SMS Transcript 8-12-2026
Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the US has sold four million copies—and now we have a biography of the author, written by Dave Zirin, The Nation’s longtime sports editor – we’ll speak with him about his new book, The People’s Historian. But first: Election Protection: the ACLU’s $25 million dollar project–that’s coming up, in a minute.
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Jon Wiener: First up today: election protection and the ACLU. For that, we turn to Deirdre Schifeling. She’s the ACLU’s chief political and advocacy officer. Before joining the ACLU, she worked both inside and outside politics, most recently at the Biden White House in the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach. She began her career as an organizer for the Steelworkers union. She spent almost a decade at the Working Families Party, beginning as a political organizer and ultimately leading the organization’s federal and state campaigns – after that, at Planned Parenthood. Then the Fight Back Table, leading the work of progressive groups to stop Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Deirdre Schifeling, welcome to the program.
DS: Thank you so much for having me.
JW: People think of the ACLU primarily as a group that goes to court to defend civil liberties, which does a lot. But the ACLU also does work in some kinds of electoral politics. For example, in the ballot initiative campaigns in Kansas and Missouri last week. We want to talk about those just for a minute. In Missouri, Republicans supported an initiative that would have made it more difficult for state constitutional amendments to pass. Tell us about that one.
DS: This is an amendment that was in reaction to a ballot initiative that we and other partners helped pass in 2024 that protected reproductive rights. So, it was one of the many ballot initiatives on the ballot in 2024 that protected reproductive freedom. And in Missouri, this had a huge impact because Missouri was a state that had a total abortion ban. So, this took Missouri from a state with an abortion ban to a state where abortion was now possible to access, which was a huge deal.
Republicans in the legislature reacted to this by trying to change the ballot initiative process to make it more difficult for citizens to initiate and pass ballot initiatives, and by their plan was to try to require the same level of voting across all congressional districts in the state. So not just a majority, but a majority evenly spread across all congressional districts in the state, which of course is practically impossible, which is the point voters saw through this. They can sniff a power grab, a politicized power grab when they see one, and they voted against this amendment 80 to 20.
JW: 80 to 20. That’s a pretty amazing victory.
DS: Resounding message from voters.
JW: And in Kansas, another very red state, a similar story: four years ago, voter approved abortion protections in the state constitution by an initiative on the ballot. That was a very memorable event. What did the Republicans try to do in Kansas and how did that work out?
DS: Similar playbook. So, Republicans, after losing their attempt to ban abortion –abortion is protected in Kansas, in the state constitution and state constitutions are a big focus for the ACLU. You know, the US Constitution is the floor, but state constitutions can build on that floor for rights and liberties and really expand rights and liberties for people who live in those states. And Kansas did that. So, Kansas has a constitution that protects personal autonomy. And as part of that personal autonomy reproductive rights is included. The legislature tried to ban abortion. Voters voted it down by wide margins in 2022.
And then the legislature tried a different tactic, which is to change the court. And the way they went about changing the court was to try to make state Supreme Court elections in Kansas partisan. Their hope was instead of going from a system where you had a bipartisan panel recommend qualified candidates for the governor to choose from, to appoint to state Supreme Court, and then voters could vote to retain or reject them every six years – instead of going from that system, which was designed to be as nonpolitical and nonpartisan as possible, a very balanced panel – they would go to just straight up elections with partisan labels attached and make those state Supreme Court judges, just like any other elected office, subjected to millions of dollars in campaign spending, subjected to very partisan campaigns. You get the idea. And their goal was, in Kris Kobach’s own words, to “slowly and quietly change the Supreme Court to be a partisan Supreme Court that would eventually rule to ban abortion. That was their plan.
Once again, voters saw through it. Voters voted overwhelmingly 61 to 39 to reject the idea of partisan state supreme courts. Civil liberties and civil rights live to fight another day in Kansas.
JW: What is the basis of the ACLU’s decisions here of when to get into electoral politics and when to step back?
DS: As decision making around rights and liberties moves to the state level, which it largely has, we look for opportunities to make a meaningful impact on protecting or expanding rights and liberties – state by state. So, in some states, that looks like defeating bad ballot initiatives that would make it more difficult to protect rights and liberties. Example from Missouri and Kansas, as you just said. In other states like Montana, coming up, we actually initiated a constitutional amendment to protect nonpartisan state supreme courts in Montana because the legislature kept trying to make them partisan. So, we were trying to get ahead of it and say, okay, let’s just enshrine this in the state constitution, that these will be nonpartisan in other levels of the ballot.
We do things like educate voters around the differences between candidates for state Supreme Court judges. So, state Supreme Court judges are elected in many states, not all states, but many states are elected directly. And many of those elections are nonpartisan. And voters often don’t have very much information about candidates. Many people have never heard of who their state Supreme Court justices are. So, we do a lot of voter education around the differences between their records, so, voters can make an informed choice.
We also, this year, are focused on a couple of secretaries of state races where there’s a clear contest between a secretary of state committed to upholding the rule of law and administering fair and free elections, and an opponent who is an election denier. So that’s like a place where there’s a stark difference. And we, we feel it’s very important to democracy and to rights and liberties to educate voters–and also in some state legislative races.
JW: The big news in the last couple of months has been that the ACLU announced it was going to spend $25 million on election protection in the midterms. This is the biggest initiative of this kind the ACLU has ever taken. What are you going to spend the $25 million on?
DS: So, we have an electoral program that is focused on educating voters around ballot initiatives, around the differences between candidates in those levels of the ballot that I just outlined. That’s our electoral program. Separately, different part of the House, we have an election safeguarding program which is also $25 million, $24.5 million. And that program this year is about anticipating and preparing to react to all the different ways that the Trump administration and other actors could try to subvert or sabotage the election.
JW: All the different ways – and how many different ways have you been thinking about?
DS: Well, there are 25 different ways that we have outlined that this administration either has already started to try to do or could envision trying to subvert or sabotage the election. And for each one of those different scenarios, different 25 ways, we’ve built out a litigation strategy, a communication strategy, an advocacy strategy with local elected officials, and an organizing strategy. And so, I think we are going to be well prepared going into this election cycle to do everything humanly possible to safeguard the sanctity of our electoral system.
JW: I want to talk about a couple of the 25 that you are preparing to deal with. Of course, a lot of our friends are most worried about Trump sending ICE agents or the military to polling places on Election Day to intimidate voters. What are your plans for that scenario?
DS: Yeah. So, this is a scenario that has gotten a lot of discussion for good reason. Trump has developed a penchant for deploying the National Guard, deploying ICE agents in all situations. So, I would say a few things. First, intimidating voters is illegal, period. Full stop. If there is any military, any troops or any other kinds of law enforcement designed to intimidate voters, that is breaking the law. We are working with state AGs, governors, secretaries of state as well as state law enforcement, to make sure that everybody’s on the same page about that- that is illegal, that cannot be allowed to happen. And we have a de-escalation plan: if ICE or law enforcement were deployed to polling places, the last thing that we want to do is escalate it and turn it into a dangerous situation for voters or a situation that seems intimidating. The best thing to do is to quietly and calmly have local law enforcement ask them to leave and protect access to the polling places.
The other way that we’re trying to get ahead of any kind of voter intimidation effort like that is by encouraging people to vote early. Very important. So a huge early vote effort is underway. And by recruiting and training volunteers to be outside polling places, to be helping to educate people about know your rights in terms of their right to vote, and to be creating a peaceful, joyful, calm atmosphere. So that going to vote seems like an attractive, peaceful, safe thing to do, which it is, which it should be. And if for some reason it isn’t or anything is happening, we have those volunteers trained to be first responders to immediately call the ACLU, call other folks who are election experts in a state, alert them so that they can immediately deal with whatever’s happening at a polling place.
JW: I’m especially interested in another one of the items on your 25 list of potential threats. The last one, number 25. This is long after Election Day, January 3rd, 2027. That is really the end of this whole season, because that’s when the new Congress convenes, and the newly elected representatives are supposed to be seated. But your number 25 is: the speaker of the House refuses to accept the winning Democrats as having been elected, and instead installs the Republicans who lost as new members of Congress. Maybe he relies on a report on the vote that was counted by somebody else, the local sheriff in California. We have an example of a sheriff who tried to do this and that thereby, Mike Johnson could preserve the Republican majority in the House. You can’t take that to the Supreme Court. The House is the final judge of its own membership. What is the plan for January 3rd: Mike Johnson refuses to recognize the Democrats who were elected.
DS: You know, I think just to back up a minute, I think the real process that we should be focused on is certification, state by state, and making sure that people who are democratically elected, who have won their elections are certified, and then those certifications are sent to the House. That, I think, is the key moment that we need to really focus on and make sure it’s happening state by state. It is theoretically possible for the House to find ways to meddle with, disrupt, delay, recognizing a new majority, whoever that majority is, it’s theoretically possible. There are a lot of complicated things that go into that involving the House clerk who is a civilian, right? Not a political person. If the current House majority fires the clerk, that could be a big red flag. If the current House majority takes other steps to make it harder for civilian actors in the House to be the ones who are administrating the process to install the new House, which should be a civilian process or nonpolitical process, that could be a red flag, but the spotlight of the entire country would be on them doing that. And so that’s why I think it’s less likely. I mean, it’s the most dramatic thing that can happen. Sure. But it’s also the easiest in some ways to generate a lot of public outcry around like, people don’t like their elections being stolen and people don’t like their power being stripped away. And when politicians try to subvert what, where they have democratically elected their representatives, people do not like that. So, I think it’s much more likely that attempts to cast doubt on elections as a way to delay certification, state by state. Like that, to me, seems a much more likely focus for them than undoing an elected House majority once they finally get to Congress.
JW: And it’s also very important that we have big majorities. The best election protection is to have undeniable majorities.
DS: Yes. ACLU is nonpartisan, but yes, close elections make it more possible for doubt to be cast. That is definitely true, although I will just remind you that and remind your listeners that, in North Carolina, in the state Supreme Court race last year, the outcome was delayed by seven months, because the losing state Supreme Court candidate refused to accept the results and tried to disqualify literally 60,000 North Carolinian voters. And this was in a state where the winner had won by 300 votes. So, I think these are like practice runs for trying to find everything, you know, a throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it type of approach. But we are also preparing for them to throw the kitchen sink at it and are not going to let that happen and are going to be ready to fight at every turn.
JW: The most impressive thing to me about the ACLU’s election Protection Plan is not just lining up thousands of lawyers ready to go to local and state courts to get injunctions blocking efforts to interfere with voting. You’re organizing thousands of non-lawyers, of ordinary citizens to do all kinds of work before the election, on Election Day and after Election Day. Tell us more about the citizen engagement here.
DS: Yes. This is our People Power program, and it is really the foundation of our election safeguarding program. It’s great to have lawyers and we need lawyers. But as you just said, that’s exactly right. We have thousands and thousands of regular people who are volunteers who are trained to know their rights and share those rights with others to help get out the vote, help people learn where their polling place is, what do they need to do to vote? How do they get out and vote, get their neighbors out to vote, and then to be election observers, counting observers, and people who are ready to mobilize if it comes to that. And so, I think at the end of the day, our greatest power is in people insisting that we are living in a democracy, that we are going to have a fair and free election, and that the winners of that fair and free election are going to be seated. And that is how we’re going to run our country. And the best way to make sure that happens is to get involved and to be ready to help get out the vote, observe the election, observe the count, and then be ready to protest if things seem to be going sideways. So, you can sign up for that. Anyone can sign up for that at https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/people-power. And we will train you. We will deploy you. We will make you part of this democratic process.
JW: Aclu.org/people-power. Last question: how confident are you that voting in the midterms will be fair and free?
DS: I am a believer in the people in this country, and every time you try to take their power away, or do things to subvert our democracy, we see people coming out in droves, whether it’s the No Kings protests, right, where we saw millions upon millions of people come out. Time after time, when people saw what was happening with Renee Good in Minneapolis, in Minneapolis, and the other kind of vicious attack of ICE on protesters and on immigrants, people came out in droves. People stood up. So, I feel like, yeah, this is a test for our democracy. We are undergoing a severe stress test right now, but I believe we will prevail.
JW: Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer of the ACLU. Deirdre, I hope we can come back to you for updates in the coming couple of months.
DS: Yes, I would love to give you some updates on how all of this is going.
JW: Thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
DS: And thank you so much for having us.
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JW: Howard Zinn is our best known and most widely read historian. His book, A People’s History of the United States, has sold more than 4 million copies. Even though Zinn died in 2010, Donald Trump attacked his book a couple of years ago, calling it “a propaganda tract” that “tries to make students ashamed of their own history.” Now, Howard Zinn is the subject of a new biography written by Dave Zirin. Of course, he’s The Nation’s longtime sports editor, host of The Edge of Sports Podcast, a frequent guest on ESPN and CNN, and the author of 11 books on the politics of sports, including A People’s History of Sports in the United States. His new book is The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. Dave Zirin, welcome back.
Dave Zirin: Hello, hello. It’s so great to be here.
JW: I’d like to start at the very end of your book, the acknowledgments; the first acknowledgment. Tell us about that one.
DZ: The first person that I acknowledge is my sister, because when I was 18 years old way back in the early 90s, she gave me a copy of A People’s History of the 20th Century by Howard Zinn. And it changed my life. It changed the way certainly, I saw sports. I was a very rabid sports fan, as I had been my entire life. It changed the way I saw perspectives in history, in terms of understanding how history can look differently depending on whether the person is in a position of power or not. It was just so eye-opening. And I think that was true for really a generation of people my age.
JW: In your acknowledgments, you also say that in 2007 was another key moment: the volume, People’s History of Sports. Tell us how that came to be.
DZ: Anthony Arnove is one of the editors at Haymarket Books. He is a collaborator with Howard Zinn, and a book agent as well, and my friend Anthony gave Howard some of my sports writing, and Howard really liked it, and he emailed me one day and of course I almost fell out of my chair. He asked if I’d be interested in writing A People’s History of Sports in the United States as part of what was called The People’s History Series over at The New Press.
JW: And you did write that book.
DZ: Yes, I did. I just didn’t want anybody else to write it. But the real point of bonding, though, was that I got to interview Howard Zinn on stage several times, and those were really remarkable.
JW: And what years were those?
DZ: 2008, 2009. And then Howard passed away in January of 2010 at the age of 87.
JW: You know, the most fascinating part of your book for me is the chapters about Zinn’s early years, because I knew nothing about this, his politics and his reading before he became a famous historian and activist. You know, in some ways it’s the same story as a million other people of his generation growing up poor in the Great Depression, in his case, a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and then going off to fight the Nazis in World War II.
DZ: Yeah, the story is one that is familiar to my family; I mean, people who — Eastern Europe, Jewish, Brooklyn. I mean, these are our ancestral homelands, if you will. Don’t let Netanyahu hear you say that. But it felt this real sense of identification with the Zinn family journey, with Howard being the first generation born in the United States. he and his three brothers, 1922, Brooklyn. But there’s also something different, though, about Howard Zinn than, say, my family, for example, and many Jewish families. I would call Zinn’s journey more atypical than typical because he did not view the United States as a site for potential social mobility, even though he certainly experienced social mobility relative to the incredible poverty with which he was raised. But he also believed very much in that Eugene Debs dictum of when I rise, it’ll be with the ranks, not from the ranks. I mean, his imagination was much more captured by the incredible phalanx of socialists, anarchist communists who were on every street corner in Brooklyn while Howard Zinn was a teenager.
JW: You know, one of the most fascinating things in this book is his political education, as you say, Brooklyn, very left-wing place in the ‘30s. His parents were not political activists, as you explain it. But he identifies the turning point at which he became a political radical. A single event transformed his whole life. Tell us about that.
DZ: Yes. Single event. I mean, that’s what happens when some of the people on the corner with the revolutionary newspapers invite you to come to a demonstration. Then the next thing you know police are knocking you upside the head and you’re being knocked to the ground. And this was a radicalizing moment for Howard Zinn. This idea that the state was not neutral. And the idea that demonstrations provoke fear by those in power. And that fear expresses itself in violence.
JW: Yeah. You quote him saying, after he got hit on the head by a cop and knocked out, “from that moment on, I was no longer a liberal.”
DZ: Absolutely.
JW: After graduating from high school in Brooklyn, he got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, 1939. What was the Brooklyn Navy Yard like?
DZ: You go there now, and you can order some sort of artisanal sandwich that go for $19. But back then it was very rough, but it was also one of the most important places of the what they called the Arsenal for democracy, with which the United States was arming Western Europe against Hitler and Mussolini in the axis powers. And because Zinn had that job, he could have been exempt from fighting in World War II. He could have done the entire war working on the Navy Yards. That’s how indispensable the war, the Pentagon found that work.
JW: The Brooklyn Navy Yard, I learned from your book, was a target of organizing for the Communist Party. What was Howard’s relationship then? Did they successfully recruit him?
DZ: He was never a member. He had too many disagreements. But he found that the Communist Party people were the ones who were the most on the front lines for workers’ rights and most on the front lines around issues of race. And that was why he found in them the kinds of people he wanted to build movements with, build his union with, build workers power on the docks. But he was not — nor was he ever — a card carrying member. Despite the strong suspicions of the FBI.
JW: He became a bombardier in the Army Air Corps, sent to Europe, flew the B-17, which flew to an altitude of 25,000ft and dropped bombs on people they never saw. Of course, the Allied bombing policy, as the end of the war approached, it came more and more to target civilians. Bombing civilians had been considered a war crime. Up to this point, toward the end of the European War, April 1945, Zinn and his unit bombed a town in southwestern France, I had never heard about this, called Royan ROYAN, and that incident came to loom large in his thinking for the rest of his life.
DZ: It certainly did. He left World War II really a committed pacifist after going through. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a massive role in that as well. But it really was just the experience of reckoning with his own mind when he was, as he put it, war, crazy flying, these bombing missions. And it was not until 1966 when he went back to Royan to visit, and he really came to grips with the fact that he had been sent to bomb civilians. And Howard Zinn spent the rest of his life–I found this in his correspondence–writing letters to the Pentagon in an effort to learn about how the decision was made to bomb Royan. Did they know that civilians were to be the ones? And, like, really trying to get people to answer for a war crime. And they did return his correspondence, but never with the actual facts that he wanted to really go after the people who ordered it.
JW: After the war, he went to college, and then he decided to go to grad school and get a PhD in history. Not the most obvious move for a young left-wing vet. How did he decide he wanted to get a PhD in history?
DZ: I was just fascinated by world politics and global politics. And so, and Howard Zinn was also very taken by the historians who were being read popularly in Brooklyn, people like Philip Foner and Herbert Aptheker. And so, it was just a very interesting topic for him. I mean, he was an intellectual from the time he could pick up a used book up off the ground and read it just this incredible autodidactic mind. He wanted to study history. And so, that began at NYU and then went to Columbia, where he got his PhD.
JW: And at Columbia, he worked with some of the greats, Richard Hofstadter for example. But when it came time to get a job, he only got one job offer. Tell us about that.
DZ: That’s so. I mean, you have to understand the politics of the red scare. The House un-American Activities Committee, what would become known as broadly as McCarthyism. But this was about J. Edgar Hoover. This was about the red squads, and this was about their efforts in the climate, of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of trying to make the lives of the young Zinn’s Rosalyn and Howard Zinn, making their life really hell in the late 40s and early 50s, because Howard Zinn was very active in the veterans’ movement after coming back from World War II. And so, he had a target on him because of that, because he believed in multiracial organizing, because he believed in fighting against police brutality, as it had been inflicted on Black vets and was in favor of one of the great contributions of the veterans’ movement. The American Veterans Committee is what they were called, building multiracial branches in the Jim Crow South. So, all of that in the climate of that of deep reaction made him a target. And it also meant that when it was time to look for a job, even though his dissertation had become a published book that had won awards, the only job offer he got was Spelman HBCU, Atlanta Women’s College.
JW: And how many students did Spelman have when they hired him?
DZ: 400. But he was very excited to get any job. I mean, this is still a kid, raised in poverty during the depression. And, for him to be able to take his young bride, Rosalyn. And now two kids Myla and Jeff and bring them to Atlanta to start a new life. That’s what they were going to do.
JW: And what did Spelman teach Howard Zinn so much?
DZ: I mean, first because Spelman was a women’s college and because the young Black women at the school were almost invariably coming from working class sharecropping backgrounds to what was kind of seen as a finishing school for them to become proper middle-class ladies. They really identified with young professors in his own working-class background. But what he learned from them was the importance of fighting both racism and sexism, and not seeing them as different fights. Because these young women at Spelman, remember, Zinn gets there in 1956, just the year after the Montgomery bus boycott. You know, they want to tear the head off of Jim Crow, but to do so, they also have to get around what is a very paternalistic campus. Zinn was their stalwart supporter, both in their fight for civil rights and in their fight against sexism on campus. And I think what he learned from them that he never forgot is that you got to let – you got to create space so young people can lead.
JW: Wasn’t he fired from Spelman?
DZ: Yeah, he was fired from Spelman in I believe it was 1963.
JW: And why was that? What happened?
DZ: He and the president, Albert Manley, had just been sparring for many, many, many years. Manley was very hostile to the students being part of the civil rights movement. He had concerns about them putting themselves in danger. But his response to that was to even amp up the patriarchal structure on campus. And Zinn was the eternal thorn in his side. They were at each other’s throats. And finally, Manley he drummed up a really grotesque rumor. He threatened to release rumors that Howard Zinn had done anything, something improper with a student. And it was really like a threat to say, ‘leave quietly. We’re firing you. Don’t challenge it. Even though you have tenure. Leave quietly or I’m going to harm your reputation.’ It’s a real dirty pool.
JW: This was also the era of the sit-in movement, and Zinn immediately appreciated the significance of the Black college students who were trying to desegregate lunch counters in the South, but he was now 38 years old when SNCC was organized. He had a very clear vision of what SNCC should be. How did that go over with the young Black radicals of SNCC?
DZ: Well, the young Black radicals of SNCC invited Zinn into SNCC, along with the legendary Ella Baker, to be the two adult advisors of this for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And Zinn was also given the responsibility to help launch with Staughton Lynd, the Freedom Schools so famous in the south of that time, teaching young kids in rural areas about history, politics, poetry, science, and running these makeshift schools all over, like deep, deep poverty in that area. So, Zinn knew his place, for lack of a better term, relative to the folks like Bob Moses and the Ladner sisters and Stokely Carmichael. And so there was never a tension as far as ‘who’s this guy telling us what to do?’ Like they had him in the room. And more often than not, he was an observer more than a participant, when you look at the minutes of their own meetings.
JW: And this is where I first heard of him, because he published a book called The New Abolitionists, which was a tremendously important book when it came out.
DZ: Yeah, I love SNCC – The New Abolitionists, it actually just got republished by Haymarket Books. It’s a really interesting piece of reportage more than anything else. Like, I find it to be riveting because he’s speaking about what’s happening right on the ground in front of him. I mean, the civil rights movement is literally unfolding page by page in this book. It’s an act of extraordinary journalism.
JW: Of course, then he became a leading voice of the antiwar movement. Traveled to Hanoi in the ‘60s. Let’s talk about the book, the book that has sold 4 million copies, A People’s History of the United States. He was 58 years old when it was published in 1980. Remind us about the world in which Howard wrote and published this book.
DZ: Howard Zinn was working on A People’s History of the United States with the help of his wife, Roslyn Shechter Zinn, throughout the latter half of the 1970s, where he’s teaching at Boston University. They’re trying to force him out of there, too, like they did at Spelman. Their administration, led by the execrable John Silber, with a whole chapter about Silber boo and all the strikes on campus and battles that took place. So, he’s writing it during this period of intense reaction on campus, right-wing in ascendancy, him trying to hold them off with the workers on campus. And then the book comes out in 1980, the dawn of Reaganism. You know, sometimes when everybody zigs, you gotta zag. And it is one hell of a zag to say in 1980 “I’m going to write a people’s history. I’m going to publish a People’s History of the United States.” But what it then provided was that kind of common language for a generation of people resisting Reaganism.
JW: What do you think explains its success? I’m sure nobody anticipated it would sell 4 million copies in 1980.
DZ: No. And its reviewer in The New York Times, Eric Foner, decried it for being too depressing, which is so interesting because one of the – to answer your question, it’s because with every generation it seems to still have the powers of inspiration. I had a teacher say to me that they like teaching Howard Zinn, because it was the only thing that kept the kids off their phones. And it’s that kind of verve with the way Howard Zinn tells history that I think people really respond to. And because his focus is always from below, and it’s always on how ordinary people have been able to do extraordinary things. He is able to capture the imagination of a reader to say, ‘well, if they can do it, maybe I can do it too.’
JW: One of the best things about Howard Zinn was, in your words, that he was “always the happy warrior” — even though he saw terrible suffering and oppression, and experienced some huge political defeats that did not make him depressed or pessimistic. How do you explain that?
DZ: Yeah, I mean, he certainly did have his have moments of feeling pessimism, for sure. But he was always so focused like a laser on two things. Like first is an understandingf history that backlashes are really baked into the cake every time we fight for progress. And we’re living through a version of that right now. But backlashes themselves can be beaten back. And so, he was very rooted in that history, which allowed him to weather the difficult presents. But the other thing, too, was that he would always try to generalize from the present, out of struggle that did exist. So instead, really as a starting point, looking at, what wasn’t happening, trying to look at what was. So, we could draw lessons from that. So, his instincts as an activist and as a historian were both very farsighted. And I think certainly in our current attention economy, being farsighted is very far away from where we are. So, I’m hoping that’s like a mild contribution. I hope people read the book and see the value in having a rooted sense of history and a sense of patience about the world around us.
JW: Dave Zirin – his new book is The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. Dave, thanks for talking with us today.
DZ: Thank you so much, Jon. I really appreciate you.
