NARRATOR: The American idea was born in Philadelphia 250 years ago.

This bold experiment would become a beacon for democracy throughout the world.

TAYLOR: When we think about our American Revolution, we, of course, think about independence from Britain.

And that's a big deal.

But we also need to think about, this is the formation of republican government.

And it's also the formation of our union of our states.

And, all three of those were enormous gambles.

They were unprecedented.

There had never been the foundation of a republic out of a revolution.

NARRATOR: The American Revolution was the first war proclaiming universal rights, forever altering how people would think about government and themselves.

The Constitution, written in 1787, begins with the words, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union..." a radical declaration that power rests with the people alone.

GORDON-REED: The people who created the American Revolution and created the American nation assumed that Americans would be involved, that they would be active citizens, not subjects.

Being a citizen requires the kind of participation in the democracy that keeps it vibrant.

NARRATOR: Across two and a half centuries, the nation's ideals have been tested.

Yet the values of self-government, equality, and the checks and balances of our unique system have prevailed.

The question now is the same as it was at the beginning: How will Americans work together, and bring us closer to that "More Perfect Union."

Next... ROSEN: Welcome to the National Constitution Center and to A More Perfect Union.

I'm Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center.

BARNES: And I'm Melody Barnes, executive director of the University of Virginia's Karsh Institute of Democracy.

Joining us to explore the state of the American experiment and areas of agreement and disagreement about the American idea are Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, co-directors of the PBS documentary, The American Revolution.

And Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation - And Could Again.

Ken and Sarah, we are delighted to have you here with us this evening.

And I want to start with you to talk about the film.

Your film The American Revolution takes a fresh and in-depth look at what happened in the years before and after 1776, and I'm wondering if you can tell us about the unique set of circumstances that came together at the moment that led to the uprising against British rule.

BURNS: Thank you so much for letting us participate.

I think the American Revolution is the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history.

It starts off in, in rather pedestrian fashions, uh, kind of arguments over, as we were taught in school, taxation and representation.

Underlying it is a desire for Native American land.

That's sort of undergirding the whole interest in North America and that project.

And what happens is that disagreements between British people over that representation, over those taxes, over that Indian land suddenly gets blown out into a much larger argument about natural rights that begin to articulate what happens, uh, down the street with the Declaration of Independence.

So, the beginning of the revolution starts in simple human disagreement and ends up articulating the highest aspirations of humankind, and that's a really good story.

Underneath the sort of relatively simplistic, uh, stories of disagreement is this amazing transformation.

Everyone before the revolution is essentially a subject.

The people in the United States are now citizens with all of the responsibilities inherent with that.

BARNES: You talked about the simplicity with which we often think about this period in time.

And for many of us, we haven't studied these issues since high school, or for some of us, in college.

And I want you to tell us why you think it is so important for us to study the American Revolution right now?

BURNS: I think it's possible for us to reinvigorate the sense of purpose that we have had and have, perhaps fearing that we have lost, by going back and understanding that origin story, which is, for most Americans, unfortunately, sort of encased with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia, and needs to be liberated from that.

Maybe it's that there's no photographs or newsreels.

Maybe they have buckled shoes or powdered wigs.

But somehow, we've kept them at arm's length, and yet, in this complicated story is, I think, the beginnings of our salvation, our recalibrating where we want to go, what our North Star might be.

BARNES: What about you, Sarah?

BOTSTEIN: I think, at the end of the day, the American Revolution is actually a deeply patriotic story.

About... it's actually, it's a very unlikely story.

So, in 1775, 1776, the colonists in Boston had no idea what the world was gonna look like nearly a decade later.

I think in this moment where we feel divided and things feel complicated and we don't talk to our neighbor about politics, I think thinking, for me at least, in working on the film, to go back and understand how divided and different opinions different people had, including the Founders, and how they, over the course of a decade, came together to create this extremely interesting, important, and new kind of nation that we all have a great stake in and a lot to fight for.

And also, I think, important for us to think about the men, the women, the children who sacrificed themselves.

This was a bloody, difficult, awful 18th-century war, and a lot of people sacrificed themselves, lost loved ones, families were divided.

And we need to honor that sacrifice and, and make good on what they thought they could do and what we have done, I think, well and not well over 250 years.

ROSEN: Well, the principles that inspired the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, liberty, equality, and government by consent, became building blocks for the Founders as they built the Constitution, which is the framework for the United States.

The US Constitution divided the government into three branches: the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

Let's look at a clip from The American Revolution film.

NARRATOR: In a delicate balance by which each was meant to check the others to ensure against overreach that could result in tyranny.

They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment.

Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an "unprincipled" man would "mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion."

"In a government like ours," he would write, no one is "above the law."

WASHINGTON: I wish the Constitution which is offered had been made more perfect, but I sincerely believe it is the best that could be obtained at this time, and as a constitutional door is opened for amendment hereafter, the adoption of it, is in my opinion, desirable.

ROSEN: Those last words were from George Washington.

In my new book, The Pursuit of Liberty, I show how the battle between Hamilton and Jefferson over congressional, presidential, and judicial power has defined American history from the founding until today.

Jefferson championed states' rights and individual liberty while Hamilton pushed for a strong federal government and a powerful executive.

We're now gonna talk about the three branches, and let's start with Congress.

In Federalist 48, James Madison wrote, "The legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex."

Yuval, you've written a superb book about the Constitution.

Tell us why Congress came first, what was the core of the federalist and anti-federalist debate over the powers of Congress, and most importantly, what would the Founders think of Congress today?

LEVIN: Well, it's a wonderful question, Jeff, thank you.

And thank you for letting me be part of this extraordinary conversation and bringing us all together.

The first branch, as you say, is not first by coincidence.

It is first because there was no other way to think about how a democracy could begin.

Madison says that too.

In Federalist 51, he says very plainly, "In republican government, the legislative department necessarily predominates."

And the reasons for that actually have to do exactly with what Ken and Sarah were just talking about so beautifully.

They go right back to the revolution, to the Declaration of Independence, to the simple fact that we are all created equal.

In a society of equals, you cannot have a politics of coercion.

You have to have a politics of discussion, of persuasion, of accommodation, of negotiation.

And that kind of politics can only really happen in a plural institution like a legislature, where the people who represent the diversity of the society can come together and deal with each other, negotiate with each other.

What a legislature ultimately does is provide for a kind of structured negotiation where those representatives of the differences that characterize our society can work together somehow.

And that's rooted in a recognition of another fact that absolutely goes back to the founding and that was plain to the Founders, as it should be to us, and that is the permanence of differences of opinion in a free society.

You bring people together, and they're allowed to think what they want.

They won't, they will not all think the same thing.

And so, what do you do with that?

Madison's answer is, "You can still have a unified society despite that fact."

Because in a free society, that is therefore a diverse society, unity doesn't mean thinking alike.

Unity means acting together.

And the question the Framers of the Constitution had to wrestle with was how?

How do you act together when you don't think alike?

You do it by bargaining in structured ways in a legislative body.

And so, to deal with the fact of diversity and equality, the fundamental facts of American life, then and now, it was necessary for our way of thinking about government to start with a legislature.

The simplest answer is simple, absolute majoritarian democracy.

Take a vote, and the majority gets to do what it wants.

Majority rule is essential to legitimacy, but majorities can be oppressive.

You can't look at American history for a second without seeing that.

And so how do you balance the need for majority rule and minority rights, and the need to act together when you don't think alike.

It's a complicated challenge, and that's why the Constitution is a complicated system.

It's also why it begins with Congress.

It could not have begun anywhere else.

ROSEN: "How do you think together if you can't all work alike?"

That puts it so beautifully and helps us understand why Congress is so central to the Founders' plan.

Well, as soon as the new government is up and running, Hamilton and Jefferson start disagreeing about the powers of Congress.

Why did Jefferson and Hamilton view federal and state power so differently?

BARNES: It's a great question, and I often think about that phrase, "Where you sit is where you stand."

And I use that because Jefferson and Hamilton come from very different places.

You think about Jefferson, he was a Virginian.

He believed in the agrarian way of life.

He thought that if farmers were leading and driving the nation, that it would be a more virtuous nation.

He believed in a strong federal defense, but he thought if the states were in control, that the states had a better handle on what their citizens wanted and needed.

And then you have Hamilton.

He saw the war up close.

He saw what happened to the Continental Army when there weren't resources to fund the war.

He believed that if there was a stable, strong, federal government, that there would be the opportunity to have the resources to fund things like a defense.

And he was also there for the Articles of Confederation when Jefferson was abroad, and he saw the chaos that took place there.

So, you have these two men coming from very, very different places, and at the same time, they both believed that their view was the view that would advance liberty.

So, there was a common view and a common desire for an outcome, but they came from different places.

And I think it's also interesting that we see the thread of that debate being pulled through to the debates that we're having today.

ROSEN: Thread is exactly the right word.

It's the productive tension between the threads that sustains the American idea.

Well, Ken, you have said that democracy was not the intention of the revolution; it was a consequence.

What'd you mean?

BURNS: Well, I think the evidence shows that the Founders were initially interested in forming a republican government that would represent sort of the highest class.

The property owners, the people who had had some form of education.

As the war progresses, it's really clear that in order to win the war, they're going to have to offer the people who are fighting that war, who are often teenagers, and, uh, ne'er-do-wells, and second and third sons without the chance of inheritance.

And recent immigrants from Germany and England, they're gonna have to have a stake.

They've done the fighting, they've done, as Sarah said, the dying.

And so, what you see is that democracy, which was the big fear all along, it was the rule of the mob.

Even when Abigail writes to John Adams in Philadelphia and says, "Remember the ladies.

Husbands will be tyrants if you let them.

And if you don't give us some representation, we're likely to foment a rebellion."

He'll go, "What?

What, women will want something?"

You have this wonderful tension between the people trying to grasp onto a kind of aristocracy, an elite talent that they're inheriting from antiquity.

This idea of the sort of highest levels of society.

But the reality of the war is, and remember it's long, and as Sarah says, it's bloody, you know, done with bayonets, and muskets at very close range, and the damage is great, the medicine is really primitive.

People are dying, and the people who are staying are that ragtag group.

There's a wonderful quote from a German Hessian who ends up surrendering at Yorktown.

And he says, "Who would've thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble could come a people who could defy kings."

So that rabble, that multitude of rabble, is somehow going to have to participate in the glories of this victory.

And that means that you're going to have to extend what you normally thought was going to be more of an elitist thing to most everybody.

And what we meant then, and of course we're talking about active verbs and process verbs, like "pursuit of happiness" and "more perfect union," you're going to have to extend to them some basic rights.

Pennsylvania starts first.

And they're no longer saying property, they're saying men, White men, 21 years of age.

This is radical, and they're upstairs at what we now call Independence Hall.

And downstairs, this is freaking John Adams out.

(laughter).

So, we can say that democracy is not the object of the revolution.

It is a consequence and perhaps even an unintended consequence, but one that we can now grab onto with, with a, with a wonderful sense of what a gift that accident was.

It's a wonderful bottom-up story that I think that we've focused on our top-down Founders, understandably.

And if you can remove the layers, the veils, and, and see them as complicated, flawed, extraordinary human beings, no one more important, more central to the success of our experiment than George Washington, but also introduce dozens of people who are so-called bottom up, who are contributing to this dialogue.

So essentially, slavery's over at this moment.

It's gonna take four score and nine years, way too long, but it's over.

Women are gonna get the right to vote.

144 more years, but it is going to happen.

And so, you begin to realize, like, the walls of Jericho, these ideas are going to blow this thing apart, and they're out, and you can't put that genie back in the bottle.

ROSEN: And you see the war between those ideas in Jefferson himself.

BURNS: And his whole foundational world of slavery is over.

I mean, it's bankrupt.

But other people are growing and learning.

He opened the door by distilling a century of enlightenment thinking into one remarkable sentence, the second sentence of the Declaration.

He did it, and he doomed his world and opened up possibilities for, as Adam says, "millions yet unborn."

BARNES: We've been talking about the legislative branch, and, Ken, thanks to you, I will forever have a picture of John Adams freaking out now in my head.

BURNS: Downstairs.

BARNES: Downstairs.

But let's turn to executive power, and Article II of the Constitution begins, "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

At a dinner party in Philadelphia in 1791, because the Founders got together with the way we also get together.

Jefferson recorded Hamilton as saying, "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar."

He founded the Democratic-Republican Party to resist Hamilton's supposed conspiracy to resurrect monarchy in America.

Jeff, you begin your new book with this story to show that both Hamilton and Jefferson feared a Caesar-like demagogue who would consolidate power and threaten liberty.

I now want to ask you why you believe that to be true.

ROSEN: It's the dinner party that defined America, and it's not the one in the room where it happened, where they moved the capital to DC in exchange for assuming the debt.

It's a year later, Washington's away, the cabinet's gathered, and Hamilton looks around the room and says to Jefferson, "Who are those three guys on the wall?"

And Jefferson says, "Those are my three visions of the greatest men in history, John Locke, and Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton."

Hamilton pauses and then blurts out, "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar."

And Jefferson records in his diary that night, "This proves that Hamilton is not only for a monarchy, but a monarchy bottomed on corruption."

And he goes on to found the Democratic-Republican Party in supposed opposition to the monarchical tendencies of Hamilton and the Federalists, and this defines the battle for the next hundred years.

Hamilton was joking.

He fears a demagogue as much as Jefferson.

He thinks the demagogue is gonna come from below by flattering the people and persuading them to exchange their liberties.

Jefferson fears the demagogue from above, the character who will call off elections, and, in fact, he worries that a future president will lose an election by a few votes and refuse to leave office.

But both of them, in the end, unite in their opposition to demagogues.

And they think they've found one in Aaron Burr.

Hamilton says, "If we have a crypto-Caesar, 'tis Burr."

And he nobly sacrifices his life because he fears Burr as a would-be Caesar in a way that Jefferson, who he dislikes but thinks is a patriot, can never be.

And for the next 250 years, we've been debating who is the next Caesar?

And all of our strongest presidents have been attacked as Caesar.

Andrew Jackson is called King Andrew.

Lincoln is assailed as a dictator.

Franklin Roosevelt gets so many dictator comments that he dresses up like Julius Caesar for his birthday in 1934.

And Eleanor dresses as a Roman matron, and he kind of just tries to make fun of the whole fear.

And today, we are having a similar debate.

Is our president Julius Caesar?

Is he trying to consolidate power and threaten the core of the republic, or is he, like Jackson, a populist who's trying to shrink the federal government using strong executive power?

BARNES: I just wanna delve a little bit more deeply on this and where we are today.

Do you think that the Founders' fears have started to come true with the shifts in the presidency and the, and the executive branch over the last many decades?

I mean, we've gone from this idea of a chief magistrate to the use of executive orders.

And certainly, executive orders have been used for decades, but now being used almost at an exponential rate.

Has that fear come to pass?

ROSEN: It's a central question, and you're right to take us back several decades, and maybe even a century, because it was in the progressive era, in particular, in the election of 1912, that both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson defend the president as a steward of the people who will directly channel popular will.

And ever since, presidents have insisted that they alone represent the people, combined with new technologies, first the radio and TV, and now, of course, social media, there's no question that the president has become a populist office in the way that the Founders never imagined.

That, combined with the growth of executive orders, George Washington issued, uh, um, less than 10.

Uh, Lincoln had more like 50, but then it ballooned up to 100s during the New Deal era under Roosevelt.

Ever since, President Obama or so, the numbers have been consistent.

But the real change is a supine Congress.

A Congress that's refused to check the empowered president, combined with a Supreme Court that's taking an increasingly deferential view of what's called the unitary executive theory, means that just descriptively, whether you think it's a good idea or not, the president has absolutely swelled in ways that the Founders did not imagine.

BARNES: Jeff, you've painted a really wonderful arc for us.

Sarah, I wanna come back to you and go back to the beginning of that arc and to George Washington.

And your film helps us understand him as a man and as a leader.

And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the character of George Washington that helped to shape this office and our perception of what this office should be.

BOTSTEIN: I think when we started making the film, we understood George Washington would be very important, and we would not have a country without George Washington.

I don't think we understood how important George Washington was both to the military story that we've been talking about.

And he was not just a great general who leapt out onto the battlefield and won every battle in a smart and thoughtful way.

In fact, he made a lot of mistakes that military historians love to talk about.

But he did, have the idea that he could lose the battle and win the war, and that happened over and over again in the American Revolution.

And Washington was a very steady, thoughtful, helpful leader.

And I think he inspired, the soldiers and the people around him, and, is ultimately a little bit unknowable and a little bit opaque.

And that, is a leadership style that our country needed.

For me, one of the most moving scenes in our film is in the last episode, where he walks away from power not once but twice, at the height of his power, actually, he walks away from it in a military sense.

And then he walks away from the presidency when he feels that he's done what he needs to do and the country needs to go on without him.

So, I think historians, to a person, agree that he is the most important person for the American Revolution, both in a military and then I think in a political sense.

BARNES: Thank you for that.

I mean, he is the person that we first learn about as children, and, and he stretches across American history in such a powerful way.

BOTSTEIN: But he's cartoonish, I think, in some of the ways that we think about him.

The more you peel the onion, the more you learn about him.

He didn't have his own children.

He kept meticulous records.

He traveled in a tent.

He had changing views on slavery.

All the Founders, as Ken was just saying about Jefferson, have different records on slavery.

At the end of his life, he freed some slaves, and his wife didn't.

So, it's an interesting, complicated story, and he's an interesting, complicated person, just like our interesting and complicated country.

BARNES: Yuval, I do want to ask you a question about this.

I mean, given your experience, and you have worked in the White House.

You have worked in government.

And my question for you is that some administrations have taken executive power to seemingly new limits.

Is this unique to our time and topic?

LEVIN: Well, I think it's not unique, but that doesn't mean it's not worrisome.

I would describe it in the terms that Jeff pointed to, which I think it's important to see that the Framers of the Constitution were looking for a balance.

It's described in the film wonderfully as a delicate balance, and it is sometimes a delicate balance, but very often it's really a rough balance.

The branches are meant to fight each other.

There is intended to be conflict constantly in the system.

And so, the expectation was that people in power would seek to maximize their power, but because they were set against each other, the system as a whole might be kept in some balance.

I think what stands out about this moment, because we have seen presidents seek to exceed their authority before the 21st century, and those moments have often been followed by periods of Congressional reassertion.

In the wake of Andrew Jackson, in the wake of Woodrow Wilson, you saw presidents who were self-consciously restrained and made a point of being restrained in their office.

In the wake of Franklin Roosevelt, we enacted a constitutional amendment to limit the president to two terms.

In all those cases, there was an institution of Congress that stood up for itself and said, "This has gone too far, and now we're gonna push back."

And the question for us in the 21st century is whether that can happen now.

Because a president who wants more power would not have surprised the Founders.

A Congress that doesn't seem to want power would very much have surprised the Founders.

And I think in this moment, when, all we're seeing in our politics is a constant set of titanic struggles between the executive and the judiciary, we should keep our eye on the dog that isn't barking.

On the institution that is absent from these fights, what's really missing is that.

We need more Constitutional conflict, not less.

And when you don't see it, that's when you should worry.

BURNS: I think that Founders are reverse engineering for a tyrant, meaning coming more likely from the executive.

What they aren't reverse engineering for is for a docile and a dominated legislative.

LEVIN: Yeah, it's important to see how they worried about both things at once.

In the 10 years before the Constitutional Convention, they've lived through 5 years of war and 5 years of peace.

The war had shown them the danger of tyrannical executives.

The peace had shown them the danger of the absence of effective government.

BURNS: Right.

LEVIN: So, they went into the convention knowing they needed a government that could function, that could be effective and administer itself.

The states in that period under the Articles of Confederation had very, very weak executives, the exception of New York, and the lesson they learned was, "We need an executive."

But they didn't forget the lesson that executives can be very, very dangerous to liberty, and they tried somehow to create a sustainable balance within the system itself that would give us what we need from an effective executive administrator, but would not end us up with a tyrant.

ROSEN: Well, let's talk now about the judiciary.

In Federalist 78, Hamilton famously said, "The judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.

It has no influence over either the sword or the purse.

It may truly be said to have neither force nor will, but merely judgment."

Yuval, why did the Founders find it necessary to create a federal judiciary?

What problem were they trying to solve?

LEVIN: You know, it's an interesting thing.

The need for courts was actually a very important reason why the Constitutional Convention happened.

We don't think about it now, but there were disputes between the states, especially about land, that nobody could figure out how to resolve.

What happens when Virginia and Maryland both claim the Potomac River?

And it so happened that one of the largest landowners on the Virginia side was George Washington, who was in a position to call a convention.

And he called a convention in Annapolis to try to figure out, "How're we supposed to resolve these problems?"

And the problem was structural.

It was the absence of an institution.

And so, the Framers who came to the convention disagreed about a lot of things, but they actually all thought there was a need for a national judiciary, and its purpose would be to resolve disputes about how the system was supposed to work.

There was a lot of talk at the convention about whether judges should be involved in legislation, about whether judges should be involved in the veto power, which originally was proposed as a power to be exercised by the president and the Supreme Court together.

And the Framers decided, "No, judges can't be involved at the beginning because they ultimately have to make a decision at the end," that only they could be respected enough to make.

And to sustain that, they created a judiciary focused on structure, a real innovation of the American Constitution.

ROSEN: How did the court system evolve, and how did the debate over judicial power, change after the ratification of the Constitution?

BARNES: Well, as we've been describing, during the Constitutional Convention, there was deep focus on the legislative and the executive branches, with an understanding that a judiciary was absolutely necessary.

But when you look at the Constitution, what you see is the creation of a Supreme Court and the opportunity to create inferior courts.

But it was, it was relatively sparse.

Not long after ratification, you had members of the first Congress coming together to enact the Federal Judiciary Act.

And that's the place where they put meat on the bones.

So, you have the Supreme Court and then the establishment of district and appellate courts, and going to the point that Yuval was making, a deeper understanding of how the state and federal courts would work in tandem with one another.

Simultaneously, keeping their promise, you've got Madison now with a draft of the Bill of Rights in hand, which also created clarity around the liberties that would be those of citizens and establishing a right to a civil trial, right to a criminal trial.

Again, putting more meat on the bones.

These things were happening at the same time.

And then not long after, you get to the point of Marbury versus Madison.

And you have this seminal case coming down that's saying, "Yes, the Supreme Court, judicial review, the right to determine acts that are unconstitutional."

And that really establishes the Supreme Court and puts it on par with these other two branches.

And then, of course, we've got the debates that have gone on that you allude to, Jeff, since then.

The interpretation of the Constitution, the battles around the court, the battles around who will sit on the courts, and those are certainly heightened and fraught today.

ROSEN: Yuval, what do you think about that suggestion, that the central debate in American constitutional history has been between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution?

LEVIN: One way I've thought about it is, the separation of powers is also a separation in time.

Congress speaks in the future tense.

It says, "Shall," and "Will," and builds out legal frameworks that people will live in tomorrow.

The president lives in the present tense and acts now.

The president gets that 3:00 AM phone call.

The president speaks for the country in moments of crisis, and is expected to act.

The courts speak and act in the past tense.

They review things that have already happened and determine whether they're in line with the kinds of broad frameworks of law that were created by Congress and enacted by presidents.

And I think a lot of times, when we run into obstacles in the Constitution that seem to constrain our government from doing things that large portions of the public wanna do, we bang our head into some particular word that seems to stand in the way of action.

And the courts, when they're doing their job, try to continue to speak in the past tense, but they're often forced, and we sure see this now, they're dragged into the present tense.

They're dragged into debates that are not ultimately about whether the actions taken by public officials are in line with the legislation enacted by prior public officials; they're really about, "What should our government be allowed to do?"

And I think that it's very important for us to see that that is a question intended to be answered in the legislative process.

Sometimes that process needs to involve amendments to the Constitution.

We've found ourselves in places where the Supreme Court said, "You can't squeeze the, the income tax through the existing tax language in Article I."

And so, the country passed a constitutional amendment allowing for the income tax.

It's not my favorite constitutional amendment, but it's there.

Th, they settled it in the right way.

I think when we force the court to make these decisions because we can't get the numbers to advance them through the legislature and constitutional amendments, we put our courts in impossible places, and over and over, we've placed the court in this place that seems like it should have the final say over what the laws should be, rather than over what the laws mean, and I do think we run that risk now too.

ROSEN: Ken, thoughts on the courts?

BURNS: I take Yuval's metaphor, and it's a really good framework for understanding it.

I get the sense that the Founders were looking for something that would be a reconciling force, a kind of third force, a Father, Son, a Holy Ghost, that would subsume the other warring factions.

LEVIN: You know, there's a beautiful way in which the, the Constitutional Convention actually confronted yes-or-no questions and answered them with both.

BURNS: Right.

LEVIN: Right?

And, uh, we find this very confusing and frustrating because it's a simple question: do we wanna represent the power of the larger states or the smaller states?

And the Convention says, "Yes, we're gonna represent both of them at the same time."

Is the job of the president to be a glorified clerk just doing what Congress says, or is it to be an elevated statesman representing the nation and the world?

BURNS: Yes.

LEVIN: The answer is yes.

And so, it's an impossible job, and yet people just line up to do it.

I think over and over, the, the Convention created a very, very complicated system that only works in practice.

It doesn't work in theory.

BURNS: Right.

LEVIN: And the reasons for it were practical.

They faced these impossible choices where they didn't have a clear majority on one side or the other.

But what they ended up building was a dynamic balance that says, "We can do this and that even though they are in contradiction because we're human beings, and there will be times when we wanna lean this way and that way."

And it's given our system this ability to shift its weight without losing its balance that I think has been very, very important to its durability.

BURNS: In our jazz film, Wynton Marsalis says, "Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time," which I think Yuval has nailed just perfectly.

If you think about it, the Articles of Confederation, which are toothless, they've satisfied everybody's problem; is unable to do anything, and it's taken months and years and years to put them together.

We take four months in Philadelphia to produce four pages of parchment with extraordinary compromises and, of course, inconceivably tragic compromises, and to create this document that says yes to these things, and it's almost like it's now the jump ball.

You know, you just throw it up, the whistle blows, and it's time to start the game.

BARNES: We've been talking about this complexity, the dissonance, and we've been doing that in the frame of the branches of government.

I wanna pull back a little bit and talk about this in terms of some of the ideas, um, that our nation has had to grapple with.

The Founders gave themselves liberty and freedom, but it would take many years to fully address the rights of all Americans.

Let's go to a clip from the film.

KAMENSKY: I think to believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility.

That, to me, is the extraordinary thing about the patriot side of the fight.

I think everybody, on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.

BARNES: Slavery was legal until the 13th Amendment took effect in 1865, and women only got the right to vote in 1920 with the 19th Amendment.

Sarah, I wanna turn to you and ask you how the quest for freedom and liberty shaped the decisions and actions of the free and enslaved men and women, as well as Indigenous people, during the period of the American Revolution?

BOTSTEIN: That's one of my favorite moments in the film, and I will never forget when Jane Kamensky said that in the interview, a whole bunch of us cried, and it was a really early interview that we did in the film in trying to get different scholars and people to help us understand why we should care about the subject, what is important, and she, she goes to the heart of it there about this idea of promise.

And at the end of the Declaration scene, when Maggie Blackhawk says that the Declaration of Independence will have the people at the margins push the levers of power and inspire them.

I think one of the things we try to do in the film is give some context and some color, and for people to begin to have empathy and understanding for the choices people made back then.

Now, not everybody made the same choices for the same reasons, and they're not alive to tell us why they made those choices, but it was fairly reasonable for, let's take the Native American populations in Northern New York, for example, and the Haudenosaunee, they split themselves who sided with the British and who sided with the patriot cause for very reasonable reasons that have to do with the history and the hundreds of years that they had already been here and how the British had treated them versus how the French had treated them, to remember that the American Revolution is also a global war, and a lot of countries are involved and have a lot of history in what happens here.

And the same with the enslaved and free Black populations.

The British were promising them freedom.

They were fighting as slaves.

They were hearing these ideas and wanting to fight for their own freedom.

As Annette Gordon-Reed says, "You would fight and die so that your children and your grandchildren would not have to be enslaved," and that is a really reasonable position, whoever is promising that.

Yuval's talking about the complicated ways that we are and we aren't all at the same time, that was true at our founding, and I think, you know, the Founders ultimately wanted us to be involved and care, and I think we've done pretty well in 250 years when it comes to those liberties and those rights.

BURNS: I was struck by the first phrase of the second sentence of the Declaration.

It says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

There's nothing self-evident about those truths they are about to enumerate.

They are brand new, and as someone said in our film on Benjamin Franklin, "It's the old lawyer's dodge.

Just tell them it's self-evident, and it becomes that way."

And there's something about this sense of possibility.

You just, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

This is just not self-evident.

It may now be as a result of your stating it.

It may be because you've been able to distill this enlightenment philosophy, but it's really up for grabs.

BARNES: Let's go back to Washington.

And at the same time, they were talking about these inalienable rights, we know that what was being practiced was, in many cases, diametrically opposed to that.

But we also know that there was this shifting and, and... BURNS: Movement.

BARNES: A different perception and movement.

Tell us more about George Washington in that context.

BURNS: Well, you know, he is a, maybe the richest man in America now that he's married and owns hundreds of human beings at the same time, we are articulating these universal, uh, ideas of freedom and liberty.

He takes over the Continental Army, uh, he's the first head of it.

He arrives in Boston and is shocked, shocked to find that there are Black troops who had been fighting for the militias, and insists that we do not, enlist any more, but changes his mind.

He comes to understand that slavery is wrong, it's a moral failing.

And he begins to, in his lifetime, uh, free them.

You are seeing movements like that.

The events of the time are changing people slowly but surely.

It's happening with Washington; it's not as much as we might want in the present, but there is a movement.

And as I said before, the second you articulate these not self-evident truths, they're gonna happen, and things like slavery is doomed, or things like women's suffrage are going to happen.

BARNES: Jeff, I want to turn you, if you could talk to us a little bit about how ideas about slavery shaped what we ultimately found in the Constitution in that debate.

ROSEN: There was a debate during the Antebellum Period about whether or not the Constitution was a pro-slavery document.

And even some abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison insisted that it was a pro-slavery document.

But in 1840, Madison's notes were published for the first time, and both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass read Madison's notes, and they see that Madison had said in his notes that the convention refused to put into the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men, 'cause it didn't want to endorse slavery.

And Douglass said that changed his conception of himself as a man and as a citizen, and he came to see the Constitution as a glorious liberty document and said it was a libel on the Founders to, to say that they had explicitly endorsed slavery.

And Lincoln said that a majority of the Framers believed in extending the Constitution to free Blacks.

BARNES: Yeah, in that Frederick Douglass, Garrison debate and difference of opinion there is, is such an interesting moment.

Yuval, I wanna turn to you and just ask if you have an additional thoughts on this and how the founding and the Constitution were shaped by this debate.

LEVIN: You know, for one thing, I think there's an entire education in American political thought that could had by just following Frederick Douglass's public writing as he changes his mind about the Constitution, from being a Garrisonian, starting out where some Americans start today, thinking, "Well, this is an unjust document.

It was written by people who accepted slavery.

It, it, it did not end slavery.

It defends it."

And himself coming to realize, in a public way, writing as he changes his mind, that the Constitution can be an incredible force for liberation for Black Americans.

Our practices evolved, gradually in the direction of, uh, greater inclusion.

But all that time, the word "all" was sitting there and judging us.

BURNS: Right.

LEVIN: That word did not evolve.

And I don't know what Thomas Jefferson meant, but what he wrote was "all".

The original meaning of that document is final.

The understanding of the concepts that are imbued in those words is only mysterious if you really work hard to make it mysterious.

It just says, "all."

If you say, "All men are created equal," that's final.

If you say, "Governments are instituted to preserve our rights," that's final.

That's not a, a, the beginning of a negotiation.

That's a premise for everything.

And I think that's absolutely right.

One of the gifts we have is to have, at our beginning, that assertion, which, yes, the people who asserted it did not live up to, and people ever since have not lived up to, but it is there, looking at everything, we do and saying, "all."

BURNS: Amen.

BARNES: 2026 is, of course, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it gives us an opportunity to come together to discuss our founding story.

Ken and Sarah, let's turn to another clip from your film.

JEFFERSON: "I will not believe our labors are lost.

I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance.

And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.

In short, the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776.

Have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism."

Thomas Jefferson.

ATKINSON: America is predicated on an idea.

That should act as a polestar for us to provide true north.

Telling us what it is that we think we can do as a people.

The perpetual challenge of the American experiment, is to, uh, draw on those aspirational ideals, make them our own, hand them off to our children, and our grandchildren, and to use that as a propulsion system for being the nation that those forebears thought we could become.

BARNES: In his farewell address, George Washington said, "It's substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."

Washington and the other Founders thought that the republic would fall without virtuous citizens.

Sarah, talk to us about George Washington's frame of mind as he stepped away from the government and the country that he helped create?

BOTSTEIN: We've been talking a lot tonight about the different branches of government, the way that our government was founded, the ideals, what we've done well, what we've not done well.

I think the piece of the puzzle that is so important even now, is how active and engaged we are as citizens.

I think Jefferson, Washington, Adams, they believed deeply in education.

They believed in civic-minded education.

I think they believed in an active citizenry.

They wanted the people who lived here to be engaged in our politics in small, medium, and large ways.

And so, I think the message to take away from his farewell address, from the debates between Jefferson and Adams listening to everything you've said tonight, is to inspire, as Rick Atkinson just said, our children and our grandchildren to take good care of this incredible experiment that we are living and breathing in, and be involved, and pay attention, and be educated and do our homework.

BARNES: Yeah, Yuval, I wanna pick up on what Sarah so beautifully framed, and this conversation that we've been having tonight, reminds us of the American political inheritance that we have.

What should be our frame of mind as recipients of that?

How should we regard that?

LEVIN: I think it's a beautiful question on the 250th anniversary.

It's a very hard question.

How to regard a tradition that I am part of is a very hard question.

I didn't choose it, I didn't make it, it was imposed on me, and yet it is my responsibility, and it gives me some tremendous benefits, and gifts, and advantages.

I think of how to regard it by an analogy to how children think about their parents.

So, there's a very childish way that young kids think about their parents.

Their parents are perfect, they hung the moon.

If something goes wrong, you talk to mom, it gets fixed.

Then there's a kinda juvenile way that you discover as a teenager, which says, "Maybe our parents aren't perfect.

There's all kinds of things wrong with them.

They lied to me about Santa Claus.

What else are they lying about?

Maybe they lie about everything.

This is a juvenile attitude.

And then at some point you have kids of your own, you're sitting across from a toddler, telling her not to eat pasta with her hands, and you realize, "I am my parents."

That is a mature attitude.

And all three of those are evident in how we think about traditions we belong to.

There's a childish attitude that says, "The Founders are perfect.

They're just these ideal human beings, White statues.

Nothing's wrong with any of them, don't you dare."

There's a juvenile attitude that says, "They did terrible things.

They did this and that.

They were, they were wealthy and only cared about money.

They, they were wrong about slavery.

How can we possibly accept anything from them?

It's corrupt."

And then there's an attitude that says, "They were doing what we're doing.

They were trying to live as decent human beings in a free, diverse society, and figure out ways to allow for social peace and incredible dynamism to be combined."

And some of the ways they did that are incredible.

Some of what they did was terrible.

We can learn from the bad and the good with reverence if we understand that what we are doing is what they were doing.

And approach our inheritance, not in a spirit of idolatry and not in a spirit of iconoclasm, but in, in something like a spirit of repair that says, "I need to fix this so that it can do what it was built to do."

A spirit of repair says to us, "We should be grateful for this, but there are ways in which it is broken."

And if we understand the spirit in which it was built, we can also have the right spirit for repairing it.

I think that's what's demanded of us.

It's hard, but that kind of maturity is what it takes to be a citizen.

BARNES: Wow, beautifully said.

And I wanna Jeff, turn to you because here we are, almost at the semiquincentennial, how is the National Constitution Center helping us to understand these issues at this moment of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration?

ROSEN: By convening conversations just like this one, which is so exciting.

We've launched this amazing America 250 Civic Toolkit, which I want everyone to check out.

And I'll kick the question to Ken.

I learned from you that for the Founders, the pursuit of happiness meant lifelong learning.

How are you determined to bring this theme of virtuous self-mastery across America for 2026?

BURNS: My fear was that the semiquincentennial would be a lot of fife-and-drum treacle.

And that it was important for us to have a complicated conversation about it.

I'm not worried about that anymore.

The pursuit of happiness is not the acquisition of things in a marketplace of objects, but lifelong learning in a marketplace of ideals.

This is the virtue, reaching back to antiquity, that our Founders insisted we have.

I think all that we've described tonight, the story of the Revolution, the founding documents, the extraordinary people, as complicated as they were, all of the ideas are a mirror.

It's held up to ourselves if we're willing to look.

And so, there's a, a moment in our film with Annette Gordon-Reed, where at the Declaration, we look at the most intimate portrait painted of Thomas Jefferson and say, "These were revolutionary ideas, but he was unable to live up to them in his own lifetime."

And you hear Annette's voice saying that slavery is foundational in his life.

It binds the beginning and the end, even though he knew it was wrong.

And she says, "So why did he do it if he knew it was wrong?"

"That's a question for all of us."

She has not let Jefferson off the hook, and we will never let him off the hook.

But then we have to put ourselves on that hook and just say, "To what extent do we fail in this?"

And now the responsibility is for us to improve, not to pay lip service to it, not to abstract it, not to say what they really meant and what they really thought, but to say, "Who am I," not just, "Who are we?"

"Who am I, and how do I make myself better?"

And the toolkit is actually written in June of 1776 and in the summer of 1787 right over there.

BARNES: That's so beautifully said.

And you call all of us to the work that we have to do at this time, at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

You know, by design, our Founders didn't leave us a finished project, but an invitation to build the democracy of our aspirations, a democracy resilient enough to endure for the next 250 years.

Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, Yuval Levin, thank you so much for joining us and for your work.

And I also want to thank our viewers for being with us and for watching.

ROSEN: We hope this program sparks conversations between Americans of all perspectives, about the principles that unite us, so we can all continue working toward "A More Perfect Union."

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Dive deeper and explore more about civic and civil conversations across America at pbs.org/MorePerfectUnion.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: This program is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

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