Preamble: Sharon McMahon

In this urgent moment for our nation, we can strengthen democracy—together. Raj Vinnakota, President of the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, sits down with diverse leaders to learn about their work and hear their ideas for shaping a more perfect Union. Here, Raj talks with Sharon McMahon, known as “America’s Government Teacher.” Sharon is the author of The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. She runs the viral Instagram account @sharonsaysso, hosts the award-winning podcast  Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, and writes The Preamble, a Substack newsletter about politics and history.

Below are edited excerpts from the conversation recorded in August 2024.

On her new book and unsung heroes that shaped America

Raj Vinnakota: You’re coming out with a book called The Small and the Mighty. Why a book and why now?

Sharon McMahon: The Small and the Mighty is coming out at the end of September and I’ve been working on this book for three years. So this is not a one Saturday afternoon when I was like, I should write a book. This has been a long time in the process. Anybody who’s written a book knows how absolutely glacial the process can be, and also specifically writing a history book is very slow because it’s not just typing up your ideas, it’s conducting coping amounts of research that then has to be fact-checked. And writing history in a compelling and fascinating way is a very specific genre and a very specific skill like narrative nonfiction.

So anyway, all that to say, it’s been a long time coming, but these are the stories of unsung Americans who changed the course of history and people who did something remarkable where they were with the resources available to them. And I think those are stories that people are really hungry to hear right now. Like we are George Washington’ed out! George Washington’s great, he’s good to learn about. We need to know who he is. But that story has also been done to death. We’ve heard about crossing the Delaware. We heard that part a few times. We did that in elementary school, middle school, high school two times. I find the people of history who are not on the monuments, who do not have the bronze statues and the oil paintings, to me, do some of the most interesting things that no one is even aware of. So that’s the focus of The Small and the Mighty.

Raj Vinnakota: Can you give us a bit of a teaser, tell us one kind of story that you are highlighting?

Sharon McMahon: Yeah. Well, one of the people in the book started out came from absolutely nothing. His parents were immigrants. His parents were peddlers, like actual peddlers, went door to door selling items. We have a fabric, I have eyeglasses. All of the things that a peddler going door to door might have. And he came into large sums of money by chance, and what he referred to as by virtue of proximity, by luck, and what he chose to do with the money…I love it so much. Instead of building monuments to himself, instead of naming museums after himself, instead of putting his name on the side of everything, what he decides is that he is going to help build schools with it. And ultimately this man built more than 5,000 schools in the United States, 5,000 schools! I can almost guarantee you don’t know who he is, but if you were like Sharon, I built five schools, I would be like, dang, that’s incredible.

The impact that that has on American history that we are not even aware of, that potentially tens of millions of families who, over the course of centuries, their parents, their great, great grandparents had a chance to become educated and that has a ripple effect across their entire community and their entire bloodline. Those are the kinds of stories that I just think are so fascinating, so worth telling. And the book is full of stories like that.

How choosing hope fuels change

Raj Vinnakota: In your podcast, Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, you did a whole series on resilience, right? Does that in any way relate to these kinds of stories as well?

Sharon McMahon: One of my first podcast series was about Japanese American incarceration during World War II in the United States. In the book are some stories related to that topic that are just…I love them so much. But yes, this idea that people have been dealt a variety of hands in their lives. Some people are born in the right place at the right time, with incredible wealth and rich parents, all the connections, and they go on to do something cool too. Like Teddy Roosevelt is a great example of that.

But other people are dealt nothing. They don’t even get a card, right? They’re like, “I would love any card whatsoever. I say I would take a seven if that’s what you have.” Yet they still do something really impactful. But here’s the thing, they don’t always set out on this journey thinking “Someday there’s going to be a book about me.” They just continue to put one foot in front of the other with the hope that what they do will matter. It’s not a feeling that they’re waiting to descend from the heavens where they wake up in the morning and they’re like, “I just am encompassed with an incredible sense of hope”. No, hope is a choice that they are making. They’re orienting themselves towards choosing to have hope each day that what they do will make a difference. And I think that’s a message that all of us really can use right now. That we can choose to have hope about the future. Because to many people, the future seems fraught with peril. Whatever that future might look like, whatever your politics are, you might be looking to the future and being like, “I don’t know if I like what I see. It looks real scary. I’m not interested in repeating anything that’s happened in the past.” A sense of hopelessness is something that I think is very pervasive in the United States right now. There’s just no hope that it will get better. But listen, we can’t make change unless we choose to have hope.

A lesson Sharon learned about working with your enemies

Raj Vinnakota: When you think about all the people that you’ve interviewed, when you think about these people that you’ve written about, what, to you, stands out or seems to be required to be the kind of engaged and committed citizen that we need in this country right now?

Sharon McMahon: There’s one woman in the book that I profile that says something that I think is so profound that I would like to see on billboards on the Beltway. I’d like to see a stadium renamed this. And she experiences tremendous hardship in her life. She’s almost killed a number of times. People try to firebomb her house. She’s falsely accused of crimes and is arrested. Her husband is a philander with a secret second family, and then he dies and leaves her penniless and she has to raise her child alone. She has been dealt a terrible hand and yet she continues her important work, not knowing where it might lead. One of the things that someone asked her as she got towards the end of her life was, “What have you learned from all of the work that you’ve done?” And she said, “I have learned that I can work with my enemies because you never know when they might have a change of heart at any moment.”

That statement to me…man, do we need some people to adopt that today? I can work with my enemies because we never know when they might have a change of heart. And if I’m not working with them, who is, right? If my enemies are opposed to some really great initiative that I have, my enemies are opposed to building the school or whatever it is, my enemies are opposed to this. Who’s working with them? Instead, how can we ever hope to make change for the good? If we don’t ever influence the people who you might regard as an enemy, where would the positive influence be coming from, if not from you? So I love this idea that you never know when that person might change their mind and they’re never going to change it if they do not have the opportunity to be influenced for good by somebody like you.

How Sharon builds trust online

Raj Vinnakota: You have 1.1 million and growing followers on Instagram. I don’t know if you did it proactively or if it just happened, but how do you think you started to build trust from the beginning of your work?

Sharon McMahon: Transparency is one part of it. Being transparent about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, what my goals are, and being fair is another part of it. I now have a long history of fairness, a commitment to not engaging in bad faith argumentation on the internet, to actually caring about what people on both sides of the aisle might think about. Giving voice to people who might feel like their position is drowned out by these ‘conflict entrepreneurs’, so to speak. You don’t really understand somebody until you can articulate their position back to them in a way that they would agree with and say, that’s correct. That is what I feel. And I think that is modeling how to do that I think is an important skill today because what we’re learning are a lot of how to create conflict skills. We’re learning a lot of how to cut people out of your life when they disagree with you skills, but we’re not actually engaging actively in skill-building around the ideas of building a community or acting in a way that is in accordance with your values.

These are skills that people can practice, but they need to be given modeling on how to practice them, and they need to be given the opportunity to practice those things. So those are spaces that are kind of lacking on the internet. That’s why the work kind of work that you do is so important, but it can be difficult to access those spaces in a digital format. When people feel truly heard or understood is when somebody is willing to hear you out, and when they can see that she actually did take the time to understand where I’m coming from, and then she was able to articulate what people who think this truly believe. And to be able to fairly assess those things so that people would be like, “That’s accurate.” I do think that that sense of fairness is something that I have also worked for a long time to cultivate.

On combatting misinformation

Raj Vinnakota: At Citizens & Scholars a lot of the work we do is to cultivate Gen Z’s civic potential. So you’ve been talking about all of this already, the skills piece. I really appreciate what you just outlined. I have a question around civic knowledge. What are common misconceptions about American government, civics, and history people have that we should be actively seeking to change?

Sharon McMahon: This is a big issue. I actually started this account with really basic government knowledge that you can easily verify, that is not based on my opinion. These are just things that are real or not real. And the internet is full of people who are really confidently wrong, and that overconfidence…it creates believability. In some cases, if I’m like, listen to me, this is the best food you are ever going to eat, it is so good. I’ve never had food that is better than this food. The way that I’m presenting it is very compelling, right? You’re like, dang, okay, this is the best food. Wow. So that’s what’s happening online, except people are telling you the wrong information. Listen to me. When the people graduate from the Electoral College, when they graduate and they get their degrees, they are going to walk out onto Pennsylvania Avenue because the Electoral College is down the street from the White House. Okay? They’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and then they have a ceremony outside the White House. You can watch it on CNN every year and then they become official electors. It’s the graduates of the Electoral College. Well, listen, I just sent that really compellingly. I just said it really confidently, and 100% of it is wrong.

And so it’s very easy to believe and to be manipulated by people who are saying things that are incorrect. The best inoculation against misinformation are facts. There is no such building as the Electoral College. There is no such university as the Electoral College. It is not located in Washington DC because it’s not a place, you don’t graduate from it and become an elector. That’s not how any of that works. So that’s part of my mission as an educator. That’s how I view my role on the internet – to help people understand the basics and also some of the idiosyncrasies and nuances of how government works so that they are inoculated against misinformation. There’s an additional goal of you can’t change what you don’t understand. If you’re out here thinking that people are graduating from the Electoral College, listen, it’s hard to change government if that’s your understanding of how it works, because that’s not real at all.

Why Gen Z gives her hope for democracy

Raj Vinnakota: Are you optimistic about our democracy? Why or why not?

Sharon McMahon: I am. One of the biggest reasons I’m optimistic about our democracy is Gen Z. I am very bullish on Gen Z. I think Gen Z is poised to become the most civically engaged generation in American history. And I say that without hyperbole going back in the past. Yeah, there were some guys that were involved for sure. Women were excluded, members of minority groups were excluded, immigrants were excluded, Native Americans were excluded. We have now engaged in a multi-hundred-year experiment that has resulted by and large in the advancement of people’s rights, and we have built something to be proud of. I think Gen Z is going to do us proud someday.

How Sharon grows her civic knowledge through conversations across difference

Raj Vinnakota: How do you grow your own civic knowledge?

Sharon McMahon: That’s a great question. I think one of the best ways is talking to people. Talking to people from different backgrounds. Yes, a lot of stuff you can learn from people like me or listen to podcasts or read a textbook or take a class. There’s a lot of fundamental knowledge that you can acquire that way, like the three branches of government. But understanding, for example, directly from somebody, why did you come to this country as an immigrant? What has it been like to be an undocumented person living in the United States? What has it been like for you to grow up in a place that I did not grow up? If I grew up in a cornfield in Illinois, asking somebody, how was it different growing up in Los Angeles? These are the kinds of things that you just can’t learn from a textbook. And that greatly enhances my own civic knowledge about how things like different public policies impact various groups and what those groups actually value and care about. Those things are, I think, really important to keep in mind when we are making public policies that impact our neighbors.

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