Best of: Jill Lepore: ‘Most Forms of Tyranny Do Come to an End’

I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion, and this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you. Today, I'm talking with Jill Lepore, the historian and best-selling author. She has a theory about why our political system seems so stuck, about why we used to be a country of dynamism and aren't anymore. Lepore focuses on our failure to amend the Constitution. But her theory of change. ends up being much broader than that. In the conversation that follows, we talk about a dream list of constitutional amendments. And about a disagreement that she has with Pete Buttigieg. We also talk about why she prefers the idea of determination to hope. I found it bracingly honest. I hope you do too. It's great to have you, Jill. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. As I was reading your book, the words that you wrote, the words that you wrote, the words I was reading your book, the word that anchored my thinking was progress. And my background is mostly in covering economics. And as I was thinking about this period in which we haven't changed the Constitution or our government very much over the last 50 years or so, it made me think about some aspects of our economy. I'm in my 50s. And when I think about how the economy and day-to-day life in this country have changed in my life. I actually think in many ways. It's less than they changed in my grandparents' lives. My grandparents lived through the introduction of mass automobile travel. They lived through the introduction of the airplane. They lived through the introduction of birth control. They lived through real earthquakes in daily life. And your book made me wonder a little bit whether we in certain ways have lost the ability to imagine change of the scale that used to be normal in the United States. That's really intriguing because I think even the words we use to discuss and describe change have changed. The 18th century idea of progress really meant moral progress, moral improvement, right? The 19th century idea that replaces it is evolution, right? People become obsessed with the idea that change happens by way of organic evolution. The 20th century is really committed to economic growth. Our era is really only able, I think, to see, anticipate, and kind of index change as technological progress or, you know, to use what was the fashionable term some years ago, disruptive innovation, right? So when you narrow an idea of progress that includes amendment, which amendment is a moral term as much as anything else, it's not just about cleaning up your pros, right? You mend your ways. You make amends. When you narrow the idea of progress to the latest update on your iPhone, or do you have ChatGPT 5 or 4, then you are only the object of change and never the subject of it. Change happens to you, but you don't make change. So I'm always fascinated seeing in my students that if you ask them about a particular era, they do sort of want to index. They index it around, oh, that's when we first got our own phones, or that's the year that I got to be on Facebook, or that we have just a real, I think, quite painful passivity about change being done to us and our being molded to be better and more efficiently acted upon as consumers than to think of ourselves as, you know, we're the ones who are going to do what we want to do. And that if we could reclaim a moral language, we could see ourselves more as actors, I think you're saying. I think that's right. And I don't mean a moralistic language. I just mean the language of care and community that is just really no part of our public discourse. There does seem to be a conundrum here, which is in some ways we are stuck. We're stuck politically. We haven't amended our constitution. And yet you just look around and boy, Americans seem hungry for change. I mean, Barack Obama and Donald Trump don't have much in common, but they both clearly represented change. And it is curious to me that we are simultaneously living in an age when the establishment and the status quo is deeply unpopular, and we seem incapable of achieving major political change, or at least major productive political change. Yeah, I mean, so constitutional change does happen all the time. It doesn't happen by way of amendment. It happens until very recently, exclusively by way of the Supreme Court and its interpretations. We live in an era now where the president says the Constitution means this, that somehow we're supposed to accept that the president has that power, which, of course, under the terms of the Constitution, the president does not have that power. So let's say there isn't change happening. But I think the rhetorical move of a certain brand of conservatism is to insist that the change that it is implementing is not change, but restoration, that we are returning to a better America. That is the four-word argument of make America great again, right? I think, you know, it is essentially a marketing decision to package your brand of change as a restoration. So it's not that there hasn't been a lot of change. I mean, this administration, these first months of Mr. Trump's second term, our character is by nothing so much as tumult. It's chaos. You know, I remember the first time as an American historian, not the kind of person in anyone's Rolodex that anyone called to ask a question, but someone must have said to me after the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, is this unprecedented? And I was like, well, you know, kind of, not really. Very few things are unprecedented. But like we're living in a time now where I think day to day, I think you get in your on your bicycle or in your car, you walk to work, whatever, get on the subway. Every goddamn thing feels unprecedented. I mean, this is a series of conversations about what our next story might be. And very clearly, we're trying to ask what might a post-Trump story be? He's not going to be president forever. And I mean, you've thought about this really directly, right? One of your previous books is called The Story of America, in which you investigate the changing nature of the American story. And I'm curious, how do you think about what might be a plausible story that is less dark and more hopeful and more constructive than the terrible story that Donald Trump tells, but that also resonates with the American people? Can there be a national story that is not Trump's and that people embrace? Sure, there absolutely can be. But I think defining it as oppositional to Trump's story dooms it from the beginning. I will tell you a story. I'm a historian who likes to tell stories. So in 2016, I covered the conventions. I'd never been to the conventions. I've never been since. There was never asked to go again. So the Cleveland one came first. There were the Republicans where Trump was nominated. And then there was Philadelphia, city of love, Hillary Clinton. They're truly the opposite of one another. And so one of the ways that the Democrats had tried to play on this was they're the party of hate and we are the party of love. Yeah, Love, Trump's Hate was the sticker. Love, Trump's Hate was the sticker. It's like very rainbowy. And then the night that Clinton accepted the nomination, she came out in this white, you know, suffragist whatever. And Chelsea introduced her. She was wearing this like Valentine red gown and then red and white balloons came down. And I found it to be the most reprehensible political theater I have ever seen. And that counts Trump's acceptance speech. I just thought it was the most depraved, cynical manifestation of a complete failure of political imagination to think about the world of possibility that that administration might have brought about. And instead, to paint your enemies as satanic is always a losing move, right? You might win an election, you will lose the whole country. You will lose your moral center to paint your political opponents as they're running on hate and we're running on love, when there really was What we want to do. We're going to do what we want to do. love at that convention, I will have to say. So I'm just saying, like, I don't think, I applaud what you're doing. I just don't think, like, what is the anti-Trump future story is by definition the wrong question. Oh, so to me, I appreciate that critique. And to me, the question shouldn't be anti-Trump, it should be post-Trump, right? And I love this line from David Axelrod that people often go looking for the remedy, not the replica of a past politician. So Barack Obama was very different from George W. Bush in all kinds of obvious ways. Donald Trump was very different from Barack Obama. So I don't mean to suggest that the next successful story will be anti-Trump. It should probably be Trump agnostic, but it does feel like it needs to take into account Trump and yet be very different from him. Do you disagree with that? No. I don't disagree with that. I have two things to say about it, and I'm not trying to be cantankerous. I'm spicing up your podcast by being a disagreeable contrarian. We like that. I do a lot of performance of disagreement. I'm going to stake out a position we can argue about it. But I will, I had an assignment, the hardest assignment of my writing life last spring. I wrote this history textbook kind of book, big narrative history, a thousand page history of the United States. It's called These Truths. And it ends with, it was going to end with Barack Obama's inauguration in January of 2009. And I was very excited to end the book there. It was going to be, like almost by the time the book came out, like 10 years in the past, which feels very comfortable for a historian. You don't know what's going on in the present. And it's just, you know, it's a beautiful moment, right? Like Obama, don't like Obama. It was triumph of America's capacity to move beyond a past of, it's all human bondage and forced segregation. I was so excited. I could like from day one of writing the book, I could picture the ending. It was really great. And then Trump got elected and I thought, well, I can't really end with Barack Obama's inauguration because although that is the one story of America, it will, it will appear to readers to be just professional negligence. Like as if I was erasing Trump from the story, right? So I somewhat hastily added a final few pages that got us through Obama's two terms all the way to election night, 2016, when Trump, you know, wins. And it was a really different ending to the story of America that this thousand page book told. And people kept saying, how did you so quickly write a book that explained Trump's rise to power? I was explaining Barack Obama's rise to power. It's the same story, like the same country elected both of those people. And the same history lies behind both of those presidencies. And so this spring, my editor, my editor asked me if I would write a new chapter because they want to put out a new edition of the book. And that chapter has to run from the night that Donald Trump was elected to the end of Trump's first hundred days. And, you know, I had like, oh yeah, 15,000 words. You can have eight illustrations. You have to explain this period in American history to people that are living in it and who lived through it, which is really different than trying to, you know, explain Abraham Lincoln or Herbert Hoover. It was so hard, David, because it is an ongoing story. It is not over. But you have to kind of have an ending that could lead anywhere. It has to have a sense of possibility at the close of it. And I think we don't really have much of a sense of possibility right now because there is such, I mean, this is the author part of authoritarianism, right? Like we are characters. And someone else's story is kind of how it feels. But what does that, you know, next chapter look like? I really think it is extraordinarily hard even to hold on to the contingency of the past and the present. Like the world that we are living in didn't have to be this way. And that like things could have gone really differently and they still could. And having that sense of contingency is, I think, really important to I guess having a sense of authorship of your own, your own life. How can we reclaim a version of the American story that is patriotic and that appeals much more to the better angels of our national nature than what we've had recently? I just think that many people right now are struggling to get energized by a story that has the possibility that you just elude. They are instead drawn to much more negative stories. And I don't see how we solve our problems, including the kind of problems we should be solving by amending the Constitution, if we can't get some of that sense of possibility back. I think it's a little bit like the problem that all politics is national politics now. Because having a sense of purpose as a community of citizens that subscribe to a particular creed about our common life together really isn't something that most people experience nationally. I was just reading about Walter Cronkite had this idea that is very David Lenhart's. That for the bipartisan. Bicentennial, there should be these things called American issues forums, because they were all worried. The bicentennial, everybody had the same question, right? Just come out of this crazy, the war, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam War, you know, Kent State, the 70s. It's like the country's a mess. Where's our national purpose? We have no vision. Now it's our anniversary. Then there's this, you know, horrible, highly commodified bicentennial. People are really mad about it. And Walter Cronkite's like, you know, we need to do, we're going to have, I don't know, I just like. Maybe it was even 200 issues, but like there would be like in elementary schools of an evening or in public library in a city block or whatever, all around the country for like 200 nights, there would be debates, discussions, public discussions about particular issues. It seems like such a cool idea, actually. I was like, wow. So I went looking a little bit to try to figure out like, how did those go? Did they do any good? How do people experience them? And they forgot to keep any records. Oh, my God. They happened. Like these meetings happened. And they maybe were hugely important to people. I don't know. But there are, to be honest, there are a lot of organizations trying to stand up efforts like that for the America 250th in 2026. There's a lot of these organizations that call themselves bridging organizations to try to bring kind of red and blue families together for meals and outings. So I don't know how that. Scales up. I've been talking to a lot of people about what they're trying to do for America 250. And one of the ideas was to devise a curriculum and distribute this lesson plan across the country that could be kind of done almost at any grade level, which was to have kids research what their community has historically done to celebrate July 4th. And like, it didn't matter if your family was there from colonial days or, you know, you were. The child of immigrants or yourself an immigrant. Like, it was just like, what did your community do? How has your community told the story of its belonging to this country and its national project? Which I thought was like a really sweet idea, which just like, let's just, we don't have to kind of teach what is America, what America should be. Let's just figure out right here, you know, how did the town of Montgomery, like, when did we first start celebrating July 4th? And, uh. I think that kind of writing a story about your place in the country is maybe the easier place to begin than coming up with a, you know, an American historian issues an edict about what the national story is. That resonates in a lot of ways. I mean, when you look at some of the research about what it means when a community loses its local newspaper, for example, which is really alarming. Yep, yep. Right. And one of the things you see is that. Right. Right. Right. Everything becomes more nationalized. And you think of your neighbor mostly as, is that person a Republican or a Democrat, as opposed to, we agree on this local issue, or we're at the soccer field together. And it is much easier, I think, for people to find common ground when they're actually dealing with other human beings, rather than just being consumers of media, essentially. Yeah. And also, our national political discourse is really mediated by corporations that own those platforms. Yes. Whereas locally, I mean. I mean, it's the same corporations that put the local newspapers out of business. But, you know, you can have neighborhood meetings. You can physically go to the city council. You can sit next to somebody and be like, do you really think we should spend this money on the library? Well, I do. Like, you have that conversation that, you know, maybe it's kind of hard for you. And maybe you don't change your mind, but that is really different than, I don't know, getting your news from TikTok. Yeah. And that kind of sense of belonging. Belonging is a word that Pete Buttigieg used when we chatted with him. If we want to repair much of what ills our country, we need to give people a better sense of belonging than they now have. And you're basically pointing out that it's much easier to feel like you belong to something real and local than it is to feel like you belong to some sort of online community. Yeah. I mean, I assume you spoke to Buttigieg about this, but, you know, belonging has been a key term of the left, even while punishing people for their views. Like the backlash against wokeism is largely about people like, you know, I'm really tired of everyone just telling me I don't belong because my ideas are not your ideas. So I think it's a little hard, honestly, to reclaim belonging because I think it's so associated with a kind of HR language. Like I'm all about it. I believe in it. But I think the word is really, sadly, become politicized. And so is there some way that the left can fix that by actually being more welcoming and less judgmental? And even if it has to change the word from belonging to something else, can it actually embody the values of being welcoming? Or do you think that's just gone forever? No, it's not gone forever. I'm just kind of bristling a little bit at the word because so much of what came out under that banner was shaming people for their various non-woke views. Do you think what is often described as wokeism is a real problem as opposed to merely a problem that the right has managed to, to use another word the left likes, weaponize? No, I think, you know, I am in the belly of that beast, right? At Harvard. I've been teaching at Harvard since 2003. And something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this. Like, what was it that, what actually changed it? But students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak or a way, a thing you can say about something. The entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial. The public shaming stuff, I just think it's silly to deny that that existed, that it didn't harm a lot of people, that it wasn't wildly out of control in many occasions. Do I still like deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on? I think those are crucially important. But I think it's, it's just surprises me no end when people are like, well, there was really never a problem. On college campuses? Yeah. I don't know what college campus they're talking about. I think the place I put blame is quite different than the places that the right would put blame. I think the corporatization of higher education has been a real problem. So I have a different understanding of what has gone wrong with higher education. But I just, I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong. Yeah. And it's hard to win people over when you're making them feel that way. I want to get back to the Constitution before we close. While I was reading your book, I made a list in the back pages, I hope you don't mind that I was writing in a copy of your book, about the constitutional amendments that, that I thought we needed today. It's like the bucket, it's the constitutional bucket list. Totally. And I, I, I will admit, I set aside political feasibility. At least in the short term. And so I don't want to ask you to, to go down the whole list and debate them. But I'm just curious whether what you think of this list, whether you think it's wrongheaded or, or, or how you react to it. So my list was easing the amendment process. And you basically quote Antonin Scalia in the book, suggesting that it has become far too hard in modern America. And what is it, 2% of the population organized in the right way electorally can defeat any amendment? That seems like a problem. Abolishing the Electoral College, I put on my list, putting limits on gerrymandering and changing the structure of the House of Representatives, so it becomes more representative, which is in its name, putting limits on campaign donations, and changing the structure of the Supreme Court to include term limits. What do you think of my list? Crazy radical, not radical enough. How does it strike you? I like your list a lot. I don't expect we're going to be amending the Constitution anytime soon. I think it is important to imagine that it were possible. And I wouldn't be surprised if the cataclysmic political world that we live in today does create enough force to push open that door. I think it's just people are very afraid of what's on the other side of that constitutional door. And I think it's, you know what, I think if you think it could get pushed open, you sure as heck better have a list. Mm-hmm. Because maybe it will open. Maybe it will. Or at least it's not entirely an act of hope. And then you have so many of Trump's critics, I think, who say, oh, my goodness, the fact that he's now won twice causes me to despair. And I think that we can't solve our problems unless we retain some degree of hope. And I'm curious what your deep study of American history has left you thinking about what are the rational reasons? For someone in the America of 2025 to retain some hope that maybe we can again amend the Constitution, or maybe we can build a better society, a fairer society, a less unequal society than we have today. Because I both understand the despair that people feel, and I also feel that we have no hope of overcoming our problems if we give in to that despair. You know, I like the word determination. I think it's important to be determined. And one way I fortify my own determination is by thinking about women first asked for the right to vote in 1848. They got it in 1920. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They were determined. There were millions of people subject to human bondage, living their lives often literally in chains, who fought generation after generation. Were they hopeful? I don't think they had the luxury of being hopeful or not hopeful. And I think forms of tyranny, I think forms of tyranny succeed by destroying your determination, by destroying your imagination, your ability to picture the end of something. I would say, I often say to myself that why I'm a historian is I like to know how things begin because then I can imagine they're going to end. And I think that's one of the great gifts of history. Most forms of tyranny do come to an end. And feudalism, imperialism, fascism, dismantling these systems has required years and years and years of very hard work and determination. I'm not sure that they always required hope, but they required determination and imagination. Jill Lepore, thank you for this enlightening and honest conversation.