthouse. No, she's not in trouble. In fact, she's about to experience her recently guaranteed constitutional right. While she waits, let me catch you up on what's going on.

• 6:18Greg Jackson?

  Earlier this morning, the Nixon White House gave the US Senator from West Virginia, Jennings Randolph, the honor of securing the nation's first 18-year-old to register to vote. See, ever since World War II, 18-year-olds have been of age to be drafted, and Jennings has been one of the leaders of the "old enough to fight, old enough to vote" debate. Over the course of three decades, he introduced legislation to lower the voting age 11 times. Now, at last, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution has been ratified. The legal voting age has been lowered from 21 to 18. The question is, who will be first? The well-connected senator knew exactly where to find a next-generation voter:

• 7:03Greg Jackson?

  nearby Davis and Elkins College, where he had once been a member both of the faculty and Board of Trustees. When the phone call came into the office, 18-year-old work-study student Ella accepted the historic invitation. Ah, and look! Here comes the senator now. He picks Ella up, and as they drive along the icy road, the two strike up a conversation. Ella shares that her brother, Robert, was drafted and began service the month before his 21st birthday, when he would have been eligible to vote. Less than two years later, he was killed in action in Vietnam, only one day before he was to return home. The sad irony on so many levels. Specifically,

• 7:45Greg Jackson?

  the 26th Amendment Jennings had fought so long to pass had come too late for Robert. He was old enough to fight and die for his country, but not old enough to vote. Then, another revelation. Ella tells the senator she's planning to register as a Republican. After all, her family are Republicans. Jennings is a lifelong Democrat, and she worries this might embarrass him. The evuncular senator smiles back and tells her, "That's beside the point." Exercising her constitutional right in whatever way she sees fit, that's important. That's exactly the point. With that disclosure out of way, the short drive to the courthouse comes to a blustery end.

• 8:29Greg Jackson?

  The 70 years younger senator and 18-year-old Ella hold on to each other as they cross the slick pavement. Now, inside the county clerk's office, Ella May signs the registration papers. She's the first of 11 million US citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 to register to vote. But for Ella, the registration isn't about politics. She'll later recall, "I was honored to do it because my brother had been killed in Vietnam, and he had not been able to register to vote. So I feel like it was something that I did for him, too."

• 9:09Greg Jackson?

  I love that story. It's a relatively recent event in US history that illustrates how we, the people, can make our union more perfect. It reminds me that every generation has the opportunity to be a founder because the work of building our nation is always unfinished business. And since the passage of the 26th Amendment, the youngest generation can assert its right to vote and participate in the construction rather than the destruction. Right, Lindsay?

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Well, I think in a time in which everyone's hearing that government sucks and everything's bad and it's just gonna get worse, we are offering a little bit of a different way to approach this sort of subject.

• 9:45Greg Jackson?

  You're damn right. You know how strongly I feel about... Look, and I say this without any dismissal of the very real issues and concerns that people are feeling across the political spectrum. Right? But what we have is actually a pretty special thing, and it works a lot better, both at its peaks and at its lows, than we sometimes realize.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  The way I come at it is government's gonna happen to us whether we like it or not. Politics is gonna happen to us whether we like it or not. But we are way better to navigate it and bend the ends to our will if we understand what's happening. And so, part of that is just figuring out the rules, but another part of that is looking back on when government has worked in the past and kind of seeing, ooh, how can we get something that feels functional, that we like the outcome of, by looking at how we've done it before?

• 10:35Greg Jackson?

  You know, obviously, you're speaking my language there. You're tapping into history. I mean, this is America 250 this year, right? And the Constitution isn't that old, but it sure is fairly close. We're just gonna go ahead and lean into that whole 250 thing. We've gotten a lot right, and...

• 10:52Greg Jackson?

  You know, the framers, they embraced that this wasn't a perfect union. They called it a more perfect union. They realized that they were upgrading, that the Constitution was the 2.0 version of their union from the Articles of Confederation. That sucked, okay? And we've continued to improve it from there. One of the most brilliant things about that document and about what America is, the American experiment, is this idea of government by the people. We say that and that trite phrase just gets lost, I think. You know, it loses its specialness because it just rolls off of our tongue from kindergarten and on. But, you know, one of the things I love the most about reading the founders' words is

• 11:37Greg Jackson?

  how much they talk about the right of a generation to alter or abolish. And, you know, that isn't to say that radical answers are always required, but the understanding that is incumbent upon every generation, if you're going to have government by the people, that they continue to hold that right. And I think it really says something about how special this is, that for over two centuries, the American people have only chosen to alter. And we have, right? We've amended the Constitution. And now I'm getting ahead of myself. I realize that, Lindsay. We're going to actually get into a full-on, you know, episode here. But I'm just very excited about the concept of what we're doing.

• 12:16Greg Jackson?

  And I'm very open-eyed, warts and all, excited and patriotic about this country and the ideas that it's built on. So both in terms of this episode and this podcast as a whole, I'm just thrilled to be doing this with you.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  I'm very happy to be doing this with you as well. And I think there is something truly worth celebrating as we get to the 250th Declaration of Independence birthday. And I kind of think about this not so much as cheerleading for the United States government, but as a way to reflect on when it gets things right and celebrating them. When we think about the stories that our children hear, that we see on the media, it's usually when something goes wrong, when there's a failure, when there's something that shouldn't have happened. But there's so many things that we get right and we just don't focus on those stories. It's sort of like Yelp reviews, where you're far more likely to leave a Yelp review if it's like, oh, I had a horrible time versus like, oh, this was pretty good. The food was nice and now I have sustenance for the rest of the day. That's what I see this as, is pivoting and focusing on the times in which it does go

• 13:15Speaker 01

  right, or there is a benefit, or it even goes great.

• 13:18Greg Jackson?

  So Lindsay, I guess you could say we are here to give, not exclusively, but among the things we're going to do is we're going to give some much-needed five-star Yelp reviews to those oft-forgotten restaurants that are agencies and institutions within our government.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Or at least some four stars.

• 13:36Greg Jackson?

  You have mentioned before, and I'm going to butcher it, so you're going to explain it properly after I completely massacre your idea. You've basically framed people today, citizens, as founders themselves, right?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, I think about this a lot. So in the work that I've been doing in the last few years is I've been around a lot of middle school children, a lot of elementary school children, high school children. And oftentimes, they are taught about the founders, and they hear, you know, there were these very few men who had elite ideas. They came together and they built this thing. Isn't that great? And I understand that that's a story we should care about, and it's a story we should tell. But it casts us as sort of spectators in a historical theater play, whereas I like to think of us as all founders. And so when I'm working with children, after we talk about who the founders were, I point to them and I say, what kind of founder are you?

• 14:29Greg Jackson?

  Honestly, I mean, that jives so much with everything that the founding fathers talked about. I mean, Jefferson could kind of run his mouth a little bit on some of his ideas, things that some of the other founders were probably a little more inclined to say, okay, okay, Tommy, chill out there. But, you know, he did articulate the idea that the revolution should effectively be renewed every generation. That's what I mean, right? Like the idea that, well, basically a little blood's got to be spilled. Calm down, Tom. I don't know if we need to go quite there. But the real sentiment, what I feel like TJ is getting at, isn't that we necessarily have to spill blood, but perhaps that we should have our blood, our skin, in the game, right?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  And I think we do have to have our skin in the game. And I think we kind of all have skin in the game, but we're not realizing the benefits.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  We're just not. If we like think someone else is taking care of it, then we aren't being in it in the way that I think our OG founders wanted us to be.

• 15:30Greg Jackson?

  I feel like people want this perfect guarantee of a safety rail that government's going to work out and be okay without them being the safety rail. There has to be this recognition that we, the people, we are that safety rail. You just don't get government by the people unless the people are doing it. Look, we do government at the end of the day, at least from the American framework, I'd say, in the pursuit of happiness. That's the point here is that we, we believe that we have this unalienable, right, self-evident right to be able to pursue our own happiness, whatever that means for us as individuals.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Greg, I have a question for you.

• 16:15Greg Jackson?

  Oh, let's go.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  When is the first time you remember reading the Constitution?

• 16:20Greg Jackson?

  Oh, my gosh. Um, it was as a kid. So I, my mom flirted with homeschooling off and on. I was in public school from sixth grade on continuously, but my elementary school years were, were back and forth as she, well, as she went back and forth on this idea. And my mom was really good about, about covering civics government. And I remember, I was growing up in Southern California. We, yeah, I remember sitting in my room, reading the Constitution because mom said to do so.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I think that's really lucky. I think most of us can get to our 18th birthday, be fully eligible to participate in the American experiment, but not really know the rulebook at all, having never cracked it. And that's something that I think makes me a little bit sad when I get to interact with new undergrads every year. Because I know that no one likes playing a game they don't know the rules to, whether it's like a card game, a board game, or politics. And I'm like, guys, this game can't feel that good. If you haven't read the like the rules, you have to have that if you want it to be something that you can have a better chance of winning.

• 17:38Greg Jackson?

  If you run with that analogy even even more, I mean, imagine you're on a baseball team, but for some reason, you've gotten the idea that you are such an invaluable player that you're just going to go sit in the stands and you don't know the rules. So not only is your team missing you on the field, and then you're not realizing the the damage that that's doing right as as an easy pop fly is just thudding to the ground in the outfield because you're not there to catch it. I'm not trying to make people feel guilty, maybe a little guilty, not super guilty, the right guilty.

• 18:18Greg Jackson?

  And at the same time, you don't even know the rules to understand when a call is made. You might get the impression that the ump is being unfair when in fact, there are three strikes and you don't understand that. And or perhaps the ump is being unfair and you don't know to call it out, right? It cuts both ways.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  I think this is this is sort of the point of shared governance is that you have to have people who understand oversight and accountability. And if we all want to play like, oh, that's not for me to know, or oh, I never learned that, then we're never going to have something that feels accountable. We have to understand what it is that they can be held account for. And so that's one of the reasons I'm happy that you got to read the Constitution early on. I didn't do this till the very end of high school. And I will say, I probably didn't understand it until the very end of a PhD. And I still learn things. I read it once a year. I get to do it in class, and I learn things every time I do it. But I really think we sort of under gear our citizens to understand the world that they're stepping into because we don't have most of them read it.

• 19:20Greg Jackson?

  I feel the need right now to say, thank you, mom.

• 19:25Greg Jackson?

  So let's, let's fix this a little bit. And I, again, I love your premise, the declaration. I'll throw one more analogy out there. We could think of this like, like a business. We live in an entrepreneurial society. And perhaps, you know, we're thinking about this as a company that's been established 250 years ago. But maybe it'd be better if we thought of every generation as having to be the new entrepreneur. Yeah, you've, you've got stake. You, you own shares in this company. Like any great enterprise of yesterday, it could easily become not so great tomorrow.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  I think that's right.

• 20:05Greg Jackson?

  Things shift under your feet. The economy shifts, new inventions. You've got to adapt. Government also has to adapt. There might be these broad principles like separation of powers, checks and balances. Sure, that's your, your, your basis, but we've got to be ready to adapt. That's why we need a living, you know, breathing Congress that can pass new laws.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And I think if we're talking about this like a business, we're obviously the shareholders. And instead of like a set annual meeting, we actually get tons of annual meetings and tons of places for like customer feedback in the form of elections. And part of that is knowing, you know, like, who am I electing? What are these positions? When does it have to happen? Like, you could not convince a business to listen to you if you didn't show up to the annual meeting. Same is true for government. If you don't agree to show up, if you don't agree to understand the rules, they're probably not going to listen to you.

• 20:55Greg Jackson?

  I'm a total fanboy and nerd for representative government. Okay. That's what I think makes America so exciting today. You think about how much this nation has improved over our more than two centuries. It used to be a very limited number of people who could hold stock, shall we say, right? You're typically a state right out the gate was saying that you had to be white, male, and a landowner. That is a very narrow little piece, but today, every American citizen of voting age, 18 and older.

• 21:28Greg Jackson?

  Right? As established in the cold open to this episode, 18 and older, yeah, they've, they've got their share and they're able to participate.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, each successive generation, we do sort of expand the franchise a little bit further to a few more people. So that we can have a more representative, more perfect union. Something else that I think about is if America is this startup, we probably sort of failed the first time we did it and that's okay. In the sense that we had 12 or 13 years where we're sort of like under the Articles of Confederation and then we learned and said, you know what? I think we can do better. And that's kind of how I think about government is yes, there's things that I like to complain about, but inheriting a government is not like inheriting something that you can just point out the flaws. It's something where like you have to see yourself as a part of it to be able to change it.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  And one of the reasons I think it's important to talk about the upsides or the positives is if I was on a team that was losing or if I was in a company that wasn't doing well. I don't think I would motivate everyone else by being like, sorry, you guys are losers and this system is rigged and it's always just gonna suck. Instead I'd say like, what can we do to make this better? And that's where I think as US citizens, we have an ability to change our destiny. It's one of the most beautiful parts of being in a representative democracy in that each of us gets to have a say on how we go.

• 22:45Greg Jackson?

  An ability and even a duty, if I may.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it's, it's something where when I, when people, someone asked me a question recently, they said, Lindsay, do you think the founders would be proud of America today? And I was on a panel with other people and the other people who answered it had a lot of negativity around like, you know, there's partisan infighting and there's people who are not getting their needs met and there's problems internationally. And I totally took it a different way where I was like, I believe what America is today is beyond the wildest imaginings of what the OG founders would have thought we could have been. Because they're bringing together tiny little powers against the global hegemon of the time. And now we are sort of, not even sort of, we are the country that the most people want to come to.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  If you look around, if you travel, you can find other beautiful places, but you can't find an upgrade.

• 23:36Greg Jackson?

  Can I just pause you for a second there? I mean, think about that for all that's going on and I don't mean this in some sort of Pollyanna sort of way, right? Again, I'm not dismissing the things that, that people are worried about in this present moment and yet, yet we still have people longing to come to the United States.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely, we always have, we probably always will. One of the things that I think is really attractive about being here is this equality in inputs for voting. So we know that people have different levers of power to pull on based on wealth or connections or industry. But at the end of the day, everyone's vote counts as one. And so I think that's really attractive, especially if you come from a place where you're not permitted to contribute to who's going to be in your government. Or you're not permitted to say, I have a problem with this, let's have a referendum. It's awesome to be in a place that allows you to do those things.

• 24:25Greg Jackson?

  And Lindsay, I mean this as like the ultimate pep talk right now for Americans, okay? But think about this, for us today, in this environment with the vote so accessible, as accessible as it is, right? Go ahead and know all of the limiting factors, but as accessible as it is. Could you imagine being in this situation and going back in time? You know, you just talked about being on this panel where the founders are, you know, you're answering hypothetically how the founders might look at today. Well, let's flip that around. If you were to go back and try and tell the founders about how hard and awful it is and why you should just give up. Because, you know, you're not sure your vote counts much.

• 25:08Greg Jackson?

  I just see them scratching their heads and saying, you know, we're fighting a war against one of the world's greatest superpowers.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Like the idea that you get a choice at all is sort of a miracle.

• 25:21Greg Jackson?

  Yes, right, like this is amazing. Or imagine, you know, going back to so many of the civil rights champions, Alice Paul, Frederick Douglass, you know, take your pick. And saying, you know, yeah, it's just too hard for, in my situation, that our present is too hard. I just think that, you know, that they would, they'd be a little stunned to say, you know. Are you not aware of what our situation is? And yet we fight without the vote.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I think it's something where if we think about the founders, I sometimes believe that we have this impression that they all got along in the first place, and that's not really true at all. And so the idea that we have friction in the system, or the idea that we see things differently, or we fight about things, or we want different ends, that's what it baked into the whole process of liberty. I mean, is that how you see it?

• 26:15Greg Jackson?

  100%. Look, I mean, I know you've heard me say this elsewhere, but when I read Federalist 51, James Massey, and he makes the comment that men are not angels. Look, this is the premise for government, and what James Massey just said is people suck. That's it.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  They can, yes, they can. Not always.

• 26:38Greg Jackson?

  Well, you know, men are not angels. That's a pretty definitive statement. And what I see is that they built a structure on the premise that it needs to be able to endure people who suck.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 26:53Greg Jackson?

  And yes, they hoped for public virtue at the same time. So the hope is that the best of us will come to bear, and the republic needs that desperately. It needs that. It can't endure if everyone... To return to the many analogies we've made, right? People have to be rowing, people have to be playing, people have to be participating. That is crucial. And at the same time, they tried to build a republic that could endure people being checked out, people being power hungry, people putting their own interests above that of America as a whole. That is why we've endured as long as we have, and they saw it right out the gate themselves. You know, to get back to your original point, I'm sorry, I kind of, I guess, tiraded there a little bit on Federalist 51,

• 27:37Greg Jackson?

  but, oh my gosh, when I want to talk about ugly parsonship, I talk about the founders.

• 27:45Greg Jackson?

  You know, once King George was out of the picture, you know, it was really easy to agree on who the external enemy was, but now you've got to govern.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  You brought up my favorite president, which is James Madison. And one of the reasons I Oh, totally. Absolutely. Sure. Problematic figure in some ways, but but my favorite.

• 28:03Greg Jackson?

  No, no, no, dude's brilliant. You know, I cite him left, right and center in my book.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  But I don't just like him for who he is. I really like him for who he chose as a spouse and for who chose him back. Because I think when we tell this story of America, when we get wrapped up and like there were these white property owning landed men who got to make the choices, there is so much that happened that Dolly Madison, that all the other women in the houses of presidents changed. And when we think about that governing question that you just brought up, at the early republic, a lot of founders or a lot of early governors or a lot of people who are nominated to Congress and end up showing up, think that they can't hang out with each other because it'll look like they're corroborating behind the scenes or they're trying to like figure things out in a way that's unbecoming of a Republican man who like

• 28:50Speaker 01

  has his own sort of ideas on things. And the women look around and say like, well, these antisocial loners are not going to do that well if we can't sort of like grease the wheels. And so someone like Dolly steps in and says, let's have some parties. Let's let these people know each other. Let's get together outside of the halls of government. And that too, is part of the founding story. It's not just we passed these laws and we made these decisions. It's all this sort of like, what does it mean to be in a republic? And it's more of a family than it is someone who's just like, you're elected, you're in and everyone else is out.

• 29:24Greg Jackson?

  Absolutely. And look, with all my respect for James Madison, the dude married up. And I don't just say that because he was five foot four.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  He was tiny. I know that might be also why I like him. That's probably also why I'm the the Coxon, I think, because they're all really small and I'm one inch, I'm one inch taller than James was.

• 29:42Greg Jackson?

  Okay, you know a lot more about rowing than I do. Did you row? Is that a thing?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 29:47Greg Jackson?

  Okay. It's more, it's bigger in the east. I'm gonna, I'm gonna lay it to that. You're, you're east coast. I'm, I'm west.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm of the heartland. I'm, I'm the first.

• 29:55Greg Jackson?

  Are you?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first 22 years of my life.

• 29:58Greg Jackson?

  More, my goodness.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yep. The first 22 years are Michigan and Texas and Illinois and Kansas.

• 30:05Greg Jackson?

  Okay.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, running up and down. I had another question for you because as I, you know, I'm like very happy to learn that you got to read the Constitution in a dutiful home with a mother who cared about this. What do you think Americans misunderstand about the founding? Like, what is it that you think people believe is correct, but actually probably isn't historically accurate?

• 30:27Greg Jackson?

  Can I tell you a personal story?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:30Greg Jackson?

  So, a number of years ago, serving in a, in a position in my hometown, on the Planning Commission, we were having a meeting and those can get pretty heated. Planning Commission is sometimes the, the warm-up, if you will, for, for city council on.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I'm on my local community board, yeah. I know what these meetings feel like.

• 30:55Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, yes, yes. For, for our listeners who, who aren't familiar, right? Yeah, some of the most intense debates you get are in these sorts of meetings. And, and fair, I mean, these are the decisions that impact your, your life deeply. In another episode, I'd love to talk about why I'm such a huge fan of municipal government, and why I might even go so far as to argue, if you're going to be passionate about government, you are better to first let that passion come out at home and forget Washington DC even exists, if, you know, if, if you're going to throw energy into this. You know, this, this is the government that impacts your life the most, even if we'd like to talk more about what happens in DC. Anyhow, I digress.

• 31:39Greg Jackson?

  And in this meeting, a elected official of some sort, I will leave it at that level of vagueness, but an elected official got up and spoke about a zone change. So, we're talking about, you know, what structures can be built in a certain part of the city, and there's a proposed zone change that had come before the Planning Commission, and it was up to us, you know, to vote whether or not we were in favor or against that. And, and this elected official, to be fair, recently elected, said that the Constitution has endured since the beginning, and the Constitution doesn't change, and there's no need to change the plan of the city.

• 32:22Greg Jackson?

  And in that moment, all eyes on the commission, they all fell on me.

• 32:29Greg Jackson?

  Because they all knew I was gonna have bots. And I'm told, like, I have a terrible poker face. I really do.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Oh, me too.

• 32:37Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, okay, well, great, that we can never play poker together. It'll be great. Yeah, I would never, I would never play the game because I just cannot hide what's going through my head. And I remember what one of the other commissioners, he said, oh, Greg, I could just see like you're the things that were, you know, brooding within you. And so, of course, as we get to comment, you know, I explained, well, it's, it has been changed. It's literally been changed 27 times specifically, not just in interpretation, but as in the words that are a part of the Constitution. One of those changes was literally to say, we change our mind about one of the other changes. It's a very changing document.

• 33:23Greg Jackson?

  Yes, and furthermore, there is one article dedicated to nothing but explaining, this is how you change the document.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And you know why we have that? It's because the Articles of Confederation were so hard to change that they were like, hey, we gotta figure out a way to do this that is workable. Because we originally said, like, you all have to agree. And any change has winners and losers. And so this is like, no, we'll just do a super majority. Yeah.

• 33:46Greg Jackson?

  That night is just etched into my head. And I really don't mean that with disrespect. I don't. But I think it's noteworthy to point out that we have good people. And I'm gonna say that about, you know, the, about the individuals speaking that evening. Good intending people who even run for office, who get elected by their fellow citizens. And that means they've, right, they've done right according to our system. And yet, have not taken the time to understand the very Constitution that they've been taken oath to uphold. And I don't think that they ever did it intentionally. But there's just a lot of assumption that we understand the rules of the game when we don't.

• 34:30Greg Jackson?

  Both by candidates and we, the people, are not holding them accountable. Clearly, there weren't questions in the, in the election process that drilled this, you know, newly elected official on constitutional principles enough to expose that and lead them, not to necessarily even drop out, right? But just pause, reflect, and go, holy crap, maybe I should read this thing.

• 35:01Greg Jackson?

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• 35:45Greg Jackson?

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• 36:13Greg Jackson?

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• 36:56Greg Jackson?

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• 37:39Greg Jackson?

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• 38:22Greg Jackson?

  And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Well, we don't have that requirement, right? If you're in office, it's usually like, are you this old? Do you live in this place? Okay, you can go ahead and run it if you want.

• 38:53Greg Jackson?

  But, and you know what, Lindsay? I'm not even necessarily saying that there's gotta be... Right, because I think, and I'm not saying that you're suggesting that. I think we'd get into a lot of trouble fast if we were like, lit this test, we know nasty things have been done with that, right? I'm not calling for a test per se to be given to potential candidates, but the test has to come from us. This gets back to, what are we, the people? If we want government, buy the people. Well, if we don't ensure that our candidates even understand the rules, how on earth do we expect, you know? That they're going to hold to them.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  So I have two sorts of thoughts on this. One is the Constitution isn't that long. Like if you were to print it out on eight and a half by 11 page paper, it's like 17 pages, like 15 if you make it smaller font, 19 if you make it bigger. It's not that long. But the other thing is when you just said like bringing it back to we the people. I think that both the founders trusted we the people as in we want to do this, but they also feared the people and we sort of see both of these things. And it's not necessarily bad to have both of those. It's like, yes, we trust if multiple people are thinking about it, we'll get to a better outcome. But we also should fear the people in that we are going to be held to account if we do something that the people don't like. And I think having both of those is important.

• 40:08Greg Jackson?

  It is. And look, we see that so many times. Ben Franklin, apocryphal tale. We always got to, you know, I'm a historian, let me put my little asterisks there. But allegedly asked after the convention, what have you wrought? What have you done in there? He says, "A republic if you can keep it."

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Keep it. Yep, yep, yep.

• 40:28Greg Jackson?

  Yeah. And more than that, I found this so interesting. Go back to our boy, little Jimmy, James Madison. He says in the Federalist Papers that the Senate, that you know, he's explaining, right? Why did they do the things that they did? And he's explaining the check and balance between the two houses of Congress. So Congress, our legislature, has two houses. And fair enough, people sometimes ask, well, why? Why bother? And he's explaining that it's a check against corruption. And one of the ways to ensure that check really holds is to try and make these two bodies that are clearly, you know, two halves of one thing, nonetheless as different as possible. So the House will elect congresspersons.

• 41:16Greg Jackson?

  Every other year, right? And that's meant to intentionally make sure that representatives are dancing to this, to whatever tune the people call. You want to hold on to your seat, you will do whatever is popular. Period. But he says the exact opposite for the senators. And he even says that it is their duty to protect the people against their own delusions on occasion. Right? So here is a document. Here's a government that's about government by the people. And yet here he's introducing even a check against the people on a short term basis. I'm sorry, I got excited and kept talking.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  No, there's no need to apologize. Something else that I like about, and I love teaching about the distinction between the House and the Senate, is they didn't just invent these. They looked to their closest historical relatives and said, hey, over in England, we've got a House of Commons and a House of Lords. We certainly don't want to have a House of Lords, which is no family nobility. You get into it because of who you are, not because someone elected you. But we do want to have these sorts of polls, which is like that dance to the tune, turn over every other year. You're a public servant through and through. Versus someone who can build up a little bit more institutional knowledge in a six year Senate term. And the idea that they're staggering the Senate. So a third of the people are elected in every midterm election versus the House,

• 42:35Speaker 01

  where you could have the entire House flip over. There's sort of like lessons in history that the founders take and say, we're going to like change this. We're going to make it a little bit better and suit our needs. And I think that's sort of like the work of self governance is figuring out what you can learn from the past and say like, how can I change this and make it suit my needs a little bit better?

• 42:53Greg Jackson?

  Lindsay, I feel the need to just know that there is an Alexander Hamilton jab to be made there if Thomas Jefferson and little Jimmy were here, right? Well, you know, you say we don't want a House of Lords, but I think, I think Tommy would be going, huh, Alex wants a House of Lords.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe, maybe, which is interesting, given the like low born status of his own background. But the idea that he'd be an imperialist or a monarchist or a, yeah.

• 43:21Greg Jackson?

  Right? So James, I want to stick with the checks and balances thing, but I'm going to go ahead and make this little, this little segue, this little aside. Since, you know, we're talking about comparing, comparing parsonship then to today a little bit, right? We've touched on that here and there. Let me just insert, I mean, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison called Alexander Hamilton a monocrat. That was their blended slam of a monarchical aristocrat. Because they believed he wanted to end the American experiment and introduce, if not a king in name, at least in reality. That was, that was their perception. I think that they were super wrong.

• 44:04Greg Jackson?

  There are some to this day who go, oh, you know, Tom and little Jimmy super nailed it. That, that was Alex. I think that is an insane position to hold, but they did. And that was their partisan divide. And you had those Federalists and those Jeffersonian Republicans each convinced that the other party wanted to destroy the country.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Which sounds a lot like how people talk about this today. Where every election is the only one that matters and the other side is going to like ruin the country or drive us into death or take what we want and throw it all away. I, something, so I don't know if everyone knows this, but you do have a new book where you kind of go through a lot of times in which partisanship got to much worse places than we are today. Do you feel okay talking about any of those parts and examples?

• 44:49Greg Jackson?

  Sure. Well, I'm, I'll tell you right now, that example I just gave, straight out of chapter one, where the, the very first two national newspapers established within the Washington administration. So we can't even get through our first president without having a national media, two papers, each supporting the two instantly developed parties and just slamming each other. And they're, they're using pseudonyms, something we don't do in the press today. But I might say that's not all that different from, you know, getting on social media and you're dealing with, say, bots or, you know, people who are putting ideas out there under fake names, not using real images, right?

• 45:31Greg Jackson?

  So right out the gate, you've got disinformation. You've, you've got bad assumptions about the, the opposite party. Lindsay, we, we couldn't make it.

• 45:44Greg Jackson?

  Hardly a second without doing that.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  I do think there's something about, one of the reasons that it feels hard or uncomfortable to talk about politics is because of partisanship. And the way that I sort of like to think about things is think like a patriot, not like a partisan. Being a citizen is different than being a partisan. But partisanship is a feature. It is a reality. It is not a mere bug. It is what's going to happen when you have any sort of government that's competing for control. And so, something that I like about the way that you've written your book is saying partisanship has happened and it's been pretty bad in a bunch of different ways that many of us just don't know about.

• 46:23Greg Jackson?

  Stop, stop.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  It is. Like, we're not tarring and feathering each other. We're not, we're not doing that. We're not dueling each other when we think that you've like affronted our sense of honor. Partisanship has gotten really ugly in the past. And now we might like tear each other down on online forums, but it's usually not political violence.

• 46:42Greg Jackson?

  Um, if, if I may, Lindsay, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull the book from the shelf just to really drive home the point. And it's a real background, that that's always worth showing.

• 46:53Greg Jackson?

  The Federalist Papers, right? Your, your point about, uh, partisanship being a feature? So, James Madison, Federalist Number 10, uh, he says that, and I quote.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Wait, hold on, I think I'm gonna follow along, because I'll just go to my bookshelf.

• 47:12Greg Jackson?

  Let's do it, do it.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Here we go. I was like, sure, I got this up here, too.

• 47:17Greg Jackson?

  Okay, I love that none of this was scripted or planned, but that we both have the Federalist Papers within arms' reach.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Oh, and I was on 51, that's where mine was open, too. Okay.

• 47:25Greg Jackson?

  Oh, I love, oh, 51, I mean, solid. Uh, but yeah, we'll, we'll go to 10. Uh, we'll, we'll, basically, we're, we're doing Little Jimmy's Greatest Hits today. That's what, that's what's happening.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I mean, he is the author of the Constitution. He's the father of the Constitution. It makes sense.

• 47:41Greg Jackson?

  It, it sure does, which is where it's real fun to think of him and Alexander Hamilton in 1793 getting into a print war under pseudonyms in which they're yelling and screaming at each other over what the Constitution means. But of course, if anyone is also qualified to yell back at Little Jimmy, it's Alex who wrote 51 of these Federalist Papers. But- Before I go into this, Lindsay, can we just pause and point out if the very two men that we might say, and you know, I'm maybe you could take some contest with Alex perhaps, but follow me on this. If we look at them as authors of the Federalist Papers, and of course, as the framer, right, behind the Virginia Plan, James Madison, specifically,

• 48:21Greg Jackson?

  as like the two guys behind the Constitution, and they get into a full-on screaming fest in the papers over what the Constitution means, why are we surprised that we don't always agree on what the Constitution means?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I hear you. And I also think it's something where like, we want it to be like, this is the black and white, right, answer, wrong. And that's just not how it is. And you're going to show us how it's never been that way.

• 48:46Greg Jackson?

  Absolutely. Okay. So after, after his super long opening paragraph that some teacher somewhere today would be like, you can't write an essay like that, James. We jumped down to two more. The paragraph that starts with, it could never be more truly, you with me? Okay. It could never be more truly said that, you know what, actually, I'm gonna back this up just one paragraph. He's gonna make a point here about liberty, and how you've got to embrace the fact that partisanship exists if you're gonna have liberty. All right. So he says, dang it, now I feel the need to back up even more.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Via faction.

• 49:23Greg Jackson?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Via faction is there, yeah.

• 49:25Greg Jackson?

  So, by a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction, the one by removing its causes, the other by controlling its effects. Okay? Easy enough so far, right? This isn't super deep. We can all follow this. There are, again, two methods of removing the cause of faction. The one by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence. The other by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

• 50:10Greg Jackson?

  Okay, so this should be super obvious to all of us, but going into this next paragraph, it's, it's, right, great thoughts are, in my opinion, a mark of greatness is that when you hear it, it feels obvious.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 50:22Greg Jackson?

  Right, so, and that, that for me is what Federalist Number 10 does on this point. "It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an element without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life because it imparts to fire its destructive agency."

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, which is-

• 50:59Greg Jackson?

  Right.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  If we're gonna have liberty, we're gonna have differences of opinion, and if we wanna keep liberty, we're gonna have to have some way of figuring out how we navigate those differences of opinion, instead of saying, "No liberty for anyone."

• 51:12Greg Jackson?

  Founding father, mic drop. Like, that stuff, Lindsay, I mean, that is why 250 years later, right, and I'm, again, Jimmy wrote it after 250, but embracing the semi-quintcentennial that we are in, I have practiced that word, by the way, I just want you to know that, that was not a first try.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  I've been saying it for like a year, yeah, I'm with you.

• 51:35Greg Jackson?

  Yeah, yeah, uh, it, it, it needed it, but it's the brilliance of these ideas. It's not just some happy accident that the United States has endured, that this republic has endured, and it, it's not because we're revering, um, out of a de facto need to revere these dead white dudes. These ideas are brilliant. They have withstood the test of time, they have held against the vicissitude of challenges that this nation has faced, even carrying us through the existential crisis in bloody

• 52:14Greg Jackson?

  civil war that killed some upwards of 2% or so of the nation, these things have held, and they're worth trusting today.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  And they were created in a time in which day to day life sucked a lot more. Like you couldn't drink the water. You had to have a lot of beer around or a lot of ales around. Life expectancy is something like 40 years old. So you have a 40 year runway to say like, what am I gonna do? Kids are dying in their first year of life at rates we would never think about today. And so it's just, everything was much harder and yet we still got a pretty good thing out of it.

• 52:48Greg Jackson?

  Lindsay, I'm gonna go ahead and assume that you, uh, you understand what I mean when I say you have died of dysentery.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  I played the Oregon Trail.

• 52:56Greg Jackson?

  Absolutely, right? Yeah. Well, Lindsay, we've, we've kind of been a little bit all over the map here, but I, I think perhaps long and short, some things that we've, we've really hammered on as we've gone into unexpected weeds and come back out are that, what, one, we've got to participate. Two, we've got to know the rules of the game in order to participate. Three, this isn't the scariest time. Politics are simply scary. That's part of it. That's okay. I don't know. I might leave the list there, but what am I missing?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  You know what? I'd add in at least one more, which is we have to see ourselves as founders in this process. We can't think that it's done. We can't think that we have nothing more to do. But if we're gonna contribute to it, maybe it's better to recast ourselves as modern day founders.

• 53:52Greg Jackson?

  Bingo. Thank you. Yes. I felt the absence and that was absolutely it, of course. So moving forward, I will do as I do on History That Doesn't Suck. I'm gonna tell stories. And you'll be, by and large, having some great interviews. I will, of course, come in and disrupt those from time to time. And yeah, we look forward to telling you the story of government.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and figuring out when it does and when it doesn't suck. So we'll see you every other Monday for a new episode of Government That Doesn't Suck.

• 54:34Greg Jackson?

  History That Doesn't Suck is supported by VistaPrint. This podcast is a small business passion project, and seeing our vision come to life offline is cool, too, thanks to our expert partner, VistaPrint. On my recent book tour, we were able to order custom, high-quality banners for book readings. It also added a nice professional polish. It also made the events more memorable because readers and I could pose together in front of the banner for selfies to post online. And that's just one of the countless premium products VistaPrint offers to elevate your brand identity. From postcards and posters to tumblers and t-shirts, VistaPrint makes high-end, custom printing accessible to everyone, giving you exceptional quality and results that make every single dollar go further. With real people on standby and seamless tools, VistaPrint guides you through every

• 55:16Greg Jackson?

  step of the process so you always look completely polished. There's a reason over 17 million small businesses trust VistaPrint to elevate their vision. VistaPrint: Print Your Possible. Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at vistaprint.com. That's 20% off at vistaprint.com using code NEW20.

• 55:45Greg Jackson?

  HTDS is supported by fans at htdspodcast.com/membership. My gratitude to you kind souls for providing funding to help us keep going. Thank you. And a special thanks to our patrons whose monthly gift puts them at producer status. Adam Goran, Ahmed Chaplin, Amy and Ross Henson, Andrew Nissen, Andrew Sherwin, Anna M. Huta, Art Lang, Baby Nico, Bob Stinnett, Bonnie Brooks, Ryan Gavigan, Ryan Boils, Ryan Goodson, Bruce Hibbert, Kayden Hallitz, Charles Plendenin, Charles Starkey, Charlie Majes, Christopher Merchant, Christopher Lyle, Christopher Pullman, Christopher Young, Cody Brown, Colleen Martin, Colin Ferris Pennington, Connor Hogan, Craig Burhost, Dan G., Daniel Beecham, Daniel

• 56:27Greg Jackson?

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• 57:09Greg Jackson?

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• 57:54Greg Jackson?

  Matthew Edwards, Thomas Sabbath, Tim and Sarah Turner, Todd Curran, Tom Bestafka, Travis Cox, Walter M. Ames, Wesley McKee, William Durham, William Curry, William Thompson, and Zach Jackson. Join me in two weeks, or I'd like to tell you a story.