The Atlantic Celebrates America’s 250th Birthday

0:06How would you fill in the blanks for these four statements? Statement one, at the founding of the United States, some of the country's most important political values were blank. Number two, after 250 years of U.S. history, I would describe the country's track record of following through on those values and ideals as blank. Statement number three, right now an outside observer would likely look at our politics and say we value blank. And And finally, four, when it comes to the United States as a country over the next decade or century, I want to see blank. One of you shared this, the country's most important political values at the founding were democracy, not kings, checks and balances, genocidal and colonialist.

0:56Another of you shared this, the country's track record on its values was limited, Unfinished but trending in the wrong direction Fair Middling at best Consistent And successful As part of a special issue coming out this November, the Atlantic Magazine tasked writers and historians with looking at the country's founding and what the U.S., its people, and its political thinkers valued at the beginning. Today on 1A, we go back to our country's beginnings to remind all of us of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other important revolutionary documents, and to examine how reconnecting with those ideas might help us as we struggle to keep U.S.

1:36democracy together 250 years later. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get into.

1:49Let's get right into it with our guests. Joining us in studio is Jeffrey Rosen. He's president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and he's author of The Pursuit of Liberty, How Hamilton versus Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America. It comes out this month. His piece in the Atlantic issue is called The Insurrection Problem. Jeff, welcome back. Great to be with you. And joining us from New York City is George Packer. He's an author and staff writer for The Atlantic. His novel, The Emergency, comes out in November. His story in The Atlantic is called America Needs Patriotism.

2:22George, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So you've both written pieces for this new issue of The Atlantic. It's called The Unfinished Revolution. And I want to hear from both of you. Jeff, you first, what value do you think we can gain from looking back to the revolutionary era, given the political moment we're living in now? Well, the question you pose to listeners is so important. What were the values of the American idea. And your listeners began to identify some of them. They include liberty, equality, and government by consent in the Declaration, and separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

2:58And my piece in The Atlantic argues that although Americans embraced those values from the beginning, they disagreed about how to balance the values. And that's why the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson is so fundamental. Hamilton and Jefferson disagree about how to balance national power versus states' rights and executive power versus congressional power, democracy versus rule by elites, and liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution. In particular, they clash about how strong the president should be. They fear a Julius Caesar who's going to come in and subvert democracy by flattering the people and persuading them to give up liberty and consolidating all power in his own hands.

3:44They unite in resisting Aaron Burr, who they think is that Julius Caesar like figure. Hamilton says if we have a crypto Caesar, tis Burr. And he accurately fears that Burr is conspiring to lead an insurrection in Spanish, Louisiana and set himself up as an emperor of Mexico. Hamilton sacrifices his life for that noble purpose of resisting a Caesar. And for the rest of American history, the question has been, is the Caesar coming? And Lincoln and FDR and Huey Long are all attacked as Caesars. And of course, the big debate we're having today is, is President Trump Julius Caesar? Or is he Andrew Jackson?

4:23Is he the would-be demagogue who wants to consolidate all power in his own hands and subvert democracy? Or is he a populist who attacks elites and uses executive power to shrink the size of the federal government, as Jackson did? It's too soon to tell for historians about whether President Trump is Jackson or Caesar. but it's so significant that it's that productive tension, the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson that sustained the American idea and prevented us from descending into violence for all of American history. And that's why that debate is so important to study and to keep the spirit of civil dialogue going forward.

5:00I'll just end this intro thought by noting that when Hamilton dies, Jefferson places his own bust across from Jefferson's bust in the central entrance hall of Monticello. You can see it when you go there today. And when Jefferson passed it, he would smile faintly and say, opposed in life as in death. And for Jefferson, Hamilton is not a hated enemy to be destroyed, but a respected opponent to be engaged with. And that is the spirit that we have to get back to today. George, what do you think we gain from looking back to the revolutionary era? Well, I find myself doing it more now than I ever have in my life.

5:37I'm not a historian, so it's not my profession to do it. But as a writer and a journalist, I find myself thinking about the Declaration, the Constitution, the figures that Jeff Rosen has been talking about and the conflicting clashing ideas that he outlined. because for the first time in my life, I sense that it is in danger of fading, that we're in danger of losing the best of those ideas of the documents that became the founding documents. And this is something new for me and I think for a lot of Americans, That, for example, there is a tendency on the MAGA side to welcome the idea of a Caesar, not to warn about it, but to say we need a Caesar.

6:32Red Caesarism is the phrase used to welcome the idea even of a monarch to question, as Vice President Vance has done repeatedly, whether the founding ideas really are the definition of Americanism or whether it's something closer to European blood and soil nationalism. These are all, for me, shockingly new and disturbing earthquakes in our history. We've been through them before. I mean, the Civil War, the debates between Lincoln and Douglas echoed many of the same clashing ideas that we're hearing today. But I had thought that was history, and now it's alive. And so to understand the time we're in, we have to go back and look at the founding and at the decades and centuries after the founding, particularly the Civil War, when Lincoln turned the Declaration of Independence into the very essence of what it meant to be a self-governing republic, to be American, when the word equality became for him the key word to opposing slavery and to keeping the union together.

7:53And so we have to relearn all of it. We have to go back and make it fresh again, because when it becomes a cliche, that's when it's actually in danger of becoming something actually too weak to have force over our minds. And I sense for a lot of Americans, for some understandable reasons and some, I think, iniquitous reasons, those famous sentences are losing their hold over our minds and over our politics. Well, before we go any further, George, I just think it's important to be clear-eyed about our history. When we think about this late 1700s. These aren't perfect, harmonious times in the country.

8:34Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other founders avoided ending chattel slavery when they established the country. Some of them kept enslaved people. The enslavement of Africans had existed in the colonies for over 150 years by the time they founded the country. There was also the genocidal actions against Native peoples, claiming Native land as they moved west. How do you suggest we look back to this era to get value out of founding documents like the Declaration of Independence without being blind to those historical facts? Well, yes, what you're pointing to is profound paradox, which is many of the men who wrote and signed those documents were guilty of the very things that you're describing.

9:21And yet the words in the documents, at least some of the words, especially the first sentences of the Declaration of Independence and the provisions of the Constitution that were written in order to prevent the return of a king gave Americans the tools to undo those sins, those evils, which is the reason why for Lincoln the Declaration was such a key document. It gave him the rhetorical, the intellectual, and the moral tools to eventually undo. It took this horrendous war to undo that original sin. And so we have to be able to have in our minds these contradictions and not try to erase any of them, but to hold them all together and to see them in balance as essentially the birth pains of this democratic republic.

10:19Jeff, as you laid out for us, you focused on the writings of Hamilton and Jefferson. Again, two political adversaries had very different views of how U.S. democracy would work. What do you think they would have imagined the U.S. would look like 250 years later as a democracy domestically, but also as a nation state in the world? Well, they weren't sure that the experiment would work. And that's why that initial dinner party between Jefferson and Hamilton defined America. They're all at dinner at Jefferson's house. Hamilton looks around the room and says, who are those three guys on the wall? And Jefferson says, those are my three visions of the greatest men in history, John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton.

11:03And Hamilton pauses for a long time and says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And then Hamilton inspires Jefferson to found the Democratic-Republican Party in supposed opposition to the Caesarism of Hamilton and the Federalists. And that's why the central battle for the first hundred years of America is how strong should the president be and how should we respond to violence? Remember, the Constitutional Convention is called because of fears of mob violence in western Massachusetts, Shays' Rebellion, where debtors are mobbing the bankruptcy courts because they can't pay their debt and mobbing the federal armory.

11:40And that's why the Constitution wants to create a federal government empowered to put down domestic insurrections. It explicitly empowers the president to call out the militia to put down domestic insurrections and foreign violence. And that's why how to respond to mob insurrections, the very question we're talking about now, is the central question at the convention. And it resurfaces in Whiskey Rebellion, which is the rebellion against Hamilton's hated whiskey tax. Hamilton always wants to send in troops with himself at the helm to put down insurrections. Jefferson always wants to pardon the insurrectionists because he thinks that revolution is necessary to moisten the blood of tyrants.

12:20But the great irony, and there are so many in American history, is it's ultimately Jefferson who passes the Insurrection Act of 1807 that we're now debating. And this question in today's news, can the president send in federal troops against a governor's objection, is exactly the question that Jefferson and Hamilton debated. Let's go back to our voicemail box. We got this from Megan. What I'd like to happen in the United States over the next 250 years, I would like it to revert back to a respectable time. And I truly believe any time without Donald Trump can be that time. And some of you shared these statements on Instagram about the question, how would an outsider look at our current politics and what would they say we value?

13:05Some of the answers, oligarchs, money and power, profits over people, racism and misogyny and greed and power. Now, George, for your piece in this special issue of The Atlantic, you focus on patriotism as an ideal of the early United States and as a value we would do well to embody more today. Briefly, how do you think people in the U.S. today define and perform patriotism? Well, there's been polling on this over the last 25 years. I think Gallup has polled both Democrats and Republicans about their feelings about the country, their pride in being American. And it turns out that Republicans say that they feel proud to be American at a very high level and a pretty consistent level of around 90 percent.

13:54It dips a little bit when the opposition is in power, when, for example, President Obama was in the White House, but not significantly, whereas Democrats change their feeling about the country pretty dramatically depending on who's president. And especially beginning in 2016 with Trump's first term and especially in the past nine or 10 months of this year with Trump's second term, Democrats' pride in being American has plummeted. So there's the biggest partisan gap now between the two parties in the 25 years Gallup has been asking this question. So it seems that for Republicans, there's a kind of consistent and it may well be that it's somewhat performative because the Republican Party has used patriotism as a powerful political tool against Democrats ever since the Vietnam War.

14:51But there's a consistent pride. And for Democrats, it seems to depend on what the country is doing and how it's doing and what policies are being enacted. And so those are in every in so many ways were divided, including in how we feel about being American. And at the beginning of the piece, Jen, I compared the struggle to feel patriotism right now with going to a trial of a loved one for some horrendous crime. And every day you keep hearing this damning evidence that this happened and that happened. And it begins to make you wonder, is my loved one a good person? Why do I love this person? And yet you continue to love the person or feel that you should and to keep showing up at the trial to show support.

15:39Right now, that's how I feel as an American. I don't want to let go of my attachment to this country. I don't want to lose my claim on it. And at the same time, I keep wondering, how is it that the world's the oldest democracy in the world today and the beacon of at least an attempt at a multiracial and multiethnic democracy like nothing the world has ever seen before is betraying so many of its core principles, or at least the ones I think of as core principles, almost without noticing. or as if it's not a matter of deep concern because what matters is inflation or what matters is the southern border.

16:24And so I'm in a state of struggle as a patriotic American. So to come, the future of the U.S. and how we can help shape that future that's just ahead.

16:41Let's get back into the conversation with some messages we got from you. Shelby emails this answer to our prompts. After 250 years of U.S. history, I would describe the country's track record of following through on those values and ideals as falling short. Women are the cornerstone to the great law of peace, and we were left out right from the start of the U.S. experiment. And when it comes to the United States as a country over the next decade or the next century, I want to see land back, reparations, wealthy taxes at a higher rate, environmental values superseding capitalistic values. We also heard from John in Indiana.

17:18I would say we need some more constitutional amendments to include ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. But we need amendments limiting time in Congress and regarding the presidency and ethics. We also heard from more of you on the question of where you want to see the U.S. over the next decade or century. Here are some of the answers you shared. Citizens United overturned. Supreme Court expansion. universal health care and expansion. Our diverse population actually represented accountability, reparations, and income equality. We got this question from Stephen who says, I think at least one of the founders was worried about the inclusion of political parties.

17:59If any part of the experiment is failing, it's that one, particularly the way control begets more control. We're down to only two parties with meaningful control, and they're currently in a struggle for the monopoly. Let's shift power away from the parties. So a really quick thought exercise for both of you. If revolutionary figures like Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could see how our current politics and system of government work, what do you think they'd find surprising? Jeff? Well, it's true that the founders initially feared parties. And James Madison defines a faction as any group, a majority or a minority animated by passion rather than reason, devoted to self-interest rather than the public good.

18:39But in one of the great ironies of American history, it's Madison and Jefferson who themselves preside over the foundation of America's first political party, the Democratic-Republican Party, found in opposition to the purported monarchical ambition of Hamilton and the Federalists. And for the rest of American history, parties become an integrated part of the system. Madison changes his views on parties. He comes to see them as inevitable and thinks that they can unite different geographic and economic interest to support the value of democracy in supposed opposition to the elitism and urban conspiracies of what he perceives as the Federalist.

19:22And for much of history, the parties have maintained a vital center and have kept us from descending into violence. What's so striking is that it's at the most polarized times when we've descended into violence. And those are the times when both sides reject the American idea itself. And that's why the Civil War period is so striking. that's when John Calhoun and the Southerners say that the Declaration is a self-evident lie and that we should reject it as a glittering generality and that slavery is a positive good. And that's why it's so troubling today, as George mentioned, that some on the extreme right and left are rejecting the American idea itself.

20:07Christian nationalists saying that we're based not in the American idea, but in blood and soil, and some on the left questioning whether we should break up with the founders and tear down the entire experiment. All this is to suggest the villain of American history is not the parties which have been moderating forces for much of our history. It's those outside who would break up with and reject the declaration and the constitution itself. Those are the ideals that bind us. And And John Quincy Adams in 1839 says, unless we cleave to the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and teach them to our children and whisper them before we sleep, we're going to descend into violence and civil war.

20:49And that's been the abiding lesson of American history. George, I want to hear your thoughts, especially as you're in this moment when you're struggling with your sense of patriotism. How are you thinking about those initial ideals and how you think the founders would look at our current political system? What do you think they say about it? Well, I think one thing they would say is that the Caesar, the demagogue, the tyrant that they feared and that they drafted a constitution quite intentionally to prevent is casting a long shadow over the country. And I think they would be and maybe Jeff would I don't know if you would agree with this.

21:34And I think they would be pretty surprised at the disengagement of the public from politics and the disengagement of the public from one another. In other words, the idea that democracy requires an informed and engaged and even a virtuous citizenry, which was a common idea in the 18th century, we seem to have lost that. We seem to think that it's just a matter of tuning into social media and maybe voting once every four years. So I think the alienation from government and from politics itself, the disrepute into which politics has fallen for large numbers of Americans would be pretty upsetting.

22:21Another shock, I think, would be how socially equal we've become since the 18th century and how economically unequal. In other words, there is more social equality between races, sexes and all kinds of minorities and new Americans, immigrants, etc. than I think was thought possible, even possible in the 18th century. And yet, economically, we now have something like what Tocqueville, a few decades after the founding, warned would be an aristocracy of industry, essentially an aristocracy of the robber barons, of the rich. And that was not – Jefferson thought that would be a fatal thing for democracy, that what democracy needed was rough equality and a virtuous yeomanry who all own their own farms.

23:22Of course, that wasn't going to happen because we were going to become a huge commercial and industrial juggernaut. But the effect of that on the willingness of people to pay attention and to care about and take responsibility for self-government, that has, I think, faded enough that that might be the one, the most shocking thing of all to the founders, that Americans don't seem to regard this democracy as theirs in a way that the people who fought the revolution and drafted the documents believed they had to. Well, I wonder, though, George, does some of this link back to what we discussed earlier, which is for some people, they may not feel like the democracy is theirs because they don't feel they've been given opportunity to fully participate in it.

24:15So much of the history we talk about on this program, whether it's the civil rights movement or other movements, that's still fairly recent history. We're talking about, in some cases, our parents. My oldest siblings were born in this country before they would have had full voting rights. This is recent history. So how do you make the argument that embodying patriotism in the more revolutionary sense and treating it as a kind of civic religion could help us in this political moment when people feel they haven't been fully a part of this democracy from its foundation? I think that's a huge battle.

25:01It's a huge battle. It was the battle that the civil rights movement was fought for. The check that came back marked insufficient funds that King talked about. And it's it's acutely a battle for those who were excluded from the beginning. But today it feels like it's even a battle for those who thought of themselves as the backbone of the country. essentially the white heartland, the white Christian heartland that has given us Donald Trump twice now, their sense of alienation and of having been somehow left behind by the elites, by the coastal elites, by the NPR listeners, to put it bluntly, has caused a huge reaction and brought us closer to authoritarianism than we've been in my lifetime.

25:58So you've got both things going on. There are large numbers of Americans who have only recently had a chance to participate in and benefit from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And there are others who took it for granted for a long time and now feel as if it's been taken away from them by a new class of overlords. And that's a pretty dire situation when you think about it. It's a pretty drastic level of alienation on both sides. Ward emails this hope for the country. I want to see politicians who prioritize the people instead of prioritizing their people. And Paul in Wichita sent in this answer.

26:47an outside observer would conclude we don't have a unifying value. One side is centralized power at all costs. The other side is power to the people. Going forward, I would like to see power return to the people, all people. And we got this from Ken in Asheville, who says, the founding fathers would look at America today and ask, how could one man do so much damage to the American experience and nearly bring American democracy to its knees in such a short period of time? Now, President Trump has been the dominant U.S. political figure, both in office and out of office for the past decade. Where the history of this country goes in the next decade is likely going to be in response to his presidency.

27:25So what do you think a post-Donald Trump political system looks like, especially if that system were to take into account these revolutionary ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality? Jeff, I'll come to you first and just briefly, please. Well, the question of whether or not President Trump is transforming the system is, of course, the central matter of debate. But there's no doubt that the presidency swelled for reasons that long predated President Trump. It was during the progressive era that Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt insisted that the president was a steward of the people who could directly channel popular will.

27:59And that, combined with the shrinkage of Congress so that it's now supine to presidents of its own parties and a judiciary increasingly deferential to claims of unitary executive power, has changed the separation of power So they're now out of whack. It's just a nonpartisan descriptive statement to say that the founders anticipated Congress would be the most dangerous branch, the president execute Congress's will, and the judiciary the least dangerous branch. And that's not the situation we have now. Whether or not the system writes itself depends on the willingness of the branches to assert their constitutional prerogatives.

28:37The entire system is based on the idea of ambition, checking ambition, and each branch serving not its immediate partisan interest, but the public good, the common will. And that is what we must urgently return to. And the value of a more perfect union united by our allegiance to the Declaration and the Constitution is what alone will save us. George, your thoughts? Well, as Hemingway said about how people go bankrupt, it happened gradually and then suddenly. There was, yeah, Jeff's absolutely right. There was a long accumulation of power in the executive until the point where Donald Trump could say everything in the executive branch is under my control and could take control of a party.