The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on America’s “Unfinished Revolution”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, a look back at the very beginnings of the United States and where it is 250 years later. That is the focus of The Atlantic’s November issue. Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg speaks to Walter Isaacson about the Founding Fathers’ lofty ideals and how the country is living up to them.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Christiane… And Jeff Goldberg, welcome back to the show.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Thank you.

ISAACSON: You and The Atlantic have just launched a series and a special issue for the 250th birthday of our nation. It’s called “The Unfinished Revolution.” First of all, tell me why you call it unfinished.

GOLDBERG: It’ll never be finished. I, I mean, no human endeavor ever reaches a stage of perfection in my mind. So, we are, we’re 250 years into this experiment. There’s not a straight shot toward near perfection in American history or any other history. But we have seen the expansion of the American idea to include women, to include black people, to include all kinds of other people in, into the promise that was made by the founders, the genius founders of the United States. And what I mean by unfinished is that we’re always trying to figure out better ways to be a representative democracy. It’s also unfinished there. There’s a, I guess you would say a particularly unfinished quality to where we are right now, where in my mind and in the minds of a lot of other people, we’re slipping backwards in many categories, including, and especially in organizing a government by the people and for the people.

If you take the long view, you realize that America goes up, America goes down. We go through periods of idealism and we go through periods of cynicism, like we’re in right now. But, you know, it’s the task of every citizen to try to understand what their responsibility is as delineated by the founding documents and the founding fathers of our country. And that’s what this issue tries to do. It sort of says, this is, this is what happened. This is what it means. This is where we’re going and here are the challenges ahead.

ISAACSON: You just said that we generally progress, but sometimes we slip backwards and we’re slipping backwards now, you said. I think on democracy, you were talking about rule of and by and for the people. Give me some examples. What are you talking about? 

GOLDBERG: Well, the thing that really eats at me right now is this: So the founders were generally speaking pessimists about human nature. And so devised a government that would work against the vagaries of human nature. Obviously, we had men who founded this country who had extraordinary insight into into human nature and also extraordinary extraordinary qualities. I mean, George Washington obviously set the pattern until today when he went home, right? But leaders don’t go home. They don’t, they don’t voluntarily give up power. George Washington became a model for every president until today, until today’s president of the person who takes power and then willingly cedes power. We are, we’re in a new situation right now, obviously.

The thing that really gets me though is the separation of powers. They devise a system of separation of powers where each branch would check the power of the other branch. That only works if everybody takes on their proper role. And right now we have a situation in which Congress, in my mind, again, Congress is not taking the power granted to it by the Constitution to actually be a check on executive power. So it, it works on paper, but it only really works if everybody plays their designated role. And what I don’t understand about this moment, more than almost any other thing I don’t understand about this moment is, is why the leaders of Congress don’t fulfill – it’s not just fulfill their responsibilities – why don’t they do the things that they can do, which is to check the executive. And so here we are. We’re here where we are in large part, because Congress doesn’t do what it was meant to do. If you look at Watergate, why did Watergate end? Why did Nixon resign? Because the Republican leaders of Congress said to him, that’s enough. Thank you. But we’ll take it from here. And we don’t have that situation today, not by a long shot.

ISAACSON: One of the things that diffuses the Declaration of Independence is also at the core of the Constitution, and you just referred to it, which is a protection against authoritarian rule, a protection, they were trying to make sure that we didn’t have a monarch again. And that’s what the whole Declaration of Independence is about. And that’s what they do when they balance it in the Constitution. Why are you fearing that we are now getting back to a more authoritarian executive?

GOLDBERG: Well, because, because we elected a person who does not – it’s abundantly clear – have the same respect for the restraints that previous American presidents have willingly taken on to advance the cause of representative democracy. He’s just in a different mindset. I mean, every president loves power. And, you know, to even run for president and think that you could do the job suggests that there’s something, you know, there’s a screw loose anyway, right? But until this president, we have not experienced a person who has frankly, you know, authoritarian impulses and who believes that the government should be used as a weapon against his domestic political enemies. So we have that, and again, I come back to this, it’s like the story of our moment is not simply the story of a man who believes that he has or should take privileges that previous presidents didn’t think that they should take. The story is a system out of balance in which the people designated by the constitution to check his power aren’t checking his power.

And again, this is a, this is a, this, this conversation could go into why are we in this moment? And I would say that the rise of reality TV and the entertainment internet complex and the rise of social media have, have lowered our resistance to the kind of populism that we see today. You know, that, that we, we are inoculated against this kind of thing by the naturally slower processes that we had in our, in our politics. But now that everything’s at warp speed and now that very, very, very bad and dangerous ideas can move around the world in a, in a nanosecond, we’re in a different thing. And, and Donald Trump takes advantage of those things.

ISAACSON: To what extent do you see the role of the press – you’re talking about Congress not stepping up to the plate – but the role of the press in dealing with this moment.

GOLDBERG: I mean, without the press we’re finished, obviously. Authoritarians across the world understand that point which is why they turn the press into the enemy of the people. Jefferson in particular, but many other, many other of the founders understood the indispensability of a free press and the chaos that a free press brings. Remember that chaos that they worried about was a very measured slow chaos by the, by the standards of today. 

One of the things I would say is that – and this is sort of a commentary on the way the press itself behaves. We don’t as an industry, as a collection of oppositional people, we don’t explain why we do what we do to people anymore. We just assume that everybody understands the, the, the valuable role of the press and the valuable role of the First Amendment in their lives. And I don’t think that could be taken for granted anymore, especially when you have a president who actively argues against the, the, the existence of a free, untrammeled press.

I’m really just throwing out here a bunch of ideas and questions. I don’t know what to do yet. I do know that we have to A, hold the line on what we do, but B, explain to people, especially people susceptible to propaganda from the anti press side, why this is so important and why we do what we do. The third thing we can do, obviously, is try to get better at what we do and recognize our own faults and, and interrogate how we do things. But I think the press, I, I don’t know where we would be without a free press today. We would be in a much more authoritarian position if, if we didn’t have the free press right now.

ISAACSON: You call this series The Unfinished Revolution, you said, because in some ways we have to keep improving, that the arc is towards progress, but it recedes back and forth, a lot of flaws in the American thing. So it’s a great balance. But President Trump has talked about, he put out  a order in March called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, which declares, “over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history, replacing objective facts with distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” When you are trying to put together this issue do you feel the push of this president and this administration trying to keep our history looking great? Or do you see how you can do a balance?

GOLDBERG:  Look, there, there are, there are three camps in America, I’m making this oversimplified, but there’s three camps when it comes to understanding American history. There’s what I think of as my camp, probably your camp, which thinks that America is a wonderful country, a wonderful experiment, that sometimes it’s made bad mistakes. But the great thing about America is that we learn from our mistakes and then we get better. The expansion of rights is one example of that. And that we’re so strong and self-confident that we can examine honestly, the mistakes we’ve made in order to learn from them and, and just deal with them. 

There’s another camp that is so brittle and fragile in its understanding of American history that they think you can’t say anything bad about America at all, which is silly. I mean, it’s, it’s just juvenile, right? That, that to criticize any aspect of America is to be anti-American. There’s a third camp, and this is, you know, on the, on the hard left that thinks America is uniquely evil in the world. I don’t have much patience for it. ’cause It’s so dumb, you know, that America is, is is a, is a uniquely evil presence on the world stage. That’s not for me. I’m in the middle. I’m in the middle group, which says that America is a, is a wonderful experiment. It’s a wonderful country worth saving and, and growing, and that we make mistakes and that we should fix our mistakes and acknowledge them. I find that to be a sensible middle ground. But that’s where we are. 

And what you’re seeing now when it comes to the National Archives, when it comes to the Smithsonian, we, even in culture when it comes to the Kennedy Center, is you’re seeing that, that that camp of brittleness dominating the conversation. And that’s not, that’s not useful. And that’s not what makes a country great. What makes a country great is a bunch of people arguing with themselves about what makes a country great and doing those things. So that’s why we’re in this weird, we’re in this weird moment. 

ISAACSON: One of the things you have to deal with, of course, is slavery and the notion that Jefferson can write, all men are created equal when he is enslaved 200 people. And there are 500,000 enslaved Africans in the United, in the colonies at that point. Annette Gordon Reed takes it on real well in your issue, which is this question of how do you look at that, but also see the progress made the, the 250 years since then.  Tell me how Annette Gordon Reed takes on that issue of all men are created equal, and how we have to deal with that. 

GOLDBERG: Here’s a manifestation of Annette’s genius and of Lonnie Bunch’s genius Lonnie, who built, who’s now the Secretary of the Smithsonian, and dealing with some of this pressure about how do we talk about history but, but also the founding director of the of the National American, African American History Museum. When you go to the – you, you can, you could see Annette’s theory brought to life in that museum. And there’s a statue of Thomas Jefferson in about seven, eight feet tall. Thomas Jefferson, behind him is a, is a curved brick wall that has all, all etched into each brick, the name of one of the slaves, one of the enslaved people, black Americans who were kept in Monticello, right? And the wall is higher than Jefferson. And, and, and, and the, the symbolism there is, is obvious that the sin of Jefferson is larger than the man, right? 

But then above that two stories high, the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, and, and that symbolizes that the ideals that Jefferson held but didn’t live up to as a man are perfect. And that’s what we’re striving for. It’s the perfect representation. And, you know, I have such admiration for Annette and all the scholars who have made Jefferson the more complicated, that’s probably a euphemism complicated figure that he actually is. But, but that’s a perfect representation of, of the entirety of the American story. The founders were flawed men who had a limited understanding by our understanding today, of, of who gets freedom, right? But they articulated a set of ideas that if you actually carried them out, would, would create something close to utopia on Earth. And that’s, that’s, that’s the, that’s – I, I don’t know that, that that should keep Americans motivated for a lifetime. Let’s get better. Let’s meet, let’s – we don’t have to. We don’t have to. We don’t have to make believe that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington were perfect people. We just have to, we just have to acknowledge that they had some pretty good ideas for us and that we should do them.

ISAACSON: I have a piece coming out in this series a little bit later based on a book I’ve done about the Declaration that talks about that second sentence, that “we hold these truths to be self-evident” as being a foundation for common ground in this country and for the American Dream. How can a series like you’ve done in the Atlantic, you know, in the tradition of your previous editors, you know, of Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, how can a series like this form a foundation for common ground?

GOLDBERG: One of my worries is that we don’t talk about these things anymore. You can’t, you just can’t assume that people understand their own history unless it’s taught and discussed widely. I don’t have any illusions about the capacity of one magazine to – or one, you know, one book or a thousand books or a thousand Ken Burns documentaries to – to move us back onto a constructive pathway. But just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean you don’t do it. I mean, that’s what, that’s what citizenship is. Citizenship is trying. 

And, you know, and I’ve thought about it and I’ve been asked this question, you know, okay, so you’re putting all all these ideas written by great scholars into the world, what do you hope to accomplish? And I said, well, I don’t, all I can do is all I can do is try to get people to read it and think about it. The alternative is to give up. And that would be that would be absurd… the way I see this current crisis is we’re gonna come out of it either the hard way or the easy way. And I, I think that all of us should just work to like, let’s, let’s, let’s get the country going toward the easier direction rather than the hard direction. I love this country so much that I can’t do anything but try to push out the ideas of much smarter people than, than, than than I am into the, into the public realm, and hope that people read them and grapple with them and come to understanding. And that’s, you know, that’s enough for me. But we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta talk about this stuff. We can’t be passive in the face of some obvious problems.

ISAACSON: Jeffrey Goldberg, thank you for joining us.

GOLDBERG: Thank you, Walter.