The United States is pretty intertwined with Latin America. So why has it historically been seen as more of a European outpost as opposed to a nation in the Western hemisphere that is part of the broader Americas? Our guest this week points out that there are other ways to understand the history and identity of the U.S., aside from the narrative that is so often a part of contemporary discourse. Greg Grandin is the C. Vann Woodard Professor of History at Yale and the author of “America, América: A New History of the New World.” He joins WITHpod to discuss rethinking our conceptions of the “New World,” democratic backsliding in the U.S., why he says we should rethink hemispheric history and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Greg Grandin, Historian and Author: What I say in the book is that every wealthy country went through some restructuring to deal with changes in the global economy, competition, rising oil prices, every rich country in Europe. No other country so gleefully assaulted the institutions that could have ameliorated that restructuring, as did the United States.
Chris Hayes, Host: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I’m speaking to you during the week in which the president of El Salvador, President Bukele, came to the White House and met with President Trump in a pretty appalling spectacle in the Oval Office, which we’re sort of used to appalling spectacles in the Oval Office now, but, at issue, of course, is the fact that the U.S. government has contracted with Bukele’s government in El Salvador for a fee, essentially, as a kind of like paid contractor.
Take people that the Trump administration deems with no due process, terrorists and criminals, and render them to this infamous prison that Bukele has built for what he says are the worst of the worst in a country that really has been besieged by gang violence, largely MS-13, which is the gang born here in the U.S. that we exported to El Salvador. Fun fact.
And so they’re sitting in the Oval Office. And one of the things that really kind of snapped into my mind and a lot of people’s minds was, like, oh, these two guys are peas in a pod. These are two of the same kind. Like, they’re ease with each other, the fact that they’re kind of pursuing the same project.
Bukele has massively consolidated power in El Salvador. He has used the genuine and real threat of gang violence to trample human rights and due process and to create a very powerful central authority. Watching these two guys sort of rib each other and laugh and kind of do this, like, really appalling gaslighting of the American press, like, oh, you want to send back and someone wrongly deported?
Like, what am I supposed to do, smuggle him into the country? And then Trump’s saying, well, what are we going to do, violate his sovereignty? Meanwhile, he’s talking about, like, taking Greenland and Canada.
I mean, the whole thing was preposterous. But the point, I think, the moment that I had and I think a lot of people had, which I think was really useful and instructive and sets up our conversation today was, oh, these are two peas in a pod. These guys are the same category.
And the reason I think that same category is important is that so many conversations about what is happening in the U.S. vis-a-vis Democratic backsliding looks to Europe particularly as the comparison set, Hungary most often. I personally think there’s a lot that Erdogan did in Turkey that’s in some senses more relevant, because, actually, Erdogan is more authoritarian than Erdogan has been.
And I think the aspirations of Trump are actually more authoritarian than even Erdogan. But it’s weird how much America situates itself in the cohort of European nations and uses European reference for everything that’s happening here, including on up to Nazi comparisons, when people talk about the rise of the Third Reich.
And “The Atlantic” wrote this great piece about how the Nazis sort of undid the constitutional republic of the Germany that they had inherited within 130 days. And, again, all that stuff is useful and instructive.
But there is a profound and rich history in the Western Hemisphere of moves towards and away democracies, democracies that were thriving, that were destroyed, democracies that fell into dictatorship and then came out of dictatorship thanks to movements, people’s movements that felled that dictatorship, an extremely rich history right in our own backyard that really does tend to get very short shrift.
And I think part of the reason is Americans think of America as a kind of European outpost, as opposed to a nation in the Western Hemisphere that is part of the Americas. And it’s that kind of conceptual revolution that is at the heart of this incredibly ambitious new history from Pulitzer Prize-winning professor Greg Grandin.
He’s the C. Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale. He’s author of numerous very acclaimed books, including “Fordlandia,” which is a remarkable book, and also “The End of the Myth,” which won a Pulitzer.
And his latest book is called “America, America: A New History of the New World” that attempts to tell the story of the Western Hemisphere as a kind of coherent whole in which the projects of conquest, self-governance, authoritarian and dictatorship and liberation are constantly at battle within states and across states throughout the hemisphere in this kind of united, thematic way.
And it’s really a kind of remarkable conceptual revolution. And I thought, what a great time to talk about precisely this.
So, Greg Grandin, welcome to “Why Is This Happening?”
Greg Grandin: Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s really terrific to be here.
Chris Hayes: Is that how you understand the project of the book?
Greg Grandin: Yes, that is. That is how I understand it.
I also understand it as a way of trying to think about, to reorient our understanding of the creation and foundation and maintenance of what is called the liberal order, the rules-based order that is now being undermined and threatened and collapsing in front of our eyes, and situate its origins less in terms of Europe and its colonies or the Anglo-American sphere of interest, and reorient it more towards U.S.-Latin American relations, and understand how, after World War II, what gets put into place is largely what was in place in the Americas.
And what was in place was not just the institutions of Pan-Americanism and a lot of the kind of liberal legal concepts we think of when we think of modern jurisprudence when it comes to international law, but also a kind of tension there, like, as you said, a struggle between different conceptions of what it means, what sovereignty means, what equality means, what citizenship means.
And looking at that history through the long lens, from conquest, the Spanish Conquest in the early 1500s up through the imposition of neoliberalism and its unraveling now. So it really does kind of take in the full sweep and leaves us right at the current moment, where that system that emerges out of the New World is now being unraveled, and nowhere better than where you explained it.
It’s a perfect example of the idea of turning El Salvador into Devil’s Island for the United States or a gulag for the United States.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I’m curious just given that you have spent your career writing about the Western Hemisphere and Latin America and South America, Central America, I’m just curious what you thought watching that in the Oval Office on Monday, because, I mean, to me, like I said, it was an appalling spectacle, but I’m not as historically informed as you are.
Greg Grandin: Yes, or the ways in which histories layer itself. Latin America has long been the place where the United States sought to export its excess population, right?
So, back in the 1830s, a lot of people came up with the idea, well, the way that we could deal with the problem of slavery, either if we abolish it or we keep it in some form, is that we can get rid of the free people of color by sending them to Latin America.
And then, after the Civil War, during the Civil War, Lincoln and others thought a good place to send people of color would be Central America. So there’s been a long history of kind of the idea of exporting our excess population, and, of course, the Trail of Tears.
The first people who had birthright citizenship were Native Americans. And they didn’t have citizenship formally, but they certainly had birthright.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: And they were the first people expelled. And so now we have got full circle. There’s that layer of history.
Then there’s the layer of Latin America as the place where people are disappeared. Latin America as a region in the 1970s had become famous for the state, the anti-communist predatory state that literally just disappears people. Back then, though, the state denied it.
And this is what struck me more than anything else, and that that denial added to the uncertainty and thus added to the terror. The state would say, ah, they ran off to Cuba, they went off with the guerrillas, we don’t know where they are. Now they’re like, yes, we know where they are, with the kind of fuck you impunity that is just like another kind of terror.
Like, we are really powerless in front of people who are admitting that they’re disappearing people, and they’re not going to do anything about it. It’s quite striking. And then of course, there’s the long history of the United States and Central America and El Salvador.
Chris Hayes: Yes, let’s stay with this for a second, just the desaparecidos. I mean, if you have been in South America and you have traveled through South America, like particularly in Argentina, you know there’s museums and there’s exhibits about the desaparecidos and people that are taken, snatched.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I was just over the weekend reading a great memoir or graphic novel by Ari Richter called “Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz.” He’s got four grandparents who survived the Nazis and weaves together his story with theirs.
And there is something profoundly elemental as like the core of tyranny is the snatching of the person.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, whether it’s the knock at the door of the night of the S.S. to the Gestapo or someone taken off the street by some right-wing dictatorship in Brazil or Argentina.
Like, I think partly what was so chilling about what we saw on Monday and partly what’s so chilling about what the Trump administration is saying they have the right to do is that it’s the absolute beating heart of tyranny.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The thing that makes an unfree society unfree is that the state can just snatch you off the street, basically.
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes. And like I said, in the ‘70s, the state would deny it. Now they’re saying, sure, we’re doing it. It’s ramped up to 10, the fact that they’re admitting they’re doing it and they’re not going to do anything about it.
But, yes, that history of disappearances is exactly a kind of modality of violence that is particularly perverse, in opposition to the idea of a state that is constituted in order to protect rights, and much less distribute rights through social rights.
And, certainly, in the 1970s in places Argentina, they drew a direct connection to the Nazis. A lot of the artwork that was done in the 1970s referenced the disappearances of the Nazis. They understood it as a genealogy. And with all debates here about getting back to the provincialism of the United States and the debates about fascism so much, Latin Americans have understood themselves as fighting fascism since World War II.
But whatever. They didn’t get into theoretical debates about what is fascism. But certainly these anti-communist states, they understood as fascists.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: But what’s interesting and, again, chilling, is that, coming out of the Cold War, as Latin America returned to constitutional rule, there was a widespread repudiation and an enormous amount of cultural and political and legal work meant to kind of deal with the problem of disappearances, pushing the militaries back at the barracks and dismantling the paramilitary networks.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: A lot of the central left governments had memory projects.
And so when Rumsfeld, and, again, we’re jumping in all over the place.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: But when Rumsfeld and Bush went down to Latin America in 2002, first to Santiago and then Quito in 2005 and tried to get Latin America on board on, on the project of rendition, Latin America refused–
Chris Hayes: Ah.
Greg Grandin: — like completely. The Open Society has a report of global rendition at every continent–
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Greg Grandin: — even Scandinavia, in terms of letting flights go over there. Airspace was involved in the operation of rendition, except Latin America.
Chris Hayes: Ah.
Greg Grandin: And Latin America refused. That was the heyday of Lula and Kirchner in Argentina and Chavez in Venezuela. They just refused. And so what’s chilling about this is that what we’re seeing is an undermining of that and somebody Bukele saying, yes, not only we’re going to participate. We’re going to participate in the opening.
And you can see there’s certainly a social base for Trumpism. There is certainly a social base for Trumpism in Latin America, without a doubt, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally, yes.
Greg Grandin: And it’s there. And Trump is doing the normal thing that he does where, instead of cultivates it, he usually undermines it by acting–
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: — I’m going to take Panama. And it kind of isolates the conservatives.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: But there also is a fight back, right? The world’s strongest social democratic left, both in terms of political parties, but also social movements come out of Latin America. And in many ways, that’s one of the things the book seeks to explain also is what accounts for the persistence of the social democratic ideal, despite the degree of repression, activists and reformers.
And the country, the region didn’t turn towards a kind of ethnic particularism or religious extremism or theocratic whatever, authoritarianism. Its social movements still defend what we call universal humanism, whatever, the things that we like.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: I mean, they might not always do it. Things might go wrong in some countries like Venezuela.
Chris Hayes: Well, yes, you should talk about that, yes.
Greg Grandin: But at least the ideal, the ideal is, you know what I’m saying, is like, they still understand themselves as the bearers of the Enlightenment.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: It’s remarkable.
Chris Hayes: Well, so let’s go back to the Conquest. There’s two aspects of the Conquest. Obviously, I have read histories of the Conquest before.
There were two aspects that I found particularly interesting. One is, and this is a theme that I return to time and time again on this podcast and in my reading, is whenever a horrible thing happens in history, and you want to tell yourself they didn’t realize at the time, you’re 100 percent wrong almost always.
Like, in almost every case, there’s contemporary people being like, this is absolutely an atrocity. I guess I did realize that a little bit. I know that, like, Columbus, even in his own lifetime, became a somewhat controversial figure because of what was happening in Hispaniola.
But the account of the priest that gets out and is translated in all these languages of what the conquistadors are doing in South America, I had not spent a lot of time with before. Tell us about who this man is and what his account of the Conquest says.
Greg Grandin: Yes, well, the Conquest, there’s two things. One, is Spain is the most bureaucratic empire in history. It wrote everything down in triplicates and quadruplicates. in Other words, you can always fine one document here, the same document in another archive. The
second thing is advent of the printing press. So it was the most self-aware conquest. But people Bartolome de las Casas, who was a Dominican friar, he wasn’t when he went to Hispaniola in 1502. He went as a merchant and a conqueror or a conqueror’s adjunct.
And he planned to make money. He planned to get rich and he settled. And he was already a priest, a secular priests. But he increasingly became close to the Dominicans, who already were developing this critique of the Conquest.
And de las Casas became one of the most forceful advocates for what we, I guess, would call the laying the foundation of the idea of universal equality, the slow creation of humanity, as one scholar puts it. And the Spaniards didn’t arrive thinking they were finding empty land. They knew that they were conquering people, that they weren’t the Puritans.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: The Puritans, they’re, oh, look, no one’s here.
Chris Hayes: Right.
(LAUGHTER)
Greg Grandin: How lucky. The Spaniards, de las Casas thought more people lived in the New World than in all the world. He was wrong about that. But there were a lot of people here. There were upwards of 100 million people.
And Spain had to figure out a way how to justify it. How do you justify it? These people, if they never knew Christ, they never had a chance to reject Christ. So, therefore, do we have a right to enslave them? By what basis do we establish dominion?
Las Casas on all of these points said they had no right to establish dominion. They had no right to conquer them. These people, these were humans. They weren’t natural slaves. And he came up with one phrase that resonated: All humanity is one.
And I take that as the kind of foundation of modern political theory, the idea of political equality. There were other theorists also and critics, Francisco de Vitoria, who actually never went to a New World, but he was a professor at the University of Salamanca, and others who put forward a series of arguments that made it impossible to, now, it didn’t stop the conquest.
It didn’t stop any of it. It didn’t stop the horror. It didn’t stop the las Casasian vision of the New World being a place where Christianity would reform itself and back basically be an answer to Luther, it would be a place in which the Catholic–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: That obviously didn’t happen. But the critique was so strong that it did two things. One, it set the stage for Anglo-Protestant theorizing about international law.
And mostly what it did was Anglo-Protestant theorists figuring out a way to work around the Spaniards. They wanted a theory that would both discredit the Spanish Conquest and legitimate their own conquest. And they thought they could find it in the writings of Vitoria and others, but they couldn’t.
The second thing it did, and this is jumping a little bit ahead, is that it gave independence leaders in Spanish America by the time they start to break away from Spain and win independence, and then the main problem is the United States, which is reviving the doctrine of conquest.
It gave them a ready made body of intellectual apparatus of criticism that they could apply to the United States that delegitimated conquest, that delegitimated the way they treated Native Americans, that was emancipationist, that was abolitionist. And so this is the strength of the Latin American critique of the United States.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: It was first forged against Spain. So this is the heart of where the Latin American kind of humanism comes from. It doesn’t deny the barbarism of Spanish Catholicism and Spanish Empire, but the reaction to the revolt and revolution against that horror led to this critique that was foundational from modern political theory.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I want to talk about that in a second, but just to stay with the Conquest, I mean, two of the things that were really striking, one, that point you made that the idea that the discovery of the New World and its 100 million inhabitants presented a theoretical problem, which is like, clearly, we want to take this over and subjugate them.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But what exactly is our justification? It was interesting to me that they thought that, of course, because everyone comes up, I mean, even the Nazis.
It’s remarkable, right, to go back and read Nazi legal reasoning about why they put the camps outside of Germany proper, right?
Greg Grandin: Right.
Chris Hayes: They’re like, even in the most horrific genocide, there’s this sort of weird legalism. In this case, there’s a kind of theoretical legalism of like, well, clearly we’re going to subjugate, enslave these people and take their stuff.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Why we’re able to do that seems a little murky. And so we got to put a little thought into this. And I just had not sort of acquainted myself with that.
And the other thing that was so striking was, of course, las Casas writing about the horrifying mass murder that he’s witnessing, I mean, truly the worst, mass rape, mass murder, infants being killed, finds this welcome audience among anti-Catholic, like in the context of the European sectarian wars of look at these marauding Catholics.
Greg Grandin: Oh, yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: So there’s this whole audience in Europe, which is look at the Catholics, look at what barbarians they are, which I also hadn’t realized.
Greg Grandin: Yes, he’s translated. I mean, the book “A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies” is translated into English almost immediately once it’s published in Spanish in the 1840s. And then it gets published and published again in Spain, including as the English are doing the same thing to the Irish.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: So that’s another story. But, yes, they do have to justify. The way they justify the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and driving Andalusia and Islam off the Iberian Peninsula is that they had the idea that the Phoenicians and the people lived in the Iberian Peninsula converted to Christ before the Muslims came and therefore it wasn’t a conquest, but a reconquest of lands that were already Christian.
Chris Hayes: Right, reconquista. Right.
Greg Grandin: They couldn’t make that argument for the New World, right, because these people out of history, out of Christ’s history. They didn’t know Christ.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: Some tried to say, oh, maybe the apostles were there.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I love that. There’s a bunch of people mucking around at the edges being like, we feel like we found a Roman coin there, so maybe somehow they rejected Christ.
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Maybe that gives us an in.
Greg Grandin: And if the Romans were there, we’re the Romans.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: Or maybe they’re the Jews. They’re the Jews.
Chris Hayes: Right. That was another popular idea.
Greg Grandin: They decided it’s the Jews, yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: And the Jews rejected Christ.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: So, therefore, within a short amount of time, it was fairly clear that it really was a new world. And the newness of it was so startling. And it created a revolution within Catholicism as profound as the revolution outside of Catholicism and the Reformation.
And this is why, again, not to keep jumping ahead, but just to foreshadow a little bit on a preview, is liberation theology. It comes from somewhere.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: It just doesn’t spring up in the 1970s out of nothing.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: There is a strong emancipationist current, anti-capitalist current within Catholicism.
And the social history of Spanish imperialism was another kind of source of this, because the Spanish Catholic empire claimed to be universal, claimed to represent the world and all of the world’s wisdom. And here it was administering an empire that was openly and undeniably diverse.
So that reconciliation between diversity and universalism or a universal empire that was organized around the administration of difference in order to extract wealth was a recognition of diversity.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: Now, again, not to get too off the–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: The Anglo colonialism didn’t have to deal with that. They pushed their diversity to the frontier, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: I mean, there’s a document that I cite in here from 1607–
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting .
Greg Grandin: — where the Virginia Company is trying to figure out.
This is 1607. This is a century after the Spanish colonialism has consolidated itself. And they’re paying attention to the debates in Spain. And they ask themselves, maybe we should put out some kind of a document to justify colonialism in North America, our colonialism, our colonies, Virginia and what become.
And they debate this and debate this. And they’re constantly referencing the Spaniards. And they said, after a century, the Spaniards can’t justify dominion. They can’t justify slavery. They can’t justify. Maybe it’s better we don’t say anything.
(LAUGHTER)
Greg Grandin: And it’s that evasion that finds its social expression in pushing Indians away, rather than incorporating them into the colonial project, the way the Spaniards incorporated, because Native Americans were central to Spanish colonial–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: They were central morally. They were central. They created the first world currency by digging the gold out of, the silver out of Potosi. They were the center of the whole thing.
For Puritans, Indians kind of flicked off on the sidelines and haunting the imagination.
Chris Hayes: Right.
More of our conversation after this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: One of the things that always struck me these sort of differences, obviously, there’s slavery in South America. I mean, we should we should just set the table here, which there’s 100 million-plus inhabitants of South America and Central America, of the Americas prior to the Colombian contact.
And that population is reduced by–
Greg Grandin: Ninety percent.
Chris Hayes: Ninety percent within 100 years, basically, right? Yes.
Greg Grandin: Mostly by disease, but also by the first decades of dislocation and war.
Chris Hayes: Yes, horrific, 90 percent.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, just the most cataclysmic population die-off in human history as far as we know–
Greg Grandin: Right. Yes.
Chris Hayes: — including things the bubonic plague and the Holocaust, the worst.
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: But it’s also the case that, through this period of time, the remaining indigenous populations become an extractive, essentially subjugated labor force.
Greg Grandin: Subjugated labor force.
Chris Hayes: And while there are slaves, obviously, throughout South and Latin America, particularly in Brazil, the subjugation that happens of the indigenous people in South America is different than the sort of pushing to the frontier and conquest in North America.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And one of the things that was very striking to me when I visited South America in my 20s, and I went to a city in Bolivia called Potosi, which was the richest city in the world at one point, because it has a huge silver mine in the middle of the town. It still mines silver there.
And there’s a museum of the sort of depredations. And, basically, it’s indistinguishable from chattel slavery as far as you can tell from the museum. I mean, conceptually, it probably is different, but people are basically worked until their death. They have no liberty, personal liberty, and they’re doing the most grueling, horrifying things.
But it was the moment that the sort of clicked into my mind about these differences where that kind of extractive labor practice uses slavery in North America. In South America, it’s combination of slaves and the native indigenous population. And that creates a real difference both conceptually and sort of socially in terms of how these two different Americas develop.
Greg Grandin: Yes, absolutely.
Native Americans and then imported Africans as slaves were central to the whole colonial project. As you said, they were central in terms of the extraction of the wealth. The silver that they took out of Potosi created the Spanish real, pieces of eight, the peso, basically the world’s first universal currency, if you want to talk about universalism and you want to talk about what gives universalism materiality.
And it’s certainly money. So they’re central to the creation of capitalism, but also central morally to the way the Spanish administer the empire.
And I’m not romanticizing the Spanish Empire and I’m not suggesting putting forth some white legend to counter the Protestant black legend, but historians have documented that there were legal structures and courts that actually created avenues of redress for enslaved peoples, that slavery itself, even though we made the distinction here between chattel slavery and tribute and in come the end the Indians.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: That it was just slavery. It was subjugation.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: And so when independence comes, the independence leaders have a general emancipationist world view that covers the whole gamut. It’s not like, oh, we have to deal with chattel slavery as a thing or we have to share with Indians as a thing.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: They understood the whole project. And everything’s messy on the ground. And every country, emancipation comes at different times and there’s different struggles.
But there was a sense that independence from the Spanish Catholic Empire would entail a kind of end. All would be citizens within a new nation, even if that didn’t actually happen.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Right. And that’s distinct from the sort of fundamentally contradictory thing happening in the States–
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which is the slave owners getting together and braying about liberty–
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which, again, one of these things. Contemporary English critics were like, get a load of these guys.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: They love to write about liberty while they’re whipping their slaves.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And let’s talk about that sort of liberatory generation or emancipatory generation, because one of the things that also struck me in my time in South America is, obviously, everyone in South America knows American history and knows about George Washington, the founders and Jefferson and Franklin.
Americans don’t really know anything, by and large, about Bolivar, Bernardo O’Higgins, that these figures are maybe you have heard of them possibly, but it’s all pretty remote. It’s no sense in which these figures were all in dialogue with each other and understood each other as in this shared contested project, right?
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But we don’t get that in America at all in the way that we understand it.
Greg Grandin: No. No, we don’t get that. We don’t get how long the Spanish-American wars for independence were, over a decade, how bloody they were, how much more ambitious they were in their vision of what would be the post-independence nation of citizenship, that all would be citizens, and even as they confronted classes and people that stopped that from happening.
No, there’s a deep ignorance. I mean, it’s funny. My daughter is in seventh grade, and they’re doing some project on “The Crucible” and colonialism and all of that stuff. I said the Spaniards were here first. I said, colonialism didn’t start.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: The New World didn’t start.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: But it’s so funny that they’re still starting in Plymouth–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: — right, and not starting in Hispaniola when they’re telling this story of–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: And they’re properly critical. It’s a good progressive school and all that stuff.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: But they’re starting.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: So there is an enormous ignorance, and not just that.
Bolivar was such a great modernist political figure, in the sense that he had this deep existential doubt. He thought everything was hopeless, but then was like Sartrean–
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: — in his drive forward, despite that he knew that a small class of planters would never allow the nation to form, that everything was destined, to make revolution is plowing the sea and all of that stuff.
And he thought that the only way that they could hold it all together is if they confederized. So one of his plans was in 1826 to have a congress in Panama in which all the nations of the New World would come together and affirm a number of principles.
And what’s great about this, and I spend a lot of time in the book about this, is how that provoked such a backlash among all sectors of the U.S. political class, especially Southerners, who thought that they were going to be forced to renounce slavery, proclaim emancipation, renounce the doctrine of conquest.
And so in many ways that congress, which ultimately failed miserably, but what it did do was spark the emergence of the Jacksonian coalition into being. And a lot of people hold Latin America to blame for kind of politicizing the name America, right, claiming Latin, as opposed to Saxon America.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: But it was really the Jacksonians who started talking about South America in a very disdainful way, yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean, one of the things that comes through is Bolivar and that sort of revolution generation. Maybe this is a little bit of an overgeneralization, but I will say it and then you can kind of add the nuance.
The American founders are a fascinating, complex group. With some exceptions, they’re not, I would say, recognizably left-wing in the way that, say, many of the revolutionaries of France are. And I would say Thomas Paine is recognizably left-wing.
Jefferson has his moments, although not really in some ways, whereas Bolivar and others are recognizably left-wing, at least in a vision of total universal emancipation, the destruction of hierarchy, the full equality of people, and not this kind of very Madisonian cabins, like, well, we don’t get the vote to get too out of control if we don’t like–
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And there does seem a pretty different distinctness in the ethos there.
Greg Grandin: Yes, and the distinction I think comes out of the social histories of colonialism, the difference between the Spanish Empire and the British Empire, the difference of the social experience on the ground in terms of administering and recognizing people, as opposed to pushing the frontier.
I think the difference is also rooted in Catholic theology to some degree, that the sociality of Catholicism, the oneness of Catholicism. That all humanity is one is a very Catholic notion. I think there’s a sense, there’s a solidarity within Catholicism that may not be there in the individualism.
And the point isn’t to isolate any of these variables and make them the key thing that would be a little–
Chris Hayes: Right, just in the mix.
Greg Grandin: Yes, it’s in the mix. And it gives you a sense.
And, yes, I mean, without doubt, the leaders of the Spanish-American Revolution looked to France and all of the debates and struggles in France, even though they admired the United States.
Chris Hayes: Right. Totally
Greg Grandin: I mean, Bolivar said–
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: — we would love to be able to have a nation in which freedom would come back out through the unleashing of individual ambition and allowing people to pursue their interests as much as they can, as long as they don’t infringe on others, he said, but we don’t have the social base for that here.
What we have is a handful of feudal landlords. We have an obscurantist Catholic Church. We have colonial officials. We have a patrician, pater-fraternal, paterfamilia world view in which the patriarch is all.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: And so a good comparison is this. The U.S. Constitution is famously kind of prescriptive, right? It’s almost mosaic in its thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: And the first constitution in Spanish-America was in 1811, 1812, the First Republic of Venezuela’s Constitution.
And in many ways, it adopted a lot of the kind of individual rights. It affirmed the right to property. It affirmed the right to the state due process and all of that stuff. But it also said, because it had an appreciation of history, that individuals only exist if society exists. And they use the word society nine times and they use the word social 11 times.
Neither of those words appear once in the U.S. Constitution. And a lot of that goes back to the Conquest, because the writers of that Constitution and the writers of the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence explicitly referenced the Conquest.
The Spaniards came over like animals, right? They came over and they came over wolves and tigers and they ripped into the native population. In other words, they didn’t have society. They were unleashed. And what you need, the way that you create individuals is by creating a healthy society.
So that balance, if we want to call it left-wing, and I would, and I would also recall it the kind of foundation of social rights that you need.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: You need social rights if you’re going to have individual rights, is what distinguishes Spanish America from the United States, which fetishizes individual rights almost to a cultlike point.
Chris Hayes: Right. And when you talk about the social basis that Bolivar observed, right, if you’re talking about post, not the Confederate South, right, not the slave states, where there’s just this distinct racialized hierarchy and the rendering of people nonhuman and extracting of their labor.
But in the North, you had, de Tocqueville talks about, this sort of incipient middle-class society, right? High levels of social mobility, this sort of new middle class. And it’s a social base that was sort of coextensive with this kind of town hall democracy, right?
Greg Grandin: Right.
Chris Hayes: Again, all this stuff is very cabined, because you have got we’re pushing the Natives, the indigenous folks to the frontier, we’re subjugating the slaves.
But with that said, one of the things that strikes me now, and this is, again, an oversimplification, but I will say it and you can add your expertise, it’s like, I think Americans have always distinguished themselves from Latin America as we’re a middle-class society. And that’s a very hierarchical society.
And when you go to South America, you see the trappings of inequality, right, that people that achieve a certain level of money have to live behind walls with armed guards that they pay for, so that the folks in the favelas who are a kilometer away aren’t going to come and mug them, right?
Greg Grandin: Right.
Chris Hayes: And that social inequality, that hierarchy starts in the encomienda system and it transmutes in all sorts of different ways for different institutions, right?
Greg Grandin: Right. Right.
Chris Hayes: And one of the theses I sort of have as I was reading your book is American social inequality has gotten more Latin American and our politics have gotten more Latin American.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But there’s something to that. We have gotten more hierarchical, we have gotten less equal. And the kinds of things that we associate, I think wrongly in many ways, with the deficiencies of Latin American politics are here now because they’re actually about the social basis more than they are about some specific other.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
And the irony of that, which I deal with at the end of the book as I come back, and the irony of that is that, the United States emerges out of the Cold War triumphant without an enemy on the horizon, a run of economic growth that was unprecedented.
And the first thing it does is impose a bunch of policies on itself that it had already imposed on Latin America.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: It imposed the economic restructuring and neoliberalism that that it had been imposing on Latin America since 1973, which restored that manorial, hierarchical regime in which individuals were vulnerable and hence had to be servile.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: There was a protracted effort to overcome that in the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s in Latin America. And they did overcome it to a large degree.
But then there was the backlash, which wasn’t just the anti-communism but was also the neoliberalism. And that’s, of course, famous, the Chicago Boys and basically forcing privatization in Argentina and the corruption that went with it and how all of a sudden Mexico had more billionaires than it knew what to do with.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: And what does the United States do as soon as the Berlin Wall falls and Bill Clinton is elected? It starts to treat its own country as if it was an occupied territory and its citizens as belligerent.
It starts passing all sorts of punitive laws about terrorism, about policing, about prisons–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: — and as it’s implementing the same policies it imposed on Latin America and forced Russia to impose on.
I mean, it’s a remarkable moment of self-destruction. And we’re a long way from the ‘90s, and the unraveling has taken a long time. But one could root it there. And what I say in the book is that every wealthy country went through some restructuring to deal with changes in the global economy, competition, rising oil prices–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: — every rich country in Europe. No other country so gleefully assaulted the institutions that could have ameliorated that restructuring as did the United States.
Well, of course, Latin America did, but no other rich country went after its unions, went after its welfare state, went after–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: It’s one thing to restructure a little bit, like Germany. Well, we got to do this to stay–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: But we don’t necessarily have to gut the whole thing.
And that’s what’s distinct about the United States. And I think it is rooted in this, I don’t tease this part out in the book that much, but a certain history of shared history with Latin America. But that convergence of the Latin Americanization of the United States.
Frank Church, Senator Frank Church–
Chris Hayes: Of the Church Committee famously in the 1970s.
Greg Grandin: Of the Church Committee from Idaho. He in 1975, two years after the fall of Allende, just two years after the fall of Allende, talked about the Latin Americanization of the United States.
Now, that phrase could often be used in a very negative tone to mean the country’s becoming mongrelized–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: — or the country is falling to dictators, caudillos or populists.
But he meant it totally in a kind of what was deregulation, offshoring. The word wasn’t in currency at the time, but he meant it as the rise of neoliberalism and the United States was becoming more Latin America. And that’s what he meant by that.
Chris Hayes: When you talk about, you use this term in quotation marks like mongrelization. I mean, obviously, you’re not saying that term without quotation marks. You’re talking about the sort of racist vision of the populations of South and Latin America as distinct from ours.
And I wanted you to talk a little bit about that, because that seems so central right now, right? This idea of the racialized difference between Americans and South Americans.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And it’s all very complicated, as everything having to do with race is. Obviously the folks that are Chicano and north of Rio Grande, there’s 10th, 12th generation, there before it was part of the United States.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: There’s hierarchies of race in South America. I know lots of people who would be racially categorized as white who are South American.
But one of the things you’re just really seeing now with the way that Trump talks about specifically South and Central American immigration specifically is this intensely racialized vision of these sort of dark, menacing hordes essentially that are subhuman.
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I wonder just where that comes from. How much work has been done to kind of create this sort of separate racialized category of other that is the folks who are in South America, et cetera?
Greg Grandin: Yes.
I mean, it has deep roots. So, when Spanish America was breaking away from Spain, there were debates within the U.S. political class, some who focused more on the politics, how great it’ll be to have a hemisphere of sister republics. Others focused, though, on the fact that they were nations of mixed blood, that they were overwhelmingly, they used the phrase Negroes.
When that whole backlash to Bolivar inviting the United States to participate in the congress in Panama in 1828, that set off a whole wave of Southerners talking about are we supposed to sit at the diplomatic dinners with all sorts of racial epithets?
Chris Hayes: Wow, yes.
Greg Grandin: And so it has a deep sense that Spanish America is racially distinct. And, of course, it is, and it’s not just that it’s racially distinct, but that there was mixing.
And part of that goes back to the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Empire ideally wanted a republic of Indios, a republic of Spaniards, and a kind of Aristotelian symmetry between the two. But within one generation, you have mestizos.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: I have in the book the different names of mixtures just go on and on and on, until, of course, it just dissolves into meaninglessness, because you have so–
Chris Hayes: Just to intervene there, right?
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: In America, because you have this one–
Greg Grandin: The one drop rule.
Chris Hayes: The creation of the one drop rule, again, ex nihilo, all this stuff is completely invented, right?
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes.
Chris Hayes: So that you can enforce–
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in blood and with tyranny, right–
Greg Grandin: Right.
Chris Hayes: — including someone’s liberty. You can enforce this bright line.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That, if you don’t get rid of that, then what you have is, you get mixing.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And these racial categories become harder and harder over generations to enforce with the rigidity the Americans are able to maintain because of the one drop.
Greg Grandin: Yes, absolutely.
And so, without doubt, there’s racism in Latin America, Dominican Republic vs. the violence and repression against Haitians. There is hierarchies of race and skin color. It’s manifest.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s very evident.
Greg Grandin: Race has all sorts of cultural codes..
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: Money whitens, that kind of stuff.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: At the same time, because there is no one drop rule and because of many of the things that we have talked about, there was the possibility of a more capacious, generous vision of nationalism.
Just to give you one example, in the 19th century, when Cuba was fighting against Spain, its insurgent army was famously multiracial. They let people of color who were generals. That’s why you have people Jose Marti say, there is no such thing as race.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: In Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution, when you had massive indigenous uprisings supporting revolutionaries and liberals, you have the emergence of the idea of a cosmic race.
Now, this isn’t saying everything is hunky-dory and there’s no racism.
Chris Hayes: No. Right.
Greg Grandin: But there’s the possibility, the discursive possibility for a more generous vision of race than there is maybe in the United States, which is frozen in time.
And the other thing that reinforces this, and this is another argument I make in the book, because the moral crisis of Catholicism comes at the beginning of the Conquest, at the very start of the Conquest, by the time you get up into independence, you have a more emancipationist vision, right?
The moral crisis of Protestantism, when does it come? It comes in the middle of the 19th century and it comes specifically over African-American slavery.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: That’s the moral crisis of Protestantism, centuries after the moral crisis of Catholicism.
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting, yes.
Greg Grandin: And it has the effect of reifying race, because the struggle is specifically about the emancipation of African-Americans as African-Americans. It’s not an emancipationist vision that the Latin Americanists had, even if they didn’t–
Chris Hayes: Right. Although some of the radical Republicans do, we should note, right, yes.
Greg Grandin: Yes, OK. Yes. Yes.
But you understand what I’m saying, though–
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally. Yes. Yes.
Greg Grandin: The difference in when you add the moral crisis.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
And just in terms of the social basis that we were talking about before, it’s just very evident, if you’re traveling through South America and Latin America, again, it’s, A, very evident that there’s an intense racial hierarchy. You notice very quickly who is doing service jobs and who’s on TV as the president.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: This is extremely noticeable. What is also very noticeable is that it just is a more racially integrated and mixed society at the social level.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That’s just the most obvious thing in the universe.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Everywhere you go, wherever you go, Brazil, Mexico, this is very clear.
Greg Grandin: Yes, yes, yes.
I mean, there’s a great quotation from the 1820s of the U.S. diplomat who is in Caracas. And he says watching them make arepas, the corn kind of fritters that they make–
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: — it takes the whole city of women to make the city’s arepa. In a New England town, it would make one solitary mill to make the bread.
So, there’s a sociality and integration in daily life that allows for kind of an experiential social democracy, I think.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes.
We will be right back after we take this quick break.
(BREAK)
Chris Hayes: Do you think that the sort of racialized fear is also a kind of ideological fear about, you see this a lot in the rhetoric of the sort of MAGA affiliated people of import the Third World, become the Third World, right?
I mean, this is obviously a very racist idea, but this idea that if people come from places Venezuela or El Salvador or Honduras or whatever, they will turn the U.S. into that. And that means something both racially and also kind of ideological, right? There will be corrupt failed states that don’t respect property. I don’t know what they’re really saying left unsaid, but basically that.
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: And that’s an old idea too, right?
Greg Grandin: Yes, yes.
That’s an old idea. What do we do with the Mexicans when we took the land in 1848?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: What stopped the United States from taking all Mexico, there was an all Mexico movement that wanted all Mexico, was exactly that.
Chris Hayes: Yes, this exact thing, yes.
Greg Grandin: Exactly.
Yucatan, the cast–
Chris Hayes: Yes, there was a desire for imperial conquest–
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — rebuffed by a movement so racist that it thought the imperial conquest would corrupt the purity of America.
Greg Grandin: Yes. Yes, so the line, it’s a Goldilocks line.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: There was only maybe 100,000 Mexicans, people from Mexico living north of the Guadalupe Hidalgo line.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Greg Grandin: And it was just right. It wasn’t too many.
Chris Hayes: Right.
(LAUGHTER)
Chris Hayes: I mean, I wonder too, one of the fears, right, is when you talk about the sort of mestizo complexity of race and hierarchy in South America, that America, the U.S. is headed towards that. And that’s the utter existential fear, right?
That is exactly the thing that is sort of driving a lot of this Great Replacement Theory, these sort of racist conspiracy theories, this idea of importing these people and replacing them, that what it would be to wake up one day and America looks Brazil, or looks the Dominican Republic, or looks Mexico, that that is the ultimate terror endpoint–
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — that is sometimes explicitly, but most often implicitly posited as the thing that Stephen Miller and people like him want to avoid at all costs.
Greg Grandin: Right.
And then there’s the people that the color of the skin doesn’t matter so much as long as the politics. Politics widen.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: So you become a Republican, and there are ways in which you do have access into that world, no matter–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: But maybe there’s an upper limit in what that mechanism functions. I don’t know.
Chris Hayes: The last thing that is really interesting to me is on this question of Venezuela.
One thing that’s really interesting to me is here you have the kinds of populations that you can imagine a previous iteration of Republican presidents welcoming with open arms, right?
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So very famously Cubans and the Cuban boatlift and then- and then–
Greg Grandin: Nicaragua.
Chris Hayes: Nicaragua.
Greg Grandin: In the ‘80s, yes.
Chris Hayes: Jews leaving Russia in the 1980s, some of who would come here and become good friends of mine, a population of people I know very well.
The whole idea was, look, look at the depredations of these bankrupt Marxist socialist regimes. They oppress their people. We welcome them in open arms. And now you have got this crazy situation which the worst version of the right-wing critique of the Chavez revolution has basically come true under Maduro.
It really is a bad place. It’s essentially dysfunctional. It’s got very high levels of violence and poverty. People are starving. And you could imagine a right-wing government that says, see, come, come flee the depredations of your left-wing government.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And, instead, you have a government doing the exact opposite. And no one remarks upon this, but it is kind of shocking that they have become the scapegoat.
Greg Grandin: Yes, it is shocking that they become the scapegoat.
And it has something which is beyond my capacity of comprehension, but I wrote an article for The Intercept about this, about there could be a pan-hemispheric Trumpism. There’s Bolsonaro in Brazil. There’s Bukele.
Chris Hayes: There’s Milei in Argentina.
Greg Grandin: Now there’s no Noboa in Ecuador won reelection. The social basis that, people are tired of crime.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: The left is still strong. Social movements are still strong, but they have lost some of the rhetorical legitimacy that they had two decades ago.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: And it seems like it’s the right that has the energy, that’s substituted left hegemony for some kind of conspiratorial world building, you know?
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally. Yes.
Greg Grandin: And in all of these countries, and yet Trump seems uninterested in building that into a thing. He will do everything he can to undermine it.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: Why not praise these Venezuelan freedom fighters–
Chris Hayes: Right.
Greg Grandin: — and let Marco Rubio run the table in South America in a bunch of elections coming up.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: But then he does these weird things where he allies with Claudia Sheinbaum.
Or Canada. I mean, he could have a conservative president in Canada, prime minister of Canada.
Chris Hayes: Yes. No. The most remarkable thing is that Trump’s interventions have produced outside the country the most remarkable polling charts you have ever seen in country after country–
Greg Grandin: I know.
Chris Hayes: — Australia, Canada, Panama, South American, a country where people are like, oh, my God, I want nothing to do with this.
Flipped totally winnable right-wing races completely on their head through his intervention.
Greg Grandin: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So maybe, in the end, one of the things, the hemispheric legacies here happens to be the kind of, we will see what happens with the U.S. but a sort of Trumpist moment where people just decide that they want to orient their politics in opposition to whatever this is that we have.
Greg Grandin: Yes, I think that that’s right. Yes, and I think a broad church that does that would be good.
But certainly the idea of sovereignty in Latin America is a very kind of cherished idea. And to so openly reassert the doctrine of conquest–
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Greg Grandin: — which Latin Americans had done so much to abrogate, is striking.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Right.
Greg Grandin is the C. Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale. His new book is called “America, America: A New History of the New World.” He’s a Pulitzer Prize winner for his last book, “The End of the Myth.” “Fordlandia” is an all-time great book, which I recommend as well.
Greg, that was great. Thank you so much.
Greg Grandin: Thanks so much, Chris. It’s always great to talk to you.
Chris Hayes: Would love to hear your thoughts.
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