Despite Divisions, Cross Country Road Trip Reveals Americans’ Resilience

Walter Isaacson: Thank you, Christiane, and Frank Barry, thank you for joining the show.

Francis Barry: Thanks for having me.

Isaacson: So in the summer of 2020, you decide you’re gonna take a road trip, I think starting at Times Square along the Lincoln Highway. First of all, tell me about the Lincoln Highway, and then we’ll get to why you decided to do it that summer.

 

Barry: Sure. So the Lincoln Highway is the first road that connected the two coasts of the country, New York to San Francisco. It was dedicated in 1913 at a time when it was easier to get to Europe by steamer than it was to get to California by car. There were very few roads. It was the dawn of the automobile age, and a pioneer of the auto industry said, if we build more roads, people will build, buy more cars, and –

 

Isaacson: Yeah. But, but why take a road trip? I mean, what was the point?

 

Barry: So we wanted to go out and get away from the 24 hour news cycle and speak to people in their local communities about national issues, but from a much more personal perspective. And we wanted to explore what holds the country together. So at a time when there’s so much focus on the divisions, we wanted to ask people what, what holds America together, and what better way to do it than by traveling the Lincoln Highway and channeling the spirit of Lincoln, who more than anyone, held the country together during our time of deepest division.

 

Isaacson: You talk about channeling the spirit of Lincoln. Tell me, what is that spirit of Lincoln? You write that that’s as important  what he did, was the spirit with which he did it? Yeah.

 

Barry: I, I call it patriotic pragmatism. It’s the spirit that puts country over party. It’s a spirit that that, that argues with reason and understanding as opposed to rage and righteousness. It’s a spirit that seeks common ground. Lincoln was never an absolutist. Lincoln hated mobs. He believed in the rule of law. And so that was the, at a time when people seem so angry at each other. It, it was that spirit of understanding and, and even humility. There are many points in Lincoln’s career where notes of humility creep into his own speeches. A and that is so important, recognizing that we may not have all the answers, and we may not understand them as perfectly as we think we sometimes do.

 

Isaacson: You did it in 2020. You had Covid. Yeah. And you got an election that followed the Trump Hillary Clinton election by four years. Everything. Why did you pick that moment? And was that sort of a time, I mean, was that sort of a warped period that wasn’t really representative of America?

 

Barry: Yeah. Well, it was definitely a unique period, as you say, the pandemic was going on. We were traveling in the shadow of the George Floyd protest. We left New York on September 11th. The Lincoln Highway begins in Times Square. We left on September 11th, which is the day more than any other that united the country. And our goal was to get to San Francisco by election day, which should be a day that unites the country, but of course, is, is dividing us. So it was definitely a unique time, but I, I think many of the things that we found on our trip have only been heightened since then. Even though the pandemic has receded, all of the underlying issues that we experienced in 2020, I think will be even more intense in 2024.

 

Isaacson: You say we. We, I know from reading the book, who you mean, it’s you and your wife, right? Tell me about the logistics of that, and what did she think when you said, Hey, honey, we’re gonna get into a recreational vehicle and just ride for months. You’d never driven an RV before. 

 

Barry: We’d never driven an RV. We had never really been in an RV, and she said, what you might think she said, which is, that’s insane. We’re not doing that. But we talked about it, and we began doing a little research, and she warmed up to the idea, she’s always got an adventurous spirit. And we’ve been camping before, but had never been RVing. And in the end, it was in the middle of pandemic. We were sitting around staring at each other and thought, well, if we don’t do it now, we’re never gonna do it. We were both working remotely, and we both had the freedom to travel. So it felt like the right time.

 

Isaacson: You asked, you said, the question wherever you went, what holds this country together? Well, let me ask you, what do you think holds this country together?

 

Barry: Well, the que– the answers that I got were real varied. Some people said the Constitution, some people said, love of freedom. Some people said love and patriotism. Lincoln famously said it’s the moral sentiment in the declaration that all people are cre– all men are created equal. And I think there is a lot of truth in that, but there’s also something else that’s really important that help holds us together. And that became more and more evident as we traveled. And that is our willingness to accept election results, and the willingness of candidates to play the gracious loser and to accept what Ronald Reagan called in his inaugural address in 1981, a miracle which is the peaceful transfer of power. And that under underlies so much of the values, liberty and democracy and freedom that we hold dear, and, and that we believe help hold us together, none of that can hold us together without our acceptance of election results.

 

Isaacson: You talk about the acceptance of election results and the peaceful transfer of power as being the core of what holds us together. And yet, you were down, I think you were down in New Orleans, my hometown on Inauguration Day when Joe Biden takes over from Donald Trump and Trump’s not there at Inauguration Day, and January 6th has just happened, and you are there in front of Gallagher Hall talking to people. Was there a sense that America had changed?

 

Barry: No, I, I, I, I think people – everywhere we went, people were deeply frustrated by the nation’s divisions. But there was also an optimism that we would overcome them. And I think that the fact that the transfer of power took place, that Biden was inaugurated, was actually a reflection that America is the, is in many ways the same, which is that we overcame this crisis. That’s the history of the country, conflict over, over who we are and how we’re gonna move forward, and the values that we hold dear. And it’s not often pretty, we had fought a civil war over it. But our, our willingness or, or our determination, our faith in, in in democracy is what has really held us together. And I, and I think that has remained true despite the differing opinions that that remain over 2020.

 

Isaacson: Yeah. I’m reminded of Hemingway’s line, “wouldn’t it be pretty to think so,” do you really believe that now?

 

Barry: I do. I do. And I think even people who believe that the election was stolen continue to, to believe that they believe in democracy and I’m not excusing their, their belief in a stolen election. They’re wrong, of course. We know that. But it is nevertheless important for our leaders to to rally the, rally people around those shared values in, in any which way we can.

 

Isaacson: You talked about pragmatic patriots. What are they, and where did you find them?

 

Barry: Found them everywhere we went, I’ll, I’ll give you one example. Did a ride along of the border in southeastern Arizona in Cochise County with a sheriff’s office. And the sheriff said to me we were watching the, the wall getting built. There were construction cranes up, and workmen there constructing the wall. And the sheriff said I know that the wall is not a panacea. It’s not gonna solve everything we need. We need cameras, we need staffing, we need a balanced security plan. And we also need, he said, more immigrants. He said, we need a balanced, progressive plan. And that was in a conservative county in southeastern Arizona. And I think most Americans would agree with him. We’ve been fighting over immigration for 20 years. We haven’t been able to get there, and so much of it has focused on the wall. But I think there’s a – if you, if you spoke with people and get beneath the, the polling around the wall, people would agree, yeah, we do need more immigrants. We need more legal pathways for people to come here, and we also need a secure border.

 

Isaacson: Why is it our system doesn’t get us to what every – majority of people think would be a common sense solution?

 

Barry: Well, in a lot of ways, it rewards extremism. And so candidates in both parties run to the poles, run to the, to the far right and to the far left. And I, I visited one place Lincoln, Nebraska, which is the only state legislature in the country that has a nonpartisan election system where if you’re running for office the primary means you don’t just go knock on the doors of Democrats or Republicans, you knock on everyone’s door because independents are able to vote. And the, and the election is open to everyone. And that creates a, a much different dynamic for candidates. They’ve got to listen to everybody. They’ve gotta seek everybody’s vote. And it has created a more functional legislature in Nebraska than most other states have. And there’s no reason that we couldn’t bring that to other states and to Congress. I say in the book that people, cynics, I think, say, we get the government we deserve. I think we got the government we designed, and we’ve designed it for dysfunction.

 

Isaacson: Tell me about some of the people you met. There’s a guy, Chris Gibbs. Tell me about him and what you learned from him.

 

Barry: Sure. So, Chris Gibbs is a farmer in Ohio, and a cattle farmer. And he has spent his life in Republican, local Republican party politics, voted for Trump in 2016, and over the course of the administration grew disillusioned with Trump, somewhat over agricultural tariffs and somewhat over foreign policy. And so he decided to leave the party and become an independent. And in doing that he, something happened he wasn’t expecting, which is, he lost all his friends. And that was incredibly difficult for him to experience because these relationships that he had built up over a lifetime in local politics disappeared. And that was something that I heard echoes of that from other people as well. And it’s it, it’s a, it’s a really disheartening, it’s a really disheartening experience to see relationships disappear over politics.

 

Isaacson: One of the places you visited too, was a mosque. The first America’s first mosque is right there along the Lincoln Highway. You interviewed the Imam, and he told you something that stood out to me. He said, “in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, he said, suddenly we started having phone calls, letters, even bouquet of flowers we’re left at the steps, baskets of food saying, we know you you are not like them.” However, also, things change a bit. Tell me about that.

 

Barry: So he spoke very positively about the post 9/11 experience and how the community rallied around him and, and the members of the mosque and how much that meant to them. But it began to evaporate during the Trump years, he said, and he went out of his way to not be partisan about it. He said, many Muslims are Republicans. But what what President Trump was doing was demonizing Muslims in a way that was inflaming people to issue threats and to ostracize the community in a way that they had had never experienced. In a sense, it was the opposite of what President Bush did after 9/11 which was to defend Islam as a, as a religion of peace. And I’d heard something very similar from the first woman to be a first Muslim woman to be elected mayor of any town in America, in New Jersey. And she described a very similar post 9/11 experience. And then when she ran for office about six or seven years ago she encountered just a torrent of Islamophobia. And it was very disheartening for her to experience, but she recognized that it had been built up over time, and that it was being inflamed and heightened by, by Trump and, and what he was empowering other people to say and do.

 

Isaacson: The divisions you saw in America are not just domestic in the United States. We’re seeing them around the western world in particular, even with the European elections recently. To what extent do you think this populist resentment that we feel in America is related to immigration? Or is it an economic issue, or is it a mistrust of the elites, or – to what combination is it?

 

Barry: I think it’s a, it’s a little bit of, of all of that, and I think it’s really important to recognize that it’s not new. We have had waves of xenophobic sentiment in this country many times in the past, and it was certainly the case in Lincoln’s Day as well. And so we have experienced this before. And what I try to do in the book is to draw upon how we got through those times and, and how we overcame them, and how we didn’t succumb to xenophobia. The Irish and the Germans and the Italians all faced – and the Catholics all faced waves of this. And I think that’s a really important part of the American story. And a part of the American success story is acceptance and assimilation. And it’s a story that we need to remind ourselves of, that it’s part of who we are. A as we look at this, this latest wave of, of immigrants and you know, people coming to the border and, and, and from all different places,

 

Isaacson: Four years ago you were on the road and there was a Trump versus Biden election. Now we’re entering the summer, a Trump versus Biden election. You talk about the stakes, and one of the things you say is, “there’s nothing more dangerous to the maintenance of democracy than the sense that the nation is doomed unless an election goes a particular way.” What do you see as the stakes in this election, and what do you see as a way that we can remain unified going through elections like this?

 

Barry:  I, I think it is really important to remember that we’ve survived so much as a country. Lincoln had this phrase, he criticized Southerners who threatened to rule or ruin the country. And I think you can hear a lot of the echo of that sense of rule or ruin in some of Trump’s comments that the country will not survive another four years of, of Joe Biden. I think there’s enormous resilience in the, in the country’s values –

 

Isaacson: Well, let, let me say that. Don’t you think it goes the other way? People say – the Democrats that we’re not gonna survive four years of Trump.

 

Barry: Yeah, I, I do, I I think there is greater resilience than, than Democrats give the country credit for. I think that is true. The danger is that when we were traveling four years ago, January 6th and stop the steal hadn’t happened. And, and now it has. And and that is a that is a different level of conflict that than we’ve seen in American democracy in, in many years. So, but I, I, I do agree that there’s enormous resilience in, in the American people and in their faith in these values. And I, I, I think that that will con, that will continue to be the case. And the more that leaders can appeal to that, I think the more attractive they will be as a candidate. And I know that has not been Trump’s strategy thus far, but I think he would be – they’re not gonna take my political advice, but I, I think there is something to be gained for both candidates in appealing to that sentiment.

 

Isaacson: You talk about what the candidates can do, but you’ve been across America. What do you think each of us can do every morning when we wake up to say, let’s figure out a way to heal these divisions in our politicians, our media, other things, keep creating in our society?

 

Barry: Well, in, in our own little ways, in our, in our own communities. There are lots of things we can do. I spoke with a woman in South Bend, Indiana, who is a, a pro-choice volunteer at a, at a, an abortion clinic. And she talked about how difficult it was to open the clinic and how much opposition they faced from local residents. But instead of being angry at them she decided to do something about it, which was to invite some of the opponents to her home for a conversation. And she thought that this might create some common ground. It turns out it didn’t. They were both unalterably opposed to the other’s position, but she, she concluded, you know what, that’s okay, because something else happened. And that’s, we found we liked each other, and we began a relationship. And she said the lesson out of that experience was we have to be able to prioritize the relationship over the politics. And I think that is something that each of us can do in our own lives, is to remember that the relationship is more important than the particular political issue that we’re arguing about.

 

Isaacson: Frank Barry, thank you so much for joining us. 

Barry: Thanks for having me.