Firing Line

- Perfecting the American experiment, this week on "Firing Line."

- The key insight of the American founding is that most of what we would want to do as human beings is wrong.

Most of it's selfish, most of it, that's the insight.

- [Margaret] Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian with a new book, "American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union."

Drawing on documents and speeches spanning America's history, Meacham illustrates how the fight for democracy has always been an uphill battle, full of triumphs- - [News Announcer] Energetic suffrage adherents realize their long campaign is over.

- [Margaret] and trials.

- [Crowd] Hang Mike Pence!

Hang Mike Pence!

- As the Trump administration expands executive power.

America's democratic experiment is once again being tested.

- We're in a nationalistic season, allegiance to your own kind.

I believe that we have always been stronger when we've erred on the side of generosity as opposed to nationalism.

- [Margaret] What does Jon Meacham say now?

- "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part 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, and by the following.

- Jon Meacham, welcome back to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- We last spoke in the days following the November election in 2024, after Donald Trump had been reelected.

- Right.

- At that time, you warned that President Trump was a unique threat to constitutional government.

- Mm-hmm.

- You also said that you hoped you 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 by that.

- Is he still a unique threat to constitutional government?

- Absolutely he is, because what you saw, I thought in 2016 to 2020 that he was a difference of degree, 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 was then, but basically, you could sort of put it on an American spectrum what he was doing.

Then comes the unfolding January 6th, the attempt to undermine 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, 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't like what the system produced, decided to sow distrust in the system, and that continues to be something that I think we're gonna be dealing with, I hope we don't, in the midterm, but I think it's something to watch carefully.

- I mean, Donald Trump has said he wants to nationalize the elections.

You just referred to 2026.

- Yeah.

- I mean, as a historian, how seriously should we reflect on that threat?

- Well, the Constitution, the framers did this for a reason.

They didn't want nationalized elections.

They wanted, remember, the key insight of the American founding is that most of what we would want to do as human beings is wrong.

Most of it's selfish, most of it, you know, that's the insight.

The reason it's so hard to get anything done in this country is because they assume that most of what we would want to do would be wrong, and so elections moving to the states, that was part of this.

I was pleased that Senator Thune pushed 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 about this than I do, I think that every day that goes by, President Trump's direct interests and the interest of Republicans who are gonna be on a ballot again, get a little farther apart, and that always happens.

Now, President Trump has repealed every political law that people like me talk about.

We don't yet know whether he's repealed that one.

- Your new book, "American Struggle," is an edited anthology of documents and speeches and contributions to the country over the last 250 years.

Some of it feels like a direct rebuke to where we are in the context of a Trump presidency in his second term.

Did you intend to have some of these essays serve as a response or a reminder of where we are now?

- Look, it's no great mystery.

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- - Yeah.

- because we 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's not honest, intellectually coherent, nor should we look up at it adoringly.

- Yeah.

- Just because we've come through crises before does not mean we're gonna come through them again.

But I go back again and again to the soldiers at Omaha Beach, John Lewis on the Pettus Bridge, you know, Ronald Reagan attempting to readjust the conversation from the New Deal and the Great Society.

I do what I do in life, not least because, when I was a kid, I thought that Ronald Reagan was this fascinating, compelling figure.

And, you know, I'm George HW Bush's biographer, I mean, I'm not exactly a radical.

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 as opposed to nationalism.

- You write in your book, quote, "America has been defined by the perennial struggle between the appetites of the few and the privileged and the aspirations of the many who have rightly insisted that the nation live up to its self-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 more closely fought than I would prefer.

- Yeah.

- I think all of us believe that, most of us believe that.

You know, 35% of the country, that's the number of folks, by the way, who still approved of Joe McCarthy after he was censored in 1954/55, 35% of the country is a kind of hardcore base, but a huge chunk of the country is malleable, is movable, given the season and the issues.

And all I want is, because I 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 that.

The presidency should be, as FDR said, preeminently a place of moral leadership, and moral in that sense means how we are with each other.

- The book includes excerpts from the founding of the country, including two from "The Federalist Papers," one that speaks of demagogues who become tyrants, and then one that reminds us that, quote, "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm."

How have the guardrails 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 question.

1838 is Lincoln's first major speech, it's in Springfield, and Lincoln writes, "If the American experiment is to fail, it will fail not because of foreign foes, but because of internal."

"A tyrant of towering genius" was the phrase.

He spoke of how towering genius could end the American experiment at home rather than a foreign foe, and I think the founders would have been surprised that it took 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 contexts?

- I think you have to, yes, I do.

- Abraham Lincoln, of course, 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 the view that might makes right.

- You can talk all you want about international niceties and 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?

- So between Stephen Miller and Abraham Lincoln, I know where my money is, I know where I wanna be.

- But have we always been might makes right?

- 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.

- Yeah.

- Not 1776 or 1789.

Right, so we're 60 years old.

We would be a developing democracy, you know, if we were being ranked by the UN.

What Lincoln was saying was vital and perennial because of what we just heard the other day from the Trump White House about the rule of the strong is the most important, is the key.

The American experiment was explicitly conceived in contradiction to that.

- Yeah.

- The idea was that the law arrived at through popular government divided sovereignty would be a stabilizing force, because history was shaped by the whims, appetites, of individual people, who, either by an accident of birth or an incident of a war, were autocratic.

And then, the idea 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 John Locke could prevail over Thomas Hobbes, and 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 over force and accident?

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.

- In 1935, WEB Du Bois wrote about schools distorting the history of slavery to prevent Americans from feeling shame.

- Right.

- He said, quote, "If we are going to use 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."

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 round that.

I think that it's remarkable that we've gotten as much right as we have.

- And the other side of the argument would say that 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, and sometimes perhaps we've gotten it wrong.

not sure we'll ever know we got it right, because it's so inherently, it's like mercury, right, it's- - But we know when we've gotten it right and made progress.

- In the life of the country, but history, look, in the rendering of a story, to me, history is a conversation with the past in the present, hopefully creating a future that we will be proud of, right?

I sometimes ask, when I'm lucky enough to talk to politicians, I say, you know, "What do you want us to think about when we look at your portrait?

And they love it, 'cause they can't imagine a world where we're not looking at their portrait.

(laughs) But what is it?

What do you wanna be remembered for?

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.

Jackson made several appearances on the original "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley Jr.

In one of his first in 1971, take a look at how he addressed the American experiment.

- Let me put it, 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 reflecting on the promise of the Declaration.

- Mm-hmm.

- And you just said, you know, multiracial democracy in the United States has really existed since 1965, right?

You're not far out with that.

- Yeah.

- So how do you reflect on Jackson's legacy?

- Reverend Jackson is arguably the most important figure between Dr.

King and 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, well, 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 are worth going back and looking at- - They may be lost in the popular memory, Jon Meacham, but they are not lost on "Firing Lines."

(Jon laughing) 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.

I've had the experience of running across this country and this world trying to make a difference.

We must put America back to work.

That's the alternative to welfare and despair.

We must find common ground... - There are historians, there are commentators, many reflect on the importance of Jesse Jackson's runs for president.

Some have even said that Obama would never have been elected had it not been for Jesse Jackson.

Could we have had an Obama presidency as soon as we did had we not had Jesse Jackson running for president twice in the '80s?

- Well, I don't know.

What I do know is that Jackson 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 harder to get a large stage for the issues 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.

Famously said in a convention speech, "Be patient, God isn't finished with me yet."

And, you know, that's the kind of thing, a little candor in the public square goes a long way.

- Donna Brazile once told me, who, of course, came up as a political operative through the Jesse Jackson campaign, that, you know, the importance of his 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 absolutely right, and 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.

- Yeah.

- You know, it took a minute.

- Yeah.

- And then it kind of goes away in the '90s, and then 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, whereas often in history, if something is organic, you don't single it out.

- Yeah.

- Does that make sense?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

It's part of the tapestry.

- Yeah, so I just think of the American story of the last 50 years is, there's Jesse Jackson saying, "Keep hope alive."

- There are two speeches by George 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 modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition."

Do you still believe that character is the seminal quality in a president?

- Absolutely.

I think it's the most important thing, because you never know what's gonna happen.

You never know what the fuel going into the machinery is gonna be, so you'd better get the machinery right.

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 think, without knowing, what I wanna know about someone who wants to be president, is how have they responded to adversity in 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 set a Cincinnatus-like model, voluntarily stopping after two 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.

Louis and Clark, the Louisiana purchase.

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 a part of those.

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 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 Jr.

delivers a commencement address at Harvard University, promoting the plan to aid Europe in rebuilding after World War II.

He said, quote, "It is logical the United 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."

Many have given the eulogy for that era in which America leads the post-World War II peace consensus.

Does the world still need us?

- I think so.

I think that 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.

Eisenhower had just presided over the deaths of thousands and thousands of American men to deliver Europe from tyranny.

He was not gonna let the sacrifices of World War II go to waste and let there be a World War III.

- Does the world still need us though?

- Well, we need the world.

We need markets, we need allies.

We are entering an era where warfare is ever more asymmetrical.

Cyber, whatever it might be, biological, whatever it could be, and this idea that we're gonna be Fortress America is, it didn't work in the middle of the 20th century, I don't think it's gonna 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, George Orwell did a great essay on this, patriotism is allegiance to an idea.

- You've written so eloquently about the challenges that we have faced as Americans in the past.

You have highlighted these competing narratives and this journey as we continue to strive and move forward in our 250th anniversary- - As we slog forward.

(laughs) - As we slog forward in 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?

- 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 Dr.

King reached the 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.

- Yeah.

- And so we've done this, and I think we can do it again if enough of us decide that it's important.

- Jon Meacham, thank you for returning to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

Thank you.

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part 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, and by the following.

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