America is marking a major milestone. An experiment in democracy that has spanned 250 years.
In this time of celebration and reflection, “Deseret Voices” host McKay Coppins notes that some people are questioning how much longer the experiment will last.
On this episode, Jon Meacham, author of “American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union,” shares what his birthday wish is for America.
Subscribe to “Deseret Voices” on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins.
McKay Coppins: Jon Meacham, thank you for coming on “Deseret Voices.”
Jon Meacham: Thank you. I’m just going to jump in and say that I don’t know if everyone knows this, but you are in fact the Edward Gibbon of American conservatism, the author of “The (Decline) and Fall of the Roman Empire.” You have written at the same length, certainly, about the rise and fall of the American —
MC: When you make that comparison, you mean that I am long-winded, overly verbose, write too many words about my subject. That’s what you’re actually saying. It’s a —
JM: That’s — you know what? I’ve known you since you were 12, so I feel I have a certain amount of leeway.
MC: You have not known me since I was 12, but you have known me since I was probably 22 or so.
JM: The test is: could you rent a car? And I don’t think you could.
MC: I was probably not. I first met you when I was an intern at Newsweek, my very first job in journalism, fresh out of college. You were the editor-in-chief of Newsweek. This was the summer of 2010, and I actually think that’s a good place to start because my entire career in political journalism, starting in that summer when I walked through the door of your offices and you were running this big, important weekly magazine, has been kind of defined by two separate but interconnected trends: politics in that time, in the 15 years since then, has gotten, on the one hand, I think, meaner, coarser, more dysfunctional, more toxic, while at the same time, interest in politics has grown, has gotten more intense.
And you know, for a lot of reporters like me, that’s actually been advantageous in the sense that more people are reading our political coverage, more people are subscribing to our podcasts and our magazines and buying our books. But it’s also corresponded with a kind of deepening pessimism about America, to the point where as America celebrates its 250th birthday, people are openly talking about how long this country can survive. There’s talk of civil war or secession or, you know, America entering the late stages of empire, to bring it back to Gibbon. And I’m curious, as a historian, as a presidential biographer, what do you attribute that pessimism to?
JM: I think it’s almost entirely driven by both economics and — I use that in the broadest sense — it’s not just the bottom line, it’s not just people’s assets and capacity to create prosperity, but how they feel about the prospects for continuing to live in a prosperous world. You did not have this conversation about, as you put it, late-stage democracy during the bicentennial in 1976.
And if you think about it, you probably should have. We had just come through Vietnam, we had just come through Watergate. Gerald Ford is president of the United States, unelected — a good man, an excellent steward of the republic, but that we sort of understood in the fullness of time as opposed to in real time. A case where he had pardoned his predecessor before justice could catch up to him, right? So, it’s interesting, why didn’t the pardon, which was clearly a political problem for Gerald Ford, but that could have been a blow at trust in the system, that everyone stood equally before the law. So, you had the ingredients. We had entered into a stagflationary era, within the next four years we would have gas lines, we would have the Iranian hostage crisis — it’s always Iran.
And so that period should have been one of profound public despair. It was a period of public unhappiness, but in 1980, very late in the campaign, the numbers broke — in the last week of the campaign, the numbers broke for President Reagan, and that conversation, in so far as it was happening at all, disappeared. George H.W. Bush used to talk about a piece that I think Lloyd Cutler wrote, the old Washington wise man, about how the presidency was too big a job for one person. It was written during the Carter years, and Bush said — we talk about how Reagan proved that not to be true. So, that — the ingredients were there, and I think, I hope this answer will link both the points you raised.
All those things are largely true today, right? There’s an anxiety about globalization, there’s an anxiety about the cultural centrality of folks who look like me, there’s a lack of trust. Here’s the difference, I think. I think the media environment — and I don’t just mean, I mean that in the broadest sense — the information environment, how citizens receive information about what unfolds beyond their doors and then act on that information, has become so polarized that there’s not enough of an opportunity to have the Tocquevillian clash of interests in which we’re able to hear the other side in such a way that we might be able to move a little closer to the other side. And so, and I used to think that an argument about, “Oh, our polarization is about media,” or “about gerrymandering,” which I insist on calling “gerrymandering” because it’s after Elbridge Gerry —
MC: Wow. Hold on. That — just a little nugget of wisdom. I did not know that. I have never heard that.
JM: Think about it. Why do we call it that? Because of that salamander, remember from your high school textbook? That Massachusetts district? Elbridge Gerry.
MC: Gerry. Wow.
JM: It’s Gerry. So, no one cares, but I bring it up —
MC: You might be the only person in America that calls it gerrymandering, but I appreciate the insistence.
JM: I may be, and I’ve tried. I’ve told students about it. I told, you know, President Obama works on this, and I brought it up to him, and he said, “Uh, I think we got bigger problems.” So, even he didn’t care.
MC: It’s a pretty good Obama. Good job.
JM: If you can’t get Obama to care about that, you’re done. But I used to think that those things were sort of Brookings Institution kind of — no, they’re real. They’re real. If you had the capacity at this hour to draw genuinely nonpartisan districts, it would change everything in 20 minutes, because that means that the political players suddenly would have an accountability to a diverse electorate, not to their primary voters. I’m talking about it would change it by Saturday, if you could do it. And so, I think that we’re in a — I don’t know what the image would be — an accelerating, tragic cycle where we are polarized, we get more polarized because of the means of polarization, and there’s no incentive to break out of it. So, I think that’s why this is different.
MC: One of the favorite words for, you know, journalists and commentators and writers like me to use in describing this kind of volatile era in American history is “unprecedented.” And you know, we say that, you know, the latest maneuver by the White House is unprecedented, the usurping of congressional authority in this issue or that is unprecedented. Your most recent book seems to be a direct repudiation of that adjective. The book is called “American Struggle,” it’s an anthology of writing, oratory, documents that illustrate some of America’s most challenging chapters, you could say — periods of existential debate about democracy and dissent. And I’m curious, as you were putting this book together and wading through these documents and these speeches and these various chapters in American history, if you did find a direct parallel for everything that’s happening today, or if there are moments that feel genuinely unprecedented.
JM: There are. I don’t want to — yeah, I mean, when I say something’s unprecedented, people should pay attention because it’s against my business model.
MC: Right.
JM: And so, what I thought was from 2015 until 2020, I actually thought, you know what, the tone is terrible, the behavior, the dignity of the office has been fundamentally and perhaps fatally compromised, but I recognize this, right? This is a little bit of George Wallace, this is a little bit of Huey Long, you know, this is a little — I get it, right? Then came the unfolding insurrection, an attempt to overthrow the election of 2020. It was not just Jan. 6, but an entire series of, blessedly, not very well-executed maneuvers to thwart the will of the people. And that gets the U-word. That gets the “unprecedented” word, right?
Because Andrew Jackson didn’t do it in 1824, Richard Nixon didn’t do it in 1960, Hubert Humphrey didn’t do it in 1968, Ford didn’t do it in 1976, Vice President Gore didn’t do it in 2000, Secretary Clinton didn’t do it in 2016, and Vice President Harris didn’t do it in 2024 — all very close elections. The attempt to thwart the election is different, and it’s a manifestation of — fancy word, but it’s the best way to put it — of the illiberal tendencies of the incumbent. And we don’t do — to say something — to put things in historical context sometimes risks somehow minimizing the stakes. You know, if someone like me says, or like you says, “Well, yes, this is true, but remember when FDR tried to pack the court.” That normalizes things that should be opposed. And just because something has happened before and didn’t work doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen and work. And so, instead of creating a kind of historical Zoloft, what I think this should do is create a historical awareness of how contingent and how close-run a thing this really is.
MC: Well, that’s actually a really interesting point. You’re saying you hope that people don’t read this book and come away thinking, “Ah, we’ve all been through this before, everything will be fine.” Which, by the way, is a sentiment that I have heard expressed from people more often on the right lately, who kind of acknowledge that a lot of what’s happening is bad, but, you know, don’t want to admit that it’s historically bad or unprecedentedly bad, and so they say, “Oh, but we’ve been through worse, look at 1968, look at, certainly, the Civil War,” right?
JM: And by the way, when you get to that, when you get to that, you’re in trouble. This isn’t the Civil War is not where you want to be, but go ahead.
MC: Yeah, right. But you’re saying the book should illuminate something about American democracy and the American project.
JM: How closely fought this has been. You know, there but for a couple of battles, you know, you’re looking at a different outcome in the middle of the 19th century. There but for Abraham Lincoln saying he wasn’t going to take the Crittenden Compromise in the winter of 1860-61, which would have smashed the principle of Congress approving the expansion of slavery, you avoid the war, but when does slavery ultimately end? Maybe not until the 20th century. It was that close.
America First in 1940 and ’41, which was so strong a movement that we didn’t declare war on Nazi Germany until five days after Pearl Harbor, when they declared war on us, right? I mean, the greatest thing America ever did, arguably, was fight the Second World War. And nobody seems to remember that we were genuinely dragged into it almost a week after being attacked at Pearl Harbor. And so, if even the best thing we did almost didn’t happen, I think that’s orienting. I think it’s orienting in the sense that it’s not to be self-righteous about the past — I don’t know where I would have been on these issues — but it does say that if even at our finest hours we were barely OK, then all we have to be right now is barely OK. And that’s not to minimize what that takes.
What you just said about the conservatives is or the right is really interesting to me. I don’t have a partisan enough brain to understand it exactly, but the idea that you would do a — I used to call it the “comma but” versus “comma therefore.” This was my thought in ’16, ’20, and ’24. “He’s terrible, comma, but I’m going to vote for him.” “He’s terrible, comma, therefore I’m voting for the other person.” Right? And on “but” or “therefore” hangs so much. And I never got to the “but,” you know, I was always at the “therefore.” And so, the people who are at “but” must care a lot more about, you know, judges and taxes than I do. And I don’t think I’m uninterested in those things, but I do believe that the fundamental risk of the era is that we no longer — this connects to your first question, too — we no longer argue about the means of politics, we argue about the purpose. And when that happens, you are moving to kind of a — it’s not a supra-constitutional moment, but it’s an adjacent one, it’s different. You know what I mean?
It’s an adjoining argument because the Constitution, you know, arguably the Constitution isn’t really working particularly well right now. Now, I know that there’s the “yes, but” part about that, you know, “Oh, you know, because only the East Wing is actually in rubble, we’re supposed to be relaxed about this.” You know, I think about one of your subjects, you know, the Mitt Romney world. I don’t think Mitt Romney is a crazy man, and I think what we’re saying now, I’m — you tell me — is essentially where he would be. He was kind of at the “comma, therefore.”
MC: Yeah.
JM: So, here’s the question: do we — are there enough people who are willing to vote against their immediate partisan inclinations and their what they see as their immediate interest to preserve an arena of contention, or not? And there weren’t in 2024. So, to me, the big question, the big next question is — and I want to ask you this, actually, as the Gibbon — the question seems to me in 2028 is whether this has been the age of Trump, which unquestioningly it is. He has defined politics positively and in reaction to him, not positively good, but you know what I mean, action-reaction —
MC: Right.
JM: Or is it the age of Trumpism? And that’s the question that confronts us in 2028. Do you agree with that?
MC: Yes, I do, and I’ve really kind of vacillated on this question, actually, because for a long time, and coming out of my conversations with Mitt Romney, which spanned, you know, a couple of years, I was actually pretty convinced that the ideological transmogrification of the modern Republican Party was so permanent that that it would outlast Trump in some meaningful way, right? That the isolationism, the nationalism, the nativism, that all of that stuff has just it’s now been it’s been so many years of it being kind of interwoven with every institution and idea in Republican politics that it’s going to be really hard to disentangle.
That said, the one thing that makes me second-guess myself is that — and I put this this idea to Michael Steele, the former RNC chairman, and he kind of laughed at it — but I’m curious what you think about it. I think in some ways, the obvious flexibility of Republican politicians that’s been on display in the last 10 years suggests that there is possibly hope for a new leader with a completely different brand of republicanism, that he comes to power or she comes to power and steers them in a totally different direction, because we’ve clearly seen that most Republican members of Congress, whether they’re true believers or not, will kind of go along to get along, right? They’ll see what they need to to be on the right side of the leader of the party and his base. And so, what happens if a different leader of the party comes to power? I don’t know, what do you think of that?
JM: That’s a great — no, I hadn’t quite heard it that way. That’s fascinating. I think I trained you well. I’m going to claim credit for that.
MC: That’s a Newsweek column.
JM: That’s a column. If you — so if the party is in fact Silly Putty, does it depend on whose hands it’s in? Is what you’re saying. Really interesting question. And I would say yes, because if you look at the 48 months between Mitt Romney being the nominee to Donald Trump, if something can happen in 48 months, it can, you’re right, it can happen the other way. Partly because, and this is an imprecise — it sounds precise, but it’s imprecise — 35% of the country is always, you know, a kind of a hardcore, nationalist, right of center, very right of center force. I use that number because it’s the number that still approved of Joe McCarthy after McCarthy fell from power.
MC: Hmm.
JM: Right? So, 34% was a Washington Post poll in that period.
MC: Right. OK.
JM: And basically, what Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the Bushes were trying to do was keep it at 35%. What happened was the 35% took over and got the 15% for all sorts of reasons, and they prevailed. They have prevailed. What you’re arguing is that it’s that of the 15, the 15% are the ones who might follow a more moderate person, for lack of a better term. And I think that’s, you’re right, behaviorally speaking, sociologically speaking, the evidence is, you’re right, I think your rapid transmogrification I think was your phrase. If it happened that fast that way, maybe it can happen that fast the other way. That’s really interesting. Who would that be, do you think?
MC: No, I mean, that’s the problem, right? And most likely, it’s actually somebody who’s not really that much on our radar right now, because Donald Trump was clearly on our radar, but nobody took him seriously at this point in the 2016 cycle as a as a threat. So, you know, I do think it has to be a better message than “I’m a more moderate Republican,” it has to be a positive, proactive message, and maybe we are ready as a country for a more optimistic republicanism, similar to Bush and Reagan. I don’t know, but we’d have to see something like that.
JM: And he’s such a — I will say this, too, I mean, the Trump tone is so, I don’t know if something can be so sui generis, but it’s so sui generis that —
MC: No, it is. Yeah.
JM: It’s hard to see it as a transferable skill. And there’s been no oxygen whatever for 11 years — almost exactly, right? Didn’t he announce in June of ’15, I think?
MC: In June, yeah. That’s right.
JM: So, 11 years of this, and I thought — and here’s something where I was, the metaphor, the analogies didn’t work. You know, Roy Cohn wrote a really kind of honest book about McCarthy, published it in 1968. I commend it to people, just called “McCarthy.” And he’s very straightforward. He says, “Joe McCarthy chose anti-communism the way other people might buy a car.” Right? They had offered him, you’ll love this, do you know this detail? So, the first, he was trying to find a national issue to sort of elevate his profile, and the first thing he considered was the St. Lawrence Seaway. And that didn’t really seem to sweep the country. So, a bunch of guys from Georgetown got a hold of him and sold him on this stuff that was — might have been true in 1946, but was not true in 1950. We forget this. One of the reasons Harry Truman had such a hard time in 1948 with his own party was the Dixiecrats thought he was soft on race, and the liberals thought he was too tough on civil liberties.
MC: Hmm.
JM: And so, part of Truman’s fury about McCarthy was he had already paid a political price for clearing out what had been in the 1930s and until 1946, you know, they were our ally in that period. And so, anyway, but what Cohn said is that he thinks McCarthy fell largely because people got tired of the show. And this is 11 seasons now. Right? And it’s going to be 14, and I would have thought it would have — I thought people would be tired after one, after, you know, the first four years. I was wrong. So, it’s going to be really, really fascinating. And I — have you spent much time around Vice President Vance?
MC: Not really. I want to, though, if he’s listening. I’d love to interview him.
JM: I suspect he’s not. But so he’s — if I were his an adviser of his — which would be bad for him, so it’s a hypothetical — you know, Trump can be a smart aleck, and it works. When other people do it, it doesn’t quite.
MC: Mm-hmm.
JM: And that’s my sense is that the vice president needs — if he’s going to mimic his chieftain — he better just stick to the ties and that’s about it, because having a 43-year-old do this is different and less appealing. Even to the people who dislike President Trump, he is an immensely, compulsively watchable figure.
MC: Yes.
JM: I don’t — and that’s just such a rare skill.
MC: And the thing about JD Vance is he actually is he’s a good talker, he’s a good political performer. I think he’s playing the wrong part. I agree with you. I think that he should he should recast himself a little bit. But neither of us are his advisers.
JM: We’re, yeah, it’s very unlikely. It’s very, well, you may be, it’s very unlikely that I will be talking to him.
MC: You mentioned Mitt Romney. One of the first things that he showed me when I started interviewing him for my biography was this Rand McNally map that he keeps on the wall of his his Senate office, called the Histomap, that basically traces 4,000 years of human history throughout the civilizations, according to the rise and fall of global superpowers, right? And so, you have the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Greeks and the Romans, the Persian Empire. And the thing that he told me that always stood out to him about that map was that he would stand there and look at it and realize that basically all of human civilization, with very few exceptions, has been dominated by emperors, kings, kaisers, tyrants of one kind or another, right? And democracy is this incredibly rare thing in human history. It’s fragile, it’s complicated, it takes constant hard work to preserve. And I wonder if, as a historian, you think there is something uniquely difficult about preserving the American project.
JM: I absolutely do, and it’s not just as a historian and biographer, but also, without being overly personal, it’s also as a Christian. Here’s why: this is a counter-intuitive enterprise because a democracy is about giving as well as taking. And I believe the default position starts in the second chapter of Genesis, which is that we would rather take than give. There was a piece of fruit we were told not to take it, we took it, mayhem ensued. So, democracy requires an effort of moral will that is incredibly difficult to sustain. Either being a strong man or signing up with a strong man is an easier way to navigate life’s complexities than to live with ambiguity. And Chesterton once defined Christianity itself as — or faith — as the need to embrace the twilight. And I think that’s what democracy is. We have to embrace the capacity that someone with whom I fundamentally disagree, if they win an election, they are allowed to exercise the attendant power and authority that comes from that.
MC: Hmm.
JM: And that’s really hard, right? And it also requires, linked to this, we have to love our neighbor and, you know, there’s a reason both the author of Leviticus and Jesus had to command people to do it. It’s because no one was doing it.
MC: Doesn’t come naturally.
JM: Or at least not enough people were, right? You don’t say, you know, “Don’t kill” if people aren’t killing, right? You don’t have to say, “Love your neighbor” if everybody’s loving their neighbor. So yeah, I do, I didn’t know that about Gov. Romney, but, I absolutely, and, you know, we’re talking in a period where King Charles has just been in the United States. He gave, I think, a really interesting speech to Congress, in which he said very obvious things about the Western liberal tradition that in many ways begins with English common law and Magna Carta, so almost a thousand years. And the fact that it struck people as notable tells you that this is a season — to bring this full circle — a season where it’s harder than it has been to give as well as to take. And part of it requires the creation of a climate in which that’s encouraged and not discouraged. And a singular legacy of the incumbent president of the United States is that he has made harshness and taking fashionable and has prioritized them over kindness and giving.
MC: Are you optimistic? I mean, I know that’s a hard question to answer, and maybe it’s a personal question, but do you think America, you know, makes it another — forget 250 years — another 100 years?
JM: Somebody asked me the other day, what’s my birthday wish for America? And it’s that we have a 251st.
MC: That’s bleak.
JM: Yeah, no, I don’t really think that. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have thought we would be having this conversation, right? I mean, if we had planned this a decade ago, we would have thought, you know what, in 2026, we’re probably going to be discussing the literary antecedents of the Declaration of Independence. Right? I mean, you know, “Oh, that’s John Locke.” You know, that we would, right, we would not be talking about, you know, and I don’t want to be too personal here, but we, my family, we’re dealing with friends who have run afoul of ICE — a kind of darkness at noon situation where there’s no charge against someone, but they are in a cage in a different state, in a way that if I took — and I don’t want to do it — but if I took time to tell you this story, you would think I was talking about a totalitarian state.
And it shouldn’t take a personal connection to an outrage for us to stand up for common law and common decency, but it often does. It’s like gay marriage or race, you know, often, you know, you were against something notionally, and then you know someone who wants to do it, it’s like, “Oh, it’s fine.” Empathy is the oxygen of democracy. And so I am optimistic and hopeful to the extent that I believe in the human capacity to lend a hand as well as clench a fist.
MC: I want to ask one more question before I let you go. There’s obviously a lot in the world happening that is anxiety-inducing, that makes people angry, it can be very stressful to follow the news or to comment on the news, as you and I both do. What are you doing lately that is keeping you sane, keeping you grounded?
JM: So, I — and I thought a lot about it before I shared this — but, for a long time, I have read, using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer in the Episcopal Church, which is the closest thing to the Elizabethan language, I read morning and evening prayer. And it’s a small service, it takes about four minutes, probably. I probably shouldn’t admit that, it probably should be thinking more and praying more than that. But I read the words, right? Right, right. I read the words. And I do it in the morning, and I do it at night. And it puts me, again, I’m a sacramentalist, I’m an Episcopalian, and even if my mind is a hundred miles away, I have to say the words. And I read it out loud. And there’s something about — here’s a collect that I close the day with, as people have done for 500 years — attributed to John Henry Newman. “O Lord, support us all the day long until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the fever of life is over, and the busy world is hushed, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging and a holy rest, and peace at the last.” You do that every night, and you can keep marching.
MC: That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for coming on “Deseret Voices,” Jon. I really appreciate it.
JM: We look forward to volume nine of McKay Coppins, “The Rise and Fall of the Republican Party.” We’ll be right back.
MC: Thank you, Jon.