February 20, 2026 • 36 mins
Historian Jon Meacham sits down with Margaret Hoover to talk about America’s pursuit of democracy, the dangers posed by the Trump administration, and his new book, “American Struggle.”
The book collects speeches and documents by prominent figures beginning with the First Assembly of Virginia in 1619 to the present, tracking the development of America’s founding ideals and the nation’s imperfect quest to live up to them.
Meacham reflects on the first year of President Trump’s second term and his expansive use of executive power. He also addresses the administration’s “might makes right” approach to foreign policy and what it means for America’s place in the world.
Meacham reflects on Rev. Jesse Jackson’s legacy, explains why presidential character matters, and discusses how America’s history can be a source for hope in the present.
Support for Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is provided by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, Katharine J. Rayner, Charles R. Schwab, Lindsay and George Billingsley, The Meadowlark Foundation, Jared Stone, and Al and Kathy Hubbard.
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(00:01):
The Constitution, I would argue,is as much a theological
document as it is a legal one, because it's based on what they
would have called the depravity of man, the sinfulness of man.
The reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country is
because they assume that most ofwhat we would want to do would
be wrong. That's Pulitzer Prize wedding
(00:21):
historian Jon Meacham reflectingon the wisdom of America's
founders. I'm Margaret Hoover.
This is the Firing Line podcast.John Meacham new book American
Struggle deploys documents and speeches from throughout
American history to track the pursuit of a more perfect union.
(00:42):
To me, history is a conversationwith the past in the present,
hopefully creating a future thatwe will be proud of.
From the founding era to the 21st century, Meacham examines
America at its best. I believe that we have always
been stronger the more we've lived into the Declaration of
Independence and when we've erred on the side of generosity
(01:05):
as opposed to nationalism. And worst.
I think we've just barely done the right thing enough at the
time, but it's been close. So where does the second Trump
administration fit into that story?
This idea that we're going to beFortress America didn't work in
the middle of the 20th century. I don't think it's going to work
now. Jon Meacham, welcome back to
(01:29):
Firing LINE. Thank you.
We last spoke in the days following the November election
in 2024, after Donald Trump had been re elected to the
presidency for a second non consecutive term.
Right. At that time, you warned that
President Trump was a unique threat to constitutional
government. You also said that you hoped you
(01:53):
would be proven wrong. Absolutely. 13 months into
Donald Trump's second term as president, how you reflect on
that sentiment? I haven't been proven completely
wrong, but we're still here and so I'm delighted.
Is he still a unique threat to constitutional?
Government he is because what you saw, I thought in 2016 to
(02:13):
2020 that he was a difference ofdegree, but not kind.
He was, you know, you could recognize what he was doing, not
the tone and the behavior. That's totally unique and what
was then, but basically you could sort of put it on an
American spectrum, what he was doing.
Then comes the unfolding January6th, the attempt to undermine
(02:35):
the election. And that's a unique virus in the
American body politic. And if you create the capacity,
the tendency to denounce elections simply because you
don't like the result, no American president's done that.
Andrew Jackson didn't do it in 1824.
Richard Nixon didn't do it in 1960.
Hubert Humphrey didn't do it in 1968.
(02:57):
Al Gore didn't do it in 2000. Secretary Clinton didn't do it
in 2016. But in 2020, we had an American
president who, because he didn'tlike what the system produced,
decided to sow distrust in the system.
And that continues to be something that I think we're
going to be dealing with. I hope we don't in the midterm,
(03:20):
but I think it's something to towatch carefully.
The the test we're going to havehere going forward is, will he
obey court rulings? Will the Madisonian checks and
balances prevail? And you know, you can't be
against executive power when youdon't have it, right?
(03:42):
And so that's one thing I think that to reflexively denounce
what the president does, I thinkis pointless, unreasonable and
the counterproductive. I mean, Donald Trump has said he
wants to nationalize the elections.
I mean, you just referred to 2026.
I mean, how, as a historian, howseriously should we reflect on
that threat? Well, the Constitution, the
(04:04):
framers did this for a reason. They didn't want a nationalized
elections. They wanted, remember that the
key insight of the American founding is that most of what we
would want to do as human beingsis wrong.
Most of it's selfish. Most of it, you know, this is
ambition made being made to counteract ambition, right?
That that's the insight. The Constitution, I would argue,
(04:25):
is as much a theological document as it is a legal one
because it's based on what they would have called the depravity
of man, the sinfulness of man. The reason it's so hard to get
anything done in this country isbecause they assume that most of
what we would want to do would be wrong.
And so elections moving to the stage, that was part of it.
(04:46):
I was pleased that Senator Thunepushed back on that.
You don't see that a great deal from the Republican Party.
But one thing that's going on, and you know more of this than I
do, I think that every day that goes by, President Trump's
direct interests and the interests of Republicans who are
going to be on a ballot again get a little farther apart.
(05:09):
And that always happens. Now, President Trump has
repealed every political law that people like me talk about.
I'm not. We don't yet know whether he's
repealed that one. Your new book, American
Struggle, is an edited anthologyof documents and speeches and
(05:29):
contributions to the country over the last 250 years.
Subjects range from executive power to freedom of speech to
civil rights to America's place in the world.
Some parts of it feel like a reminder to us about who we are
(05:50):
250 years in. Some of it feels like a direct
rebuke to where we are in the context of a Trump presidency,
in his second term. In the context of how you
selected the pieces, Brian, did you intend to have some of these
essays serve as a response or a reminder of where we are now?
(06:13):
I'm going to quote someone who Ithink was on this program when
Bill Buckley was doing it, Pontius Pilate.
We do have a clip of that. What I have, what I have
written, I have written. But you didn't write these, you
did not write any of these. That's true of these pieces that
you selected. That's true.
And, and, and so there was a, there was an editorial process
(06:34):
that you went through in order to to of course.
Look, I, it's, it's no great mystery.
I, I don't think in the last 10 years the American experiment
has covered itself in glory. Yeah.
So I wanted to, if you will, convene voices to talk about
what we've gotten right, what we've gotten wrong, because we
(06:56):
have to look at what we got wrong.
I don't think we should look back on the past condescendingly
and cancel people we don't like and all that, that that's,
that's not honest, intellectually coherent, nor
should we look up at it adoringly.
Just because we've come through crises before does not mean
we're going to come through themagain.
But I, I go back again and againto the soldiers at Omaha Beach,
(07:22):
John Lewis on the Pettis Bridge,you know, Ronald Reagan
attempting to readjust the conversation from the New Deal
and the Great Society. You know, he used to say, I'm
not trying to repeal the New Deal, I'm trying to repeal the
Great Society. You know, and that that's I, I
use super partisan examples on on purpose.
(07:44):
I do what I do in life, not least because when I was a kid,
I thought that Ronald Reagan wasthis fascinating, compelling
figure. And, you know, I'm George HW
Bush's biographer. I mean, and I don't know, I know
I look like a socialist. You know, I, I get my fashion
advice from Fred McMurray and mythree sons, right?
I'm not exactly a radical. I believe that we have always
(08:09):
been stronger the more we've lived into the Declaration of
Independence and when we've erred on the side of generosity
as opposed to nationalism. You write in your book quote.
America has always been defined by the perennial struggle
between the appetites of the fewand the privileged and the
aspirations of the many who haverightly insisted that the nation
(08:31):
live up to itself professed creed of sacred rights and equal
justice under law. How would you assess the status
of that struggle in 2026? It's a great question.
It's it's more closely fought than I would prefer.
I think all, I think all of us believe that and most of us
believe that. You know, 35% of the country,
(08:55):
that's the number of folks, by the way, who still approved of
Joe McCarthy after he was censured in 1950.
Four, 5535% of the country is a kind of hardcore base, but a
huge chunk of the country is malleable, is movable given the
season and and the issues. And all I want is because I
(09:19):
don't particularly have policy passions.
I want politics to be an arena of contention, not Total War.
And President Trump said in the first term that he wanted to
treat the presidency as a reality show in which every day
he vanquished his opponents. The presidency should not be
(09:41):
that. The presidency should be, as FDR
said pre, eminently, a place of moral leadership.
And moral in that sense means how we are with each other.
If we, to use a local example, Herbert Hoover in a conversation
with Dwight Eisenhower in the transition of 195253.
(10:03):
President Hoover says to Eisenhower, you are going to
have the hardest job any of us have had because there are a
bunch of people who want you to take us back to 1896.
And there are a bunch of people who want to put the New Deal and
just keep pushing. And you're going to, you're
going to be unpopular because you're not going to make either
(10:26):
extreme happy. The middle is not always the
right place to be. It wasn't the right place to be
on Hitler. It wasn't the right place to be
on segregation. It wasn't the right place to be
on slavery. But by and large, absent
existential issues, that broad middle really between Reagan and
Roosevelt is not a bad place, historically speaking, for the
(10:48):
country to have been. Isn't Eisenhower said.
The broad middle is the most usable surface, Yeah.
The middle way. The middle way, right?
Look, as we approach the 250th, many people are are finding an
opportunity to go back to our founding documents.
The book includes excerpts from The Federalist Papers, one that
speaks of demagogues who become tyrants, and then one that
(11:09):
reminds us that, quote, enlightened statesman will not
always be at the helm. How have the guard rails that
the founders established protected against the dangers
they also predicted? Very well, and I think even
better perhaps than they might have expected.
I think it would surprise them that it's only been amended 30
times or so. I go back to 1838 on this
(11:33):
question, 1838's Lincoln's firstmajor speech.
It's in Springfield. John Carroll, the last signer of
the Declaration, had just died. And it was this kind of moment
where the generation realized that daddy was gone, all the
daddies were gone. And Lincoln writes that the men
of iron have passed, and if the American experiment is to fail,
(11:58):
it will fail not because of foreign foes, but because of
internal A tyrant, A towering genius was the phrase he spoke
of how towering genius would could end the American
experiment at home rather than aforeign foe.
And I think the founders would have been surprised that it took
(12:19):
250 years for this kind of presidency to be in place.
I really do. You feel that this presidency is
a departure absolutely from all the previous precedents and
contacts. I, I think you have to, yes, I
do. I, I, I certainly don't think
that Trump, Trump is Jacksonian in a kind of popular style.
(12:40):
But Jackson wrote at a critical moment that the Constitution is
not a league but a compact. He was a unionist, His family.
He'd lost his family in the revolution.
He thought the blood of the revolution had sanctified the
country. Abraham Lincoln, of course,
(13:01):
plays a leading role in this anthology.
As a candidate for president in 1860, Abraham Lincoln declared
right makes might right. President Trump's advisor
Stephen Miller has advocated theview that might makes right.
You can talk all you want about international niceties and
(13:23):
everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,
Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by
force, that is governed by power.
So as you survey American history, which principle has the
country adhered to more closely,more often?
(13:44):
So between Stephen Miller and Abraham Lincoln, I know where my
money is. I know where I want to be.
But have we always been Mike Mixright?
I think we've just barely done the right thing enough at the
time, but it's been close. Look, the country's really a
multiracial democracy as we understand it is really from
1965, not 1776 or 1789, right? So we're 60 years old.
(14:10):
We're not. We we would be a developing
democracy, you know, if we were being ranked by the UN, which
we'd probably need to avoid for various reasons.
What Lincoln was saying was vital and perennial because of
what we just heard the other dayfrom the Trump White House about
(14:34):
the rule of the strong is the most important is the the key.
The American experiment was explicitly conceived in
contradiction to that. The idea was that the law
arrived at through popular government divided sovereignty
(14:56):
would be a stabilizing force because all of human history.
Think about it heading really heading into, you know, the
glorious Revolution 1688. The the sort of the 17th to 18th
centuries. History was shaped by the whims,
appetites of individual people who either by an accident of
(15:19):
birth or an incident of a war, were autocratic.
And then then the idea was, and these, remember, these were all
Europe, these were Englishmen who were making the
constitution. They saw themselves as
Englishmen. One of the forces behind the
revolution actually was that they weren't being treated as
Englishmen and they weren't covered by the Declaration of
(15:43):
Right and the Glorious Revolution.
So the entire structure was, let's stabilize an inherently
chaotic state of nature to go back to Hobbes and Locke, right?
What did Hobbes say? The state of nature was the war
of all against all. And it was an attempt to see if
(16:05):
John Locke could prevail over Thomas Hobbes.
And that's still, that's still the tension.
It's also the tension that Hamilton talked about in The
Federalist about is our government going to be reason
and deliberation prevailing overforce and accident?
(16:26):
And we're in a moment where we have an American president who
explicitly believes, says he believes, in strength and force
over and against reason and deliberation.
Lincoln, of course, presided over a country that was so
divided it went to war against itself.
(16:46):
It's Is it too easy to point to that time and say we've been in
worse moments? I think so.
I mean, I used to say, you know,the Civil war was pretty bad.
You know, you know, I it's the peril of analogy, right?
I think this is more like the 1920s.
(17:06):
We have just so you had a globalpandemic coming out of a global
war. You had the rise of
isolationism, the rise of protectionism.
You had Smoot Hawley. You had Which?
To be fair, some economists havesaid has been vastly overstated.
Sure, but you had a. In terms of its importance.
(17:27):
But you had a This is the only room in America where you get
pushed back on Smoot Hawley. You had the Kellogg Brien Pact
right, Which outlaws war. Signatories included Italy,
Germany and Japan. You had demographic change more.
1st 1920 census was the first time more Americans lived in
(17:49):
cities than on farms. You had shifting technology.
Radio was not commercially available until 19/24/25.
You had the rise of the second clan.
Because of the secretary of Commerce who federalized the
airwaves. I love it whenever we can get
the Secretary of Commerce in. There's just, you know, the
little Herbert Hoover here and there.
You had 347 Klan delegates at Madison Square Garden in 1924
(18:13):
who wouldn't vote for Al Smith to be nominated because he was
an Irish Catholic. You had the 1924 Immigration
Act, which was so ferocious thatthat's what was still in place
during World War 2. So I think that demographic
change, technological change, global anxieties, the fear of
Bolshevism, the fear that the Russian Revolution was the
(18:35):
beginning, not the end, I think that's where we are.
And I don't want to dismiss, I want to be very clear in this
book. President Trump is in this book,
Vice President Pants is in this book, the critique of what
liberal democracy and democraticcapitalism and globalization
(18:57):
have done to the daily lives andlivelihoods of so many Americans
over the last 30 years. This that is an open and
important question. In 1935, WB Dubois wrote about
schools distorting the history of slavery to prevent Americans
from feeling shame, he said. Quote, if we are going to use
(19:20):
history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our
national ego, and for giving us false but pleasurable sense of
accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a
science. Last year, as you know,
President Trump issued an executive order to combat
teaching of history that he believes, quote, fosters shame.
(19:41):
But should some of America's history foster shame?
Absolutely. I mean, you're a better person
than I am. Jim Clyburn sat in that chair
and said, But some of it was shameful.
Of course it was right. I mean, I don't know how we get
around that. I think that it's remarkable
that we've gotten as much right as we have.
And the other the other side of the argument would say that
(20:04):
there is a danger on focusing too much on our imperfections
and failures. So everything is a balance,
right? Napoleon once said.
History is a fable agreed upon. You know, I'm not being naive
about this. Everything's a matter of
emphasis. But, and sometimes perhaps we've
(20:27):
gotten it wrong. Not sure we'll ever know we got
it right because it's so inherently it's like mercury.
I just. But we know when we've gotten it
right and made progress. In the life of the country, but
history, like in the rendering of a story.
To me, history is a conversationwith the past in the present,
(20:54):
hopefully creating a future thatwe will be proud of.
Right? I sometimes ask when I'm lucky
enough to talk to politicians, Isay, you know, what do you want
us to think about when we look at your portrait?
And they love it because they can't imagine a world where
we're not looking at their portrait.
But what is it? What are you remembered for?
It's that wonderful scene from 1965 right after Bloody Sunday,
(21:18):
when Lyndon Johnson brings George Wallace up to the Oval
Office and he puts Wallace on the couch with the deep
cushions. Wallace sinks down.
Johnson, big guy in that big rocking chair, and he leans over
him and he says, George, when you're gone, what do you want
your grave to say? Do you want it to be a scrawny
pine board thing that says, George Wallace he hated?
(21:40):
Or do you want to be a beautifulwhite marble thing that says,
George Wallace he built? And it's a good question.
And we face that question now. Speaking of legacies, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson passed away this week at the age of 84.
Martin Luther King mentions Jesse Jackson by name in your
(22:04):
book in the speech that you selected of Martin Luther King
that he gave in Memphis the night before his assassination.
Jackson made several appearanceson the original Firing Line with
William F Buckley Junior in one of his first in 1971.
Take a look at how he addressed the American experiment.
(22:25):
The thing that's most disappointing about America is
that America has the potential to be the greatest country in
the history of the world. The question is, how soon will
this country actualize her potential?
So Jackson in 1971 is reflectingon the promise of the
declaration. And and you just said the the
(22:47):
multiracial democracy in the United States has really existed
since 1965, right? You're not far out of that.
So how do you reflect on Jackson's legacy?
Well, to be highly generic aboutthis, Reverend Jackson is an
arguably the most important figure between Doctor King and
(23:11):
President Obama. He's the only person I can think
of who was both in Memphis on the 4th of April 1968 and also
in Grant Park in Chicago. When President Obama becomes or
when Senator Obama becomes President Obama.
And those campaigns that Reverend Jackson ran for
president, which are kind of lost in the popular memory, but
(23:34):
are worth going back and lookingat.
They're they may be lost in the popular memory, Jon Meacham, but
they are not lost on firing lines.
In fact, I have a clip of Jesse Jackson running for president.
Take a look at what he said to the candidates on the stage with
him. In 1988, we must not just change
presidents. We must change direction.
(23:57):
I've had the experience of running across this country and
this world trying to make a difference.
Leadership must bite the bullet.It must make the dash for
freedom. It must open up the gates and
open up new vistas. We must put America back to
work. That's the alternative, the
welfare and the spare. We must find common ground a
(24:17):
great and diverse. Many reflect on the importance
of Jesse Jackson's runs for president.
Some of you and said that Obama would never have been elected
had it not been for Jesse Jackson.
I mean, could could we have had an Obama presidency as as soon
as we did? Have we not had Jesse Jackson
running for president twice in the 80s?
Well, I I don't know. What I do know is that Jackson
(24:41):
brought an element of the American story and the American
debate front and center. And given the way our politics
works, if something's not discussed in a presidential
campaign, it's it's harder to get a large stage for the issues
(25:01):
he raised. And the other thing that I think
Jackson should be remembered for, he might not like this, but
I think it's important, was he was quite honest about his own
failings. What famously said in a
(25:23):
convention speech, be patient. God isn't finished with me yet.
And you know, that's the kind ofthing a little candor in the
public square goes a long way. Donna Brazil once told me, who
of course came up as a politicaloperative through the Jesse
Jackson campaign, that you know,the the importance of his
(25:44):
campaigns was that he took essentially a black civil rights
protest movement and mainstreamed it into American
politics. That's absolutely right.
No, I think that that's, that's absolutely right.
And it, it happened at a really interesting time, right?
The 1980s, you would imagine it might have taken place in the
70s. It's interesting that it didn't,
(26:04):
you know, it took a minute and then it kind of goes away in the
90s. And then 10 more, 10 years
later, you have Obama. I think that I guess what
pleases me to some extent is that as you ask this question,
I'm having to think about Jackson's role in this.
(26:25):
Whereas often in history, if something is organic, you don't
single it out. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah. And so part.
Of the tapestry. Yeah, so I just think of the
American story the last 50 yearsis there's Jesse Jackson saying
keep hope alive. There are two speeches by George
(26:46):
Washington in the book, both centered around the willingness
to abdicate power. And this past week, former
President George W Bush published an essay about
Washington's humility. He wrote Quote Our First leader
helped define not only the character of the presidency, but
the character of the country. Washington modelled what it
(27:08):
means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and
selfish ambition. Do you still believe that
character is the Seminole quality?
I think it's. In a president.
Absolutely. I think it's the most important
thing because you never know what's going to happen.
You never know what the fuel going into the machinery is
going to be, so you better get the machinery right.
(27:31):
I think character is destiny. I think George W Bush is a great
example of this. George W Bush ran on a kind of
come home America, no nation building.
And then history dealt him a different hand and he took a
different course. I I think without knowing what I
want to know about someone who wants to be president is how
(27:53):
have they responded to adversityin their own lives?
What have they learned? What did they get right?
What did they get wrong? Because the presidency is
nothing but a running personal crisis.
So how have American presidents helped define the country's
character? I think Washington's Washington
set a Cincinnatus like model, voluntarily stopping after 2
(28:18):
terms. He actually wanted to leave
after one. He hated criticism so much.
I think that Jefferson in a way represents our instinct for
exploration, our instinct for the future.
Lewis and Clark, the Louisiana Purchase.
(28:39):
I think Jackson represents both the best and the worst of us.
Suffrage became more widely deployed, but the twin sins of
the American story, African American slavery and Native
American removal, he was very much part of those.
(29:00):
And by the way, the reason not to cancel Andrew Jackson is that
lets the rest of us off the hook, right?
He was the leader of a popular government.
This is what the country wanted,the country as it was defined
then. And part of the American story
is, what do we really mean and who's included when we say the
(29:23):
country? Who is we, the people?
And I just think we've gotten stronger and that the eras we
want to emulate are ones where we've grown that space, not
constricted it. In 1947, George Marshall Junior
(29:44):
delivers a commencement address at Harvard University promoting
the plan to aid Europe in rebuilding after World War 2.
He said quote, it is logical theUnited States should do whatever
it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic
health in the world without which there can be no political
stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not
(30:06):
against any country or doctrine,but against hunger, poverty,
desperation and chaos. Many have given the eulogy for
that era in which America leads the post World War 2 peace
consensus. Does the world still need us?
(30:28):
I think so. I think that it's certainly, we
can certainly help. The remarkable thing about the
Marshall Plan, NATO, is I go back again to Eisenhower, whom
I'm working on. Eisenhower believed so much in
NATO, NATO's the reason he ran for president because Robert
(30:50):
Taft, senator from Ohio, wouldn't guarantee support for
NATO. And so you sort of ask, well,
was that some sort of grand, youknow, Munich Security Conference
free fleece vest kind of moment?No, it was a very, it was
elemental. This goes to your character
question. Eisenhower had just presided
over the deaths of thousands andthousands of American men to
(31:16):
deliver Europe from tyranny. He was not going to let the
sacrifices of World War 2GO to waste and let there be a World
War 3. And that's not grand.
That's not some sort of give andask narrative about great men.
Dwight Eisenhower sat in the Pentagon in a meeting with
(31:38):
Robert Taft and basically said I'll get out of this.
I'll get out of presidential politics forever.
Taft wouldn't do it. History changed when the
Canadian Prime Minister spoke and talked about how there'd
been this rupture. That was fascinating.
I found another part of that speech as fascinating, if not
(32:00):
more so. You're referring to Mark Carney,
the Prime Minister of Canada's speech at the Davos in Davos
this year. So he said, there'd been a
rupture in the transatlantic alliance that got the headlines.
There's another part of the speech he talked about the
fictions, the and I would say myth, not fiction, the stories
we tell ourselves about who we are.
(32:21):
America from 1945 through 2016 told itself a story about its
position in the world, and we got it wrong sometimes we went
too far sometimes. See Vietnam.
But our The story we told ourselves was that liberal
democracy should be promulgated,that keeping tyranny behind an
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Iron Curtain was the right thingto do.
And by telling the story, why did the folks come through the
wall in East to West Berlin? Because W Berlin was a better
place to live. Because prosperity and democracy
and freedom overwhelmed the power of a corrupt state that
(33:10):
wanted to control other people. That's what the Cold War was.
And the Cold War was as super partisan an effort as we can
imagine, right? It's Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush.
And when that wall came down, itwas this enormous vindication of
(33:34):
our investments of blood and treasure.
Does the world still need us, though?
Well, we need the world, we needmarkets, we need allies.
We are entering a, a, a era where warfare is ever more
asymmetrical, cyber, whatever itmight be, biological, whatever
(33:55):
it could be. And this idea that we're going
to be Fortress America is it didn't work in the middle of the
20th century. I don't think it's going to work
now. You know, there's a difference
between patriotism and nationalism, right?
We're in a nationalistic season,right?
Allegiance to your own kind patriotism.
(34:18):
George Orwell did a great essay on this.
Patriotism is allegiance to an idea.
And this goes to one of the one of the Reagan pieces in this
book is his speech at Lady Liberty, where he talked about
how, as he put it later in the farewell address, all the
pilgrims from all the lost places are hurtling through the
darkness toward home. This talk about fictions that
(34:40):
we're telling ourselves, or stories that we're telling
ourselves, or narratives that we're telling ourselves.
We're telling ourselves a new narrative that we're based on a
nationalism. Well, we really, our narrative
has always been that we're basedon an idea.
Yes, and we telling ourselves that narrative is is is not
quite right 49.9%. Yeah, the the our elected
leaders in this moment are growing up, yes, right.
(35:02):
Yeah, they're selling. Yes, the incumbent
administration wants this to be a nationalistic.
You've written so eloquently about the challenges that we've
faced as Americans in the past. You have highlighted these
competing narratives and this journey as we continue to strive
and move forward and our 250th anniversary to as we saw forward
(35:23):
and our 250th anniversary towards, you know, hopefully a
continuation of nearing the ideals that are set forth in the
declaration. Can you think of parallels of a
democracy that has come out of challenging times that can serve
as a positive lesson for citizens in this democracy?
(35:46):
I think we're our own best example, and it's the America
that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, which is not to say, oh,
all the protest movements were great.
But what we did in that moment was we lived into what we said
we always wanted to be. When Doctor King reached the
(36:09):
great moment in the sermon at the March on Washington, he
wasn't asking for reparation. He wasn't asking for a
revolution. He was asking for compliance.
And so we've we've done this andI think we can do it again if
enough of us decide that it's important.
(36:31):
Sean Meacham, thank you for returning to Firing Line.
Thank you. Thank you.
The Constitution, I would argue,is as much a theological
document as it is a legal one, because it's based on what they
would have called the depravity of man, the sinfulness of man.
The reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country is
because they assume that most ofwhat we would want to do would
be wrong. That's Pulitzer Prize wedding
(00:21):
historian Jon Meacham reflectingon the wisdom of America's
founders. I'm Margaret Hoover.
This is the Firing Line podcast.John Meacham new book American
Struggle deploys documents and speeches from throughout
American history to track the pursuit of a more perfect union.
(00:42):
To me, history is a conversationwith the past in the present,
hopefully creating a future thatwe will be proud of.
From the founding era to the 21st century, Meacham examines
America at its best. I believe that we have always
been stronger the more we've lived into the Declaration of
Independence and when we've erred on the side of generosity
(01:05):
as opposed to nationalism. And worst.
I think we've just barely done the right thing enough at the
time, but it's been close. So where does the second Trump
administration fit into that story?
This idea that we're going to beFortress America didn't work in
the middle of the 20th century. I don't think it's going to work
now. Jon Meacham, welcome back to
(01:29):
Firing LINE. Thank you.
We last spoke in the days following the November election
in 2024, after Donald Trump had been re elected to the
presidency for a second non consecutive term.
Right. At that time, you warned that
President Trump was a unique threat to constitutional
government. You also said that you hoped you
(01:53):
would be proven wrong. Absolutely. 13 months into
Donald Trump's second term as president, how you reflect on
that sentiment? I haven't been proven completely
wrong, but we're still here and so I'm delighted.
Is he still a unique threat to constitutional?
Government he is because what you saw, I thought in 2016 to
(02:13):
2020 that he was a difference ofdegree, but not kind.
He was, you know, you could recognize what he was doing, not
the tone and the behavior. That's totally unique and what
was then, but basically you could sort of put it on an
American spectrum, what he was doing.
Then comes the unfolding January6th, the attempt to undermine
(02:35):
the election. And that's a unique virus in the
American body politic. And if you create the capacity,
the tendency to denounce elections simply because you
don't like the result, no American president's done that.
Andrew Jackson didn't do it in 1824.
Richard Nixon didn't do it in 1960.
Hubert Humphrey didn't do it in 1968.
(02:57):
Al Gore didn't do it in 2000. Secretary Clinton didn't do it
in 2016. But in 2020, we had an American
president who, because he didn'tlike what the system produced,
decided to sow distrust in the system.
And that continues to be something that I think we're
going to be dealing with. I hope we don't in the midterm,
(03:20):
but I think it's something to towatch carefully.
The the test we're going to havehere going forward is, will he
obey court rulings? Will the Madisonian checks and
balances prevail? And you know, you can't be
against executive power when youdon't have it, right?
(03:42):
And so that's one thing I think that to reflexively denounce
what the president does, I thinkis pointless, unreasonable and
the counterproductive. I mean, Donald Trump has said he
wants to nationalize the elections.
I mean, you just referred to 2026.
I mean, how, as a historian, howseriously should we reflect on
that threat? Well, the Constitution, the
(04:04):
framers did this for a reason. They didn't want a nationalized
elections. They wanted, remember that the
key insight of the American founding is that most of what we
would want to do as human beingsis wrong.
Most of it's selfish. Most of it, you know, this is
ambition made being made to counteract ambition, right?
That that's the insight. The Constitution, I would argue,
(04:25):
is as much a theological document as it is a legal one
because it's based on what they would have called the depravity
of man, the sinfulness of man. The reason it's so hard to get
anything done in this country isbecause they assume that most of
what we would want to do would be wrong.
And so elections moving to the stage, that was part of it.
(04:46):
I was pleased that Senator Thunepushed back on that.
You don't see that a great deal from the Republican Party.
But one thing that's going on, and you know more of this than I
do, I think that every day that goes by, President Trump's
direct interests and the interests of Republicans who are
going to be on a ballot again get a little farther apart.
(05:09):
And that always happens. Now, President Trump has
repealed every political law that people like me talk about.
I'm not. We don't yet know whether he's
repealed that one. Your new book, American
Struggle, is an edited anthologyof documents and speeches and
(05:29):
contributions to the country over the last 250 years.
Subjects range from executive power to freedom of speech to
civil rights to America's place in the world.
Some parts of it feel like a reminder to us about who we are
(05:50):
250 years in. Some of it feels like a direct
rebuke to where we are in the context of a Trump presidency,
in his second term. In the context of how you
selected the pieces, Brian, did you intend to have some of these
essays serve as a response or a reminder of where we are now?
(06:13):
I'm going to quote someone who Ithink was on this program when
Bill Buckley was doing it, Pontius Pilate.
We do have a clip of that. What I have, what I have
written, I have written. But you didn't write these, you
did not write any of these. That's true of these pieces that
you selected. That's true.
And, and, and so there was a, there was an editorial process
(06:34):
that you went through in order to to of course.
Look, I, it's, it's no great mystery.
I, I don't think in the last 10 years the American experiment
has covered itself in glory. Yeah.
So I wanted to, if you will, convene voices to talk about
what we've gotten right, what we've gotten wrong, because we
(06:56):
have to look at what we got wrong.
I don't think we should look back on the past condescendingly
and cancel people we don't like and all that, that that's,
that's not honest, intellectually coherent, nor
should we look up at it adoringly.
Just because we've come through crises before does not mean
we're going to come through themagain.
But I, I go back again and againto the soldiers at Omaha Beach,
(07:22):
John Lewis on the Pettis Bridge,you know, Ronald Reagan
attempting to readjust the conversation from the New Deal
and the Great Society. You know, he used to say, I'm
not trying to repeal the New Deal, I'm trying to repeal the
Great Society. You know, and that that's I, I
use super partisan examples on on purpose.
(07:44):
I do what I do in life, not least because when I was a kid,
I thought that Ronald Reagan wasthis fascinating, compelling
figure. And, you know, I'm George HW
Bush's biographer. I mean, and I don't know, I know
I look like a socialist. You know, I, I get my fashion
advice from Fred McMurray and mythree sons, right?
I'm not exactly a radical. I believe that we have always
(08:09):
been stronger the more we've lived into the Declaration of
Independence and when we've erred on the side of generosity
as opposed to nationalism. You write in your book quote.
America has always been defined by the perennial struggle
between the appetites of the fewand the privileged and the
aspirations of the many who haverightly insisted that the nation
(08:31):
live up to itself professed creed of sacred rights and equal
justice under law. How would you assess the status
of that struggle in 2026? It's a great question.
It's it's more closely fought than I would prefer.
I think all, I think all of us believe that and most of us
believe that. You know, 35% of the country,
(08:55):
that's the number of folks, by the way, who still approved of
Joe McCarthy after he was censured in 1950.
Four, 5535% of the country is a kind of hardcore base, but a
huge chunk of the country is malleable, is movable given the
season and and the issues. And all I want is because I
(09:19):
don't particularly have policy passions.
I want politics to be an arena of contention, not Total War.
And President Trump said in the first term that he wanted to
treat the presidency as a reality show in which every day
he vanquished his opponents. The presidency should not be
(09:41):
that. The presidency should be, as FDR
said pre, eminently, a place of moral leadership.
And moral in that sense means how we are with each other.
If we, to use a local example, Herbert Hoover in a conversation
with Dwight Eisenhower in the transition of 195253.
(10:03):
President Hoover says to Eisenhower, you are going to
have the hardest job any of us have had because there are a
bunch of people who want you to take us back to 1896.
And there are a bunch of people who want to put the New Deal and
just keep pushing. And you're going to, you're
going to be unpopular because you're not going to make either
(10:26):
extreme happy. The middle is not always the
right place to be. It wasn't the right place to be
on Hitler. It wasn't the right place to be
on segregation. It wasn't the right place to be
on slavery. But by and large, absent
existential issues, that broad middle really between Reagan and
Roosevelt is not a bad place, historically speaking, for the
(10:48):
country to have been. Isn't Eisenhower said.
The broad middle is the most usable surface, Yeah.
The middle way. The middle way, right?
Look, as we approach the 250th, many people are are finding an
opportunity to go back to our founding documents.
The book includes excerpts from The Federalist Papers, one that
speaks of demagogues who become tyrants, and then one that
(11:09):
reminds us that, quote, enlightened statesman will not
always be at the helm. How have the guard rails that
the founders established protected against the dangers
they also predicted? Very well, and I think even
better perhaps than they might have expected.
I think it would surprise them that it's only been amended 30
times or so. I go back to 1838 on this
(11:33):
question, 1838's Lincoln's firstmajor speech.
It's in Springfield. John Carroll, the last signer of
the Declaration, had just died. And it was this kind of moment
where the generation realized that daddy was gone, all the
daddies were gone. And Lincoln writes that the men
of iron have passed, and if the American experiment is to fail,
(11:58):
it will fail not because of foreign foes, but because of
internal A tyrant, A towering genius was the phrase he spoke
of how towering genius would could end the American
experiment at home rather than aforeign foe.
And I think the founders would have been surprised that it took
(12:19):
250 years for this kind of presidency to be in place.
I really do. You feel that this presidency is
a departure absolutely from all the previous precedents and
contacts. I, I think you have to, yes, I
do. I, I, I certainly don't think
that Trump, Trump is Jacksonian in a kind of popular style.
(12:40):
But Jackson wrote at a critical moment that the Constitution is
not a league but a compact. He was a unionist, His family.
He'd lost his family in the revolution.
He thought the blood of the revolution had sanctified the
country. Abraham Lincoln, of course,
(13:01):
plays a leading role in this anthology.
As a candidate for president in 1860, Abraham Lincoln declared
right makes might right. President Trump's advisor
Stephen Miller has advocated theview that might makes right.
You can talk all you want about international niceties and
(13:23):
everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,
Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by
force, that is governed by power.
So as you survey American history, which principle has the
country adhered to more closely,more often?
(13:44):
So between Stephen Miller and Abraham Lincoln, I know where my
money is. I know where I want to be.
But have we always been Mike Mixright?
I think we've just barely done the right thing enough at the
time, but it's been close. Look, the country's really a
multiracial democracy as we understand it is really from
1965, not 1776 or 1789, right? So we're 60 years old.
(14:10):
We're not. We we would be a developing
democracy, you know, if we were being ranked by the UN, which
we'd probably need to avoid for various reasons.
What Lincoln was saying was vital and perennial because of
what we just heard the other dayfrom the Trump White House about
(14:34):
the rule of the strong is the most important is the the key.
The American experiment was explicitly conceived in
contradiction to that. The idea was that the law
arrived at through popular government divided sovereignty
(14:56):
would be a stabilizing force because all of human history.
Think about it heading really heading into, you know, the
glorious Revolution 1688. The the sort of the 17th to 18th
centuries. History was shaped by the whims,
appetites of individual people who either by an accident of
(15:19):
birth or an incident of a war, were autocratic.
And then then the idea was, and these, remember, these were all
Europe, these were Englishmen who were making the
constitution. They saw themselves as
Englishmen. One of the forces behind the
revolution actually was that they weren't being treated as
Englishmen and they weren't covered by the Declaration of
(15:43):
Right and the Glorious Revolution.
So the entire structure was, let's stabilize an inherently
chaotic state of nature to go back to Hobbes and Locke, right?
What did Hobbes say? The state of nature was the war
of all against all. And it was an attempt to see if
(16:05):
John Locke could prevail over Thomas Hobbes.
And that's still, that's still the tension.
It's also the tension that Hamilton talked about in The
Federalist about is our government going to be reason
and deliberation prevailing overforce and accident?
(16:26):
And we're in a moment where we have an American president who
explicitly believes, says he believes, in strength and force
over and against reason and deliberation.
Lincoln, of course, presided over a country that was so
divided it went to war against itself.
(16:46):
It's Is it too easy to point to that time and say we've been in
worse moments? I think so.
I mean, I used to say, you know,the Civil war was pretty bad.
You know, you know, I it's the peril of analogy, right?
I think this is more like the 1920s.
(17:06):
We have just so you had a globalpandemic coming out of a global
war. You had the rise of
isolationism, the rise of protectionism.
You had Smoot Hawley. You had Which?
To be fair, some economists havesaid has been vastly overstated.
Sure, but you had a. In terms of its importance.
(17:27):
But you had a This is the only room in America where you get
pushed back on Smoot Hawley. You had the Kellogg Brien Pact
right, Which outlaws war. Signatories included Italy,
Germany and Japan. You had demographic change more.
1st 1920 census was the first time more Americans lived in
(17:49):
cities than on farms. You had shifting technology.
Radio was not commercially available until 19/24/25.
You had the rise of the second clan.
Because of the secretary of Commerce who federalized the
airwaves. I love it whenever we can get
the Secretary of Commerce in. There's just, you know, the
little Herbert Hoover here and there.
You had 347 Klan delegates at Madison Square Garden in 1924
(18:13):
who wouldn't vote for Al Smith to be nominated because he was
an Irish Catholic. You had the 1924 Immigration
Act, which was so ferocious thatthat's what was still in place
during World War 2. So I think that demographic
change, technological change, global anxieties, the fear of
Bolshevism, the fear that the Russian Revolution was the
(18:35):
beginning, not the end, I think that's where we are.
And I don't want to dismiss, I want to be very clear in this
book. President Trump is in this book,
Vice President Pants is in this book, the critique of what
liberal democracy and democraticcapitalism and globalization
(18:57):
have done to the daily lives andlivelihoods of so many Americans
over the last 30 years. This that is an open and
important question. In 1935, WB Dubois wrote about
schools distorting the history of slavery to prevent Americans
from feeling shame, he said. Quote, if we are going to use
(19:20):
history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our
national ego, and for giving us false but pleasurable sense of
accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a
science. Last year, as you know,
President Trump issued an executive order to combat
teaching of history that he believes, quote, fosters shame.
(19:41):
But should some of America's history foster shame?
Absolutely. I mean, you're a better person
than I am. Jim Clyburn sat in that chair
and said, But some of it was shameful.
Of course it was right. I mean, I don't know how we get
around that. I think that it's remarkable
that we've gotten as much right as we have.
And the other the other side of the argument would say that
(20:04):
there is a danger on focusing too much on our imperfections
and failures. So everything is a balance,
right? Napoleon once said.
History is a fable agreed upon. You know, I'm not being naive
about this. Everything's a matter of
emphasis. But, and sometimes perhaps we've
(20:27):
gotten it wrong. Not sure we'll ever know we got
it right because it's so inherently it's like mercury.
I just. But we know when we've gotten it
right and made progress. In the life of the country, but
history, like in the rendering of a story.
To me, history is a conversationwith the past in the present,
(20:54):
hopefully creating a future thatwe will be proud of.
Right? I sometimes ask when I'm lucky
enough to talk to politicians, Isay, you know, what do you want
us to think about when we look at your portrait?
And they love it because they can't imagine a world where
we're not looking at their portrait.
But what is it? What are you remembered for?
It's that wonderful scene from 1965 right after Bloody Sunday,
(21:18):
when Lyndon Johnson brings George Wallace up to the Oval
Office and he puts Wallace on the couch with the deep
cushions. Wallace sinks down.
Johnson, big guy in that big rocking chair, and he leans over
him and he says, George, when you're gone, what do you want
your grave to say? Do you want it to be a scrawny
pine board thing that says, George Wallace he hated?
(21:40):
Or do you want to be a beautifulwhite marble thing that says,
George Wallace he built? And it's a good question.
And we face that question now. Speaking of legacies, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson passed away this week at the age of 84.
Martin Luther King mentions Jesse Jackson by name in your
(22:04):
book in the speech that you selected of Martin Luther King
that he gave in Memphis the night before his assassination.
Jackson made several appearanceson the original Firing Line with
William F Buckley Junior in one of his first in 1971.
Take a look at how he addressed the American experiment.
(22:25):
The thing that's most disappointing about America is
that America has the potential to be the greatest country in
the history of the world. The question is, how soon will
this country actualize her potential?
So Jackson in 1971 is reflectingon the promise of the
declaration. And and you just said the the
(22:47):
multiracial democracy in the United States has really existed
since 1965, right? You're not far out of that.
So how do you reflect on Jackson's legacy?
Well, to be highly generic aboutthis, Reverend Jackson is an
arguably the most important figure between Doctor King and
(23:11):
President Obama. He's the only person I can think
of who was both in Memphis on the 4th of April 1968 and also
in Grant Park in Chicago. When President Obama becomes or
when Senator Obama becomes President Obama.
And those campaigns that Reverend Jackson ran for
president, which are kind of lost in the popular memory, but
(23:34):
are worth going back and lookingat.
They're they may be lost in the popular memory, Jon Meacham, but
they are not lost on firing lines.
In fact, I have a clip of Jesse Jackson running for president.
Take a look at what he said to the candidates on the stage with
him. In 1988, we must not just change
presidents. We must change direction.
(23:57):
I've had the experience of running across this country and
this world trying to make a difference.
Leadership must bite the bullet.It must make the dash for
freedom. It must open up the gates and
open up new vistas. We must put America back to
work. That's the alternative, the
welfare and the spare. We must find common ground a
(24:17):
great and diverse. Many reflect on the importance
of Jesse Jackson's runs for president.
Some of you and said that Obama would never have been elected
had it not been for Jesse Jackson.
I mean, could could we have had an Obama presidency as as soon
as we did? Have we not had Jesse Jackson
running for president twice in the 80s?
Well, I I don't know. What I do know is that Jackson
(24:41):
brought an element of the American story and the American
debate front and center. And given the way our politics
works, if something's not discussed in a presidential
campaign, it's it's harder to get a large stage for the issues
(25:01):
he raised. And the other thing that I think
Jackson should be remembered for, he might not like this, but
I think it's important, was he was quite honest about his own
failings. What famously said in a
(25:23):
convention speech, be patient. God isn't finished with me yet.
And you know, that's the kind ofthing a little candor in the
public square goes a long way. Donna Brazil once told me, who
of course came up as a politicaloperative through the Jesse
Jackson campaign, that you know,the the importance of his
(25:44):
campaigns was that he took essentially a black civil rights
protest movement and mainstreamed it into American
politics. That's absolutely right.
No, I think that that's, that's absolutely right.
And it, it happened at a really interesting time, right?
The 1980s, you would imagine it might have taken place in the
70s. It's interesting that it didn't,
(26:04):
you know, it took a minute and then it kind of goes away in the
90s. And then 10 more, 10 years
later, you have Obama. I think that I guess what
pleases me to some extent is that as you ask this question,
I'm having to think about Jackson's role in this.
(26:25):
Whereas often in history, if something is organic, you don't
single it out. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah. And so part.
Of the tapestry. Yeah, so I just think of the
American story the last 50 yearsis there's Jesse Jackson saying
keep hope alive. There are two speeches by George
(26:46):
Washington in the book, both centered around the willingness
to abdicate power. And this past week, former
President George W Bush published an essay about
Washington's humility. He wrote Quote Our First leader
helped define not only the character of the presidency, but
the character of the country. Washington modelled what it
(27:08):
means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and
selfish ambition. Do you still believe that
character is the Seminole quality?
I think it's. In a president.
Absolutely. I think it's the most important
thing because you never know what's going to happen.
You never know what the fuel going into the machinery is
going to be, so you better get the machinery right.
(27:31):
I think character is destiny. I think George W Bush is a great
example of this. George W Bush ran on a kind of
come home America, no nation building.
And then history dealt him a different hand and he took a
different course. I I think without knowing what I
want to know about someone who wants to be president is how
(27:53):
have they responded to adversityin their own lives?
What have they learned? What did they get right?
What did they get wrong? Because the presidency is
nothing but a running personal crisis.
So how have American presidents helped define the country's
character? I think Washington's Washington
set a Cincinnatus like model, voluntarily stopping after 2
(28:18):
terms. He actually wanted to leave
after one. He hated criticism so much.
I think that Jefferson in a way represents our instinct for
exploration, our instinct for the future.
Lewis and Clark, the Louisiana Purchase.
(28:39):
I think Jackson represents both the best and the worst of us.
Suffrage became more widely deployed, but the twin sins of
the American story, African American slavery and Native
American removal, he was very much part of those.
(29:00):
And by the way, the reason not to cancel Andrew Jackson is that
lets the rest of us off the hook, right?
He was the leader of a popular government.
This is what the country wanted,the country as it was defined
then. And part of the American story
is, what do we really mean and who's included when we say the
(29:23):
country? Who is we, the people?
And I just think we've gotten stronger and that the eras we
want to emulate are ones where we've grown that space, not
constricted it. In 1947, George Marshall Junior
(29:44):
delivers a commencement address at Harvard University promoting
the plan to aid Europe in rebuilding after World War 2.
He said quote, it is logical theUnited States should do whatever
it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic
health in the world without which there can be no political
stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not
(30:06):
against any country or doctrine,but against hunger, poverty,
desperation and chaos. Many have given the eulogy for
that era in which America leads the post World War 2 peace
consensus. Does the world still need us?
(30:28):
I think so. I think that it's certainly, we
can certainly help. The remarkable thing about the
Marshall Plan, NATO, is I go back again to Eisenhower, whom
I'm working on. Eisenhower believed so much in
NATO, NATO's the reason he ran for president because Robert
(30:50):
Taft, senator from Ohio, wouldn't guarantee support for
NATO. And so you sort of ask, well,
was that some sort of grand, youknow, Munich Security Conference
free fleece vest kind of moment?No, it was a very, it was
elemental. This goes to your character
question. Eisenhower had just presided
over the deaths of thousands andthousands of American men to
(31:16):
deliver Europe from tyranny. He was not going to let the
sacrifices of World War 2GO to waste and let there be a World
War 3. And that's not grand.
That's not some sort of give andask narrative about great men.
Dwight Eisenhower sat in the Pentagon in a meeting with
(31:38):
Robert Taft and basically said I'll get out of this.
I'll get out of presidential politics forever.
Taft wouldn't do it. History changed when the
Canadian Prime Minister spoke and talked about how there'd
been this rupture. That was fascinating.
I found another part of that speech as fascinating, if not
(32:00):
more so. You're referring to Mark Carney,
the Prime Minister of Canada's speech at the Davos in Davos
this year. So he said, there'd been a
rupture in the transatlantic alliance that got the headlines.
There's another part of the speech he talked about the
fictions, the and I would say myth, not fiction, the stories
we tell ourselves about who we are.
(32:21):
America from 1945 through 2016 told itself a story about its
position in the world, and we got it wrong sometimes we went
too far sometimes. See Vietnam.
But our The story we told ourselves was that liberal
democracy should be promulgated,that keeping tyranny behind an
(32:48):
Iron Curtain was the right thingto do.
And by telling the story, why did the folks come through the
wall in East to West Berlin? Because W Berlin was a better
place to live. Because prosperity and democracy
and freedom overwhelmed the power of a corrupt state that
(33:10):
wanted to control other people. That's what the Cold War was.
And the Cold War was as super partisan an effort as we can
imagine, right? It's Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush.
And when that wall came down, itwas this enormous vindication of
(33:34):
our investments of blood and treasure.
Does the world still need us, though?
Well, we need the world, we needmarkets, we need allies.
We are entering a, a, a era where warfare is ever more
asymmetrical, cyber, whatever itmight be, biological, whatever
(33:55):
it could be. And this idea that we're going
to be Fortress America is it didn't work in the middle of the
20th century. I don't think it's going to work
now. You know, there's a difference
between patriotism and nationalism, right?
We're in a nationalistic season,right?
Allegiance to your own kind patriotism.
(34:18):
George Orwell did a great essay on this.
Patriotism is allegiance to an idea.
And this goes to one of the one of the Reagan pieces in this
book is his speech at Lady Liberty, where he talked about
how, as he put it later in the farewell address, all the
pilgrims from all the lost places are hurtling through the
darkness toward home. This talk about fictions that
(34:40):
we're telling ourselves, or stories that we're telling
ourselves, or narratives that we're telling ourselves.
We're telling ourselves a new narrative that we're based on a
nationalism. Well, we really, our narrative
has always been that we're basedon an idea.
Yes, and we telling ourselves that narrative is is is not
quite right 49.9%. Yeah, the the our elected
leaders in this moment are growing up, yes, right.
(35:02):
Yeah, they're selling. Yes, the incumbent
administration wants this to be a nationalistic.
You've written so eloquently about the challenges that we've
faced as Americans in the past. You have highlighted these
competing narratives and this journey as we continue to strive
and move forward and our 250th anniversary to as we saw forward
(35:23):
and our 250th anniversary towards, you know, hopefully a
continuation of nearing the ideals that are set forth in the
declaration. Can you think of parallels of a
democracy that has come out of challenging times that can serve
as a positive lesson for citizens in this democracy?
(35:46):
I think we're our own best example, and it's the America
that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, which is not to say, oh,
all the protest movements were great.
But what we did in that moment was we lived into what we said
we always wanted to be. When Doctor King reached the
(36:09):
great moment in the sermon at the March on Washington, he
wasn't asking for reparation. He wasn't asking for a
revolution. He was asking for compliance.
And so we've we've done this andI think we can do it again if
enough of us decide that it's important.
(36:31):
Sean Meacham, thank you for returning to Firing Line.
Thank you. Thank you.
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