Topics Robert McElvaine Can Discuss
This page informs viewers about topics on which Robert S. McElvaine has expertise to discuss with journalists and on television, radio, and podcasts.
Based on his long career as an historian, his books and articles, he can place current issues in deep historical perspective.
Some of the Topics Robert McElvaine Can Discuss
The Media are Shirking their Responsibility to Support Democracy
McElvaine can discuss why if democracy in America is lost, news corporations and journalists with a misplaced commitment to "fairness," "balance," "centrism," "neutrality," and "nonpartisanship" will bear a considerable share of the blame. The refusal of the networks to televise President Biden's primetime speech on the extreme danger the MAGA movement poses to democracy is one among many examples. The mainstream media need to understand that we are in a war against a domestic enemy that poses as much of a threat to democracy as Hitler did and Putin does and act accordingly. During this existential threat to the American Experiment, it is essential that the media abandon "neutrality" and take the side of democracy. That isn't partisanship; it is patriotism.
Losing Democracy Would be like Leaving an Airport Security Zone
Doors departing the security area of LaGuardia Airport.
McElvaine can discuss how we all need to understand that exiting from democracy – which would likely be the result of a "Republican" victory in the midterms – would be like the signs as one departs the security area in an airport: EXIT ONLY. NO RE-ENTRY. The rightwing extremists on the Supreme Court have begun to show us what life would be like on the other side of that one-way door. Everything else—women's freedom, dealing with climate change, equal rights for all, turning back corporate domination, rebuilding the middle class, getting dark money out of politics, reining in the radical Supreme Court, and so on—depends on preserving our democracy. Doing that requires electing Democrats.
THE Question in American History: Is this a White Man's Country?
In 1868, it was the Republicans who ran on saving the Republic and protecting voting rights, and the Democrats who ran on white male supremacy and rule by white men. In 2022, the parties have traded positions, with Democrats vowing to save democracy and voting rights for all and the no-longer-Republicans insisting that the United States is a white man's country and opposing democracy.
The Question in American History has always been: Is America to be a white man's country or a pluralistic land of freedom, democracy, and equality? McElvaine can place the current crisis in the long lens of American history, discussing how the parties have flipped their positions on this question. During Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans were radical in promoting freedom, democracy, and equality for all (apart, of course, from women). Today, the rightwing radicals who misleadingly call themselves "Republicans" are radical in their opposition to freedom, democracy, and equality. The motto of the mislabeled "Democrats" in 1868, "This is a White Man's Country: Let White Men Rule," represents the belief of the "Republicans" of 2022. The 1868 pledge of Ulysses S. Grant and the genuine Republicans was "We saved the Union in the Field—Let Us Preserve it at the Ballot-Box." That is essentially the promise of the now actual Democrats in 2022.
How the New Gilded Age Begot a Gilead Age
If the new Gilded Age, which began to develop in the Reagan "Greed is good" eighties, had been aborted, women would still control their own bodies.
The greedy hyper-rich "conservative" billionaires who have been plotting for more than four decades to reverse the progressive consensus that held sway from the New Deal into the 1970s have known that most people would not support the policies they wanted for the purpose of further enriching themselves. As long as the nation practiced democracy, they would need strange bedfellow allies. They found them among religious, misogynist, and racist extremists by emphasizing "cultural" issues.
"Fake Olds" are as Pernicious as Fake News
McElvaine can discuss why rightwing extremists are trying to whitewash history and how this has also been done in the past. It often and accurately said that the winners write the history, yet beginning in the late 1880s, it was the losers in the Enslavers' Rebellion (aka Civil War) who wrote its history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nation was reunited on the basis of a tacit armistice in which the South accepted that the Union is indissoluble and much of the rest of the white country accepted the southern belief in the innate inferiority of people of African ancestry. All the way into the early 1960s, American history as taught in schools was whitewashed. It was, to borrow from Adrienne Rich, a "book of myths." Then truthful history began to take control. Now Republicans in many states are again hellbent on keeping students from learning the truth about the nation's past. McElvaine can discuss the history of how the past was presented and why misrepresentation of the past is so important to how the present and future play out.
READ McElvaine's lead essay in Salon (Sept 17, 2022), "A short history of fake history: Why fighting for the truth is critical," on how "fake history repeating itself: The American right told vicious lies about the Confederacy for decades."
Stop Calling them "Conservatives" – Please!
The Trump Movement is all about projection. The MAGA Extremists call party members who believe in the Republic RINOs—Republicans in Name Only. Of course, it is those who want to overturn the Republic who are the actual RINOs. McElvaine contends that the most dangerous manifestation of the mainstream media unintentionally aiding and abetting the internal enemies of American democracy and freedom is the near-ubiquitous use of the word "conservative" to categorize radical rightwing people, beliefs, and organizations that seek to conserve nothing but the bloated fortunes of the superrich and white male supremacy. The authoritarian-loving, looney-conspiracy-spreading, history-erasing, book-banning, election-denying, violence-promoting rightwing extremists are not conservatives.
Call them by their accurate name, CINOs: Conservatives in Name Only.