Been There, Done That
How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome
They say the past is a foreign country, but that’s a lie. It’s just this place, only dirtier and meaner, populated by the same kind of folks who inhabit our current, agitated air. We like to tell ourselves fairy tales about the old days—that politics was a game played by men in powdered wigs who spoke in soft, measured tones—but that’s just a bedtime story we tell so we can sleep at night.
The truth is, this nation was birthed in a firestorm, raised in a brawl, and has spent the better part of two and a half centuries hitting itself over the head with a hammer. We act like the shouting matches in the halls of power and the venom pouring from every screen are something new, some unholy invention of the modern age. But if you look close—really look—you’ll see the fingerprints of the past all over the grip of the pistol we’re pointing at our own feet.
In Been There, Done That, Greg digs into the dirt of our history, pulling out eight stories that prove we haven’t changed as much as we’d like to believe. It’s a reminder that what we’re enduring isn’t a singular curse, but a well-worn American tradition.
He takes you back to the 1790s, when the Founding Fathers were busy turning the printing press into a weapon of war, slinging ink that was thicker than bile. You’ll stand in the chamber of the Senate in 1856, where a man wasn’t silenced by a filibuster but by a cane coming down hard across his skull. You’ll walk through the swamp of the 1876 presidential election, a contest so crooked it makes a back-alley poker game look like a Sunday school picnic. And you’ll see the masters of yellow journalism—Pulitzer and Hearst—turning news into a blood sport, manufacturing outrage because it sold more papers than the truth ever could.
These aren’t just dusty anecdotes for a textbook. They are echoes.
The cast of characters Greg rounds up are as flawed and stubborn as the people you run into at the hardware store or catch arguing on the evening news. They were driven by the same petty grievances, the same blind-side greed, and the same desperate need to win at any cost. You will read these pages and find yourself nodding, thinking, I know that guy. Or worse, I know that feeling.
But here is where the hope creeps in, quiet and steady as the rising sun.
See, knowing that we’ve been here before—that we’ve stood on this exact ledge, looking down into the same dark canyon—is the only thing that keeps us from jumping. We survived the partisan madness of the infancy of the Republic. We survived the cane blows. We survived the corruption and the yellow-bellied lies. Every single time our worst demons rose up to claim the soul of this country, there was someone else there, a better angel with a backbone of iron, pushing back.
This book isn't a lecture on how we’ve failed. It’s a mirror held up to the grit that defined our ancestors. It shows us that while the playbook for destruction has remained remarkably consistent, the capacity for survival has been just as enduring.
If you’re tired of the noise, if you’re worried that the foundations are finally giving way, pick this up. It won’t fix the current mess, but it will remind you that we are a resilient, stubborn, and ultimately optimistic people. We have survived worse, we have overcome darker, and we have always, inevitably, reached for a more just future. We’ve been here before, and we’ve made it out on the other side. That’s the American way.
Professor Greg Jackson's podcast
