gratian to rule the day. well i'm tom arbonne in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture forty forty years ago a very few politicians flaunted their religious beliefs for personal gain so what's changed what's given rise to the christian right to american politics and pose that question and more to susan jacoby it's nice conversations and straight lines also are republicans using austerity to sabotage america why does mitt romney hate the american worker and his big oil bought out washington all that and more in tonight's big picture rumble and what does a two thousand and eight by dick morris have to do with our politics and economy

today i'll tell you it tonight's deleted. for tonight's conversations in great minds i'm joined by susan jacoby susan is an author an independent scholar who focuses primarily on american intellectual history susan has received numerous awards and grants the guggenheim rockefeller and ford foundations as well as the national endowment for the humanities she started her writing career as a reporter for the washington post and has been a regular contributor for over twenty five years to publicly publications like the new york times magazine newsday the nation and alter net her most recent piece on alter net is entitled the ungodly constitution of the founders ensured america would not be a christian nation she's also the author of many critically acclaimed books including freethinkers history of american secularism and never say die the myth and marketing of the new old age susan joins me now from new york city susan

welcome. nice to be talking to. i wish i could see you i wish you could too we've got to get a monitor there in new york thank you both so much for being with us under these circumstances you write a column called the spirited atheist at the faith website published by the washington post i'm curious how did you arrive at atheism and secularism and what led you to those if those are your beliefs what led you to that what influenced you to write about religion in american society. well first of all i didn't start out writing about religion in american society i've written a dozen books in my of the last thirty five years of my life starting out in russia where i was working part time for the washington post and was married to the post moscow correspondent i've always been an atheist i simply as time went on i became more interested in american intellectual history and i felt that the secular side

of our history was very much under-represented in readable popular history books so that's how i got into it i am not an atheist propagandist in that i'm not interested in converting people to atheism what i'm interested in is talking about what the secular side of our history has meant to the development of the united states and what has the secular side of the development of our history and for the development this is. well it's something that's not talked about much because we've got all these people going blah blah blah about how this was founded as a christian nation but it wasn't founded as a christian nation although we were overwhelmingly a majority christian people at the time the constitution was written but what did the founders do in the constitution they made a break with all previous documents including the state constitutions at the time

after the revolution and they didn't mention god they didn't say that governmental power flows from god they said. we the people the word god does not appear in the constitution at all which always astonishes my college audiences when i tell of that which tells you how badly american history is taught in fact that what is generally taught about the origins of the united states is everybody who came here came here for religious liberty which is true but initially before we became the united states and were colonial america the people who came here for religious liberty came here for religious liberty for themselves not for anybody else so the first thing the puritans did in massachusetts was try to get rid of everybody who did agree with them however the founders had a very different view which is because there were already people of so many different faiths here we needed to have no state faith so they just left it out

altogether of the constitution the first amendment was made specifically to protect religion from government the constitution itself which leaves god out was meant to protect government from religion the two go together the second the the protecting religion from government the religious right likes they don't like the protection of government for religion you know clearly. in some of the you've written this is such a breath through your work it's extraordinary you you you know the f.d.r. didn't talk about folks and neither did lincoln how does our public discourse been dumbed down who did it was yeah that doesn't have anything to do with religion is the difficulty that you that that that that that's a different book altogether but it has to do with the dumbing down of standards for

public speech folks which is a perfectly good anglo-saxon word and has always been used in ordinary converse. sation perfectly good good word for the corner store the corner bar but it was never anything a president would use for this speech imagine just the example i use of my book the age of american and reason imagine the good they get a spirit address if lincoln said this government of the folks by the folks and for the folks that perish from the earth so the use of the word folks is really a dumbing down you didn't really hear it much in any presidential discourse before ronald reagan because it was just something it wasn't even considered appropriate for network television forty years ago walter cronkite didn't years use the word focus all the time is broadcast to it was considered a folksy word the use of the word folks which all politicians use now is really

meant to be code saying i'm one of you whereas whereas the idea of government leaders in the past certainly with lincoln and roosevelt was i understand your problems but not i'm one of you because who wants a president who is one of us i want a president who's better or who knows war is what i am as that was the idea of the idea of the presidency then for most of our history how to change. it changed largely as we became as we move from a print to a video culture and the video culture became dumber and dumber t.v. grew dumber and dumber beginning in the 1980's and i think public discourse followed along in that respect and certainly of course it definitely started with television. but it got much worse with the internet when you can say anything because half the time you're not held to account for what you're saying because

you're anonymous but you know. up until one nine hundred eighty seven. i worked in . radio news back in the seventy's and was very very. conscious of this cognizant this up until ninety seven in order for a radio and television station to get its license renewed every year they had to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the community and the federal government the f.c.c. that they were doing a public service of the main way that they did that public service was by having actual news thus all the networks offered news that was real news and they lost money on it radio stations was the radio station i worked at in lansing michigan with five people in our newsroom now they don't have anybody you know you're freelance if you're from lansing michigan i was and i grew up in land so i started i and then it we both went to school in east lansing as well but and and but it you know reagan stopped and foreseen that f.c.c. regulation in one thousand nine hundred seven and that's when all the networks went

to infotainment do you do you think that that's a pivot point. well and i don't think it's really because reagan stopped and forcing that rule i think that a lot of things came together certainly beginning in the nineteen eighties intensified by later on by the digital culture and i'm not saying by the way that computers are a bad thing or television is a bad thing but we had a lot of things coming together and what's happened in the united states since the 1980's is people are spending much more of their time with canned entertainment the decline and i don't want to go on about this and do a jeremiad about it because so many people do it i'm sure on your program too people are reading less particularly who's reading less are our people roughly between the ages of fifteen and forty and as people read less it means that they

turn to low cultural models more for their standard discourse and certainly on television for example the the the standard on the new is lower not just in terms of coverage but in terms of the way people talk and that is not only a reflection of our culture but it's also a driver of the culture of the internet what's on you tube and more important the amount of time everybody spends on the internet again has has really has really dumb down conversational interaction in real life so it isn't surprising that our political speech is lower than it was it's not just because of political polarization it's a general dumbing down of standards and also there was always the idea that there was a difference between elevated public speech and ordinary speech and that was something

that got. haven't leaders up held for a long time now the idea is to make a public speech sound as much like ordinary speech is possible to prove that you're one of the boys or one of the girls. and apropos of the recent study found about a half of american high school students right now don't think evolution is solid science does that speak to that same issue or is that more institutions of education. so that's that's more of the religion thing and but the dumb and the you know the educational problems of our country certainly have a good deal to do with that but evolution is a controversy specifically which should be a controversy and it isn't anywhere else in the developed world this is the only country in the developed world where a large number of people about one third think that think that the biblical story

about the creation of the world is true and the the religious right has made it more difficult there was more taught about evolution in public schools before the scopes trial which was held in one nine hundred twenty four than there is today the word evolution is one that teachers try to avoid because it's a buzz word which gets which gets christian right parents angry so what you have is a kind of bifurcated educational system in places where people are educated in the christian right doesn't have veto power over curricula you have evolution taught as part of science the way it should be taught but in a lot of the country you don't and states like texas because they buy so many textbooks have an undue influence on eliminating discussion so instead of talking about evolution by means of natural selection which is what the rest of the world

talks about in its public high schools teachers will talk about changes over time. which is you know in other words it's a way of muddying the waters and also just not telling kids what the accepted scientific view is said euphemism. i want to get to your book the age of on reason right after the break if we made more conversations with great minds and susan jacoby right after this break. there hasn't been anything good on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact. before source material is what helps keep journalism honest when.

we want to present. something else. is easily beat. if. he feels. the need. to. be in it. it.

would. be a clue. back to conversations of great minds with susan jacoby susan is an author an independent scholar and has received numerous awards and grants from the guggenheim rockefeller and ford foundation as well as the national endowment for humanity she's also the author most importantly the author of many critically acclaimed books including freethinkers a history of american secularism and never say die the myth of marketing in the new old age and also a book a brilliant book called the age of on reason susan in the age of on reason you talk

about how f.d.r. educated the american people in preparation for taking on hitler using maps in fact some what lessons for today should we take from that and along that line if you could if you'd like to riff on this how could or should president obama be emulating f.d.r. and how did george w. bush compare with f.d.r. when he uses bullhorn to threaten bin laden told us all to go shopping or bill clinton tried to push through health care without really informing us about. look people aren't used to being informed of the truth is is is partly it's the partly it's the proliferation of media in the soundbite world which is really short and all of our attention spans when f.d.r. had his fireside chats. everybody in america who had a radio tuned in you know which is to say when the president spoke everybody who

had the medium of the day which was radio listened nobody that president bush not president obama not anyone can expect that ninety percent of america will tune into anything and by the way this is very much related to what your what to what you're talking about i want to correct something that was in one of the ads in the break that was in my ear you said young people are getting their news from television they're getting it on line young people are watching television there were they're watching online studies have shown that the more time people spend on line the more they watch television too they just aren't getting their news from television but the question of what kind of news they're getting on line is very interesting because one of the things we know about on line reading is nobody who

gets their news on line gets anything but the print equivalent of soundbite news people don't for instance and this is true by the way of the old as well as the young to when you're looking for news on line you're looking for something specific you don't read an article as you do when you're flipping through a newspaper or an old bag a scene you're looking for something specific and this is true whether you're sixty or whether you're twenty so you could talk to anybody about about something that was in the news today and if it wasn't something they were interested in the first place they're not going to know about it whether they get their news on line or from television because people don't pay attention to long term news they're just looking for the little headlines they only get part of it it's one of the ways in which this by the way and i believe the. this change in attention span is irreversible it precedes the internet but it's got worse since we've become an

a.t.g. of genic society. absolutely absolutely nobody is going to sit down and listen to a president not not the vast majority of people is going to sit down and listen to a president talk for half an hour and point to maps and show me where as f.d.r. did show them where czechoslovakia is show them where hungary is show them where the soviet union is show them where france and england are nobody's going to sit down and watch the president point that out on a map today which is probably why so many americans have no idea where iraq and afghanistan are it seems that the overwhelming majority have no idea exactly where they are it seems along those same lines that our political dialogue in america has been siloed bifurcated. the most recent example that we've been i've been reporting on is talking about is that the fox news viewers think that the whole fast and

furious thing was an attempt by holder and obama to create such a crime wave in the united states caused by brown people in mexico that poor white people would clamor for an end to the second amendment so that we would lose our guns and we've actually had republican members of congress promote this theory and this is something that anybody that really yeah exactly and this is something the people who don't watch fox news think watch but people watch fox news it just makes perfect sense to them we just learned for example two thirds of republicans this was a study that just came out today two thirds of republicans think we found w m d's in iraq we hear from our pundits that america has always been separated into two hostile political camps they basically didn't talk to each other but i remember everett dirksen and barry goldwater reaching across the the aisle. lyndon johnson talking to to the republicans and in the sixty's and seventy's it seems that

something has happened is this a unique time this bifurcation or is this just the way you know the john adams thomas jefferson battles revisit it. well if you had ever read the jefferson adams letter you would know it's not the jefferson adams battles or revisit it because jefferson adams everything they said to each other was informed by a vast knowledge of the political disagreements they had were not there you know other words jefferson adams didn't have their own facts they had their own opinions and in fact reading their letters which i have for free thinkers just make sure you really want to cry because it shows you i i cannot imagine two politicians writing letters like this to each other and they well nobody writes letters to it today anyway but again i want to stress that to think of this as

a political culture or a news culture that separate from the culture as a whole is a great mistake these are the all of this is as much a reflection you talked about fox news viewers one of the great differences for example of one of the people i write about in free thinkers is robert ingersoll who is known as the great agnostic in the late nineteenth century when people went to hear his lectures some of the people who went to hear them were people who didn't agree with him people who were religious now what happens is that other words going to hear somebody who disagreed with was a form of public entertainment then now what you have with fox news and m.s.n. b c two you have people going to stations and going to websites because they know they already agree with them and they want to hear more about what they already agree with and this is where the decline of newspapers which for all their faults

and i would be the last to say that they didn't have them that the client of the general interest mainstream newspaper really comes into the. this because you were forced when you read a newspaper to read sydney information you actually didn't know whereas when you listen to fox news you're not forced to hear anything you don't want to hear unless you're an m.s.n. b.c. viewer who's just looking at it to get mad which people do also it's a new you've written as i mentioned earlier so many books and so many different topics one of them was about alger hiss what do we need to know and what lessons can we learn from the life and times of algeria's. at the end of your viewers know who alger hiss is one of those three with they're going to do it. ok ok who elgar hist was was he was he was an official in the state department under roosevelt actually anyway to make

a very long story short he was accused during after during the mccarthy era basically at the beginning of the mccarthy era of having been a member of the communist party and actually probably passed state department secrets on to russian spies now the truth the truth is for sure he probably was a member of the communist party which was actually legal then whether he was affectively able to pass on secrets to russian spies i don't know his was a high up official he he made the actual arrangements for the yalta conference and it's one of the big things about the far right i think without a doubt his was guilty of lying to congress that he was a member of the communist party in the one nine hundred thirty s. as many americans who later repudiated the party were his student but what what this became was all blown up his you know his

a till his death in his ninety's could see expenses to that he had been innocent but this became a touchstone. known for the both the far left of the far right the far right claiming a long history of betrayal of people who worked in democratic administrations of our security interests the far left insisting that his said probably never been a communist and it was all a set up of the far right the truth is he was a communist probably like like many many not many but a number of americans were during the depression and and he probably was not able to do any real harm to the interests of the united states since at the time of yalta when we lost when we quote lost poland to communism well the reason we lost poll of the communism is the red army was already occupying poland which a lot of people today don't know that russia had anything to do with winning world

war two or that russia and america were in fact allies i would give a lot to know whether mitt romney who thinks russia is now our number one enemy actually noticed that russia and the united states were allies during world war two and the truth is he did his was a communist and not one who probably did much damage to american interests of all ok very interesting. you we just have one minute left susan how do we return to the ideals of the secular ideals that you mention of our founding fathers i realize it's not a one minute question but if you can try. all people like me can do is keep talking about the fact that the glory of this nation at a time when america was not only ninety nine percent christian but ninety nine percent protestant is that the founders said we are not going to say that

governmental power comes from religion we're going to say that it comes from we the people and we're going to have freedom of every form of belief and every form of non-belief this was such a revolutionary idea in an era when the union of church and state in europe had been done nothing but harm that is what our constitution comes out of why we should even think of doing anything different about an arrangement that worked so well and built the united states well that's a mystery really and susan jacoby my fellow michigander thank you so much for joining me tonight. thank you to see this in other conversations of the great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com coming up after the break we know our stir it is crippling europe but a new study out says it's hurting america too are republicans pushing austerity to intentionally crash the economy no matter the consequences all that and more in

tonight's big picture rumble. admission and free accreditation free transport charges free. range month free risk free studio tide free. download free broadcast clothing video for your media projects and a free medio dog r t dot com.

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