hello, new york. thank you for joining us live at town hall in new york city for this very, very special edition of why is this happening. he is incisive, he is big hearted, he is very, very, very smart. and admitted, he's taller than you expected. please give a warm welcome to my friend, my beloved colleague, msnbc's chris hayes. >> thank you. hey. oh, stop. stop it. how are you? good. thank you. thank you, thank you, thank you. thank you. sit down, sit down. thank you. that's extremely kind. i hate attention and positive feedback. that was a really hard 20 seconds for me. thank you for cutting it short. it's amazing to be here in my hometown of new york city. i got some family here. so tonight, we're going to talk about democracy. and that word, we probably talk more about democracy in the last four, five years than i had in all of my time before that. like, even that as a topic seems weird. we all know, america is a democracy. there's a certain kind of history you're taught that i think is part of american civic culture, almost civic religion, which roughly goes to the following. the founders rebelled against the tyranny of the crown. and the injustice of monarchy. and they conceived in liberty a new nation, founded on the government by, of, and for the people. that's the gettysburg address version of it, and they rejected basically the idea that there is some authority above all of us that has dominion over us, that each of us are imbued with the ability to determine our own fate collectively as a we, and that's a very difficult and messy process, but fundamentally, in the eyes of some of the founders and in the eyes of others as a natural truth, but that's the idea. we all decide together what we all are going to do. and that's simple fundamental and at the time radical vision is what separates us here in the western hemisphere from the old world of europe where you had monarchies and kings and queens and tyrants. then as time went on, various forms of blood and soil authoritarianism, ultimately fascism, culminating in the second world war. you don't really get democracies in that part of the world in the way we think about them here. there are some, obviously, like there are democratic forms of government that exist before then, revolutions, these sort of compromises that get worked out in poland and other parts of the continent. basically, we are the model for the world. right? yes. we're the first ones. we figured it out. we slough off the yoke of tyranny and seize our fate. the other part of the story we all know is a very complicated story. as one british critic at the time said, the loudest cries of liberty come from the americans as they whip their slaves. which is, by the way, an important point that they saw it at the time. right? like people understood at the time, there was an incredible ridiculous tension in american rhetoric about self determination and democracy. but the general story i think we have is we sort of start with an imperfect democracy and we work towards a more perfect democracy, the more perfect union in the preamble. and i think there's something to that story. i don't think it's a crazy story, but it's basically the civic religion we have. i think there's another way of thinking about the story of american democracy which is america is kind of the ongoing dynamic site of a contestation over democracy. the site of a constant pitched battle between forces on the side of democracy and forces against it. and the forces against them are not fringe characters, and sometimes the forces against them are the most celebrated people in the country. andrew jackson, who is viewed as a small "d" democrat because he railed against the elites, and he founded the modern democratic party with populism and invited the people into the white house on the day of his inauguration where they all got drunk. he was not in any recognizable sense really a democrat in the way that we think of it today. i mean, he thought there was a caste of people who should rule over another caste of people. he was one of the major pursuers of the ethnic cleansing that made the continent what it is. he didn't think people had inalienable rights and all of us should rule collectively. he thought the white man should rule over slaves and over the indigenous people that populated the planet. i'm not saying this in an andrew jackson is canceled way. i mean, he should be. to be clear. i'm actually talking in a very specific way about what, how would you characterize idealogical belief system of andrew jackson. is it accurate to call him a small d democrat? is it accurate to call andrew jackson a believer in democracy? right? i think it's a little tough to say it is, at least in our modern sense, which is the best sense. theodore roosevelt who is on mt. rushmore, what does he believe? he believes, and writes, and says often, that the white race is there to rule over the other races. he found what becomes essentially the american empire. in the pacific, where we will rule over these people. they're not going to get the vote. they're not going it be citizens. they're subject to authority from on high, and they are forced to be under that authority and not that different a way than the remote king back in the time. and again, with all of these examples i'm giving, there's people at the time who recognize it. one of the most pitched debates in american history before the congress is about the trail of tears where people come to the well to say this is -- they didn't have the term at the time, ethnic cleansing. this is totally unjust. we can't do this. these people have inalienable rights. at the same time when we started fighting our wars under roosevelt and pursuing american empire, there were people at the time, mark twain being very prominent among them, saying we're doing the thing we hated the crown for doing. at each moment in american history, where you have these fights and frictions over what the meaning of democracy actually is, there are contemporaries on each side of the debate. it's not this neat arc where we start out sort of confused and don't understand that slavery is wrong, but we walk into the light. no, they knew. they knew. they knew the trail of tears was wrong. they knew that the wars in the pacific and the philippines, what we were doing, they knew it was wrong. there were people who very clearly saw what it was. and that's true at every point. and it's true up until the period and the run-up to world war ii. now, that story we learned is basically the following. because of the trauma of world war i, the u.s. is very reticent to get involved in another war on european shores. fair. and we kind of dither, and fdr comes up with land lease. this is like the basic version because he's trying to straddle, but he realizes something has to be done, but it's hard to get americans into this idea of a second war in europe in several decades later and then pearl harbor happens and we're in and we defeat fascism. right? go us. that's basically the story. and that story also masks exactly the same thing that is masked in the other moments from country to founding, to the trail of tears and jackson, to the creation of u.s. empire in the pacific under theodore roosevelt, which is contemporaneous debates in the society about what democracy is and whether it's good. whether what we actually do want is for all of us collectively as individuals with sovereign rights over ourselves collectively to come together to transfer that sovereignty into a collective we that decides as a democracy how we will mark our fate. how we will go forward. or whether what we want is something else. dominion, ruled by some group or person, that is an eternal debate in american politics. we're now realizing this, i think, in a way we didn't appreciate until wi found ourselves in that moment now where we're debating it again every day. and it feels weird and it feels alien, and it feels like it landed from mars. hadn't we had come to a consensus on this? didn't we all agree that we're a democracy? wasn't it the fact that in the old days we would fight along the 40 yard lines, as the cliche, right? we didn't have extremes. we weren't actually debating, no, the debate has been there the entire time. one of the most useful interventions in understanding the debate being there the whole time comes by way of this up and coming talent that i spotted. [ laughter ] >> i got a pretty good eye. and this really remarkable podcast called ultra, that came out i think a year ago. [ applause ] >> totally, if you have not listened to it, go download it. subscribe to my podcast too while you're doing it, but download ultra. and it is the story of basically a fascist sympathizers in the u.s. prior to the war, and their efforts. and the incredible lengths they went to, i'm not going to spoil it, and now that subsequently has been turned part of it, but i want to urge people because i read the book this week because i have been under the gun deadline wise. i want to urge people who listen to ultra to read the book because this book prequel, see it? there it is. it is not just the podcast in the book. it actually goes so much further, it's an incredible read, and is kind of, i think, a skeleton key for this particular moment. so without further ado, i would like to introduce the author of prequel, my dear, dear, dear friend, my beloved colleague rachel maddow. [ applause ] >> there are a lot of people in this room. >> a lot of people. for those listening on the podcast, there's 20,000 people in this room. never seen anything like it in my life. >> i'm wearing my reading glasses so you're just little blobs. i can't see you at all, which is helpful. >> yes. can we -- i want to start in your way into this material, because i have to say, it is an incredible talent that you have, and this has been true on your television show for years, at sort of finding these sort of unexplored nuggets in american history, these stories that people don't know and then you tell them and they're like, what? really? that actually happened? and ultra was an incredible example of that, where i literally -- i mean, i knew who father coughlin was. a right-wing anti-semitic populist creature. i knew that. i knew there was this american first movement that lindbergh, i read the philip broth novel, but that was kind of my canning for those things. i knew those things, and nothing else that appeared in that podcast. i want you to start by saying what was your way into this material, because it really is not on the surface. >> so, i never set out to tell a history story. i'm always looking for something that's going on in current life. it's always something that is sprung from things going on in the news. and the thing i get dinged for rightly, i think, in terms of the way i do my work is that if i want to tell you about, you know, something happening in the world today, everything has to start with, you know, first, a meteor hit the earth. then, the dinosaurs died. and when their bodies dissolved. i mean -- >> that's a good bit. >> but if that is not your way of thinking about the world, i can understand why that's alienating. i know i'm not everybody's cup of tea. oh, thank you. i love you too. but that's the way my brain works. and i was -- i was as unnerved as everybody, but kind of confused and interested that we were seeing all this alt-right neonazi, anti-semitic and holocaust denial stuff around the rise of trumpism. trumpism is happening in the electoral politics space and then we have this thing for a minute we called the alt-right. i don't know that we call them that anymore, but it was seeing them rise alongside trump and seeing them cheerleading for trump and seeing them as sort of parallel movements. i didn't understand why that was. and so i wanted to figure out how not just anti-semitism but specifically holocaust denial has functioned in the united states before. >> that was the starting point. >> that was the starting point. how do -- because if you go back far enough in terms of the origins of american holocaust denial, which i did, you get back to like 1948. and holocaust denial is a lot of terrible things but one of the things it is is weird. with so much evidence it happened how it can be that we say it didn't happen. that's especially true in 1948 when there are lot of people in the world who are witnesses to what happened. how can it be that it's a source of denial for a political movement. it's not that they earnestly believe it didn't happen. they're using holocaust denial as part of a political project. that's what i got into in the '40s and how i found my defendants and how i learn thad all got put on trial and all got off when the judge died. i thought, you know what y was going to tell a different story. i think i'm going to tell this one, because i didn't know any of it. >> you trace in the book different strands of pro-fascist, anti-semitic, nazi aligned thought and actors in the u.s. how would you describe, because in some ways it's a little bit of a misfit toys situation. there's some real odd ones in there. but they're also operating in a discursive environment that is not closed off to what they're saying. >> correct. >> tell me about public opinion around the question of fascism and the rise of it in 1930, '31, '32 when some of the people you document in the book are trying to and sometimes at the behest of the german government, cultivate sympathy. >> fascism was the movement of the future. fascism did not have the caste that we associate it now retrospectively with nazi germany. the number one selling book in america in 1941 was written by charles lindbergh's wife, and it was about how fascism was coming to america and wouldn't that be fantastic because we could finally get some stuff done. and it was in fact, a lot of people who have looked into it, i can't say this definitively, but a lot of people believe it was ghost written by a guy named lawrence dennis, he actually wrote a book called becoming american fascism. one of the things we found was old nbc radio archives from town meeting of the air, which was a great debate show that they used to host on one of the nbc radio networks, and in one of the very first ones they did, they brought lawrence dennis on to argue for fascism against other people who were arguing against fascism. he wiemed the floor with them. >> fascism cross fire. >> he totally won, exactly. but it was a popular thing. i mean, by the time you get to 1940, 83% of the american public is against us joining world war ii. 83%. that's what fdr was up against. and some of that was just we don't want to fight another war, but some of that was the people who you want us to fight against we think have the better idea. >> how did they go about cultivating -- we talk about dennis for a little bit, who is a worthwhile spending a little time on. >> oh, there's such a good twist when it comes to him. >> but talk about him a little bit. >> lawrence dennis had been a state department official. he had been -- he had gone to harvard. he was a very erudite, very articulate guy. and he was -- he had kind of a substack contrariness to him. you couldn't compliment him without him insulting you for complimenting him, but he also in his gruffness and his contrariness made everyone fall in love with him. he was seen, men, women, old, young, it didn't matter. everyone had a crush on lawrence dennis and he slept his way through the 1930s in a way that he didn't understand why his wife minded. so you know, a lot of interesting stuff about him. but he was writing speeches and books for the isolationists. and the isolationists weren't calling themselves fascists overtly but they had the self-described fascist of america writing their stuff. and dennis was a favorite of the nazi government in berlin, and they brought him over for the nuremberg rallies. they brought him over to germany and gave him access to everybody up to and included hitler. and he used it to essentially become a very well networked, very influential person. he interviewed mussolini, interviewed hitler. spent time all the most important diplomats and leaders of the time, and he came home and wrote speeches for isolationist senators and books for wives and heroes. and he was one of the sedition trial defendants and he was so arrogant, he not only defended himself in court, but he insists there should be mental examinations of his co-defendants, which they once they realized it was a way out, agreed. they all wanted mental examinations. >> he is sort of the leading, i mean, leading fascist american intellectual you document, but there's also -- the seed is being planted in somewhat fertile soil for a bunch of reasons. i wonder if you could talk about why that's the case. like, there is the fact that world war i was brutal and awful, and there's an interesting thing that happens in both this book and ultra which is that people who totally understandably and reasonably were like, whoa, that was a disaster, being kind of prepared to be like, we're never doing that again. and that posture which is not at all a crazy posture, a totally rational posture, being the kind of slippery slope by which they end up in first isolationism and then outright fascism. you have the depression. and then you have this sense of like the brokenness of the american system/the messiness of democracy. all three of those things are sort of running themes in the people that are pushing for, proposing, or in the case of huey long, embodying an alternate to that. >> yes, i think it's easiest to see it when you look at what the germans were secretly telling us. so one of the things we now know and this is in ultra and in the book too, is there was a really big, really aggressive, really well funded secret german propaganda effort targeting the american people. and what were they trying to do? basically trying to do three things, probably i guess you could narrow it down to. one was to support isolationism, however they could. however you wanted to hear it, they would help you hear it. any argument against the americans joining the war, they were all for that. they also wanted to turn us against our allies by making us see fascism as preferable to every other form of government. so they're arguing we shouldn't go to war to defend our ally britain because in what sense are they really our ally? they're corrupt, they're an empire, they're cruel. they're weak. the germans who have a much better idea are going to run over them in a matter of weeks. why would we side with the failing empire that we should resent and not with the germans who have a better idea. they're also trying to make us believe that we are inherently weak, that we should change our own form of government, and that by having a democracy, we're opening ourselves up to be controlled by the jews, to be controlled by international forces, to be controlled by those who would send us into the meat grinder of these wars with we should just let germany win and side with them. they were trying to articulate all of those things through any american voices they could put their words in the mouth of. so it's members of congress, it's u.s. senators, it's people like lawrence dennis who they are funding up the wazzu. it's an american nazi agent who is running like 12 different publications, it's publishing houses they have bought, it's magazines, and the messages that they were trying to sell us, to me, it's just unnerving and clarifying to see them because it is so much the story that we're still being sold by those who would prefer that we became a strongman form of government instead of a democracy today. the exact same message. power e*trade's award-winning trading app makes trading easier. with its customizable options chain, easy-to-use tools and paper trading to