“Alexander Stephens was a senator from Georgia, and he becomes the Vice President of the Confederacy. And on March 21, 1861, he gives this speech in which he talks about how the cornerstone of not just the Confederacy but of a new world, is going to be human enslavement. And he firmly believes that the world is going to come around to the idea of enslaving the people that other Southerners call ‘mudsills,’ that the world should be organized with a few elite, wealthy people on top. Everybody else works for them. And this in his mind is not self-serving because those people at the bottom really don’t have the mental capacity to organize society and education and art and so on.
“And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because you know, if you think about—Stephens thought he was starting a new world. And at the end of the day it is not the era of Alexander Stephens. It’s the era of Abraham Lincoln. And you think about, jumping forward, Hitler, who was going to start the—He, too, thought he was gonna start a whole new world, right? This was gonna be the Third Reich and it was going to take over the whole globe and this is the way people would think. But in fact we didn’t live under Hitler’s world for our lifetimes. We lived under the world that Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and their partners and allies constructed.
“And so you think about Trump trying to create his own new world, and he is, not just in the United States, but also around the globe with his decapitation of leaders in Latin America and the attempt in Iran and so on. And I look at that and I think if history is any guide, we will not be living in Donald Trump’s world when he is ushered off stage. We will be living in the world of the people who recreate a global order or at least a United States based on those principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
