Dr. Will Horne is a history professor at Villanova University. He is also the founder and editor of The Activist History Review, an online journal created in 2017 to contextualize US history in light of ongoing threats to our multiracial democracy.

Horn jumped on to talk about recent counter-majoritarian trends in US society and the threat to democracy in the US. I have deep respect for academics who do their thinking in public, rather than in academic journals that no one can access. Will is great and you should read his work.

From the TAHR website:

“The Review is intended to allow us and others like us the opportunity to use our knowledge of the past to help inform our decisions in the present. Our struggle is not optional. Failing to understand the forces that shape our world is a luxury of the powerful.

We launched this online journal on Inauguration Day, 2017, in the United States, a moment poised on the precipice of a forbidding uncertainty. As a nation, the United States cannot chart the way forward without reference to where it has already been. As a people, its citizens cannot make informed decisions without understanding a shared national past and the ways it has shaped the present. The events of the 2016 election remind us that forces often thought lost in the mists of a past best left forgotten are as present and as powerful as ever. The continued existence and success of those forces is the direct result of a pervasive and systemic refusal to come to terms with that past and its connections to this present.”

In other words, the authoritarian turn we are seeing in the US is a regression to the historical mean. Multiracial, pluralist democracy has really only been the norm in the US since 1965. We have to understand this history to navigate the present and build a better future.

Cast of Characters

Going Further

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM