CSPAN - New Orleans Book Festival Opening Event
Aired: 2026-03-12
Duration: 01:41:53


=== Senate vs House Dynamics (05:00) ===

[00:00:00]  Between those two things, the House very reliably switches.
[00:00:04]  But the Senate, keep in mind, the last four elections, the House and Senate have gone different directions, where one party picked up seats in the House and actually lost seats in the Senate.
[00:00:12]  It depends on which seats are up and where.
[00:00:16]  Let's take a look at an Economist YouGov poll.
[00:00:19]  This came out on the 11th of this month, and it was just asking for President Trump's approval rating among independents.
[00:00:27]  So this is just independents.
[00:00:29]  And it came out to be at 62% disapproval, 31% approval.
[00:00:35]  How did those numbers look?
[00:00:36]  Because really it's the independents that decide these elections.
[00:00:39]  No, you're exactly right.
[00:00:41]  And that typically we see the presence approval rating among Republicans in the mid-high 80s, approaching 90, among Democrats, single-digits, and generally in the 30s among independents.
[00:00:55]  And, you know, it varies slightly from one poll to another, but that's, yeah.
[00:01:01]  And the thing about it is in red states, red, solidly Republican states and districts, a lot of these, a Republican can win with like no independent votes, certainly no Democratic votes.
[00:01:13]  And the same thing the other way with blue Democratic states, districts.
[00:01:17]  But the swing states and districts where the big races are, they tend to be disproportionately independent.
[00:01:23]  Live now to the opening of the 2026 New Orleans Book Festival in partnership with the Atlantic, marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S.
[00:01:33]  But the sponsors and friends of the festival who provide the resources for all we do.
[00:01:38]  For the Tulane University family and our leader, Mike Fitz.
[00:01:47]  From our co-chair and collaborator, the incredible Walter Isaacson.
[00:01:54]  Finally, for the speakers who bring us all together.
[00:01:58]  Their stories inspire, investigate, make us pause, and reflect more deeply on a wide variety of topics.
[00:02:07]  There is no place in America over the next few days that has a larger concentration of thought leaders right now during the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.
[00:02:20]  This is your great city.
[00:02:22]  People have traveled near and far and gotten stuck along the way.
[00:02:28]  Either like in a Boston airport like Annette Gordon-Reed or on Audubon and Willow Streets one block away from here.
[00:02:37]  Over this weekend, we have 220 speakers.
[00:02:41]  They include James Beard award winners, celebrated historians, Pulitzer Prize winners, artists, national book awardees, our mayor, our congressman, one of our senators, a governor, journalists, a country music hall of famer, two four-star generals, and a four-star admiral.
[00:03:06]  So many bestsellers, academics, all who are here to share their stories and ideas with you.
[00:03:14]  Now, in our fifth year at Tulane, we persevered and are so thrilled to be celebrating with you over the next few days.
[00:03:26]  The event has inspired a national community and is not limited to the days that we are here on campus.
[00:03:34]  For those who have attended in the past, welcome back.
[00:03:38]  For those who are joining us for the first time, we're so excited to have you here.
[00:03:43]  The schedule has been published, and when things happen that impact the schedule, we'll update you in real time.
[00:03:50]  Planes get delayed and things come up, so we thank you in advance for your patience.
[00:03:56]  Tomorrow and Saturday, we have full days of dialogues on 10 concurrent stages.
[00:04:03]  While there is no chance you can see them all, our team is capturing the conversations for posting on our website and on YouTube.
[00:04:12]  Sunday, Sunday is near and dear to my heart.
[00:04:18]  It brings an expanded family day in partnership with our longtime friends at Scholastic.
[00:04:24]  So make sure your little ones come and be part of this great literary experience.
[00:04:29]  And tonight, we are excited, very excited, to be in partnership again with the amazing team at the Atlantic and their Atlantic and their Atlantic Across America series, an initiative that is going to all 50 states in the nation.
[00:04:51]  This university was founded in 1834.
[00:04:55]  The Atlantic's first issue was published in 1857.

=== 1776 Ideas Reach Louisiana (03:10) ===

[00:05:00]  Tonight, we travel back to 1776 as America celebrates our 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
[00:05:16]  About a mile from here, in Audubon Park, an oak tree was planted in 1740.
[00:05:23]  The tree of life, as it's now known, stretches out in every direction, Spanish moss dripping from every limb.
[00:05:30]  People come from all over to see it.
[00:05:32]  Some people even get married beneath it.
[00:05:35]  But in 1776, it would have been just tall enough to sit under for a bit of shade on a hot Louisiana day, pondering life and the things to come.
[00:05:46]  In early 1776, boats and barges traveled down the Mississippi River, carrying goods, men, and most important, ideas.
[00:05:56]  Word was spreading rapidly around the British colonies and the Spanish colony of Louisiana about a piece of writing, a pamphlet, that would change the world forever.
[00:06:06]  47 pages of scorn aimed directly at the aristocratic and imperial ideas of colonizing nations around the world.
[00:06:15]  Thomas Paine's common sense put into words what many people felt in their hearts to be true, that this fledgling nation they now call home deserves a government that works for them.
[00:06:27]  Not a king or a ruling class, but a we.
[00:06:33]  We have it in our power to begin the world over, Paine wrote.
[00:06:37]  The birthday of a new world is at hand.
[00:06:44]  It was a call to arms against the tyranny of British rule and proof that the written word could spark a revolutionary fire.
[00:06:54]  Under Spanish rule, New Orleans had become a critical port for global commerce and a popular hub for smuggling.
[00:07:02]  The Spanish governor of Louisiana smuggled gunpowder to the colonial forces that was critical for early victories.
[00:07:09]  And New Orleans was also a key port of entry for Enlightenment thinking.
[00:07:14]  The British had banned many of the Enlightenment text in the colonies, but the port of New Orleans became a back door for the ideas of Rousseau, Voltaire, and others.
[00:07:24]  Ideas that the founding fathers relied on when charting a course for the new nation.
[00:07:30]  What started as an acorn grew into a sprawling oak with roots buried deep, a tree that 250 years later we can still sit beneath and ponder things to come.
[00:07:42]  Tonight, as the New Orleans Book Festival in the Atlantic celebrate the 250th birthday of America, we remind you to also reflect on and celebrate the power of the written word in this quintessential American city, where a boiling pot of cultures, histories, and languages created a truly unique community and gave its country a bottomless well of food, music, and independence.

=== Regime Change Risks (16:21) ===

[00:08:11]  Welcome to the 2026 New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.
[00:08:17]  Mardi Gras for the mind.
[00:08:29]  And now, please welcome General Stanley McChrystal and Atlantic staff writer George Packer in conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg.
[00:08:51]  Thank you.
[00:08:52]  Thank you all very much for being here.
[00:08:54]  There's a lot of you.
[00:08:56]  Very impressive.
[00:08:58]  Let me first say thank you to Cheryl, Cheryl Landrieu, and her deputy assistant director Mitch Landrieu of the book festival for, you know, in the last, it's only been a few years that they've done this, but this has become one of the best book festivals and ideas festivals in the country, thanks to her and thanks to Tulane and the amazing team.
[00:09:26]  And I should also thank my colleagues at the Atlantic.
[00:09:30]  You know, we're very tied into this festival.
[00:09:32]  We love being here.
[00:09:34]  You'll see a lot of our people, including George Packer today and tomorrow.
[00:09:40]  And we're just overjoyed to be here.
[00:09:42]  And thank you for supporting independent, vigorous journalism.
[00:09:46]  It's actually very, very important right now.
[00:09:53]  So I'm going to jump right into this because we have George with us, National Book Award winner.
[00:10:02]  George and I actually sort of met a long time ago on the Iraq story.
[00:10:09]  And he's been writing about that region for decades and has been very active writing about the Trump administration and the decisions that it's making domestically and internationally.
[00:10:23]  And then, of course, we have sort of a living legend, General Stanley McChrystal.
[00:10:29]  One of makes you sound, I didn't mean to make you sound old.
[00:10:32]  You're living.
[00:10:33]  Focus on living.
[00:10:37]  Former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and truly a legendary member and leader of the special operations community and someone with also, you know, a huge amount of international experience and also experience in dealing in the relationship between the uniformed military and the political echelon, which is one of the hardest relationships to negotiate.
[00:11:08]  Let me start with you, Stan, if I may.
[00:11:14]  Just give us your sense of where this war is right now.
[00:11:22]  Is there a chance that this comes out to the benefit of the United States?
[00:11:28]  Yeah, well, first, thanks, Jeff, for the opportunity to be here between two of my heroes.
[00:11:33]  But, you know, being a former soldier between two investigative journalists is an uncomfortable position.
[00:11:41]  Hostile terrain.
[00:11:42]  Yeah.
[00:11:43]  So where are we in the war?
[00:11:44]  And the answer is we don't know where it will come out.
[00:11:48]  We have no idea.
[00:11:50]  But what I will say is the part of the war we have seen thus far is the part we are best at.
[00:11:57]  So I tell people, if you like this war, enjoy this part of it.
[00:12:02]  Because everything after this gets harder.
[00:12:06]  Because the disproportionate technology advantage we have, professionalism, all of those things start to decrease over time.
[00:12:16]  Particularly if the war drags out for an extended period and if we get into what we'll call unconventional or asymmetric operations, then the difference between the forces becomes much less.
[00:12:30]  It becomes a much grittier kind of experience.
[00:12:34]  Do you think that there's a chance that the Trump administration would order ground troops?
[00:12:40]  Is there something for ground troops to do in Iran?
[00:12:44]  I cannot imagine a situation where I think it would be a good idea, but I can see either a civil war, a loss of internal control, a question about where the nuclear materials are that suddenly in the moment make it seem like an imperative.
[00:13:04]  And once you do that, of course, go back, and we're all prisoners of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:13:12]  Once you get in that environment, things get very, very complicated.
[00:13:17]  George, why, I'm not asking this in any kind of snarky way, but why did he decide to go to war and why now?
[00:13:31]  It really depends on what hour of the day we're hearing from our leaders.
[00:13:39]  Because, no, that's not a snarky answer.
[00:13:41]  That's an accurate, factual answer.
[00:13:44]  We don't know because the answers change all the time.
[00:13:49]  So now we're guessing, we're divining, we're trying to read a little bit behind the scenes about what decisions were made.
[00:14:00]  The best gloss I can put on it, and this is apart from the whole question of whether it was the right thing to do, the best gloss I can put on it is that both the American and the Israeli governments saw that the Iranian regime was at one of its weakest points in the history of the Islamic Republic, if not the very weakest.
[00:14:25]  Their proxies have mostly been not neutralized, but hurt, especially in Syria.
[00:14:37]  They've lost their ally.
[00:14:39]  In Lebanon, Israel did a lot of damage to Hezbollah last year and the year before.
[00:14:46]  The Houthis seem to be quiet right now.
[00:14:48]  I'm not quite sure what's going on with that.
[00:14:52]  So maybe they decided this is the moment to do whatever we think we need to do in order to damage or destroy their ballistic missile program and put their nuclear program out of action for this foreseeable future.
[00:15:11]  Forever is the word that Pete Hegseth used.
[00:15:13]  I don't know what that means actually.
[00:15:15]  But that's the best.
[00:15:18]  And then maybe get lucky and the regime falls because maybe two-thirds or more of the Iranian people see it as a repressive, intolerable regime.
[00:15:31]  But let me ask you.
[00:15:32]  That's the best case.
[00:15:33]  That's the best gloss I can put on it.
[00:15:35]  Right, let me ask you about that, the possibility of regime change.
[00:15:39]  I think the three of us, and probably the majority of people in this room, understand that it's a heinous regime.
[00:15:45]  They just killed, we don't know the number for sure, but possibly 30,000 of their own citizens who are protesting the government.
[00:15:54]  And, you know, the sympathy is obviously with the Iranian people.
[00:16:01]  Does the use of this kind of force that America is bringing to bear in Israel bringing to bear on the regime itself?
[00:16:08]  Does that help the people rise up?
[00:16:13]  Because the reason I ask is because you can knock out ballistic missiles, but they weren't using ballistic missiles to keep people in line in the cities.
[00:16:22]  They're using handguns.
[00:16:26]  My sympathies are deep.
[00:16:28]  My wife has written a book about the Iranian democratic movement.
[00:16:32]  She's been to Iran half a dozen times.
[00:16:34]  We have a lot of Iranian friends.
[00:16:36]  We're very connected to the Iranian diaspora community, which is divided.
[00:16:43]  It's divided.
[00:16:44]  Some think things had reached such an intolerable pass, not just Iranians outside, but Iranians inside, that anything had to be better than that.
[00:16:55]  There's an expression in Persian: there's no shade darker than black, and that means it had reached the darkest it could get in January.
[00:17:03]  So, part of me emotionally is: I want this to have that effect.
[00:17:08]  I want the regime to collapse.
[00:17:10]  It is not collapsing.
[00:17:12]  Regimes don't seem to collapse under air power.
[00:17:15]  It's sort of a lesson of history.
[00:17:17]  And if anything, I fear that the use of our Israel's air power has become so extensive: desalination plants, oil depots, electrical grids, dual-use facilities that civilians rely on, plus maybe a police station right next to a classical palace or a mosque,
[00:17:44]  that we may be turning the Iranians who hated their regime into Iranians who were saying, why are they attacking us?
[00:17:52]  We're not the ones who they were going to attack.
[00:17:54]  Stan, talk about the complications of trying to help a population free itself while also trying to eliminate the offensive capabilities of the regime itself.
[00:18:09]  Yeah, the thing to remember about any regime, particularly when it's got military and police forces, they become targets, they become natural targets.
[00:18:18]  They are also fathers, they are brothers, they are sisters.
[00:18:22]  And so every time you target what you think is a legitimate target, and it is, you're also targeting part of the population.
[00:18:31]  And the reality is, these wars become very personal.
[00:18:35]  You know, you start a war for political reasons, and then pretty soon somebody kills your comrade or someone in your family, and it gets a different intensity for you.
[00:18:46]  And I think that happens with societies as well.
[00:18:50]  So when we begin and we think that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and people didn't like him, so we toppled the Saddam Hussein regime and we thought that automatically that would be popular because people would be liberated.
[00:19:04]  Well, what happened was many of them lost their positions, some way down in the government, they lost their pensions, the electricity went out, and within weeks, the liberators that we thought we were were perceived as foreign occupiers.
[00:19:21]  And people who probably didn't like Saddam Hussein at all were picking up rocket-propelled grenades and shooting at Americans.
[00:19:32]  And then as you started the violence between that, it gets its own momentum.
[00:19:37]  That's what gets so complicated.
[00:19:40]  At the end of the day, a nation is the fabric of the people.
[00:19:43]  It's not a thing on a map, and it's not a symbol of a government.
[00:19:48]  You know, you have a lot of experience with a lot of presidents.
[00:19:53]  Talk about this president and his Secretary of Defense and the way they make decisions and whether you trust the way they make decisions.
[00:20:01]  Yeah.
[00:20:03]  I'm going to start with a comparison.
[00:20:05]  The ones I got to know well were President George W. Bush and his group, and then President Obama.
[00:20:11]  And they were very different, but in both cases, I thought that if, in the case of my interactions, if I made my case, that they were listening and that they would make the best decision that they could with the information that they had.
[00:20:29]  I didn't always agree.
[00:20:30]  I didn't agree with the invasion of Iraq, but I thought President Bush made it in good faith.
[00:20:36]  I don't have the same confidence right now.
[00:20:42]  Yeah.
[00:20:47]  And the Book Festival Award for understatement goes to Stanley McChrystal.
[00:20:53]  Thank you.
[00:20:54]  Yeah, I mean, well, talk about that.
[00:20:55]  Talk about that in a serious way.
[00:20:57]  That's a really important thing because, you know, I'm on our side.
[00:21:02]  The soldiers who are out there, my heart is with American soldiers.
[00:21:07]  Don't get me wrong there.
[00:21:13]  But I want the people making decisions to be very thoughtful about it as they put young men and women in harm's way, as they decide to put even our opponents and civilians in harm's way, because that's going to happen.
[00:21:29]  I want a very thoughtful approach to that, and there will be very hard decisions made.
[00:21:35]  I remember when, well, I got to tell a war story here.
[00:21:39]  You make decisions sometimes when you know civilians will die as a result of that.
[00:21:44]  And I want the people making that decision to think about it and feel it.
[00:21:48]  I don't want anybody to make jokes about it.
[00:21:51]  I don't want anybody to be flippant about it.
[00:21:55]  And I don't want ever our government to have sort of a braggadocious attitude toward this.
[00:22:11]  You began with a bit of understatement.
[00:22:13]  I think you then worked your way up to statement.
[00:22:18]  So at the risk of overstatement, but that's partly what Jeff and I do for a living.
[00:22:26]  Speak for yourself.
[00:22:29]  I work for you, man.
[00:22:35]  It's shocking to watch Secretary Hakeseth give his briefings at the Pentagon.
[00:22:42]  It's shocking to hear him puff his chest up and talk about death and destruction raining down from the sky all day long, as if what we are is marauding bandits whose only goal is a kind of violent subjugation.
[00:23:07]  How does that sound to anyone who is living under the Islamic Republic and is desperate for change and thought because President Trump told them that we were going to come help?
[00:23:21]  It's shocking to hear President Trump deny that the airstrike on the school that was next to the Navy base in southern Iran was a tomahawk and one of ours, and instead to say it was Iran's.
[00:23:36]  He knew that was a lie.
[00:23:38]  So we can't believe what we're hearing.
[00:23:42]  And in a way, the lying and the utter contempt for human values go together.
[00:23:49]  They're both a sign that all the rules are off, that the restraints are gone.
[00:24:02]  And without restraint, without restraint, what happens in war?
[00:24:08]  Well, what happens is the soldiers down the line are put in a position where they have to choose between this new culture of there are no more rules, stupid rules of engagement, Hagseth called them, and perhaps have to live with their conscience for the rest of their lives for doing something they know is wrong, or run afoul of the chain of command.
[00:24:30]  It's a terrible position to put them in.

=== The Reality of Total War (15:10) ===

[00:24:32]  Yeah, I think, George, you hit something really important.
[00:24:35]  And I'd just like to give a view that I've had for a while.
[00:24:37]  We use the term warrior sometimes, and I'm really uncomfortable with that.
[00:24:42]  We say the warrior ethos, because in my mind, the warrior ethos is sort of an ungoverned group of people, almost like the Huns who come.
[00:24:53]  An army is not that.
[00:24:55]  An army is a disciplined group of people that are following the orders of civilian government.
[00:25:03]  They have rules of warfare.
[00:25:05]  They have discipline that keeps them.
[00:25:07]  They are led by leaders who match that.
[00:25:11]  And if we don't remember that when we send people forward with weapons, with incredible power to kill, that the most important thing we have to have is incredible self-control at the individual level and at the organization level.
[00:25:27]  We got to be lethal, but it has to be in a very mature way.
[00:25:32]  What's your analysis of Secretary Hagseth and the way he speaks about warfare?
[00:25:39]  And what is the to jump onto something that George is alluding to?
[00:25:44]  What is the downrange consequence of that language?
[00:25:48]  And I'll throw another one on, which is in your long career and storied career, have you heard other American leaders talk the way our current leaders talk?
[00:26:05]  Yeah, it's interesting you say that.
[00:26:06]  If you go back, if you take a two-dimensional view of George Patton, you might say that, but actually, if you listen to what he said and wrote and how he did discipline, it wasn't that way at all.
[00:26:17]  And Patton believed in studying history and in military education.
[00:26:23]  Exactly.
[00:26:23]  He understood a disciplined army was important.
[00:26:26]  The problem with what we're talking about here is most of the people on the battlefield are 18 or 19 years old.
[00:26:33]  They are still malleable.
[00:26:36]  They are influenced by their sergeants, by their lieutenants, by their captains, and by the rhetoric of their leaders.
[00:26:44]  And if the rhetoric of their leaders gives this idea that this is what you've got to be, and if you are not macho enough, then you are not going to be an effective service member.
[00:26:56]  And I completely disagree with that.
[00:27:04]  I think that if you are a good service member, you perform your duty well and competently and you're willing to serve.
[00:27:11]  That's the definition of it.
[00:27:13]  And so I think when we start throwing out these terms, we really risk confusing the young people at the lowest level who have got to show, in many cases, the greatest maturity and restraint.
[00:27:26]  Jeff, you mentioned that we met when we were both covering the Iraq war.
[00:27:29]  I do remember once President Bush saying, bring it on.
[00:27:33]  Do you remember that?
[00:27:34]  He got a ton of criticism for saying that because it seemed to be inviting attacks.
[00:27:40]  It's a sign.
[00:27:41]  It's also macho posturing.
[00:27:42]  It was posturing, but it was one three-word mistake or it's a sign of how our leadership has fallen, that those three words wouldn't even be noticed today.
[00:27:59]  It would be almost toning it down a little bit if Hegseth said, bring it on.
[00:28:06]  And this has a strategic implication too, because, so I'm obviously having a lot of bad memories of the Iraq war and the early years of it.
[00:28:17]  It seems that the lesson that this administration has learned is from a prolonged counterinsurgency and occupation is, well, we'll never do it the hard way again.
[00:28:32]  We're going to do it the easy way.
[00:28:34]  The hard way didn't work.
[00:28:36]  Years and years with 150,000 American troops.
[00:28:40]  Didn't work.
[00:28:41]  We're going to do it the easy way.
[00:28:42]  And so Hegseth has this dismissive phrase about no nation building, no Paul Bremer, who was the civilian administrator of the first year of the occupation.
[00:28:54]  As if the easy way works, and the easy way is rain death and destruction from the sky and then just see what happens.
[00:29:05]  Let me note, though, not playing devil's advocate here, but maybe a little bit, let me note that the United States won World War II by raining death and destruction down on whole cities across Germany and Japan.
[00:29:18]  They got the absolute surrender of those countries.
[00:29:21]  What's different?
[00:29:22]  Why was that effective and what's different between now and then?
[00:29:26]  One observation I'd make about that is it was a total war.
[00:29:31]  Air power did not win World War II.
[00:29:34]  In fact, ground forces in every case, nuclear power did finally dissuade the Japanese, but that was after we'd already gone through Okinawa on the ground.
[00:29:44]  And then we did do nation building.
[00:29:46]  We just did it after the war.
[00:29:48]  People think we didn't.
[00:29:49]  Counterinsurgency was performed in Europe after the war.
[00:29:53]  The Marshall Plan was all part of not allowing Europe or Asia to go in a wrong direction.
[00:30:00]  And we need to remember that.
[00:30:02]  At the end of the day, anything you break, you need to build.
[00:30:07]  I'd add that we won.
[00:30:10]  I'm not sure that we should look back on the incineration of Japanese cities and the leveling of German cities was a high point in American history.
[00:30:21]  No, but what I'm asking is the thing.
[00:30:27]  We were not fighting for the populations of those countries.
[00:30:31]  Those populations were, by all appearances, in total war against the Allies.
[00:30:38]  And once that was on, our leaders had the attitude of they're fighting a total war, we have to fight a total war.
[00:30:48]  This is utterly different.
[00:30:50]  We have a population in Iran that supposedly President Trump wants to liberate from the Islamic Republic.
[00:30:59]  You can't do it the way we did it in World War II because that's sheer destruction.
[00:31:06]  And that's why the tactics and the attitude of Braggadocio, as Stan said, has a strategic effect which I think is terrible, which is whatever we may be achieving as far as degrading the Iranian, the IRGC, and the regular military, I worry that it's going to have the negative effect on the people, not just killing them,
[00:31:34]  but turning them against the idea that we are there with any of their interests at heart.
[00:31:41]  And why would they think so when Trump hasn't even spoken to them in a way that says that?
[00:31:48]  Stan, let me lift up a little bit and ask you this.
[00:31:52]  You know, by the time you had some stars on your shoulder by the time you were dealing with George W. Bush and Barack Obama, you got to understand their doctrines.
[00:32:03]  Maybe you didn't agree with this doctrine or that doctrine, but they had doctrines.
[00:32:06]  How would you define looking not only at Iran, but Venezuela, Nigeria, Greenland, the Greenland discourse, and so on.
[00:32:18]  How do you explain the Trump doctrine?
[00:32:26]  I'm a big fan of Dolly Parton.
[00:32:31]  Do you remember her?
[00:32:32]  Where is this going?
[00:32:34]  I can't wait.
[00:32:35]  I really can't.
[00:32:35]  Do you remember her song, Jolene?
[00:32:37]  Yeah.
[00:32:38]  And this poor wife says, Jolene, please don't take my man.
[00:32:43]  Don't take him just because you can.
[00:32:46]  And that's what worries me.
[00:32:48]  I think we might be in a period where we think what we can do, we should do because we can.
[00:32:56]  And I think the world is starting to view us that way.
[00:33:00]  I think, by the way, just putting just my editor hat on for a minute, if in the next 24 hours the Atlantic doesn't have a piece called the Jolene Doctrine, I will have failed as editor of the Atlantic.
[00:33:17]  That is an excellent answer.
[00:33:18]  George, go on.
[00:33:21]  And George is writing it if he won't.
[00:33:23]  Yeah.
[00:33:25]  I'm going to have to go listen to the song because I'm not sure I know it.
[00:33:29]  Sorry.
[00:33:32]  I think I could come up with a great Neil Young.
[00:33:34]  I think we've discovered a spy in our midst.
[00:33:38]  So slightly less articulate and fun.
[00:33:46]  What I see happening right now, yes, we're doing it because we can.
[00:33:52]  Russia did it because they could.
[00:33:56]  And I worry that what we're seeing is what the world looks like after the 80-year international order has been abandoned by the major powers.
[00:34:10]  We don't consult with Congress.
[00:34:12]  We don't tell the American people what we're going to do or why we're going to do it.
[00:34:17]  We certainly don't worry about the UN.
[00:34:19]  We don't even let our allies in on it.
[00:34:21]  We just do it because we can.
[00:34:23]  And that, in a larger sense, is the world of might makes right and great powers, which I'm not going to say that the invasion of Ukraine is parallel in all kinds of ways, except in that one way, which is it feels as if all the old rules, which were violated, we all know that, but they were there, and we could say you're violating the rules.
[00:34:47]  No one says that anymore because the rules are gone.
[00:34:51]  Stan, talk about the impact all of these actions have had on allies and maybe go back to your own experience on Management of alliances.
[00:35:06]  Talk about this more go-at-it-alone approach.
[00:35:09]  I can't stop thinking about Denmark, actually.
[00:35:12]  And I know that.
[00:35:13]  I suspect that Trump will come back around to the Greenland issue again.
[00:35:19]  The reason I can't stop thinking about it is because in Afghanistan, one time, I remember not in betting, but being with some Danish special operators who are very good.
[00:35:28]  They have a small army, but they're very good at it.
[00:35:30]  Maybe you could talk a little bit about the consequences of our new approach.
[00:35:35]  Yeah, I'm a great believer in allies.
[00:35:38]  And in Afghanistan, my last job, I commanded the coalition, which was 46 nations.
[00:35:45]  And we think, well, America was doing all the fighting.
[00:35:48]  Actually, the highest per capita casualty rate was not America.
[00:35:52]  It was Estonia.
[00:35:54]  And people go, I didn't know they were there.
[00:35:56]  They were, and they were fighting.
[00:35:58]  But the point about the 46 nations is they all had different capabilities and a lot of political limitations, but they were doing their best, and they were all there because the United States asked them to be, not because they had some overriding political requirement, geopolitical interest in Afghanistan.
[00:36:19]  They thought their relationship with us was important enough that when we asked them to put people in harm's way, they would do that.
[00:36:28]  To me, that's the sacred kinds of relationships that are essential for any nation.
[00:36:35]  We'll never be powerful enough to go it alone.
[00:36:39]  And take one more question based on your own experience.
[00:36:45]  I've written about this, some George has written about it a lot.
[00:36:48]  The effect of this kind of war and these kind of messages coming from the top, I want you to spend some time on this on the American soldier.
[00:37:00]  And talk about this warrior ethos versus a soldier's ethos a little bit.
[00:37:05]  You have vast experience on this question.
[00:37:08]  And we were talking a little bit before about performative machismo.
[00:37:14]  You are in the pantheon of special operators.
[00:37:20]  You might not want the praise or the acknowledgement, but it's true.
[00:37:25]  Very hard to imagine Pete Hegseth calling you a wimp or calling you a coward or calling you whatever it is, a Nambi-Pamby.
[00:37:35]  Talk about that just for a minute, about the soldier and what we should expect of the soldier and what the soldier should expect of his or her civilian leadership.
[00:37:47]  Yeah, first his soldiers don't look like they maybe once did.
[00:37:51]  They look across the spectrum.
[00:37:54]  Different physical capabilities, different genders and whatnot.
[00:37:58]  About a month ago, I got the opportunity, I was invited to officiate the retirement of five service members.
[00:38:06]  They couldn't be given a formal retirement because they were transgender.
[00:38:10]  And they had changed during the previous administration when it was authorized.
[00:38:16]  They were continuing to serve.
[00:38:18]  One was a colonel, another was a lieutenant colonel.
[00:38:21]  There were three NCOs.
[00:38:23]  Incredible records.
[00:38:25]  Their families were there with them, and they were forced out of the service simply because someone has decided, okay, you served for all these years, you did really well, now you can't.
[00:38:36]  And all they wanted was the respect of a ceremony.
[00:38:42]  And the reality is, it was just such a reminder because I had spent so much of my career in the special ops world where, frankly, there was a lot of sort of biceps and whatnot.
[00:38:53]  But when we got in the really difficult part of Iraq, we became very different.
[00:39:00]  We became a hierarchy of what you did.
[00:39:03]  We became a meritocracy.
[00:39:05]  I remember one day I came into one of our op centers, and there's one of my big operators there, you know, big hoking guy in body army, looks about 6'5 and all that.
[00:39:14]  And there was a young girl, an intel analyst, and she's about 105 pounds, soaking wet, and she's got her finger and she's pounding it into his chest.
[00:39:23]  And I'm watching this, and I said, I got to see how this comes out.
[00:39:28]  But the reality is, what had happened is she's right, and she had earned the respect she had.
[00:39:34]  And so the force is different.
[00:39:37]  Our Army, our military, ought to be a mirror of our society.

=== Defending Free Speech Rights (14:51) ===

[00:39:43]  It ought to reflect us.
[00:39:48]  That is an appropriate and insightful place to end this conversation.
[00:39:53]  I want to thank both of you for doing this.
[00:39:55]  I'm sure everybody is appreciative of your insights.
[00:39:57]  Thank you so much.
[00:40:18]  As we reset the stage for our next conversation, please enjoy this brief look at the official 2026 New Orleans Book Festival poster created by Louisiana artist Francis X. Pavi.
[00:41:34]  And now, for a conversation about America at 250 years, please welcome Ken Burns, Annette Gordon-Reed, Walter Isaacson, and Clint Smith to the stage.
[00:41:45]  Here to lead the conversation is the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
[00:42:08]  Wait, somebody's holding a sign.
[00:42:10]  It's like a Springsteen concert.
[00:42:11]  I can't read it, though.
[00:42:12]  What is this?
[00:42:13]  Hi again.
[00:42:14]  It's me.
[00:42:14]  Sorry.
[00:42:18]  The empty chair is not for Elijah.
[00:42:20]  It's for Annette Gordon-Reed, who is coming from the airport.
[00:42:25]  There's been some travel stuff, but she's going to pop onto the stage, and we're looking forward to having her here.
[00:42:33]  But in the meantime, we have three luminaries.
[00:42:37]  I've got Ken Burns next to me.
[00:42:39]  You're familiar with some of his work, I imagine.
[00:42:47]  Ken and I have been doing a little bit of a road show, international roadshow, around his documentary, our special issue on the American Revolution 250 issue.
[00:42:57]  And he is the greatest interpreter of the American experience we have, I think.
[00:43:04]  And so glad to have him here.
[00:43:09]  Walter Isaacson, you all know, because he's going to be your next governor, probably.
[00:43:16]  I don't know.
[00:43:21]  You have to live in Baton Rouge, I think, right?
[00:43:24]  Ask Kathy.
[00:43:25]  Yeah, Kathy's going to be now.
[00:43:27]  Walter, of course, on the Tulane faculty now, but former leader of the Aspen Institute, former editor of Time magazine, biographer of the great and the good, and one very weird guy.
[00:43:44]  I'll let you figure out which one.
[00:43:47]  And Clint Smith, the next next governor of the state of Louisiana.
[00:43:56]  And do you know his father's a judge here?
[00:43:59]  I know his father very well.
[00:44:00]  He's one of the most serious and best-dressed judges in the state.
[00:44:06]  That's like being the highest mountain in the state.
[00:44:08]  He's a man of serious demeanor and moral purpose.
[00:44:13]  I actually know him pretty well.
[00:44:15]  But let's talk about Clint, though.
[00:44:18]  Clint is a hometown hero, as you all know, one of the greatest writers in America, and even more to the point, one of the greatest writers at the Atlantic.
[00:44:29]  I want to thank New Orleans for giving us him.
[00:44:34]  He's been doing great and very, very meaningful work, especially in this period around issues of historical memory and what we owe the past and what we can learn from the past.
[00:44:46]  And we're going to talk a lot about that.
[00:44:48]  And then when Annette gets here, obviously one of America's greatest living historians.
[00:44:54]  Her work on Jefferson and the Hemings has been revolutionary, but she's incredibly erudite.
[00:45:00]  And we'll look forward to having her.
[00:45:02]  But Ken, let's start with you.
[00:45:03]  We're going to talk tonight about the upcoming 250th anniversary celebration of American independence.
[00:45:15]  And three of the four of us on this stage are old enough to remember the bicentennial.
[00:45:24]  Right, Clint?
[00:45:25]  You're not that old.
[00:45:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:27]  Wait, were you born after the bicentennial?
[00:45:29]  A little bit.
[00:45:30]  Oh.
[00:45:32]  That's brutal.
[00:45:37]  But we all remember the tall ships and the fireworks and the hot dogs.
[00:45:43]  And it was, even though it was coming right after Watergate, it was still, there was a different, and we've written about this.
[00:45:50]  People have written about this.
[00:45:51]  It's a very different feeling than what we have now.
[00:45:54]  It seems as if most of the questions about America have been sort of settled.
[00:46:02]  Ken, what's different now?
[00:46:06]  Well, I'm just the previous panel sort of goes into it.
[00:46:10]  I started this project, our documentary series on the history of the American Revolution when Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency.
[00:46:20]  So I feel in a way like I've been run over by the present.
[00:46:24]  That is to say, there was a huge amount of attention to the centennial in 1876, also a very complicated year.
[00:46:34]  Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York, won the popular vote, but Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio won it.
[00:46:40]  Backroom deal in Florida among electors, if you can believe that, changed the deal.
[00:46:49]  By the way, for those of you betting on this panel, the over-under on Ken mentioning Rutherford B. Hayes was two minutes.
[00:46:58]  Yeah, I have to say that it was inevitable that we would get to Rutherford B. Hayes.
[00:47:03]  And I do remember the centennial really well, and it was notable for the fact that it didn't in any way correlate with what we'd been through.
[00:47:12]  The Vietnam era, searing civil rights, assassinations.
[00:47:15]  There were hundreds of bombings that had taken place from 1969 to 75 or so.
[00:47:21]  A president had resigned.
[00:47:23]  There was a crippling oil crisis.
[00:47:28]  It was an amazingly disconnected because I think in a way people had assumed we'd arrived and everything was just going to be adding layers of positivity to it.
[00:47:39]  So when we began this, we felt, though in much even more complicated times, that the film that we would be telling would be all right.
[00:47:49]  We worried that this coming July 4th would be drowning in pfindrum treacle and that we were hopeful that our film might come out as it did last November in a way that would offer a kind of counterpoint that would be more complicated.
[00:48:06]  And now we're, of course, arguing about the very meaning of it, about whose history is included and all of that stuff.
[00:48:12]  And there's a palpable sense, I think, that is actually ripe for a positive response because everything is so fraught.
[00:48:21]  The moment feels existential.
[00:48:23]  The threats seem, as they always do in the present, worse than they've ever been.
[00:48:27]  The revolution tells us that's not true.
[00:48:30]  The Civil War tells us that's not true.
[00:48:32]  Reconstruction tells us that's not true.
[00:48:34]  Vietnam and many other people.
[00:48:37]  History has a strangely calming effect also, knowing the history.
[00:48:41]  Well, I think that's exactly right.
[00:48:43]  And I remember at one point there was an article that came out in the fall.
[00:48:46]  Oh, there she is.
[00:48:59]  There is a kind of calming effect.
[00:49:03]  And I think that people who study the past or understand some of the perspectives that an understanding of the past gives you helps you.
[00:49:13]  When the 08 meltdown happened, a friend of mine in financial business in New York came up to me and said, this is a depression.
[00:49:20]  And I just looked at him and I said, in the depression in many American cities, the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor.
[00:49:29]  He said, when that happens, we can do it.
[00:49:31]  And so there was a little bit of cold comfort in that perspective that that offered.
[00:49:37]  But I don't know now what kind of discussion we will have or whether we will devolve basically to a celebration that is not connected as we were not in 1976 to Watergate and bombings and resignations of a president and Vietnam and civil rights.
[00:49:58]  It was just some other thing that happened and existed parallel.
[00:50:02]  I hope not.
[00:50:02]  I think it's an opportunity to reinvigorate and reinvestigate some of the...
[00:50:07]  I think if you're in crisis, you go to a professional who wants to know right away where did you come from, what's your family, who...
[00:50:16]  What's your origin story?
[00:50:18]  And I think for us, we didn't realize that dealing with this origin story would in fact perhaps be therapeutic in a way, as you understand the complexity of our founding and the complexity now doesn't actually hold a candle to the complexity of the founding.
[00:50:35]  Walter, I want to come to you, but first I want to welcome Annette.
[00:50:38]  Thank you for being here.
[00:50:43]  There's a rumor, there's a rumor going around that you've got a police escort to get to this panel on time?
[00:50:48]  Yes, the first time.
[00:50:50]  It's really cool.
[00:50:51]  Does every Pulitzer Prize winner get a police escort out of here?
[00:50:54]  Because that's a good deal.
[00:50:55]  A point of privilege.
[00:50:56]  Having said that, let me introduce the police chief of the city of Fawla, Andrew Patrick, who did it.
[00:51:06]  Suddenly it becomes clear.
[00:51:09]  Gotcha.
[00:51:11]  I'll let you breathe for a minute and come back to Walter just for a second, and then we'll keep going.
[00:51:17]  But Walter, this idea of the unfinished revolution, I guess the question I have this year is how unfinished is it?
[00:51:25]  You know, the title of the great Atlantic special issue was The Unfinished Revolution.
[00:51:32]  And when you look at the Declaration of Independence, and I've written about that second sentence, that we hold these truths to be self-evident sentence, you realize it was not a finished description of the nation, but a forcing mechanism and a mission statement, an aspiration of what we could be.
[00:51:50]  And that, you know, fourscore and seven years after the founders write that, Lincoln invokes it, saying a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated the proposition that all men are created equal.
[00:52:03]  And he wasn't just giving a speech at Gettysburg.
[00:52:05]  He was consecrating a burial ground, a cemetery there, in which 7,058 young men were being buried for having tried to make that sentence a little bit more true.
[00:52:19]  And so I think that's why going back to the founding aspirations and using those as a way to bring us together, which is what you tried to do in the special issue, and not glorifying or sugarcoating it, but also not demeaning the journey that we have been on.
[00:52:40]  And American history is a narrative in fits and starts.
[00:52:45]  Sometimes progresses, sometimes regresses, but the narrative is to take those founding principles and even that sentence, which not only Lincoln invokes, but it's in the Seneca Declaration of Rights for Women when they do it.
[00:53:00]  It's Martin Luther King's last speech.
[00:53:03]  It's LBJ when he signs a civil rights bill.
[00:53:06]  So that's the extent that I think you were right when you called your special issue, you know, this unfinished narrative.
[00:53:14]  Clint, look, you're a scholar and a writer, but you're also, and I use this word under advisement now, a warrior in the sense that in the sense that you are legitimately fighting for the preservation, not only the preservation of memory, but the advancement of memory.
[00:53:41]  I think a lot of people are surprised that generally accepted memories are so controversial.
[00:53:49]  Now, talk a little bit about, talk about this fight.
[00:53:53]  Sometimes you're writing about it through the prism of institutions, the Smithsonian Institution being obviously one extremely important one.
[00:54:00]  But talk about this fight and talk about things that might have surprised you about this kind of war on accepted memory.
[00:54:08]  Yeah, I mean, I think that I've been struck by how explicit it is, how direct it is, but part of what I think is happening is that it's not so much like if we take slavery, for example, right?
[00:54:21]  And our president famously, I want to say tweet, but I don't know what you call it, a post-it, true social post, posted that the Smithsonian spends too much time thinking about and talking about slavery.

=== Jefferson's Complex Legacy (15:32) ===

[00:54:35]  Like it spends too much time talking about these sad things, these depressing things.
[00:54:39]  It should be more uplifting.
[00:54:40]  He has all these executive orders thinking about what a patriotic education is, and that we should be teaching a patriotic education in our curriculums and higher ed, that our museums should reflect notions of patriotism.
[00:54:53]  And what we know is that he has a very narrow sense of what constitutes as patriotism.
[00:55:02]  For me, and for so many of us who think about the past, America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunity for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors could have simply never imagined.
[00:55:18]  It has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed.
[00:55:26]  And both of those things, both of those things are the story of America.
[00:55:32]  It's not this one over here or that one over there.
[00:55:34]  You have to pick this one and not pick that one.
[00:55:36]  Both of those things reflect the totality, the complexity, the cognitive dissonance of this country.
[00:55:43]  If we think about ourselves, I'm a person who has done things in my life that I'm proud of, and I'm a person who's done things in my life that I'm not proud of.
[00:55:51]  I've made mistakes because I'm human.
[00:55:54]  And what I try to teach my children and the way that I try to be in community with my loved ones is that if you make a mistake, you don't pretend as if you didn't make a mistake.
[00:56:04]  You don't pretend as if that mistake doesn't exist.
[00:56:06]  What you do is you try to acknowledge it and learn from it and become a better version of yourself because of it.
[00:56:12]  And if that's the standard I hold myself to, if that's the standard I hold my children to, why would that not be the same standard that I hold this country to?
[00:56:20]  And I think it's, and so, you know, I find it, I find it bizarre that there is an unwillingness to hold the both-endedness of this country, which is to say the both-endedness of ourselves.
[00:56:38]  of what it means to be human from so many people in power.
[00:56:41]  But my sense is that they believe that if people understood fully the history of slavery or Jim Crow, it's not so much that they don't think those things happened or even that those things were bad.
[00:56:55]  My sense is that if they recognize that if more people, more children, more Americans understood that history properly and meaningfully and in its totality, that millions of people would then begin to look at the country that we live in today and understand it with new eyes and understand, oh, the reason somebody, you know, that community looks that way or that community looks that way, is not because of the people in those communities, but because of what has been done to those communities or what has been extracted from those communities generation after generation.
[00:57:28]  I think you are running for governor.
[00:57:33]  I want to come back to all of these things.
[00:57:35]  Annette, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the way, to expand upon what Clint is talking about, the way in which you're seeing people, different political factions, deal with the complicated realities of American history.
[00:57:52]  You obviously went through a seminal moment in this discussion with your discoveries about the true complexity of Thomas Jefferson's life.
[00:58:03]  You talk a lot today, and we've done events where we've talked about George Washington, the greatness of George Washington, who is a very complicated character as well.
[00:58:13]  Maybe you could just expand on this a little bit and talk about the complex feelings that people have about complex history.
[00:58:21]  Well, I think a lot of it stems from, well, fear.
[00:58:26]  A sense that it's a zero-sum game.
[00:58:30]  If you recognize the struggles that some groups have had and you try to make recompense for this in whatever way or try to fix the law so that everyone is treated equally, that means that they will lose something.
[00:58:43]  So I think a lot of it has to do with a fear of the loss of privilege.
[00:58:47]  And we just haven't communicated to one another and has been communicated that there's enough for everybody, that we can be Americans and we can strive together and we can all prosper.
[00:59:00]  I saw a survey a couple of days ago about asking what percentage of Americans do you think are good?
[00:59:09]  And Americans believed, I don't remember the precise numbers, but Americans in the survey believed that the majority of Americans were bad people.
[00:59:18]  In Canada, it was something like almost 90% of the people were good.
[00:59:23]  I mean, that is a different sensibility between people who trust each other and people who don't.
[00:59:29]  And we've always had this duality in the country from the very beginning, the people who believed in the ideals of the Declaration and people who didn't.
[00:59:37]  And at various moments, the politics work out so that one side is in ascendancy, and we're in the ascendancy now of people who don't believe in America as a creed.
[00:59:48]  I think the vice president has been explicit about that, that we are not a creedal nation.
[00:59:53]  The idea of America, it's really about what the Germans would call or thought of as blood and soil.
[01:00:00]  It's about your heritage, heritage Americans, people who are white, Protestant, and so forth.
[01:00:06]  So I think a lot of it has to do with, as I said at the beginning, fear and seeing everything as a zero-sum game.
[01:00:15]  I want to come back directly to something I raised before with you.
[01:00:21]  What did George Washington think about this idea of a creedal versus blood and soil nation?
[01:00:28]  Well, he had to believe in the creed because it's incorporated into the Constitution.
[01:00:35]  We the people, and the idea, the actual makeup of the country was always diverse from the very beginning.
[01:00:43]  And he assumed that people would become Americans, that they were Americans, if you believed in it and you committed to the ideals of the country.
[01:00:53]  He didn't talk about it as much as Jefferson.
[01:00:55]  Now, Jefferson had a more complicated idea about this because he didn't think that we could live together, blacks and whites could live together without conflict because blacks wouldn't forgive whites for what had happened to them.
[01:01:08]  Whites would never give up their privilege.
[01:01:11]  Of course, when he dies and he frees the people that he frees, he asks to let them stay in Virginia, the legislature, to stay in Virginia because that's where their families and their connection were.
[01:01:24]  So once again, there's the outward sense, theoretical thinking about what will happen between the races.
[01:01:30]  But the people he knew, he understood that they belonged here because their families and their connections were here.
[01:01:39]  Walter, talk about this issue that Annette is raising, this fear or mistrust or even loathing that a surprising and disconcerting number of Americans have for other Americans.
[01:01:55]  I remember asking Jim Mattis, who was the Secretary of Defense in the first Trump term, classic sort of journalism question.
[01:02:04]  What is the thing you, what is the threat you worry about most?
[01:02:07]  And he says, the threat I worry about most is that Americans have lost affection for each other and see each other not as opponents in the political realm, but enemies.
[01:02:20]  And so I'll ask you in light of your book, in light of your study of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, can America survive if we don't like each other?
[01:02:33]  We call it the POGO question because there are three of us old enough to remember Walt Kelly's Pogo cartoon.
[01:02:40]  And he said, we've met the enemy and he is us.
[01:02:44]  And that was the problem, which is when we turn against each other.
[01:02:47]  And when the political system, and by the way, when the media system and when the algorithms of our social media system and our gerrymandering are designed to divide us rather than unite us, this is what happens.
[01:03:02]  When Hancock signs the Declaration, he says we must, given the forces trying to divide us, we must all hang together.
[01:03:12]  Franklin answers, yes, assuredly, otherwise we'll all hang separately.
[01:03:17]  And that was the challenge they faced then.
[01:03:21]  One of the things about New Orleans that I love, it's the most diverse city I've ever lived in, and the diversity leads to wonderful things, whether it be jazz or the food.
[01:03:33]  But we all know we have to live together.
[01:03:36]  And I think this country now can be divided in some ways, not between left and right or Democrat and Republican, but between those who love the diversity of people and the different ideas and the mix, that's America, and those who feel more tribal, I guess, in a way, that they want to divide.
[01:03:58]  And we have to, if we're going to survive the next 50 years, find ways to have everything from the algorithms and media.
[01:04:09]  I see Tim Berners-Lee here, he invented the World Wide Web and taught my class today.
[01:04:16]  But we were talking, Sir Tim, about the algorithms now are designed to pull us apart.
[01:04:23]  So it's not just our politicians.
[01:04:26]  It's the whole atmosphere is inherently divisive.
[01:04:32]  I was hoping we were going to use the 250th to at least pause for a second and reunite, but it's not happening.
[01:04:41]  Go ahead.
[01:04:41]  And the interesting thing about that, Walter, is that it's domestic.
[01:04:45]  That kind of division is domestic, but it's global.
[01:04:48]  People outside of America understand us and try to play us against one another because they know the buttons to push to do that.
[01:04:58]  But real quickly, it's happening internationally too, this divide, and it's a populist backlash.
[01:05:04]  And we have to understand that there are some real causes to it.
[01:05:07]  That somehow or another, the whole globalization we thought that would bring us together created great wealth but left a lot of people behind feeling threatened by free markets, free immigration, free movements of people, all of which we, meaning I think I can speak for this panel, thought were a good idea, but somehow we forgot it was going to build up resentments not only here, but In Hungary and in France and in Germany.
[01:05:34]  Walter, do you think that we do spend too much time talking about our differences and not the things that unite us?
[01:05:41]  Oh, absolutely.
[01:05:43]  And it used to be there was a common ground of media.
[01:05:47]  So I think I'll praise you and Evan and others at the Atlantic.
[01:05:52]  The Atlantic is one of the few places that's a common ground for ideas.
[01:05:58]  And I think just because of who we are in the business model of media now, we spend more time talking about our differences rather than how we all kind of, I mean, 70% of this room could agree on 70% of all issues, and then we could agree that, all right, that other 30%, we can live with each other.
[01:06:22]  But you get out into the world of social media or into politics, and the divisiveness happens.
[01:06:28]  I just had a conversation with somebody in the MAGA world and sort of the White House universe about the Smithsonian, which is going to be a big issue.
[01:06:36]  I didn't tell Clinton this, but it's kind of amusing.
[01:06:39]  Although it's amusing, but there's also a level beneath it.
[01:06:43]  And we were talking about the National Museum of African American History, you know, the one that Monty Bunch built before he became the secretary of the Smithsonian.
[01:06:52]  And I said, what is the particular problem or challenge that people in the MAGA universe have with that museum and the way it portrays the world?
[01:07:04]  And the answer, I mean, it sounds funny, but there's something to it.
[01:07:08]  There's something deeper than just the answer.
[01:07:11]  The answer was that the problem with the National Museum of African American History is that it's way too focused on blacks.
[01:07:22]  And I said, you can't be surprised when you go to it, given the name.
[01:07:29]  But what they were trying to say was that why do we have to have Smithsonians for every group?
[01:07:35]  And I think this is, I'm trying to put the best gloss on what you're seeing, what the reaction to the expansion idea of American identity.
[01:07:48]  The best gloss is that why do we have to talk about, why does everybody get their own, why do the Indians get their own museum?
[01:07:55]  Why is there a move to have a women's museum?
[01:07:57]  Why do the blacks have to have a Smithsonian?
[01:08:02]  Clint, in your journalism, talking to white Americans about the way they feel about their country currently, how strong a feeling is that something has gone, quote, too far and that the effort to build the first large-scale multicultural democracy in the history of the world has gone awry in some way.
[01:08:25]  You know, it's interesting.
[01:08:27]  My work in so many ways has been building on all of you alls up here and in some ways most directly.
[01:08:36]  Annette's, I have a chapter in my book about Monticello.
[01:08:42]  And Annette is the queen of all things, Monticello.
[01:08:48]  And she was so generous.
[01:08:51]  You know, five years ago at the height of COVID, I sent her an email and asked her if she would read the chapter from my book, and she agreed, and we had this wonderful manuscript seminar that I'll remember forever, like a sort of marathon session on Zoom where we talked about a book and we talked about Monticello and we talked about a sort of larger project of slavery and memory and how we tell the story of the past.
[01:09:15]  And one of the things that I encountered when I went to Monticello is that the docents there told me that almost every day somebody shows up and confronts the docents about the way that they're talking about Jefferson, right?
[01:09:32]  And so, you know, if you go to Monticello, there are a range of different tours you can take.
[01:09:37]  There's the House Tour, there's the Hemmings family tour, there's the Slavery at Monticello Tour, there's a horticultural tour.
[01:09:44]  He was a dynamic person, and they have a lot of different tours and experiences to reflect the different facets of his personality and his work.
[01:09:56]  But in the Slavery at Monticello Tour, to Monticello's credit, the way that they tell the story about Jefferson's relationship to slavery is very different today than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago.

=== Telling New Stories Together (15:53) ===

[01:10:08]  And so much of that is because of Annette's incredible work.
[01:10:11]  But every day, I remember talking to a docent, she was like, every day somebody comes here and they're like, why are you telling these lies about Jefferson?
[01:10:18]  Like, why are you telling these woke stories about Jefferson?
[01:10:20]  Why are you telling these liberal lies about who Jefferson was?
[01:10:24]  All this politically correct stuff.
[01:10:26]  And the thing that she said is that for so many people, Jefferson is almost a personification of the idea of America.
[01:10:37]  And if you have to tell a new story about Jefferson, it means you have to tell a new story about America.
[01:10:42]  And if you have to tell a new story about America, for many people in this country, that means you have to tell a new story about yourself.
[01:10:49]  And that's something that is deeply frightening to many, many people.
[01:10:53]  And some of it is conscious, some of it is subconscious, but for many people, if you have to tell a story about America that runs counter to the story that you've been told by the people you love in the communities you've come from, it represents almost an existential crisis, that fear that Annette alluded to.
[01:11:13]  It's a sort of fear of a loss of a sense of identity.
[01:11:17]  And that is why, in part, I think there is such a profound desire to hold on to a set of mythologies, even those that are like clearly, empirically untrue.
[01:11:34]  Because for so many people, history is not about primary source documents or empirical evidence.
[01:11:39]  It's a story that they're told.
[01:11:40]  And it's a story that they tell.
[01:11:42]  It's an heirloom that's passed down across generations.
[01:11:44]  It's something where loyalty takes precedent over truth.
[01:11:47]  And so they would rather believe a set of stories than to accept the complexity and the complicated nature of this history and multiple perspectives that reflect the dynamism and the pluralism of the American experience, which are reflected in all of these different museums.
[01:12:06]  Because at their best, these museums are all in conversation with one another, right?
[01:12:11]  I think it's wrong to think of it as like, oh, this museum is telling the story of just this group of people, and this museum is telling the story of this group of people.
[01:12:19]  In the narrowest sense, that's true.
[01:12:21]  But what's also true is that when you go to all of these different museums, you see the overlaps, you see the relationships.
[01:12:29]  It's as Du Bois, Dr. E.B. Du Bois, talks about how learning about these different facets of American history and global history stripped him of a sense of social provincialism because he was able to recognize the interconnectedness of the experience of black Americans and of Native Americans and of Jewish Americans and of Jewish people in Europe and the people experiencing imperialism and colonialism in Africa.
[01:12:55]  And I think that there are people who are unwilling to engage with those connections because they think that it means that they have to, again, tell a new story about themselves, which is uncomfortable.
[01:13:08]  Ken, this is a very interesting segue To a conversation, it all leads up to, we're all laddering up here to the 250 and how we're going to, how we're going to celebrate and recognize this incredible length and duration of the American experiment.
[01:13:28]  But how do you, as a filmmaker, how do you take this fractiousness and turn it into something coherent?
[01:13:38]  And what kind of pushback do you get?
[01:13:41]  I mean, you're, I mean, for those, I assume many of you have watched the documentary on the revolution.
[01:13:46]  If those of you who haven't, you really should.
[01:13:51]  It's excellent through and through.
[01:13:54]  But how do you deal with people who say, why do you focus too much on X and not Y?
[01:14:04]  I have been anticipating that avalanche for about 13 or 14 months, and it hasn't come.
[01:14:12]  And so, in a way, I would agree completely with Annette and Clint about the fear and the idea of self-reflection, but I'd like to make a distinction between levels of story.
[01:14:24]  I think some of the stories are acquired as we acquire fashion, and they become these convenient things that sort of swathe us in argument, right?
[01:14:37]  They make an argument.
[01:14:39]  But real stories are much more complicated and have all of the features that you described, the beautiful necklace of perspectives, the modes of inquiry that surround the green at the mall, the National Mall, all of those different perspectives.
[01:14:55]  That was so liberating for Du Bois, as you pointed out.
[01:14:59]  He really writes really quite beautifully about coming into that.
[01:15:04]  What I've found is actually sort of counter to this, to not liking each other.
[01:15:10]  I presume that this would be attacked as being woke.
[01:15:14]  You know, we do focus and center not only women who are half the population, but the 20% of 500,000 people who are free and enslaved blacks, the assimilated and coexisting Native peoples, those Native nations that are as distinct from one another as France is from Prussia, that are on the Western border, all the European influences, all of that stuff into a very complex narrative.
[01:15:40]  And I actually found that people like it, Walter.
[01:15:46]  They are, I think we know in our own lives the complexity, as you spoke about your own mistakes and your own willingness to own up to them in a way, which is so admirable a characteristic, that I think we're prepared to do that.
[01:16:02]  That there is this extraordinary sense that, I mean, Richard Powers, the novelist, said that the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view.
[01:16:13]  The only thing that can do that is a good story.
[01:16:16]  And so that what you have in the process of storytelling is this ability to call balls and strikes, this ability to list all these things and not favor them in any way, not to ignore the things that we have perhaps been hung up on for so long about that exceptionalism, which isn't, but also is it, about Washington.
[01:16:37]  And I have to frankly admit, it was exhilarating as we're telling a bottom-up story to also be able to say, and guess what?
[01:16:46]  There's one person without whom we don't have this country, and that's him.
[01:16:50]  And you go, but wait, he owns 500, whatever Rick Atkinson says, 577 human beings, and you can't square that circle and all of that.
[01:16:59]  But he's able to speak to people about why they're Americans and no longer members of a separate country, Georgia or New Hampshire, where I live.
[01:17:08]  He's able to pick subordinate talent.
[01:17:11]  He's able to do all these things.
[01:17:12]  And so out of the complexity of that narrative, I expected Jeffrey so much stuff that never happened.
[01:17:21]  And, you know, when it was, we were talking about this a few days ago.
[01:17:27]  I assumed if I could get to mid-October without the shit hitting the fan, I would be okay because a little controversy would be good.
[01:17:36]  The film was broadcast in the middle of November, and it was then that the National Review and the Federalists, clearly having watched 20 minutes of the film, said this is woke.
[01:17:47]  And then it dissipated like skywriting.
[01:17:50]  And I expected, as I've had in every other film where there's been some contention, people to say, well, the National Review said this or that, and nobody said anything.
[01:18:02]  They're accepting or willing, hungry.
[01:18:06]  I experienced this only once before, which was with the Civil War series in 1990, which is now, you know, 36 years ago, that you could tell a bottom-up and extraordinarily complex story and that everybody would get it.
[01:18:21]  I mean, that film, by the way, which is okay apparently to the National Review, but I can no longer be trusted, after a short prologue and then a fairly lengthy introduction, begins with a quote that goes something to the effect, when thinking about America,
[01:18:37]  I admire her bright blue skies, her star-crossed mountains, her fertile fields, but then my rapture is soon checked when I realize it is filled with slaveholding and wrong, that the rivers bear to the sea the tears of my brethren, that the soil drinks daily of the blood of my outraged sisters.
[01:18:56]  I am filled with unutterable loathing.
[01:19:00]  Frederick Douglass.
[01:19:02]  That's how our film began.
[01:19:04]  So I think we just tell stories.
[01:19:10]  That's the commandment, to just tell the stories.
[01:19:13]  I mean, nothing's more interesting than Sally Hemmings and the dimension.
[01:19:17]  When I was working on a biography, nobody would want to say anything in that.
[01:19:22]  Nobody would want to admit it.
[01:19:24]  Definitely not let a Hemmings into the burial ground.
[01:19:28]  And now it's something's moved.
[01:19:30]  And so I just think there's levels of story, and sometimes the stories are the things that are really arguments.
[01:19:36]  There's just the comforting things.
[01:19:37]  And other times these are the stories that are really animating about who we actually are.
[01:19:42]  And I think everybody is drawn to that complexity.
[01:19:46]  Walter, can you quote Frederick Douglass at length?
[01:19:51]  I just read Beecham's book, which has the beautiful Frederick Douglass saying to him.
[01:19:55]  He didn't write a bad sentence.
[01:19:56]  He didn't write a bad.
[01:19:57]  No, he was a very good writer.
[01:19:59]  But one of the things I was thinking about is, with Annette here, I see, I think, five of the people in my biography class there and one in the back there.
[01:20:08]  We have Thomas Jefferson as this touchstone that we use of how can you be both a truly great person, and you're very good at this, when you even talk about why do we not take down the monument, a truly great person who has flaws and a sin, too.
[01:20:27]  And I say, well, we're all human.
[01:20:29]  And this is what we call the Jefferson dilemma in my biography class, because how can you write about something?
[01:20:36]  And I go back to Shakespeare, who, you know, all of his heroes have really dark sides.
[01:20:44]  King Henry V kills all the prisoners.
[01:20:46]  And all of his villains, so to speak, Iago or Shylock, have backstories.
[01:20:52]  When Mitch was taking down the monuments, we had to figure out, okay, but do you leave up Andrew Jackson?
[01:21:00]  And I say, we're all human.
[01:21:03]  And we have to, if we want to be less divisive as a nation, we have to cut people slack, that we are all human.
[01:21:11]  And your ability to admire Thomas Jefferson, but also write about the Hemmingses and also show him in his complexity, we just have to learn that we're a complex country, we're complex humans, and we can still love it all.
[01:21:29]  Clint, can I...
[01:21:32]  Yeah, go ahead.
[01:21:33]  Annette, can I quote you from our film?
[01:21:37]  In the middle of the Declaration of Independence, we sort of pull Jefferson's feet to the fire for his inability to live out these extraordinarily high ideals.
[01:21:49]  And Annette says that slavery's foundation abounds every part of his life from birth to death, and he knew it was wrong.
[01:21:57]  Well, how, she says rhetorically, could you do something if you knew it was wrong?
[01:22:02]  And she said, well, that is the human question for all of us.
[01:22:06]  Not taking Jefferson off the hook, but putting us on the hook for these things.
[01:22:12]  And so your William Shakespeare, Keats wrote a letter saying that Shakespeare, more than anyone else, had this ability called negative capability.
[01:22:21]  That is, he was able to hold in tension a person's strengths and their weaknesses throughout the exposition.
[01:22:28]  Even the best are molded out of the fault.
[01:22:31]  He is exactly what I'm saying for measure.
[01:22:33]  Sorry.
[01:22:36]  I'm sort of torn.
[01:22:37]  I want to ask Walter, based on something he said, whether we're, in fact, not as divided as we think, that maybe there's an idea.
[01:22:46]  Okay, I got to get it.
[01:22:47]  In the national media, on cable.
[01:22:50]  On radio, on social media, if you spend time on true social, you spend time on X, you think we're divided.
[01:22:57]  We're normal people in this room.
[01:22:58]  We kind of disagree on social media.
[01:23:00]  This is where all the normal people are.
[01:23:03]  But in our daily lives, we're going to work, we're teaching the kids, we're trying to do things.
[01:23:09]  We are a far less divided nation than our politicians and our media think we are.
[01:23:14]  Well, yeah, the division thing.
[01:23:16]  But you must admit there are people who have an interest.
[01:23:19]  You must admit there are people who have an interest in keeping us divided.
[01:23:22]  There are people who have an interest, and those tend to be the politicians and the media because they profit on dividing us.
[01:23:29]  Well, this is what I was going to ask.
[01:23:31]  I was going to ask Clint this.
[01:23:32]  As Ken is talking, I'm thinking, I want, you know, and Walter are talking.
[01:23:36]  Do you think that everyone in American life and American history is deserving of this kind of complicated and sympathetic might be the wrong word, but understanding notion that, yeah, they had some serious flaws?
[01:23:51]  I mean, or are we in danger of glossing over some real evil in the history?
[01:23:58]  When I was, before I became a writer, I was a high school English teacher.
[01:24:04]  And it was one of the teachers out here?
[01:24:07]  There we go.
[01:24:10]  The rest of them are at home asleep because it's hard.
[01:24:16]  But it was the best job I've ever had other than working for you, clearly.
[01:24:23]  But that's a raise coming.
[01:24:26]  I realized halfway through that I was on stage with my boss.
[01:24:31]  But when you're a teacher, pedagogically, you know, so if I'm teaching about Jefferson, my interest is not in telling my students that Jefferson was good or that Jefferson was bad.
[01:24:48]  Jefferson was evil or Jefferson was amazing.
[01:24:53]  For me, what I want to do is lay out as much information as I can about who Jefferson was.
[01:25:00]  This is what he said, wrote in the Declaration of Independence in the first draft.
[01:25:04]  This is what he wrote, this is what ended up in the second draft.
[01:25:07]  This is what he wrote in notes of the state of Virginia.
[01:25:10]  This is what he wrote in his letter to Madison.
[01:25:12]  How do we hold all of these different things that he said about slavery, about independence, about his sort of moral philosophy alongside one another?
[01:25:22]  And I might come to a different conclusion than my students come to, right?
[01:25:27]  It might be the case that this student thinks based on the same information that Jefferson was awful, and this person thinks that Jefferson was phenomenal.
[01:25:39]  I'm less interested in a sort of didactic framing of like, this is what you should think about Jefferson, or this is what you should think about Washington.
[01:25:50]  What I want us to do is to be operating, what I want us to do is to be operating with the same information with which to make sort of decisions based in good faith.

=== Debating Statues with Grace (06:13) ===

[01:26:01]  Because it can be, you know, part of what the last several years have taught us is that people of good faith can have different ideas about whether a statue of Thomas Jefferson should or shouldn't come down.
[01:26:12]  And it doesn't mean that, you know, one person might think that based on, again, on the same information that that statue should come down, one person might think that that statue should stay up.
[01:26:20]  But if we're operating with the same ecosystem of information, if we're operating with the same ability to extend grace to one another, should we extend grace to Jefferson?
[01:26:34]  I think it's its own question, but I do think we should extend grace to one another in our collective assessments of making sense of this country.
[01:26:46]  I want to ask all of you, you know, the 250th anniversary is going to be, is already politicized, it's already fractious.
[01:26:56]  It's almost too on the nose a metaphor that the people who are organizing the 250th anniversary celebrations can't agree on what the celebrations mean.
[01:27:08]  But I want to ask all four of you how you would love to see or most like to see America recognize its 250th birthday in the framework of, look, you have to, it has to be a positive patriot.
[01:27:26]  I want you to talk about your own version of patriotism.
[01:27:29]  What you think of when you think of yourself as a patriotic person.
[01:27:32]  Maybe, Ken, you want to start and talk about what you would imagine 250 would look like.
[01:27:38]  I just, you know, we have, as I've told you a gazillion times in our editing room and have had for decades, this neon sign that says in lowercase cursive, it's complicated.
[01:27:50]  And that's it.
[01:27:52]  I mean, Clint is right.
[01:27:54]  You're not looking, what we live in is a world in which everything is a binary, and it just does not, real life is not like that.
[01:28:02]  It's not good Jefferson, bad Jefferson.
[01:28:06]  We are pushed to think we have to make a decision one way or the other.
[01:28:11]  So it's not even a question of letting him or anybody else in history off the hook or putting someone back on the it's really just about calling balls and strikes And saying this is what happened.
[01:28:23]  I mean, this is the city that invented jazz.
[01:28:25]  And jazz is so filled with this passionate acknowledgement of the moment.
[01:28:34]  This is, is what jazz says.
[01:28:37]  And it takes in all of the things that we are.
[01:28:42]  Wynton Marsalis, a son of this city, said in our film: Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing can be true at the same time.
[01:28:51]  And I think what my idea of what this should be is to embrace the sort of complication.
[01:28:59]  I had a daughter who had reached the appropriate age of 16 or 17 who was not going to listen to her father read the Declaration on the Fourth of July again.
[01:29:13]  Did not want me to hang the big flag out on the 4th of July.
[01:29:18]  And so I said, Here, great.
[01:29:20]  I'll have your sister read a few lines from the Declaration, but I want you to read from 1851 or 52 what Frederick Douglass said the 4th of July meant to black people.
[01:29:34]  So she read it.
[01:29:35]  And now she wants me to read the Declaration every year.
[01:29:40]  And it was possible at the same table to embrace, you know, the very beautiful ideas that we mutually pledge to each other, our lives and fortunes, and sacred honor, and at the same time, hear a black man's saying that it means nothing because of unfinished work.
[01:30:00]  And all of those things are true.
[01:30:02]  And I think when we live in such a selective world, when you talk, Walter, about the algorithm, they're leading to infinite uncomplexity.
[01:30:11]  You know, it's this: Babe Ruth only hits home runs.
[01:30:15]  Well, Babe Ruth struck out way more times, and he only comes up to bat once every nine times.
[01:30:20]  And so at some point, you have to yield the story to everybody else, right?
[01:30:26]  And that when you hit into a game ending double play, that's true.
[01:30:30]  That just was.
[01:30:30]  If you made a clam in the middle of your riff in that jazz solo, that happened too.
[01:30:36]  And that work can still be great and beautiful.
[01:30:39]  So I would like to see, as Walter said, the key word in that enormous sentence is pursuit.
[01:30:47]  It meant that we were setting in motion a process, more perfect 11 years later, union, more perfect union that we're a nation in the process of becoming.
[01:30:57]  Just absorbing that and being able to go forward and say yes.
[01:31:02]  So this 4th of July we'll listen to Frederick Douglass and we'll read the declaration as well.
[01:31:14]  I was just asking if you're going to have a picnic or not.
[01:31:17]  Yeah, no, no, no.
[01:31:18]  Hot dogs and hamburgers.
[01:31:21]  You began this panel by talking about the bicentennial and saying we had just gone through Watergate and Vietnam and the assassinations of Kennedys and King and the urban riots and everything that happened.
[01:31:35]  And then they rang the Liberty Bell, Gerald Ford did, and the tall ships came into our harbors and the fireworks went off.
[01:31:43]  And we healed.
[01:31:44]  We calmed down a bit as a nation.
[01:31:48]  So my hope would be that even as we deeply disagree on different things, we do what Clint just said about extending grace to one another to realize we're all part of this country and that if we can hang together, as they said 250 years ago, we will have the first thing ever on this planet, which is a diverse democracy.

=== Finding Common Ground Again (03:06) ===

[01:32:15]  And so what we could do, what I would hope everybody would say, okay, here's my birthday resolution, is we could get up each morning and say, I could do something that's divisive.
[01:32:27]  I could post something that would tear us apart.
[01:32:29]  I could, even as the Trump administration started Freedom 350 because they didn't like the 250th that Congress created, America 250.
[01:32:40]  Say, wait a minute, what can I do each day?
[01:32:44]  every single way to turn down the hatred and vitriol that gets stoked up in our society and say it's not just them, it's us, as Pogo would say, where we have to be kinder and extend more grace even to people we disagree with.
[01:33:06]  I don't, let me just say, I don't, I'm not accusing you of naivete, but we also, a couple of us live in Washington, and we see, and it is not, I'm sharing a, you know, my own view here, it is not a fair fight.
[01:33:22]  Yeah, there's a bunch of, there are people on all sides of the debate that don't argue in good faith and that they don't, they're not on the level with the way they talk to people when they use that hominid.
[01:33:32]  But this is the first president I could think of who actually doesn't even hypocritically make believe that he's the president of all Americans.
[01:33:42]  So you could wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to be a better person, but we're in a different reality right now.
[01:33:50]  And look, in America, we have something called common ground.
[01:33:54]  That's what the whole founding was about.
[01:33:56]  In New Orleans, we call it the neutral ground.
[01:33:59]  You go to the parades, and whatever walks of life, whoever you voted for, whatever pin you're wearing, whatever your ethnic background, everybody's standing on the neutral ground and trying to catch beads.
[01:34:11]  we could be that way in america if we don't let the people in washington try to control our dialogue you know it's interesting that you you invoke new orleans in that way I was here last month.
[01:34:30]  I brought my kids from Mardi Gras.
[01:34:32]  I try to bring them.
[01:34:34]  I have an eight-year-old and a seven-year-old, and they've come twice now because I want them.
[01:34:38]  They live in Maryland, which is just much more boring than New Orleans.
[01:34:47]  And I want them to be able to do that.
[01:34:49]  Is there any other place?
[01:34:50]  I mean, no, but part of what happened, I mean, for me, you know, Hurricane Katrina was my senior year of high school, and so my life is kind of demarcated by, you know, my childhood, my youth in New Orleans and adulthood, sort of beyond.
[01:35:04]  And you don't realize how unique and special a place New Orleans is until it's kind of stripped away from you.
[01:35:10]  And you're made to live in the suburban, you know, suburban Maryland.
[01:35:15]  Which I love, to be fair.
[01:35:17]  It's a great place.
[01:35:17]  Shout out to Silver Spring.
[01:35:20]  Home of Frederick Douglass.

=== Algorithms vs Real Life (02:30) ===

[01:35:21]  Exactly.
[01:35:25]  But I brought them here, and I actually did have this moment where I was like, is this the most democratic place in the world right now?
[01:35:35]  I mean, I think that there's something to be said about Mardi Gras and also Saints games.
[01:35:41]  When you think about you go to a New Orleans Saints game, I mean, I am probably around people whenever I come back and have the ability to go with who I'm, I just, if I knew their politics, I would want to sit on the other side of the world.
[01:35:55]  And yet, we're all sitting there collectively disillusioned, just trying to be like, who's our QB1?
[01:36:08]  But I say that because the thing that I think about when we think about the 250 is when I think about so much of what we've been talking about is your point about the algorithm.
[01:36:15]  Like, the thing that I try to remind myself to do is get off my phone.
[01:36:20]  Because if your politics only exist in your phone or manifest themselves through your social media, you will think that everybody is crazy.
[01:36:30]  You will think that, you know, it's either you're with me or you're against me, that there's no in-between.
[01:36:35]  And it just, it's the sort of algorithmic animosity, the algorithmic intensity.
[01:36:40]  You know, I have friends, I have people I love who if I only knew them from their social media, I would hate them.
[01:36:46]  But then I go have coffee with them.
[01:36:48]  But then I go to lunch with them.
[01:36:49]  But then I have them over for game night.
[01:36:51]  And I'm reminded that, like, you know, you, we are all maybe falling victim to some degree to the way that the algorithm incentivizes us to post and how to talk about certain things.
[01:37:02]  But when you are in proximity to people, like when you're sitting across from someone, I mean, we experienced this at the Atlantic.
[01:37:08]  I have colleagues who write things that I vehemently disagree with.
[01:37:13]  But I see them at the office.
[01:37:14]  I see them, you know, at lunch, which you all generously provide for us.
[01:37:21]  And it is difficult to carry the same sort of animosity or the same, it's a sort of imagined animosity towards someone when you are dealing with the fullness and the three-dimensionality of that person sitting across from you.
[01:37:37]  So I think the more that we can remember that like the digital ecosystem that we live in is distorting our sense of who one another are, then I think it allows us to have a bit more empathy, a bit more humility.

=== Digital Empathy and Humility (02:50) ===

[01:37:51]  And again, it's not going to solve everything.
[01:37:53]  It's not a panacea.
[01:37:55]  But I do think that remembering, you know, I try to extend to others the same grace and generosity that throughout so much of my life has been extended to me.
[01:38:04]  And some days I'm good at it, and some days I'm not.
[01:38:07]  But I wake up every day and try to live a little bit more in that way because I think it just gets us closer to where we want to be.
[01:38:16]  So for our next session, we're going to invite up Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, and he's going to turn the switch off.
[01:38:28]  And it'll be, you know, just turn it off and we'll see what happens at 250.
[01:38:31]  Annette, the last word to you.
[01:38:35]  Well, what I would hope is what has been said already.
[01:38:39]  It's an interesting moment, though.
[01:38:41]  I mean, this is probably the first time that I've thought more about the grievances of the Declaration of Independence than the preamble and the importance of all Americans doing their duty as citizens and being vigilant, not just on social media, but in their communities, local school boards, all of those kinds of things, because we're in a really interesting moment.
[01:39:05]  You know, the question, Franklin, is whether it's apocryphal or not, the story of Republic, if we could keep it.
[01:39:11]  That's a legitimate question to ask now.
[01:39:14]  And the key is people, not the individual president, not just the Congress, putative Congress.
[01:39:24]  The actual people of the United States who are going to decide whether this Republican experiment is going to continue.
[01:39:32]  And it's in grave danger.
[01:39:33]  It's not just here, but it's around the world.
[01:39:37]  And I like to think of myself as an optimistic person.
[01:39:41]  I have kids.
[01:39:42]  I have to be optimistic on their behalf.
[01:39:45]  But it's tough.
[01:39:48]  It's tough at this particular moment.
[01:39:50]  What would you change if there's anything you could change?
[01:39:53]  I would change complacency.
[01:39:57]  People who don't realize that a democracy or republic requires individual effort.
[01:40:05]  People have to be active.
[01:40:07]  And not just voting is important, but the fact that people don't vote, and you know, you're not interested in voting, but voting's interested in you, whatever.
[01:40:17]  That's the thing you have to remember.
[01:40:18]  So, I would change the level of activity on the part of citizens and to think that we could lose all of this.
[01:40:26]  I mean, there's a lot wrong with America, but there's a lot right with America.
[01:40:29]  But you could lose the country by turning, you know, not paying attention, turning aside from the problems that we're facing.
[01:40:38]  Well, that is a gracing final charge to all of us.

=== A Final Charge to America (01:11) ===

[01:40:42]  Thank you.
[01:40:42]  Thank you to this great, great panel.
[01:40:45]  Thanks to all of you for being here.
[01:40:48]  Thanks a lot.
[01:41:06]  And now, please welcome Cheryl Landrieu back to the stage.
[01:41:14]  Thank you, everyone, for coming.
[01:41:16]  Tonight, I think we're standing in what the panelists described as the common ground of ideas.
[01:41:21]  I think Walter coined that phrase.
[01:41:23]  And you know, in New Orleans, and Walter, you know, this is true, we conclude everything with music.
[01:41:28]  In New Orleans Book Festival, we call it a Mardi Gras for the mind.
[01:41:31]  So, please help me welcome the Black Magic Drumline.
[01:41:47]  C-SPAN's Washington Journal, a live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and