America’s New Export: The Unchecked Executive

Summary

Fareed Zakaria GPS

Episode: America’s New Export: The Unchecked Executive
Date: November 30, 2025
Host: Fareed Zakaria
Guests: Walter Isaacson, Ken Burns, Beverly Gage, Ivan Krastev

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Episode Overview

This episode of Fareed Zakaria GPS investigates the state of American democracy on the eve of the United States’ 250th anniversary, focusing on the rise of unchecked executive power at home and its global implications. Fareed explores historical and contemporary threats to liberal democracy, featuring conversations with historian Walter Isaacson on the Declaration of Independence, documentarian Ken Burns on the American Revolution, Yale professor Beverly Gage on historical echoes of the Trump era, and political scientist Ivan Krastev on rising illiberalism in Eastern Europe.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Fareed's Opening Essay: The Rise of the Unchecked Executive

[03:33–09:17]

• America’s Shift Toward Executive Power

  • Fareed recounts a conversation with a Pakistani friend who compares Pakistan’s military empowerment to recent US Supreme Court decisions, noting that American legal precedent is now being “exported” as a model for unchecked executive power:

    “Didn’t your Supreme Court rule that the president could kill his political opponents and yet be immune from prosecution? Welcome to America's new democratic export: the unchecked executive.” ([03:51])

  • Founders’ intent was a fragmented, balanced government, particularly with a restrained executive—the presidency meant to faithfully execute laws within checks and balances (drawing from Federalist Papers 47, 51, 69, and 75).

• The Erosion of Constraints and Norms

  • Despite efforts, including the Inspector General Act (1978) established post-Watergate, Congress has lost political will over time, particularly after the 9/11 era, enabling an ever-stronger presidency.

  • Norms such as the firewalling of the Justice Department and financial disclosures have been disregarded, particularly under the Trump administration.

  • Fareed critiques the "unitary executive theory," which the Supreme Court has used to justify virtually unchecked presidential power, culminating in the Trump v. United States (2024) decision:

    “The court held that the president enjoys absolute immunity for actions within their core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity at a minimum for all other official acts.” ([08:10])

  • Justice Sotomayor’s dissent highlights the danger:

    “A president could arguably order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and be shielded from criminal liability, provided the order was given through official channels.” ([08:40])

• Conclusion: A Precarious Legacy

  • The presidency has evolved from a restricted position to a near-“modern dictatorship,” with Congress weakened and the Supreme Court “a rubber stamp.”
  • Fareed’s warning:

    “If not, the American presidency will become for the world not an example of limited constitutional government, but rather of a modern dictatorship wielding far more unbridled power than George III did when the Founding Fathers rebelled against him 250 years ago.” ([09:10])

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Walter Isaacson: The Declaration’s Greatest Sentence and the American Dream

[09:52–17:11]

• Origins and Meaning of “We Hold These Truths…”

  • Walter Isaacson discusses the drafting and revision process of the Declaration’s central sentence, highlighting the blend of Enlightenment rationality and religious reference:

    “Jefferson starts it with, ‘we hold these truths to be sacred.’ And there’s Benjamin Franklin’s backslashes of apprenticeship putting in ‘self evident’…saying, okay, our rights come not from the dogma of religion, but from reason.” ([10:46])

• Balancing Religion and Reason

  • The editing process incorporated both divine and rational sources for rights, reflecting a pragmatic founding philosophy:

    “[They were] doing the balance of the role of divine providence, the role of rationality in creating the nation, but not banking it totally based on religious beliefs.” ([11:27])

• The Declaration as Aspiration

  • Isaacson emphasizes the sentence as a living mission statement, continually reinterpreted by each generation:

    “Most of us can subscribe to [the Declaration] as an aspirational thing, not something we've achieved or they achieved, but we have to keep achieving.” ([12:04])

• The Notion of “Happiness” and the American Dream

  • Fareed and Isaacson explore the evolution from “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” situating it in a broader context of personal and communal fulfillment—“serving your community, serve their own family, and serve their country.” ([14:30])

• Contradictions and Racial Exclusion

  • The founders’ awareness of slavery’s contradiction:

    “Imagine that room… Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. But also Robert Hemings, 19 years old, an enslaved valet who's traveling with Jefferson…. So all those contradictions are there.” ([15:26])

• The Declaration and Its Legacy

  • Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as an explicit reference to the unfulfilled promises of the Declaration:

    “That sentence, when written by Jefferson, did not include enslaved people, but that's what the Battle of Gettysburg was about.” ([16:35])

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Ken Burns: Re-examining the Revolution

[17:52–25:03]

• The International Dimension of the American Revolution

  • Burns contextualizes the Revolution as part of a global conflict (the Seven Years' War), highlighting the British Proclamation Line that restricted colonial expansion:

    “In 1763, they put a line down through the Alleghenies, saying, you can't go over that. Which enrages not only individual folks...but also the big land speculators like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.” ([19:31])

• George Washington in Three Dimensions

  • Recognizing Washington’s faults and humanity, yet his unparalleled historical significance:

    “We don’t have a country without him… He's able to defer to Congress. He's able to convince people...that they're not from separate countries… but Americans.” ([21:43])

• Global Impact and Enduring Inspiration

  • The Revolution as an inspiration for centuries of global movements:

    “Our revolution inspires revolutions that take place for 200 years… when Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independence… he's quoting Thomas Jefferson: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident…'” ([23:07])

• The Value of Historical Perspective

  • Burns calls for revisiting the Revolution not for nostalgia, but for context and recommitment to founding ideals:

    “People are very much narcissistic in the present… But in fact, we are way more divided during our revolution, way, way more divided, obviously, and our Civil War.” ([25:03])

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Beverly Gage: Echoes of Trumpism in American History

[26:00–33:17]

• Historical Parallels to the Trump Era

  • The “Make America Great Again” slogan is unpacked:

    “Well, the phrase ‘make America great again’ has always had this implied question, so when was America great?” ([26:45])

• The Gilded Age Analogy

  • Gage compares the current moment to the Gilded Age: rampant inequality, cronyism, and the spoils system:

    “At the time it was called the spoils system…you took what you could from the government, you gave jobs to your friends, and that's what you were there for.” ([27:42])

• Backlash and Reform

  • Pressure led to reforms—the civil service, direct election of senators—that set expectations of public service beyond partisanship.

• Repression and Red Scare Parallels

  • Fareed asks about parallels to McCarthyism; Gage agrees there are echoes, especially around speech and deportation:

    “My antenna goes up every time we're talking about deportation for speech related reasons…all very resonant with the Red Scare.” ([29:29])

  • But notes a key difference: the Red Scare was anchored in real external threats, whereas today’s anti-communist rhetoric floats free of context.

• The Loss of Progressive Hope

  • Gage notes that unlike past moments of crisis, today’s America seems short of hope:

    “During these earlier periods, you saw lots of energy and hope…Unfortuntately I think we've lost a little bit of that in our politics.” ([31:08])

• Historical Lessons on Partisanship

  • Polarization today is compared to the post-Civil War period; reforms and new crises ultimately created change.

• Memorable Moment

  • On transformative crises:

    “In a weird way, what we have to hope for in a sense is a huge crisis which will make the partisanship pale in comparison.” ([32:53])

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Ivan Krastev: Eastern Europe and the Lure of the Strongman

[35:02–39:34]

• Resentment and the End of History

  • Krastev argues that imitation of the West after 1989 sowed the seeds of resentment:

    “Imitation is not a fun business. If I’m imitating you…it means that I recognize that you are better than me…resentment against imitation, in my view, was the reason why in Eastern Europe…you have this kind of a populist resentment.” ([36:27])

• Hungary’s Viktor Orban as Exemplar

  • Orban, an ex-liberal, pivoted to illiberal democracy:

    “At some point, he decided that what he does not like about liberalism is liberal democracy, that when you are winning, you are not winning enough.” ([36:36])

• The Right’s Complicated Relationship to Russia

  • Cultural, not just geopolitical, affinities emerge:

    “The idea of this liberal west…is replaced by a much more cultural view…white and Christian. So from the point of view of Russia, white and Christian Russia belongs in that way.” ([37:48])

  • For some, Putin is a model of the strongman:

    “Putin with his…focus on history…goes to a very kind of a strong understanding of East European nationalism.” ([37:51])

• Convergence of East and West

  • The region is not simply “moving West,” but the West is growing more like the East:

    “Rather than the east becoming more like the west, now, the west is much more dynamic, much more like the East.” ([39:30])

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Fareed Zakaria:

  “Welcome to America's new democratic export: the unchecked executive.” ([03:51])

• Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Quoted):

  “[A] president could arguably order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and be shielded from criminal liability, provided the order was given through official channels.” ([08:40])

• Walter Isaacson:

  “Most of us can subscribe to [the Declaration] as an aspirational thing, not something we've achieved or they achieved, but we have to keep achieving.” ([12:04])

• Ken Burns:

  “Without George Washington, we don't have a country. No him, no us.” ([22:49])

• Beverly Gage:

  “At the time it was called the spoils system…you took what you could from the government, you gave jobs to your friends, and that's what you were there for.” ([27:42])

• Ivan Krastev:

  “Imitation is not a fun business…this resentment against imitation…was the reason why in Eastern Europe…you have this kind of a populist resentment.” ([36:27])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Fareed’s Essay: The Unchecked Executive: [03:33–09:17]
• Walter Isaacson Interview (Declaration’s meaning): [09:52–17:11]
• Ken Burns Interview (Revolution’s global role, Washington): [17:52–25:03]
• Beverly Gage Interview (Historical analogies for Trump era): [26:00–33:17]
• Ivan Krastev Interview (Eastern Europe and populism): [35:02–39:34]

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Tone & Language

• The episode maintains Fareed’s signature mix of historical erudition, urgency, and thoughtful inquiry, blending accessible explanations with learned references. Guests match this tone, engaging in reflective, context-rich dialogue rather than polemic.

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Summary Conclusion

As America marks 250 years of independence, this episode grapples with the erosion of democratic norms at home and the global trend toward charismatic, unchecked leaders. The unchecked executive—once designed to be strictly bounded—is now both America’s new export and its central national challenge. Through history, poignant analogy, and global comparison, the episode urges a re-examination of ideals, a reclaiming of political will, and the humility to learn both from America’s founding contradictions and the turbulent lessons of other nations.

Transcript

[Ken Burns]

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[Fareed Zakaria]

This is GPS, the global public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York. Today on the program A closer look at American Democracy. The second president, John Adams, warned that it never lasts long, and today many observers worry about the present and future of American democracy. We will get insights from Walter Isaacson, who has written a book about the most important sentence in the Declaration of Independence from Ken Burns, who has released a magnificent documentary about the American Revolution. It was fought in hundreds of places, from the forests of Quebec to the back country of Georgia and the Carolinas.

[Ken Burns]

From the rough seas off England, France.

[Fareed Zakaria]

And in the Caribbean to the towns.

[Ken Burns]

And orchards of Indian country.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Beverly Gage of Yale about the Gilded Age in America, when democracy's future was also at risk. But first, here's my take. In a conversation with a friend originally from Pakistan, I lamented that country's recent decision to give its head of army expanded powers, including lifetime immunity from legal prosecution. My friend replied, we're just following in America's footsteps. Didn't your Supreme Court rule that the president could kill his political opponent and yet be immune from prosecution? Welcome to America's new democratic export, the unchecked executive. If America's Founding fathers were to come back and look at their legacy, what would stun them, without a doubt, is the modern presidency. They designed the American political system explicitly to fragment power. They were reacting against a monarch and the accumulation of all powers in the same hands. That's a quote from Federalist 47. They purposefully conceived of a decentralized and restrained executive described in the notably brief Article 2. The presidency was an office for faithfully executing the laws bounded by carefully constructed checks from the legislature and the judiciary. Congress, by contrast, was named the first branch of government invested with the lion's share of authority, the powers to tax, spend, declare war, and regulate commerce. James Madison, the de facto author of the Constitution, explicitly acknowledged this fact in Federalist 51, writing that in Republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. Even Alexander Hamilton, often thought to have urged an imperial presidency, in fact believed strongly that the president had few monarchical powers. In Federalist 69, he contrasts the British king with the American president, saying the latter is elected for merely a four year term and is amenable to personal punishment and disgrace race. He adds that Congress, and not the president, had been given the powers to provide advice and consent on treaties, declare war, and raise an army. The reason the president's foreign policy powers are mostly limited to military command, he explains in Federalist 75, is that an avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. Yet by the 1960s this finely tuned mechanism had clearly seized up. Wars, economic crises, and the media's tendency to nationalize and centralize attention created a one way ratchet, forever increasing unchecked presidential power. This dramatic imbalance culminated in the constitutional crises of the Vietnam War and Watergate. And in the 1970s Congress, finally energized by bipartisan outrage, passed a series of laws designed to rein in executive excess. For example, the Inspector General act of 1978 created a cadre of internal watchdogs to root out waste and fraud in departments premised on the understanding that they would be protected by from political retaliation. The whole set of restraints didn't work. While Congress established the legal mechanisms for control, for example regarding war powers, it lacked the collective political will to hold the president to them. Furthermore, after 911 War on Terror resolutions effectively nullified these restraints, all but giving presidents carte blanche for the use of military force. Beyond laws. After Nixon, both parties had agreed to a set of powerful norms, for example firewalling the Justice Department from the White House. One principle established that the president should not direct the attorney general to investigate or prosecute specific individuals. Additionally, presidents voluntarily released their tax returns and placed assets in blind trusts, financial transparency designed to assure the public that the commander in chief was not profiting from the office. The Trump administration has shredded these constraints. Even worse, the most egregious violations have been sanctified by the Supreme Court based on the bizarre unitary executive theory. This once fringe legal doctrine asserts that a terse phrase in Article 2 somehow grants the president unrestricted authority over the executive branch, even though Congress has been explicitly given the power of the purse and can use it to create agencies and departments, determine their structure and functions, and direct where its funds be spent. The president has virtually unlimited powers under this interpretation to run those agencies, even when he violates specific congressional intent. This expansion of executive power has culminated in the court's 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, in which the court held that the president' enjoy absolute immunity for actions within their core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity at a minimum for all other official acts. In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that under this standard, a president could arguably order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival and be shielded from criminal liability, provided the order was given through official channels. The American presidency has journeyed from a modest, constitutionally constrained office to a super presidency that commands total attention and power. Donald Trump has pushed these powers to the utmost, but he has been enabled by a failure of political courage in Congress and an ideological Supreme Court that seems to have lost any respect for original intent and precedent. The result is a structural asymmetry where the first branch of government is now the weakest and the Supreme Court is a rubber stamp. The court does have a chance to stop this accumulation of power by asserting what they plainly know is true that the president can't just declare national emergencies at will to place and remove tariffs unilaterally. If not, the American presidency will become for the world not an example of limited constitutional government, but rather of a modern dictatorship wielding far more unbridled power than George III did when the Founding Fathers rebelled against him 250 years ago. Go to fareedzakhariya.com for a link to my Washington Post column this week. Coming up on gps, we'll dig into different aspects of democracy in America and around the world, starting with the revolutionary idea that begat an revolution that men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

[Claire Duffy]

I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy, this.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Week on the podcast Terms of Service. Hey Meta, what's the weather like in New York today? In New York City, it's currently sunny.

[Claire Duffy]

And 45 degrees Fahrenheit. These are the latest Ray Ban smart glasses from Meta. They look more or less like normal Ray Ban wayfarers in a navy color, just with two little cameras in either.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Corner above my eyes. But just how much can you actually.

[Claire Duffy]

Do with smart glasses? And could they really one day replace our smartphones? Listen to CNN's Terms of Service wherever.

[Fareed Zakaria]

You get your podcasts. America is a deeply divided country. Polls show that Democrats and Republicans not only disagree on policy, they each believe that they are operating with A different state set of basic facts. It is in this political climate that the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday next year. In honor of this milestone, the historian and biographer Walter Isaacson has written a book about the most famous sentence from the Declaration of Independence. As a reminder, it reads, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The book is called the greatest sentence ever written. Welcome, Warner. I just said the sentence. So what more is there for us to discuss?

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, you know, let's look at the edits of it. It's wonderful that the first draft, those of you and I who are both writers and editors, is in the basement of the Library of Congress. And Jefferson starts it with, we hold these shoes to be sacred. And, and there's Benjamin Franklin's black backslashes of apprenticeship putting in self evident because he had just come back from visiting. David Hume, who talked about self evident truths of logic, saying, okay, our rights come not from the dogma of religion, but from reason. Then the sentence goes on, they're endowed with rights.

[Fareed Zakaria]

That itself is fascinating because so many people think of this as being divinely granted. And they're almost saying no, it's almost.

[Walter Isaacson]

Saying no, but the sentence goes on to say down by. And it's John Adams writes their creator with rights. And so you see just in the editing of a half of a sentence, them doing the balance of the role of divine providence, the role of rationality and creating the nation, but not banking it totally based on religious beliefs.

[Fareed Zakaria]

To you, what was the, what was the attraction of looking at the Declaration at this moment?

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, as you said, it's our 250th and as you certainly know, and you've written about the rise of populism not too long ago, we're in no mood to celebrate a birthday party. We're very divided. It's like Thanksgiving or whatever. We have to all come together. Well, I figured how can we do what we did in 1976 when after Watergate, Vietnam and the riots, we had a bicentennial. Well, maybe if we all reflect on the mission statement of our country, which most of us can subscribe to as an aspirational thing, not something we've achieved or they achieve, but we have to keep achieving, then maybe some of the poison in our politics could be sapped out. When you look at how they did the Declaration, you have all sorts of people with different perspectives, some who are slave owners, some who are abolitionists, and yet they come together to say, this is a mission statement that can live and breathe. When Jefferson takes Locke's idea of life, liberty, estates and property, and turns it into life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's a breathing phrase that sets the stage for the American dream. So I think we can all agree.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Talk about that for a minute because that's so interesting. You're right. So John Locke says life, liberty and property, and then Jefferson in the Virginia statute says property.

[Ken Burns]

Right?

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, George Mason does most of the writing of the Virginia statute, but you're absolutely right.

[Fareed Zakaria]

It says property. It says property and happiness or just property.

[Walter Isaacson]

It says estates and property and property.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So do we. Do we know what Jefferson was thinking when he enlarged that pursuit of happiness.

[Walter Isaacson]

Wasn'T just, okay, let's have fun and parties. It was a pursuit of your own fulfillment. And he had read, you know, Voltaire, Rousseau's De Social Contract. And I think he's trying to say each new generation has got to figure out its own pursuit of what will fulfill it. And for most of our history, we've been able to have each new generation do better than the last. Nowadays, that's in jeopardy. That's the American dream in jeopardy. But that, too, was part of what Jefferson was pledging us to try to pursue.

[Fareed Zakaria]

You say in the book that you know, that phrase, the pursuit of happiness really has been the most, in some ways resonant phrase, and the one that each generation has, has tried to fulfill. And you call it the American dream, But you point out, I mean, it was written at the start of the Great Depression, and it didn't mean. It didn't purely mean material. Material.

[Walter Isaacson]

You mean James Truslow Adams. Adams coins the phrase the American dream in the 1930s, and he says it's not just a dream of motor cars and find houses. It's a dream of each person having the ability to serve their community, serve their own family, and serve their country, which was a Ben Franklin idea.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Get sort of dignity from it, as I said, dignity.

[Walter Isaacson]

And you and I have had discussions, almost disagreements about the fact that globalization sort of sapped the chance for each individual, each factory worker to have dignity. However we resolve this notion of having a secure middle class, we have to make sure each person has dignity and the possibility that their children have a better lives.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So the sentence, the most famous line is, all men are created equal. It most definitely did not include slaves. And Jefferson owned lots of slaves. What describe that tension was it Felt at the time.

[Walter Isaacson]

Totally felt at the time. And imagine that room in the room of Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson. But Also Robert Hemings, 19 years old, an enslaved valet who's traveling with Jefferson, whose younger sister will end up becoming Jefferson's mistress and having children by him. So all those contradictions are there. And Jefferson's writing things about the abhorrence of the slave trade. That's in the Declaration, the first draft of the Declaration that others take out. So they knew very well this was an aspirational document, but they were leaving us a bundle of contradictions that each new generation would have to resolve.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So it feels to me, it's so interesting that you chose this as the most important sentence ever written, because the only competitor to it, I would say, is the opening line of the Gettysburg Address, which, of course refers back to it. Right. Because it says, four score and seven years ago, our father brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. So it is referring back to the Declaration of Independence and to that line.

[Walter Isaacson]

Absolutely. And what they're doing that day is they're burying or consecrating the cemetery where more than a thousand people had died because they were trying to make that sentence more true. I mean, that sentence, when written by Jefferson, did not include enslaved people, but that's what the Battle of Gettysburg was about. So when Lincoln harkens back to it, it's not like, okay, we got this right in 1776. It's like, we still have to fight and even bury our dead to remember the importance of what this sentence is telling us to do.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Walt Rasgeson, always a pleasure Free.

[Walter Isaacson]

Thank you.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Next on gps, I'll talk to Ken Burns about his new PBS series on the American Revolution. What lessons does it hold for us today?

[Claire Duffy]

Life on the Mars Farm, it's anything but quiet.

[Fareed Zakaria]

For me and Dave, every day is.

[Claire Duffy]

A lot of moving parts.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Five kids do not go in the house. A working farm, and a renovation business that never stops.

[Walter Isaacson]

We've been pushed to the limit.

[Claire Duffy]

If you build it, they will come.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Oh, my gosh, it's so beautiful. Just another day in this crazy, beautiful life we call ours.

[Ken Burns]

Fixer to Fabulous season premiered December 2nd.

[Fareed Zakaria]

At 8 on HGTV. Few filmmakers have shaped America's understanding of itself more profoundly than Ken Burns. For decades, he's brought the nation's past to life with rigor, immediacy, and a unique visual style, covering everything from the Civil War to. To baseball and jazz. And now, as the US prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, Burns has turned to the moment that launched this country's democratic experiment, the American Revolution. I spoke with him about his new PBS series, which illuminates the bloody rebellion that sparked independence movements across the world. Ken Burns, welcome.

[Ken Burns]

Thank you, Fareed.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So, as with everything you do, this is just spectacular and it's so well done, given that you don't have footage, you don't have all the usual props that help make this thing work. I love the way you focus in the very first episode on the international dimension. And on particular, one of the original irritants that turns into, you know, that builds the snowball of the American Revolution is that the colonists were enraged when Britain tried to kind of make a peace deal, saying, you know, west of the Alleghenies, we can't just have people going in and snatching land from Native Americans. You can't do that. And that would have stopped the westward expansion. And this enraged the colonists.

[Ken Burns]

That's exactly right. And in fact, it's even more complicated than that. Britain has won the, what we call the French and Indian War, but the rest of the world knows as the Seven Years War, essentially driving France out of North America completely and limiting Spanish holdings to Louisiana and there basically getting Florida. But be careful what you wish for. They're now the most far flung empire on earth. Their treasuries depleted, they have no way to defend those settlers that want to pour over the Allegheny into that Native American land. And so they look, at least to some Native American nations as a stopgap against those colonists. And in 1763, they put a line down through the Alleghenies, saying, you can't go over that. Which enrages not only individual folks who for the first time are going to own land in their lifetime. They've maybe been dependent farmers in Ireland or Scotland or Wales or England for a thousand years, but. But this is going to be something new for them. And it enrages the big land speculators like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who are dealing in tens of thousands of acres. So you have a snowball rolling down the hill for sure. That's going to finally in the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party. And then obviously Lexington and Concord set this extraordinary world war in motion and. And create the United States of America.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Yeah. You point out that Washington, who is, you know, gotten into the land business, was particularly personally offended by or enraged by this British idea of no further westward expansion. And he tells his agent Go and buy as much land in the west as you can. So he sort of had a personal interest and he gets at one of the things that you do so well, which is you present these people like Washington as three dimensional characters. Washington makes a lot of mistakes. He is selfish, he's venal. You know, he treats his slaves sometimes badly. And yet you say the simple fact is no George Washington, no American Revolution.

[Ken Burns]

George Washington is extraordinary. First of all, as you said, it's absolutely right. He is an owner of other human beings. He's rash on the battlefield, he makes two or three significant strategic blunders, but we don't have a country without him. He's able to inspire men in the dark of night. He's able to pick subordinate talent without fear of them overshadowing them. Some of them are better generals than him. He's able to defer to Congress. He's able to convince people from Georgia and New Hampshire that they're not from separate countries as they believe, but Americans. This new one thing. And most of all, he's willing to cede his power, first in giving up his military commission in 1783, and then after two terms of president, giving up the presidency, which sets in motion this American narrative and helps keep the fragile coalition together, particularly in the early decades. But it is without a doubt you can say this, perhaps in a secondary fashion, about Benjamin Franklin for securing the aid from France. Without George Washington, we don't have a country. No him, no us.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Was it seen internationally as what we romanticize it as, which is the great break with kings and courts, you know, a genuine democracy and the first of its kind?

[Ken Burns]

Yeah, I think it's fair to say our revolution inspires revolutions that take place for 200 years in Europe and Central and South America and Asia and Africa. In fact, when Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnamese independence on the same day the Japanese are surrendering in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945, he's quoting Thomas Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. This is a revolution with legs. And I think, particularly in our divided times, it offers us an opportunity, fareed to go back to our origin story and sort of re examine and reacquire these extraordinarily inspirational ideas at the heart of who we are. A few second sentences after the pursuit of happiness sentence in the Declaration, Jefferson says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. He's saying that heretofore everybody's been a subject under authoritarian rule and we're creating something else that will take a little bit of extra energy. It'll take a lifetime of learning. That's the pursuit of happiness to them, not the acquisition of wealth. It's lifelong learning so that you would acquire virtue. And so I hope that in some ways, if anything comes out of revisiting the revolution, that we get to sort of reacquire and reenergize our own founding ideals so that we might deal with the complexities of the present moment. People are very much narcissistic always in the present. Our times are the worst. Chicken Little, the sky is falling. But in fact, we are way more divided during our revolution, Way, way more divided, obviously, and our civil war during the Vietnam period. And it takes, I think, only the perspective that the great teacher history provides for us to have that ability to see things in perspective and what they really signify.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Ken Burns, a pleasure to have you on, sir. You can catch Burns American Revolution series on the PBS app or on your local PBS station. Next up, what moment in American history is the Trump era most reminiscent of? I'll ask the celebrated Yale historian Beverly Gage when we come back.

[Ivan Krastev]

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[Ken Burns]

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[Claire Duffy]

This is a great price.

[Fareed Zakaria]

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[Ken Burns]

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[Walter Isaacson]

Unreal properties.

[Fareed Zakaria]

We got the most affordable house with.

[Ken Burns]

The most amount of space.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Realistic budgets, affordable.

[Ivan Krastev]

I like it.

[Ken Burns]

Luxury is a mindset, not a price tag.

[Walter Isaacson]

Cheap beach, as is.

[Ken Burns]

Series premiere December 3rd at Nine on HGTV.

[Fareed Zakaria]

When surveying a litany of Donald Trump's excesses, his attacks on universities, the bureaucracy, free speech, to name a few, it's become customary to say that this moment in America is untouchable, unprecedented. But in fact, Donald Trump's moves echo various moments in American history, moments that many considered gone for good. Joining me to discuss them is Beverly Gage. She is the John Lewis Gaddis professor of History at Yale and the author of J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Welcome, Beverly.

[Claire Duffy]

Great to be here.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So when you think, when you think of Donald Trump, what image comes first to mind for somebody like you who has the whole sweep of really the last hundred years in front of you as your field of specialty?

[Claire Duffy]

Well, the phrase make America great again has always had this implied question, so when was America great? And so that's a game that I have played with myself over, over the last decade trying to figure out what those resonances are. And I'd say one moment that really emerges is The Gilded age, the late 19th, early 20th century, which was. Was a period of crony capitalism and mass inequality and fast technological change. And it seems like there's a lot of romance and even a desire to go back to it in the current.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Administration, even with the tariffs and such. And is it fair to say that that was also a period where a lot of businessmen, like the sort of tech tycoons now seemed very comfortable with the kind of insider wheeling dealing. They didn't want, you know, a kind of open, transparent playing field. They wanted to go into the Oval Office and make deals.

[Claire Duffy]

That's right. At the time it was called the spoils system. And that was the idea that when you were in office, you brought all your buddies in, you took what you could from the government, you gave jobs to your friends, and that's what you were there for. Mark Twain, who sort of named the Gilded Age, saw this as an example of the kind of falsity and the fakeness and the I'm just out for myself nature of American life in that time. But there was a big pushback against it too. Right. People said actually we need to think about other mechanisms of government that can push back against this kind of private. Take it all from me and my buddies. And that's where a lot of our government comes from actually, is that impulse. So this is the birth of the civil service. This is the birth of the idea of professional government service where you were going to be serving the public good and not serving the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or whoever was in power. And then there were a lot of other reforms that came in in that moment. Right. Direct election of senators because they thought these state legislatures that were picking senators before they'd become too corrupt. The money that's flowing through them is destroying American democracy.

[Fareed Zakaria]

What about the way in which the administration is saying if you say things we think are hostile to the American way or whatever we think so, for example, very anti Israeli speech. We might deport you if you're a foreigner. We might defund you if you're a university. That feels like it was the kind of thing happening in the 1950s. And of course, your last book was about J. Edgar Hoover, who did a lot of that stuff in the 1950s.

[Claire Duffy]

Yeah. As someone who's written a lot about J. Edgar Hoover, my antenna goes up every time we're talking about deportation for speech related reasons. Certain ideas and phrases that you're not allowed to say. That's all very resonant with the Red Scare. And I think you can Feel that in the air.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Fair to say it was worse then, or is it difficult to make a comparison?

[Claire Duffy]

I think it's fair to say it was worse then. Although one of the things that's interesting to compare the two is that in the 1940s and 50s, the peak of the Red Scare, this was the early Cold War. So you had a Communist Party in the United States that actually was in some ways in cahoots with the Soviet Union. You really had spies here, and you had this huge global rivalry going on. And so you had these big things that are driving the politics of that moment. And what's funny about ours is that we still have the anti Communism. Trump loves to talk about the Marxist lunatics in the universities, but we don't actually have the politics there anymore. It's just this kind of resonant language.

[Fareed Zakaria]

There isn't really a giant communist threat out there.

[Walter Isaacson]

Exactly.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Each of these ones you talked about the Gilded Age, even in its own way. Obviously, the Jazz Age. Then comes the 30s. They provoke a reaction. They provoke the civil service reforms, the Progressive Era, the Jazz Age produces fdr. Do you think it's sure that this will all produce a reaction? Because what I'm struck by is so far, we're still very divided.

[Claire Duffy]

One of the things that really strikes me, and that alarms me a little bit, is that during these earlier periods, you saw lots of energy and lots of hope that, sure, this big thing has changed in American society, but we can take hold of it. We can actually make a future that's better than the past. That's the whole ethos of the Progressive Era. We're going to have progress in the future. And I unfortunately think we've lost a little bit of that in our politics, that there are a lot of people who are feeling much more hopeless, that the future is actually going to be worse than the past. And that seems like a dangerous and not great place to be.

[Fareed Zakaria]

The other historical resonance that people often bring up, particularly political scientists when studying polarization and partisanship, as they say, we are as divided as we were right after the Civil War. It seems like the 1870s and 80s were the height of partisanship. And we've now come to those. What was it about that era that was so partisan and how did it get resolved?

[Claire Duffy]

Well, it was partly that people were still fighting out the Civil War. Right. But doing it through politics rather than through actual warfare. Although it's also worth noting that was a period of incredible political violence in a lot of ways, partly because you had such ferocious divisions, such close elections. How did it change? Well, I think some of it was these reforms of the progressive era and some of it is just that new crises come along and then everything gets flipped in the air and you figure out what comes next. So the Great depression, World War I. Right, all of those things. So history does not stand still.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So, you know, in a weird way, what we have to hope for in a sense is a huge crisis which will make the partisanship pale in comparison.

[Claire Duffy]

It does sound like that's not a great scenario, but I think that it's historically right that these moments that feel really permanent often change much faster than people can imagine.

[Fareed Zakaria]

All right, stay tuned. If one of them comes, we might have to get you back.

[Claire Duffy]

That sounds great.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Beverly Gage, Pleasure. Thank you. Next on gps, we've spent much of this hour examining democracy in America. Next we'll examine democracy abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe, where the lure of the strongman now runs deep. When we come back, one of the biggest threats to liberal democracy these days comes from a region that was once considered its brightest horizon, Eastern Europe. Last month, the party of a billionaire right wing populist won parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic. In June, Poland elected a president from the right wing Law and Justice Party. And there is of course, Viktor Orban, a key architect of the modern right wing populist movement whose chummy relationship with Donald Trump was on display earlier this month with a visit to the White House. To talk about all of this, I sat down with the Bulgarian born political scientist Ivan Krastev. Welcome, Ivan. You know, I wanted to have you on the show because you write so interestingly about everything, but you've been writing particularly about this question that I've been puzzled by, which is why are we seeing so much discontent and populism and illiberalism in Eastern Europe? Because this used to be. These were the poster childs of everything that went right since 1989. Iron Curtain comes down. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia became liberated. We see these great figures, you know, Havel Woenza in Poland. And what we now see is Viktor Orban. He's become the poster child for illiberal democracy, not liberal democracy. What happened?

[Ivan Krastev]

Listen, in a strange way, the end of history. FOADR was the title of a book for east Europeans in 1990. This was the name of the line. We believe that we know the future and the future was not somewhere ahead in time. The future was just next to you. This is very important because in a certain way, if you're living in Poland in 1990, you believe that you know, the future, because Poland is going to become like Germany. But then suddenly, if this is the case, why to wait Poland to become like Germany, just go to Germany and as a result of it. This is very interesting about the liberal revolutions. After every revolution, people were leaving the country. But normally this is the defeated party. This is the white Russians who left after the Bolshevik revolution. After the liberal revolution of 1989, the first to leave were the liberals, because they went immediately to study, to work, to live abroad. And suddenly the idea was that what these should do is to imitate the West. But you know what? Imitation is not a fun business. If I'm imitating you, it means that I recognize that you are better than me. And then if I'm imitating you, what about me? So this resentment against imitation, in my view, was the reason why in Eastern Europe, much earlier than in other parts, you have this kind of a populist resentment, saying, okay, you're not better than us.

[Fareed Zakaria]

What about Hungary and Orban? Why does that become, as I said, the kind of almost iconic case of illiberal democracy?

[Ivan Krastev]

Listen, of course, first of all, we're talking about a very gifted politician. And this is very important. The personal factor matters. And what is interesting about Orban is that he's an ex liberal. And this is the interesting story in the way the ex communists were critically important for destroying the communist system, the ex liberals who were very important for destroying liberalism, because at some point he decided that what he does not like about liberalism is liberal democracy, that when you are winning, you are not winning enough. You cannot come with a radical change.

[Fareed Zakaria]

And what about the way in which some of these populists seem pro Russian? What's behind that? These are places that were threatened by Russia.

[Ivan Krastev]

So here, here it's very much geography and history matters. So from this point of view on view on Russia, the Polish right and the Hungarian right are not on the same position.

[Fareed Zakaria]

The Polish right are quite anchored to Russia.

[Ivan Krastev]

But there are three things. One is that the very idea of the west have been translated. The idea of this liberal west, very much based on the values like first being universalist democracy and so on, is replaced by a much more cultural view of the west as white and Christian. So from the point of view of.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Russia, white and Christian Russia belongs in that way.

[Ivan Krastev]

Exactly. So as a result of it, this is very dividing. Secondly, part, paradoxically of this pro Russian sentiment was very much anti Western sentiment because before Trump, most of the far right parties in Europe had been anti American. And for example, this pro Russian far Right. Is particularly typical for places like East Germany. And thirdly, what is interestingly enough, is that basically this attraction with a strong leader, this attraction with the idea of history, because for East Europeans, paradoxically, Putin is easier to understand than Trump. Trump is too American, he thinks kind of today, while Putin with his totally focused on history, of historical missions and so on, goes to a very kind of a strong understanding of East European nationalism. So even when some of these populist parties are very strongly anti Russian, when you go on many issues, you're going to see that they're not very far away.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So at the end of the day, does this suggest that Eastern Europe, the Eastern Europe we thought was sort of firmly anchored in the liberal democratic west, is going to run away, go astray?

[Ivan Krastev]

Let's put it positively, 30 years ago, the idea was that they're not going to be the difference between east and West. We have arrived it, but very much on the terms of Eastern Europe than on the terms of Western Europe.

[Fareed Zakaria]

So rather than the east becoming more.

[Ivan Krastev]

Like the west, now, the west is much more dynamic, much more like the East.

[Fareed Zakaria]

On that sobering note, Ivan Krestov, pleasure to have you on.

[Ivan Krastev]

Thank you.

[Fareed Zakaria]

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. The holiday season is here and CNN Underscored is your VIP pass to unique gifts at the best prices. From expert recommendations to can't miss deals, we've wrapped it all up for you. Shop Holiday gifting [e-mail].