Jon Meacham Interview Part 1 - The Soul of America

mr meacham take one so strom thurman breaks away from the democratic party in philadelphia in 1948 on the states rights platform which was code for segregation he then campaigns throughout the fall of 1948 on a segregationist platform basically couched in cold war language arguing that civil rights the extension of jefferson's promise that we are all created equal to previously excluded groups amounts to socialism it amounts to a an encroachment on the true american way which in thurman's view was a segregated way it was the way of the pre-civil war era it was the way of plessy versus ferguson the separate but equal was constitutional it was an attempt to take the country back to where it was before the verdict of the civil war and so governor thurman shows up in charlottesville virginia and gives a speech to a raucous crowd arguing that civil rights is communism that white supremacy is in fact the natural order of things strom thurman was a master of using fear to divide and he was playing on the fears of white folks who in many cases all they had was that they felt superior to people of color because of the color of their skin economically culturally they were not getting ahead in the america of the post-war era and so thurman did all he could to say we know there is one group to blame for everything that's wrong and there's one group to which you will always be superior and we must defend that and that was people of color 1948's a fantastic presidential race you have four candidates you have truman and dewey as the centrists more or less you have henry wallace as a left-winger progressive and you have thurman as the right-wing segregationist candidate so it's really a referendum on almost every sphere of american life imagine uh henry wallace is basically bernie sanders in this uh in this uh analogy thurman comes up way short obviously but he wasn't really there to win the presidency he was there to advance an argument and the argument was that the civil war might be lost but white supremacy was not and by embodying that by being the true to at that point what the democratic party was the southern democratic party was he was trying to stake out a national platform on what was essentially a regional vision our better angels is aligned the better angels of our nature more precisely is a sentiment of abraham lincoln's from his first inaugural address he had begun to write his first inaugural in the upper room of his brother-in-law's store on adams street in springfield and he'd called for andrew jackson's nullification proclamation and a speech of henry clays the declaration of independence and he come to the end of it and there wasn't a particularly poetic conclusion and so he passed it around to his incoming cabinet and william seward suggested a phrase a more elegant ending lincoln went in and edited seward's edit and basically came to the line which echoes even now that at some point we would be together again when the better angels of our nature were summoned lincoln was a prose poet so much of the way we think about the country is shaped by his language better angels of our nature government for the people by the people of the people um forever free from the emancipation proclamation with malice toward none with charity for all and it's a reminder that language in the presidency matters that their words if in fact they meet the moment in a noble way can live forever well pr the presidency is intrinsically interesting right you never have to explain why you're talking about it because it's ultimate stakes it's ultimate power there's a reason shakespeare wrote about kings you know there's there's an unfolding drama that is intrinsic because the character of those figures and their actions matter enormously for good and for ill and so there's a there's an intrinsic drama and it's the most human of undertakings because you know we we i think we tend to think of history as they're sort of these distant figures and their statues and it's all in an oil painting but these are human beings and they have good days they have bad days and they're good fathers and they're bad fathers and they're good husbands and they're bad husbands and herakleta said that character is destiny and destiny can also be translated as fate and for better or for worse the american fate has been shaped in many ways by the character of the people at the top not entirely by their their character change in america happens when people in power heed or don't heed to whatever mysterious algorithm there is the voices hopes fears desires of the people who are powerless and when those two things intersect that's how history's made well nostalgia is a powerful force we would there's a natural tendency to think that our own problems are so overwhelming they're so complex boy i bet you know if only we could be like grandpa or grandma because they didn't have it so bad you know the things people came together then that's my favorite people came together in the past really did they come together at fort sumter did they come together when the isolationists were leading the charge against fighting adolf hitler did they come together when the chicago democratic national convention descends into violence in 1968 did they come together when a significant part of the country wanted ronald reagan to be impeached so there's the sense that the past was easier our own time is very difficult and the future will be what we can make of it i understand it it's the motive force behind things like making america great again that presupposes that the country was once great and now is not and that it falls to this generation to try to lift it back up or this particular group of people america is great it's a marvelous complex confounding difficult frustrating yet wonderful country but it's always been in the process of becoming the founders understood this our goal was not perfection our goal was in the words of the preamble of the constitution a more perfect union and they totally understood that in fact the life of the country would be like the life of a person that we would be driven by appetite and ambition we would get things wrong far more often than we got them right we have proven them correct in that forever as churchill once said you can always count on the americans do the right thing once they've exhausted every other possibility and we've proven him right so perfection is not the goal it's just trying to get it more right and i think that to pretend that the past somehow was simpler does two things we should avoid one is it forecloses the possibility of learning much from it because if it was easier what do they have to teach us they were walking around in powdered wigs and frock coats and everything was fine which would have surprised them the others were not doing justice to the people who sacrificed to get us to where we are we're not doing justice to john lewis or rosa parks or frederick douglass or harriet tubman or elizabeth cady stanton or susan b anthony although pick your pick your person who stood in the arena and said the country is not being all it can be if we exclude this group or that group and those are the people who have truly made us a country worth defending i don't know any people who are all good or all bad maybe you do uh so therefore the country can't be all good or all bad the republican model the government we've undertaken attempt the system of government we're attempting to make work here is the most human form of government now you would think if i woke you up in the other night and said what's the most human form of government you would say oh a monarchy because that's a human being being the government actually no it's all of us and this is an idea that begins with plato it runs through aristotle it comes through the christian west through augustine and aquinas it goes to machiavelli and it gets to the philadelphia in 1770s and 1780s really through the renaissance and the idea is that a republic is the sum of its parts it's why the founders talked about virtue they didn't want anybody to behave well though that was they wanted that but the point was that there had to be a disposition of heart and mind that would enable them to live together to make what jefferson called the mutual concessions of opinion necessary to create solutions to given problems for a given period of time and that's what politics is it's not about the next 300 years it's about how do we solve this particular question given the limitations given what george eliot the great victorian novelist called the dim lights entangled circumstance of the world given those dim lights entangled circumstance how do we get through this and so therefore you manufacture consensus you seek consensus to create a solution for that period of time it's it's always subject to amendment it's always subject to adjustment it's and i think in that way it totally mirrors what human nature is like i you know i i'm in more need of amendment and adjustment than than almost anybody and so i don't see why the the country as the manifestation the political manifestation of 340 million people should be any different the public arena is not particularly conducive to dealing with complexity ever more so you know if you want to think about social media you think about cable news you think about political figures who now benefit from dividing and not unifying that in fact they get more purchase they get more mileage out of losing fights and then being able to blame the other side than they do winning fights i understand that my argument is that it's not a hell of a lot different today than it has been in the past and you look back and you look just look at world war ii the greatest generation the greatest war we came together tom hanks uh once said when asked about why do you make so many movies about world war ii he said it was good versus evil and grandpa won great cinematic insight but let's remember we didn't get into world war ii until hitler declared war on us which was five days after pearl harbor which was after japan attacked us so we were not nobly racing toward the burning building to save human rights and democracy and the rule of law in the old world quite the opposite it was when they came after us that kind of complicates it was good versus evil but grandpa won but that's the way it happened and i think the more we engage with that conversation the more we understand that it wasn't so clear-cut even then i would hope that would give us some sense of proportion and perspective in dealing with the problems of our own time not in a policy way but you know what it we barely got it right in the greatest cataclysm in human history which is what the second world war was it begins in one world and by the end of it we have the power to destroy human life that's a hell of a six seven year period so if you recognize that that the isolationists were very strong that america first was powerful then it gives you i would think some hope that you can we can find a way to manufacture consensus to solve the problems of our own time because they barely did it then when the charlottesville riots happened when the demonstration happened the neo-nazi rally and then the death of heather heyer who was trying to stand up for what the country is truly about i knew i knew but didn't know that there would be some moment in the history of charlottesville virginia that would have prefigured this because there's always a moment that prefigures what what unfolds and the story of race and fear and anxiety and violence is inextricably intertwined with the story of the country it's not that the soul of a country has been captured by a particular group at a particular time the soul of the country is in fact this essence in which which is not all good or all bad but you have your better angels fighting against your worst impulses you have dr king and you have the ku klux klan and our history is shaped by the extent to which those better angels or those worst instincts went out in a given period of time it was true in the 1760s it was true in the 1860s it was true in the 1960s and it's true today the sunday of the weekend of the charlottesville violence nancy gibbs the editor of time magazine at the time called and said do you have anything to say historically about the history of hate in american politics and so i dived back in started with reconstruction and moved forward and what you find when you look back is that we shouldn't feel quite as lonely as we tend to feel in the present we shouldn't feel quite as unique or special i think that the efficacy of looking back is not to create a narcotic oh what's happened before so therefore it's all going to work out but it does give us a sense of realizing that there are perennial forces in the country that ebb and flow right now they're flowing so how do we get them to ebb a little bit more we're never going to get rid of them on this side of paradise but i think that history gives us the ability should give us the ability to see proportionally what is the scope and nature of our crisis how have people in previous generations address those crises and are there lessons to apply there are two ways to make this argument you can argue that there's an american idea that's under assault from one side or the other in this case from the right in our own time that the idea of fair play of generosity of spirit is something that has defined us and that we need to recover that my view is that the the creed is pretty self-evident so to speak uh that was benjamin franklin's edit of thomas jefferson um so when you can steal from benjamin franklin who's editing thomas jefferson it's always a good thing we know what the idea is what we don't always understand is to what extent can we apply that idea realize that idea and that struck me as a matter of more of the soul than of the mind because i again i think we sort of we get that the country is stronger and better when we apply jefferson's we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal when we apply that more generously we grow stronger that's the lesson of history that's a matter it seems to me of this i of these competing forces we know the right thing to do most of the time in our lives we know right the right thing to do but for a whole host of reasons we don't always do them so what is what is what is that zone like what do you what do we call that well we call that the soul and in hebrew and in greek the word soul means breath or life when god breathes life into man in genesis that word could be translated as soul when jesus said greater love have no man than this than to lay down his life for his friends life can be translated as soul so it's vital it's essential and it's in my view maybe there are saints who are like this but i don't think it's all good or all bad i think that we're all in a fallen world uh struggling ideally to do what's right and falling short far more often than we're succeeding and that the life of the country has the same collective soul and my own view is that if we get it right 51 of the time it's a hell of a good day and we don't always we lose a lot and that's why the the framers i think deserve not being reflexively worshipful of a bunch of dead white guys but those dead white guys understood that we were frail and fallen and given to sin and shortcoming and they created a document that actually enabled us to [Music] take account of those appetites and ambitions and keep keep the thing going there's a reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country it's because they were fearful that we would be so busy doing bad things that they wanted to make everything difficult and i think if anything experience has proven them right the constitution is fundamentally a religious document that's going to make heads explode across npr land but it is it's it's it's a it's it's based on an understanding of human nature that there is we are imperfect and we are selfish and ambition must be made to counteract ambition as it says in the federalist and hamilton and madison who later ended up wanting to beat each other up totally were as one on this point madison said if men were angels then no government would be necessary but because they weren't we needed a government my argument about the soul of the country is i'm sure informed by the fact that i'm a hapless episcopalian which is redundant but it's also based on a historical sense that we are all driven more by appetite ambition than we are by our better instincts most of the time and that has a religious component certainly it's also though a matter of historical observation the whole history of the world proves this and i think that it's an insight the american experiment is based on an insight that is not fundamentally religious but it is certainly an insight that was informed by religious understanding the american idea is that everyone is born equal all men are created equal that everyone has the right to rise or fall on their own merits that we guarantee equality of opportunity if not of outcome that there's a rule of law that everyone has what lincoln called a fair chance for their industry intelligence and enterprise a wonderful phrase a fair chance for their industry intelligence and enterprise to rise in the world that's the idea that's the ideal i think that it's more productive to look at the soul of the country which is how we actually act or do not act on making that idea a reality the country is entirely shaped by a battle between the ideal and the real to what extent do we make real our professed devotion to an idea of equality and liberty under law one of the most interesting phrases of the founding is the pursuit of happiness john locke and others had talked about life liberty and property jefferson changes that to pursuit of happiness his idea of happiness was yeah it was about everybody being cheerful but more fundamentally it was about how do you create a civic sphere in which there is sociability there's neighborliness there's a sense of mutual regard because without mutual regard making those mutual concessions of opinion was going to be very difficult and so the pursuit of happiness was not simply an individual endeavor it was also about the good of the whole it was a there was a civic minded aspect i would argue that the pursuit of happiness has always been more theoretical than real because the man who wrote those words didn't have much interest in the hundreds of people he enslaved pursuing their happiness he wrote those words on a lap desk that had been made by an enslaved man so abigail adams in the same season had written to john adams saying remember the ladies hoping for some equality of treatment and he didn't so we've always been in the act of failing as much as we have succeeded in terms of enabling everybody to pursue happiness i think you could argue that by the 20th century the there was a kind of prevailing cultural narcissism that has become more dispositive but i i'm hesitant to be too hard on modernity when the men who framed that as a goal were so self-evidently limited in their application of it at our best americans believe in fighting for fair play they believe in more generously interpreting and applying what became the most important sentence ever written in the english language that we're all created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights i think that every generation rises or falls on how generously we've applied that jeffersonian sentence how widely have we opened our arms if we have widened the definition of the mainstream if we've widened the understanding of and the applicability of of equality then it's an era worth emulating and commemorating if we've constricted access if we've tried to take away uh certain rights it's an era worth learning from but avoiding and so i don't think if you ask anybody what era would you like to go back to in american life to go live i think the test should be if you would like to go back to say the 1920s you probably when you think about it don't want to because we were the second ku klux klan was on the rise you know there was there was limit limiting immigration there was a fallout from the first world war you don't want to do that because that was an attempt to that was an era that was marked by a limitation of the mainstream not a expansion of it i think we're at our best when we expand access to the mainstream i think we're at our worst when we try to constrict it there are certain forces that ebb and flow in american life there's racism nativism isolationism extremism a lot of isms they they rise and they fall based on a sense of individual security if you're secure in your own life then you're probably less likely to want to keep people out or you'll have less reason to need someone to blame for an economic problem a sense of lost opportunity whatever it is when you have economic anxiety when you have anxiety about the future there's a natural human tendency to want to look outward to find someone to blame some explanation as opposed to looking inward and realizing that you have to do something to adapt to these changing circumstances yourself so it seems to me that the forces that are shaping our own moment isolationism nativism racism are the result of an economic and cultural anxiety on the part of a lot of folks who look a lot like me who believe that the country is slipping away from them the country's not going to look like them going forward and that's disorienting it's scary it's then the job of a leader if you want to go for our better angels to say don't point fingers we're going to get through this together or you get a leader who helps you point this is basically as if we have elected huey long or charles coughlin or joe mccarthy or george wallace president a figure who is more interested in dividing than unifying i figure who's more interested in raising a clenched fist than extending a hand a figure is more interested in tightening his grip than in opening his arms and there is a significant part of the country for a whole host of reasons that respond to that message i think a lot of the forces that are dividing us today are perennial american forces we've seen them before we'll see them again here's where things are different basically from 1932 or so to about 2017 we had a political era in the country that was defined by a figurative conversation between franklin roosevelt and the new deal and ronald reagan and the reagan revolution which was more about the market than the government the new deal was more about the government than the market every president from fdr through president obama governed on a field that had been demarcated by those positions the relative market in the government and the relative projection of force against commonly agreed upon foes and rivals where things are different now is that that conversation has stopped and the task of the next few years in american politics i think is going to be do we restore that conversation or has a new conversation begun and that we just don't know the answer to yet politicians are far more often mirrors of who we are than they are molders and i think when people say they're unhappy with american politics when they say oh i wish the system were different they can actually make it different and if enough of us wanted it to be different it would be michael bloomberg the former mayor of new york i once asked him what have you learned in politics he said i've learned three things politicians want to be re-elected the second thing they want most is to be re-elected and the third thing is to be re-elected really big that's that's their incentive that's that's the unit of commerce is is the preservation of power and the perpetuation in office and they will do that in so far as they possibly can and if that requires reflecting their their voters then that's what they'll do and right now they are reflecting those voters you have people who are not particularly interested in getting 55 or 60 of something they want to get a hundred percent of it insofar as they think this think this way i mean it's this is a very it's a very sophisticated conversation most people actually check into politics very occasionally and what therefore the task of political leadership it seems to me is to tell a story that is accessible even if you're only checking in every once in a while there's a myth that the founders didn't anticipate that the presidency would become so powerful they fully understood it great political scientist in the 19th century once said that what we managed to do in america was re-establish the most ancient form of government the elective kingship and there's simply in the nature of things this emotional and political connection to the person at the pinnacle of power we there was a scottish traveler who came through in the age of jackson who wrote that in america people seemed more interested in the apostle than the creed that the power of the leader the character the leader seemed almost more interesting than than the details of the policy and i think there's a lot to that our eras fdr once said this that great presidents are those who came along at periods where there were stories and issues that required definition in the life of the nation and so washington creates the office jefferson coming from an anti-federal government view uses the federal government to double the size of the country and launch exploration therefore in a way legitimizing government for people who had been skeptical of it andrew jackson really becomes the first american president from his sphere of life the first six presidents were either virginia planters or adams is from massachusetts jackson was born on the periphery of white society he rises to the top he shows that there is a there's a role for popular leadership lincoln saves the union uh franklin roosevelt saves capitalism and then wins world war ii president eisenhower leads us through nuclear struggle president kennedy does the same thing uh and so on presidents tend to be remembered less for giving the people what they expected of them but for surprising us so fdr ran on a balanced budget in 1932 but he realized as he put it that we needed us what he called a spirit of bold persistent experimentation try a method if it fails admit it frankly and try something else but above all try something president truman was from a border state truman had relatives who wouldn't come to stay with him in the white house because there was a lincoln bedroom in it uh he was coming from he had a lot of confederates in his family and yet he becomes the first president to address the naacp and integrates the military sets really a lot of the civil rights legislation in in the motion eisenhower comes in as the conqueror of hitler seen as a great warrior chief and yet not a single soldier dies on his watch in eight years uh lyndon johnson from a segregated state who has not been a champion of civil rights in the senate becomes president and finishes the work of lincoln nixon goes to china ronald reagan comes in saying that he's a great cold warrior that the soviet union reserves unto itself the right to lie and to cheat and that seeks world domination and yet he ends the cold war the presidents who reach beyond their base of support are the ones that we remember fondly and so what does that tell us it tells us that it's a big complicated country that people who think they want one thing often don't know what they want or don't want until then history and reality and politics presents them with a choice and so i think that the presidency remains the central actor in our political life but the president can only do as much as the populace makes possible and linda johnson could not have done civil rights if martin luther king and rosa parks and others had not done what they did woodrow wilson could not have passed could not have signed women's suffrage if the suffrages had not done what they would do and lord knows abraham lincoln could not have done what he did with the emancipation proclamation without the work of those who were fighting for abolition so there is this mysterious interplay where presidents tend to make things possible only after possibility has been presented to them the art of american citizenship is that our hearts and minds matter and if the government is in fact a reflection of who we are then who we are matters and it's not going to be a quick thing it's not a tweet it's not an email it's not a quick action but there is a mysterious tied in how public opinion works and presidents who shape that opinion and who and react to it are the ones who end up i think living in history in a positive light there's a marvelous scene uh right after he's become president in 1933 fdr goes to call in oliver wendell holmes and holmes talks to him and then he leaves and he says he compares him to holmes had known tr and homestead of fdr third-rate intellect but a first-class temperament and temperament matters because think of the think of the scope and scale of these jobs i mean it's just incredible presidents don't have to be perfect to be effective in fact it sometimes helps if they're not and there's actually a selfish instinct there's a selfish aspect to doing the right thing if you want to be seen as a great president it requires often taking a short-term hit in order to do that and so one of the things i always think about is i wish they would all think about the portrait test what do they want us to think about when we look at their portrait it actually is very effective because very few of them can imagine a world where we would not be staring adoringly at their portrait so it actually is kind of an effective device the character of the person at the top matters enormously because in the end as president kennedy once said you really do stand alone he once said that no one has a more clamorous council than the president of the united states but in october 1962 when he had to decide about whether we were going to have armageddon or not it was really his call and it was his temperament his decision which created a zone in which we could get to the right place i don't want to over state it they aren't kings there is this connection to us and just to what extent do they follow us and to what extent do they lead us but on the margins and the margins matter enormously their character their temperament their ability to admit mistakes their ability to convince us of something is hugely important one of the reasons i do what i do is that i was a journalist for a long time and it was amazing how all knowing and omniscient and correct journalists were and if only these people behind the desk who actually had power and responsibility understood what we understood they would do better well it turns out maybe that's more maybe life is more complicated than that my sense is that people in the arena are dealing with their own shortcomings the circumstances of the moment the crises of the hour they're dealing with it through the prism of their character through their temperament and most of them you hope are trying to get it right and are doing the best they can and sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong but they are basically trying to do the right thing big question about whether the incumbent fits into that but i think most people and it's fascinating too because i see a lot of former presidents how people tend to forgive and see complexity where they once saw things more simply so the story of george w bush is a great example i've watched audiences in very liberal enclaves who would have wanted him strung up in 2003 2004 2005. actually listen to him and come away dazzled i didn't know he knew so much i didn't know he was so charming i didn't know he could speak so clearly and what makes me think in part of the goal of history and biography is maybe if we could pre if we could load that up beforehand that maybe these people are not always wrong it's complicated because sometimes they are and eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and i think this is just the nature of it uh they certainly understand it that way on the question of temperament and character think about it for a second what if in your job in your life you went around and 49 or so percent of the people you saw wanted you fired every day what's the psychological toll of that i mean even if you have won a big victory only 51 percent of the people you're ever going to see or in your constituency are thinking you know what i want you there they're on a knife's edge and i don't think it's that complicated i don't think it's that outrageous for people to think how they would react in a situation it requires empathy hugely important aspect of not just leadership but citizenship republics don't work if we're not able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and see the world in that way so why people tend not to put themselves in the shoes of the most powerful person but instead just want more from them or want something different part of the reason i do what i do is to try to lower that the blood pressure that goes up when that happens if you put yourself in their shoes i think you have a better chance of dealing with the crises of the present more calmly because you know they're not marvel superheroes right they're not all powerful president obama is pretty funny about this you know he says no issue that reaches your desk is easy because if it had been it wouldn't have reached your desk i think the more history you know the more empathetic you should become because you suddenly realize that maybe the people you thought were all good aren't or the people you thought were all bad aren't empathy is the capacity to put yourself in someone else's shoes to feel a connection to them and to appreciate the world as they see it without history i don't know how you could be empathetic in our own lives the zone there is our own experience we would want someone to be nice to us so therefore we're empathetic i think in in broad political terms if we see people as imperfect because we're imperfect then we are we're able to manage our expectations and i'm not saying we should lower them i'm not saying that we should um not expect great things from people to whom we give great responsibility too much is given much is expected but if you if you are watching the news if you're obsessed with your phone and whichever side you're on and you're just perpetually outraged it's not a wildly productive way to spend your life based on on the historical record it's easy for people like me to say be calm woodrow wilson was bad too you know i understand the limitations of this argument and i understand that there are people who believe that the fundamental values of the country are under assault so that requires an active and engaged but i would argue historically literate citizenship and seems to me the system's working pretty well the rule of law is holding history's not a narcotic and it's not a bedtime story and i'm not saying because woodrow wilson was terrible and donald trump's terrible therefore we're going to be fine because we were fine after wilson there's nothing guaranteed about the american experiment it's amazing we're here 242 years on it could all end in a fiery crash my own view is that the institutions are in fact more powerful than the whims and deficiencies of of one single person but it is a stress test we're making it as hard as possible uh to keep to keep things going and partly and i understand the frustration people will say oh you keep saying everything's going to be fine but you don't know that and it's easy for you to say you're a white man all that's true i am a white man but i think that if you had been standing in a the political arena a hundred years ago you would have been worried about wilson cracking down on civil liberties you would have been worried about the attorney general of the united states launching warrantless raids you would have seen a rise at the aclu as a reaction to this you would have seen lynchings you would have seen a rise of the second ku klux klan of three to five million americans uh fighting immigrants and and people of color if we'd 50 years ago 1968 47 americans died every day in vietnam not captured not wounded died dr king is murdered senator kennedy is murdered lyndon johnson who had won 60 percent of the vote four years before is driven from the race the chicago democratic convention ends in horrible violence and on election day 1968 the governor of alabama george corley wallace carries 13.5 to the popular vote and five states are an explicitly segregationist platform in 1968 50 years ago so i'm not saying therefore that 50 years from now people will walk through the age of trump in the same way but i think they will a president can undermine democracy a president could in the republican experiment lower case r but i think that the institution's rule of law congress and the press and all of us i think are the bull works against that by my count there are about five elements in the political spectrum that determine whether we continue or not there's the presidency the press the people the congress and the courts and i think as long as two or three of those are rowing in the right direction we're okay we are testing that without without question but one of the things we have to be careful of is just because we disagree with the direction a certain president is going doesn't mean it's undemocratic quite the opposite actually because democracy is by its very nature a fluid set of decisions and inclinations america is really more often than not a 51-49 nation sometimes we get as high as 60 thinking one thing or another but that's pretty rare so i again this is why i think history matters if you know that world war ii was opposed by 40 percent of the country if you know that franklin roosevelt always had 40 percent of the country against him if you know that joe mccarthy had a 34 approval rating after he was censured and fell from power seems to me that should give you some sense that there are going to be a lot of people who disagree with you and your task then becomes organizing the people who do agree with you or trying to get people who disagree to agree with you the former is probably more likely and that's just the way it's supposed to work it's not supposed to be easy and it's not supposed to be this sense that the middle way is always the right way the middle way is not always the right way it wasn't the right way on slavery it wasn't the right way on suffrage it wasn't the right way on hitler i'd argue it wasn't the right way on cold war totalitarianism there was a path that we should have taken and a path that we shouldn't but in each of those we took the wrong path for a long time and so the story of the country is how do you find your way to that path and bring enough people along with you so that we're on it people i think want social media or cable news to be the death knell of democracy but you know slavery was pretty bad uh the battles over the nature of power in the republic for which we fought over which we fought a civil war uh the nature of civil liberties in the 20th century both during the first world war and during the mccarthy era every generation has some communications leap presumably forward sometimes it's just backward but when we were a written culture jefferson and lincoln wrote quickly and well when we were a radio culture roosevelt and churchill understood the radio television kennedy and reagan totally got it so and at each point in that process you had people worrying about the future of self-governance because the means of communication were becoming so much more complex it's no coincidence that 1920 is a huge moment in in history because it's the first time a census proves shows that there are more americans living in cities than on farms radio becomes commercially available in 1921. if you were an american householder at any point until 1921-22 you totally controlled the culture that came into your house it's kind of amazing when you think about it you just decided what newspapers to subscribe to maybe your kid showed up with a book from the library you didn't know about but that's about it suddenly you buy this radio and these people in these far off places like new york and hollywood which you've never really heard of are affecting directly the life and views of your family it was incredibly disorienting and it was part of the chaos of of the 20s i think social media is very much in that zone propaganda's getting more sophisticated people are becoming more open to either quickly expressing opinions without thinking about them or absorbing the quickly expressed opinions of others that's a problem one of the things i say which parents always clap if they're in an audience is that just because we have the means to express an opinion quickly does not mean we have opinions worth expressing quickly and teenagers are busy expressing their opinion so they're not listening so they miss that part but i don't think twitter is going to destroy democracy i don't think it's helping but i think that ultimately this is about the users not the technology it's unquestionable that the rise of individualized technology has brought back a reflexive partisanship that was very much part of american life prior to the middle of the 20th century so people forget but almost all newspapers were partisan organs until the early 20th century let me be very clear there were not many slave owners in south carolina subscribing to william lloyd garrison's liberator they weren't interested in hmm we should weigh the other side we should think the other views that just didn't happen in the same way today that people would only subscribe to a certain feed of people with whom they agree with i'm not saying because it's happened before therefore it's okay now but i do think we have to tap the brakes on blaming the technology and the means of communication for an underlying problem and the underlying problem is a perennial one it is that we tend to be reflexively partisan as opposed to being reflectively partisan partisanship is not a bad thing it is part of the nature of free government if it weren't we would be in autocracy so if nine times out of ten my view dovetails with this party or that party that's fine it's the tenth and america happens on the 10th example if you get up and you're on the other side of the aisle and before you even get up i think oh jesus here we go again and i just write it off and i don't listen and i'm composing my tweet attacking you before you've even said anything that's a problem that's not being true to what the american revolution was about which was that reason had to take a stand with passion in the arena but if you get up and you finish and i think jesus you're wrong that's okay because i listen to you when there's going to be a time when you're going to say something and i'm going to think you know what that's not so crazy and i think that america happens in the moment when you say you know what that's not so crazy the social science suggests that we are more partisan more reflexively partisan than we've been in the past part of that is we didn't have the science before are we more partisan than we were in 1859 i don't know uh but that kind of that's kind of interesting but not dispositive it is clear that our partisan attitudes have hardened and they've done it for all kinds of reasons uh which are familiar there's gerrymandering there's the media stuff you're talking about um so we are more partisan today uh there's an interesting number uh something like 50 of democrats approved of president eisenhower's job performance kind of amazing when you think about it and it went steadily down to the point where now no democrat approves of trump no republican really approved of obama that's a problem and that's my argument about reason it's that you know what you have to be open to contrary views actually being right and i would argue that there's a basic role for humility here which is do you really think you're always right really in your whole life there's nothing anyone can offer that that might be better thought out and might have more salience might be more rational maybe people feel that way and it's it's easier to feel that way right but we're gonna get out of this moment if we begin to see if you're a conservative this is the way i put it if you begin to understand that reason was the original insight of the founding that in fact the idea that which started with gutenberg and moved through the european enlightenment the scientific revolution the entire reorientation of the world from being organized vertically to being organized more horizontally if you understand that the american revolution was about reacting to data in a non-reflexively partisan way not superstitiously but rationally if you're a conservative you should appreciate that that's what that's where we started with this if you're a liberal you love data you say you love science so what if don't go crazy what if donald trump is right about something i know there's there's massive heads explode all over america but it's not impossible so why wouldn't you want to deal with things rationally one to another as opposed to reflexively denounce or support without thinking about it i don't understand that and that's my argument is that let's at least judge it one by one there is no pre-lapsarian moment of great rationality and that somehow or another donald trump has made us irrational he's exacerbated it but he's working with materials that he found stumbled across them i just don't i think if you don't see the country as a series of near misses you're going to render yourself crazy because you're gonna think that everything was okay before this particular moment and that's not true doesn't mean it's not bad now but the people who now believe that the republic is ending are the people many of them who thought that ronald reagan was as reagan himself said a combination of ebenezer scrooge and the mad bomber there are people that thought that george herbert walker bush was a hapless wasp there are people who thought that george w bill clinton wasn't liberal enough they thought that george w bush was a unilateralist they thought that barack obama was not liberal enough well now all those guys look like cicero and so shouldn't that create a humility about one's certitude about what's happening now it's not but it should i think there's an argument to be made that reason is utilitarian it's therapeutic because what if you suddenly were able to evaluate everything that happened on its own merits as opposed to actually just pre-deciding and being outraged what if you had to think about something before you were outraged you'd at least get a minute or two before you were outraged so that might be healthy i'm not trying to be mr rogers meet c-span here i'm really not i am and i'm not saying it's all going to be fine i think the country survives i think the institutions of the country survive but i think it's on all of us to do that and my argument is that if we don't arm ourselves with a historical understanding of how complex and fraught our history was we're not going to be able to think clearly enough to react in real time to save the republic fear is a natural result of a feeling that the world is closing in that doors that once were opened are closing or that prosperity that once might be yours has been taken away or is not no longer possible fear i think edmund burke said there's nothing so unreasoning as fear and when you think about that makes sense if you are fearful if you believe it's the loss of what you love which i think is the way aristotle defined it the loss of what you love if you feel you're on the edge of a cliff the whole time you're not going to react rationally you're going to be thrashing to stay up there and so fear creates an emotionally fraught it's almost like an asteroid field of of anxiety hope's different hope is pointing forward as opposed to pointing at someone hope is more unifying than dividing it's an act of faith and it needs to be justified you can't just end use it i'm not arguing that we shall be panglossian and just think that everything's going to be fine but if you undertake a particular course of action with a sense that in fact tomorrow can be better to than today you are more likely to act more generously and with less anxiety than if you are feel you're fighting for survival if you're advancing across the savannah then you are doing so in the hope that something great is on the other side of it if you're scuttling across the savannah like this because you feel your enemies are about to shoot you with arrows you're not going to get there as quickly it's simply the case that leaders and generations that have acted with a sense of faith in the future and a hope that tomorrow we better than today have actually ended up doing better than those who have reacted out of fear because if you're hopeful you're looking down the road if you're fearful you're looking around like this and you can see farther when you look down the road it's wonderfully western and american to believe in progress and it's one of those things that's one of the fun things about history is it feels the idea that you would have to talk about it seems silly because it's so natural that of course there's progress well actually no think about it i mean it's a philosophical idea why would you think that tomorrow is going to be better than today not every country not every people has done that there's a wonderful intellectual history to progress and i love it begins with prometheus the myth of prometheus that we got fire so we were able to begin to move forward he comes through the christian west through augustine the idea that you are perfecting there's a journey toward perfection beyond time very much an enlightenment era idea that there is the capacity of the mind to discern and learn and create a fuller embodiment of everything we can be of greater happiness a greater prosperity greater liberty whatever it might be and in many ways the american revolution is the political embodiment of the idea that progress is inevitable not inevitable but progress is a real thing that there is a journey to be taken and that that journey will reach destinations that are worth the trouble to get there there are a couple of different spheres of a way to think about this um fdr's groton headmaster indica peabody the rector as he was called used to say that there's a line in human affairs that goes up and down but ultimately it's upward uh dr king borrowed a phrase from the abolitionist theodore parker the ark of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice there is a presupposition that there is forward motion that the work of the universe is forward and history is defined by the speed with which we stay on that and the direction uh in which we stay on that path is that wrong is it possible that we can go backward absolutely but what informs the journey forward is the belief that there is a path forward and i think the alternative is worse i think if if you're thinking that the best we can do is to tread water and hold where we are then all the incentives that have informed history and this is this is historically based right so what is medicine about what is science about but discovering that which will make life discernibly better so the whole arc of the enlightenment the scientific revolution has been forward politics is not always that so the idea that we are a shining city upon a hill which is one of my favorite stories because john winthrop the puritan uses the phrase city upon a hill in 1630 in a sermon called a model of christian charity president reagan started talking about a shining city on a hill city on a hill the original phrase comes from the sermon on the mount which means that reagan managed to improve on jesus which i once said to mrs reagan i said you know president reagan to the point where i've actually heard preachers say as our lord said we shall be as a shining city of on a hill and i said to mrs reagan once you know president reagan improved on jesus and she said well yes that's the kind of thing ronnie did so may we all someday be loved as nancy davis loved ronald reagan but anyway uh so the shining city on a hill the idea that we are special that we are the new israel which is afraid begins before the american revolution there was a huge uh scope of thought in uh pre-revolutionary america that not only were we the new israel but that the millennium was going to come here that that's how special this was that god was coming back to earth right now instead we got george washington but you know you take what you can get uh so the idea that we are special has had great pluses and great minuses like everything else we have projected power around the world to secure and defend democratic values and we have done so usually without classic imperial conquest that's the good side bad side is that sometimes we do things and we think that they are divinely ordained so therefore they must be okay it's all about the balance between our sense of ourselves as by and large a force for good and our ability to recognize that we're as fallen frail and sinful as the next and how do you balance that in this difficult era this difficult moment i think the fact that so many people are engaged that so many people believe that democracy is in peril that the republic is at stake that what washington called the sacred fire of liberty might be going out that people are so ready to fight for those things is a good sign it's a sign that 50 to 51 of the country whatever it is doesn't want the institutions of which they might have been skeptical beforehand by the way one of the ironies of history they want those institutions to endure and look here's very straightforward there is something in the american spirit that bounces us from guard rail to guardrail so i'm going to name five of the most different people you can possibly imagine george herbert walker bush to bill clinton bill clinton went on arsenio hall to play the saxophone in the 1992 campaign president bush thought arsenio hall was a building at yale and he had no idea it was totally totally different generation totally different thing so you went from bush to clinton then you go from clinton to george w bush two very different baby boomers then you go from george w bush to barack obama which i thought would be the largest contrast temperamentally i would see in my lifetime until we went from barack obama to donald trump think about that for a second in a 10-minute period on the 20th of january 2017 we went from barack hussein obama being the president of the united states to donald trump and it's the same country presumably so we go back and forth napoleon is alleged to have said that geography is destiny there's no question that the scope and wealth of the united states has been essential the frontier was essential the idea that as huck finn said you could light out for the territories and reinvent yourself was an essential american myth the idea is lincoln said that you your your son could come and be president in the same way my father's son did all of that is unique because of the scope and scale of the country the fact that you could in fact go become a up of a yeoman farmer you could you could go do uh make your own way i don't mean to be sentimental about it uh there are plenty of people who did not have that opportunity but by and large there was more opportunity here than any place else and seems to me that the nature of the country has been the belief that one of the dumbest sentences ever written was by scott fitzgerald who said that there are no second acts in american lives which is a thousand percent wrong there are nothing but second acts in american lives and so it seems to me that one of the goals for the president going forward has to be the preservation of this chant the the the capacity of the country to have equality of opportunity not an outcome but to have that fair chance that lincoln talked about one of the lessons of world war ii and the immediate aftermath was as both fdr said and truman understood that we were a very small world now and that it was more like a neighborhood air power had brought us incredibly close together which is interesting because we think that the internet did that but in the middle of the 20th century you had american presidents who were thinking about the interdependence of nations fdr said in his last inaugural that we'd learned that the only way to have a friend is to be one that the world was so close together now that we were like a neighborhood and so what happened in one place mattered to us all i think that that understanding that tennyson was right that we're a part of all that we met all that we've met is one that falls at the moment that insight feels very 21st century and i think there's there's something worth avoiding that i sometimes think of as the narcissism of the present the idea that suddenly this is like the miranda in the tempest you know that oh brave new world that has such people in it you know and their father says tis new to thee we've been dealing for a long time with the world that feels very close that what happens in a cave in afghanistan matters in lower manhattan for instance true now and i think that what we have to do is figure out what is our responsibility both to ourselves and to those who want to come here and how do we project ourselves around the world in order to try to be a force for good as opposed to a force for ill change in america tends to come when something that the powerless have been fighting for finally attracts the attention and the action of the powerful so whether it's abolition or suffrage or civil rights or economic opportunity or making the softer the rougher edges of capitalism whatever it might be it almost always begins among the many and finally reaches the few there are counter examples but by and large the presidents we revere are ones who simply have listened well and i think that's an absolutely essential element of leadership at the very top and it's not just presidents but it's people who are comfortable people who don't struggle day to day to whom much is given much is expected and part of citizenship is leadership i'm just leveraging dorkdom you know i'm just the great thing about history is you often don't know what you don't know and so david halperstein had a great line uh i miss david um he used to say that a good non-fiction work is like a liberal arts education it should take about four years and you spend a couple years reading and then a couple years refining what i love doing is try to find a moment that feels serene and unified and then go actually find out about how dis screwed up it was because and you're never disappointed uh by that so you think about 1948 we've won the second world war we were unified against communism well no we're not strong thurman's out running for president saying let's segregate again you look at 1965 and you think my god the new liberal order is here lyndon johnson has built the great society he's won 61 of the vote he's about to lose more than 40 seats in the house and ronald reagan is about to become governor of california every action has a reaction and so what i try to do is take the seemingly straightforward and explain the complexities that were in fact in play at that moment my view of history is that it should be approached narratively because that's how it happened and if you can tell the story of how certain events unfolded of how certain people acted when they were in the maelstrom of the present then you're able to come as close as possible it seems to me to capturing why they did what they did and how they did it and if you know how and why of both noble and ignoble moments you then have the capacity to either replicate or avoid but if you don't it seems to me if you don't enter the stream of time with them if you stand if you stand a bit apart and judge like this that has its role of course but i don't see that it's quite as useful i think what's useful is the power of story to remind us that it's a damn miracle we've gotten this far and it's probably going to be a damn miracle if we keep going but what's the story of the damn miracle i don't believe there's such a thing as a definitive biography i guess stuff can be authoritative but biography can be no more definitive than life is without a definitive nature i think that history with a capital h is a good starter i guess to put it that way but what what's most useful in my mind is can you have a fair-minded fact-based interpretation and retelling of the past in order to possibly shed light on the present and the future and there are people who disagree with that there are people who have different views of history and biography and they don't think that we can rip people out of their context and put them in ours and that's that's true but i think the to some extent the moral utility of history is not for us to feel self-righteous about the past as arthur schlesinger used to say but to tell the story of how frail and fallen human beings made their way through the twilight of events and transcended their limitations just enough to leave us a more perfect union i think abraham lincoln is fascinating not because he was perfect and heroic but because he was imperfect and barely heroic and if abraham lincoln can be barely heroic then we need to work really really damn hard to get there ourselves the past has been shaped not by perfect people or titans or giants but by people like us who at some critical moment manage to do the right thing and if they can do it then we can too and i don't think we do ourselves any good by either looking down at the past condescendingly or looking up at it sentimentally i think we learn the most from it when we look it in the eye history is we hope a record of decisions made and decisions deferred and to my mind i wouldn't want to write about something that where there wasn't an alternative course of action because that's the inherent drama of it so they're the nature of crisis the nature of of history is that people made a decision in real time to pursue path x as opposed to path y and that made the world either better or worse and why did they why did they pursue the path they pursued why did they decide not to pursue that one and to some extent what would have happened if they'd gone with the other one i ended the argument in 1968 or so because anything more recent tends to fall more into journalism and present memory than history and people bring their own preconceptions to it in a way that is interesting to talk about but i may not have much light to shed on it it was also it was about a century of american life it was really from reconstruction to the voting rights act into the cataclysm of 1968 and i think i can i can offer him honestly i i the argument i can offer is this is what i think about what happened long ago i know you know what you think about what just happened so let's just wait till that's that falls into the long ago category and then we'll talk about it hofstetter richard hofstetter wrote the paranoid style in american politics in the uh early 60s basically the idea being that there is a recurrent tendency in american life to blame some usually an elite but some group that is undermining the way of life for everyone else it's a threat so his context in 1964 was the john birch society the the the right-wing anti-communist right-wing believed that there was this cabal of uh new dealers and squishes uh who were working for the soviets that there's always the sense that there is some group there is some force that is just beyond your control that's trying to take everything away from you and it is one of the great insights in in my modern historiography because almost every era almost every moment there is some example of that paranoid style from kind of a global point of view there are really three or four dominant themes right there's male supremacy there's white supremacy there's economic opportunity and there's our relationship with the rest of the world whether are we isolationists are we interventionist and all of those issues continue to unfold uh those are the perennial questions they all tend to the first three anyway touch on equality um [Music] are we are we a country that can reasonably and rationally say everybody has a chance if they work hard enough you know have we opened are there enough ladders for people to climb up or have we taken those ladders away and if we have should we rebuild them and put them back and i think that's really the defining question for this era is going to be was the post-world war ii middle class which was an extraordinary achievement was that an aberration and does the complexity of the changing demographics of the country make it ever harder to provide that opportunity for everyone is there a white backlash against the changing demographics that will in a way bring down the whole house and i think the next generation of political leadership is going to have to figure out a way to argue that there is a path to prosperity and prosperity is absolutely essential to the health of democracy and to the security of liberty and individual rights no democracy has ever survived without broad-based prosperity it has to be broad-based and so the the this is economic it's political it's cultural and i think it just requires not just that sounds minimizing it requires an understanding that the best we are is when we live up to the declaration and that you can sort of judge there's a good yardstick at hand does this advance equality and the possibility of opportunity or does it reverse it if it advances it let's do it if it reverses it let's not the united states is trying to do something that nobody's ever done which would have a pluralistic multi-ethnic democratic republic over a big expanse of ground with an 18th century constitution governing it it's really hard why wouldn't it be hard if it were easy somebody else would have done it well i talked about segregation in my native region as apartheid because that's what it was it was a legalized system which consigned people of the non-majority race to second-class citizenship which is precisely what apartheid was and i think if we sugarcoat it if we pretend and also if we pretend somewhere that the civil rights movement is over then we're not recognizing the reality all around us you know i grew up in chattanooga tennessee on a civil war battlefield could find little money balls when i was a kid uh interestingly i didn't get a lot of lost causeism um [Music] there was part of it was uh in chattanooga anyway the monuments were almost all union monuments because they won and they were the only people had any money to build monuments uh after the war so i was never taught oh if only stonewall had lived blah blah blah uh but i certainly encountered it culturally um and i understand uh when you look at the history of the 1950s and 1960s why people of a certain disposition gravitated to that myth because the people in the 1860s had gravitated to that myth the immediate occasion for the charlottesville violence was about robert e lee and the statue there and part of the iconography of the lost cause was that these generals were defeated by forces beyond their control northern materiel massive force and that somehow know that these are martyrs to a cause that was noble the problem with that is that that cause was about human slavery it was about not fulfilling the aspirations of the declaration and those officers took up arms against the constitution unlike washington unlike jefferson unlike jackson who were slave owners and had their issues obviously but who were devoted to the constitution as a more as experiment if general lee had had his way that experiment would have ended and i think that's a bright historical line in all of this there's no question that charlottesville was about the lost cause meeting this terrible strain of neo-nazism this idea of white nationalism that somehow another white people are under siege from the changing demography of the country and that therefore they are somehow justified to take up arms to defend a country that in their minds needs defending if you're looking for a sign of where at least the neo-nazi world thinks they are in relation to the president david duke said this is why we elected donald trump this is why we voted for him was to create this white nationalist world and again it's perennial but a lot of us thought hoped prayed that it had become much more of a fringe and become much more part of the past it's a reminder that the battle goes on

Channel: Kunhardt Film Foundation

Views: 9,474

Rating: 4.7971015 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: MhvQWc5D4IQ

Length: 93min 17sec (5597 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021