← The David Frum Show
The David Frum Show
The Triumphs and Tragedies of the American Revolution
01:02:41
Ken Burns joins David Frum to discuss how his new documentary captures both the triumph and tragedy of the nation’s founding. Plus: Donald Trump’s TikTok giveaway and Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause.
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11 Labs Narrator
11 Labs powers AI voices that don't sound like AI voices like this one. ElevenLabs voice agents are used to handle everything from customer support queries to appointment scheduling. Get started for free at elevenlabs IO Atlantic.
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David Frum
You know the words that dominate our news site?
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Ken Burns
Private equity keeps inventing.
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David Frum
But do you truly understand how they impact your world and your wallet? In a world that skims the what, understand the why. Because context changes everything. Subscribe to Learn more@Bloomberg.com the global benchmark for business news. Hello and welcome to the David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Ken Burns, the great American documentarian producer, most recently of a remarkable series on the American Revolution. We are so pleased and honored to welcome Ken Burns to the David Frum Show. My book this week will be very relevant History of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans called To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. This may seem like a chapter from the history of a bygone regime, but but the lessons that I want to single out for discussion this week are very applicable to the United states in the 2000 and twenties. Before getting to either of those topics, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about some recent events in the news. I hope you are all following this proceedings with the plans to sell TikTok to a group of American advisors. This is supposed to happen according to law by December 16. There have been a number of deadlines, each of them postponed again and again by executive order. In 2024, Congress passed a law requiring TikTok to be divested from its Chinese ownership to an American group. The law was signed by President Biden and it was approved by the Supreme Court as being a legal exercise of congressional authority. When Donald Trump won the election, he showed some displeasure about the law. TikTok had been very favorable to Donald Trump's cause in the 2024 election. He owed them a big debt of gratitude. He didn't want to transform them and he wasn't much interested in complying with a Biden era law. But it is the law and there were some opportunities here. And so Trump began to push back the deadlines repeatedly, later and later and later. The latest Pushback is to December 16, but it looks like a deal is going to happen and a group of hand selected insiders are about to purchase 80% of the US operations of TikTok from the Chinese company. A lot of this is very murky, but the reports in the Wall Street Journal and other financial papers that Quote, unnamed senior administration officials suggest that the price is going to be about $14 billion. Now, I'm going to start with the financial aspect of this. TikTok US throws off about $10 billion a year. And most conventional estimates would suggest that that would mean that the company should be worth 50 or 80 billion dollars or possibly even more. The insiders who have their be no public auction. These insiders have been chosen. They've been chosen apparently for their loyalty to President Trump. It looks like it's going to be the biggest giveaway since the days of the, of the railway grants. But in those days, at least you've got a railway for your money. In this case, the company already exists. All that's happening is a select group of insiders are going to receive a massive windfall. Now, Donald Trump will presumably want something back. I've written about this story in more detail in the print Atlantic and if you want all the details, you, you should go there. But one can expect that the TikTok algorithm, owned by a group of people who have owe tens of billions of dollars of thank you to Donald Trump, will continue to favor Donald Trump's views, maybe even more outrageously than they do now. And this brings us to a challenge, a challenge to our understanding that is going to be difficult for those of us of a certain age. Now, if you're mind goes back to America as it used to be and in, in MAGA world you hear this a lot. You have this idea of the, the media. There's this thing called the media and they are supposedly very liberal. And when you press me, what do you mean by the media? They usually answer something like the New York Times, cnn, maybe the broadcast, even news, cbs, NBC, abc. Because those were the companies that used to be the most powerful companies in America when they were young. It used to be that the people who had the ability to decide what is news and what is not news, to make a discussion stick, to force politicians to answer and do a sort of short list thinking about the year 1975 again, the networks, major national papers, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, local news affiliates in major markets like Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, and major local papers like the Atlanta Constitution, the Chicago Tribune and others, maybe Time magazine. These were all institutions that both produced and distributed their own content. They were primarily either text based or television based. And they had a kind of a shared outlook. They're not as liberal as all that, but they did, they, they were, they were broadly supportive of the foreign policy of the United States and the government of the United States, and they lean liberal, especially on issues of civil rights and civil liberties. That's the media landscape that many people grow up with, that many people imagine is still there. But when you think about what does media mean in the year 2025, I don't think there's any way to get around the fact that by far the single most powerful media company in the country today is TikTok. Even though TikTok doesn't produce its content, its algorithm decides what you see. It might as well be producing it. It picks and chooses among thousands of entrants and it directs streams of revenue to the people who are chosen. TikTok is the apparently among those under 30. It is the single most relied upon source of information. What else would be powerful? Well, other kinds of new media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta, YouTube owned by Alphabet, again, they don't produce the content, but they decide what is seen. Now, there's some people who do produce content who are important. Fox News, watched by the President of the United States and some consortiums of local TV station, local TV affiliates like those owned by Sinclair. But we live in a new media environment in which the media as they exist in popular rhetoric and popular remembrance of older folks are just not that important anymore. And the people who are important are companies that a lot of Americans are not in the habit of thinking of as the media, especially not TikTok. But these new media powerhouses, they are very different from the old. They are much more beholden on government for special favors. You may remember that story from the very beginning of the Trump administration when Amazon paid for the life rights for a Melania Trump documentary, the reported sum of something like $40 million. It looks like this was just a straight gift to the family of the President to leave Amazon alone. Other media companies have paid their ransoms. CBS and ABC News and others have paid 16, $15 million ransoms to be led out of litigation that in the case of ABC was likely to lose, in the case of CBS was certain to lose. And CNN is under similar kinds of pressure. The New York Times has been put under similar kinds of pressure. The new media, the platforms of today, are much more dependent on government and owned by people who are political allies of President Trump. We have moved imperceptibly from a world of sort of institutionalist, establishment minded liberal media to post institutional, very beholden to government, very pro Trump media. And we don't see it because we are not in the habit of recognizing these media companies as media companies, but as you try to understand the information diet of your fellow Americans. If you are someone who is watching the David Frum show and reading the Atlantic, you are consuming a media of a very different quality and kind and form than that which is consumed by most of your fellow citizens. And while congratulations, you've got a much healthier media diet than they do, there are a lot of them and they matter and they vote. So to understand what what is coming, you need to understand how this media is being shaped. You also need to understand that the people who are governing this country, Donald Trump and his circle, have a very clear view of the new media that matters. You should be aware of it as well as the President and the people who are benefiting from his largesse. You should be aware of it and you should act and think accordingly. And now my discussion with Ken Burns. But first, a quick break.
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David Frum
For millions of people in the United States and around the world, Ken Burns is the preeminent guide and teacher of the American nation's history. Since his first feature documentary in 1981 on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Burns has told the story of baseball, the Vietnam War, jazz and the Civil War. To tell his stories, Burns invented a New cinematic technique that transforms still photographs and seemingly static interviews into moving pictures. Now Burns has brought his method and his insight to the American Revolution in time for the 250th anniversary of 1776. I'm honored to welcome Ken Burns to the David Frum Show. Ken, thank you so much for joining me today.
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Ken Burns
Oh, David, it's my honor. Thank you for having me.
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David Frum
Now, I have to warn you at the beginning, I'm going to have a somewhat different perspective from. On this, from some of the people you've talked to. I spend much of the year in a part of Ontario settled by refugees from the American Revolution.
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Ken Burns
And, you know, it's probably one of my ancestors, Eldad Tupper might be there amongst the gravestones in your cemetery. So I'm a little bit more comfortable. All right.
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David Frum
I literally live on a road called Loyalist Parkway.
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Ken Burns
Perfect, perfect.
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David Frum
So I want to ask the first question, and forgive me if this is a little long, so I want to set the table for you about where I'd like to go. There are prevailing in American society today two main versions of the revolution story, and let's call them the triumphalist and the tragic. The triumphalist. As American patriots rose up to defend their liberties against the tyrannical British crown. They fought at first against enormous odds, but with going confidence and capacity and strength, they won a series of battles. They converted a ragtag group of militias into army. They defeated the British on the battlefield using European techniques. They beat the British at their own game and established a new nation of rights and liberties. That's the triumphal story. And then there's the tragic story, which is this revolution originated in mass surveillance and citizen upon citizen terror. It was everywhere. It was a civil war that divided the nation with people driven into exile. And it was a revolution that created terrible victims in indigenous populations and enslaved people, and that ultimately resulted not in a new nation of liberty, but in a slave republic that continued slavery 30 years after the people against whom they revolted abolished slavery. Now, as I watched all the episodes of your series, you give voice to both the triumphalist and the tragic version, and a kind of balance. And here's the question. My perception, and tell me if this is wrong, is as a viewer, is that while your head is with the tragic version, your heart is with the triumphalist version.
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Ken Burns
Oh, what an interesting interpretation. I would say that it's both the head and the heart are invested in both things in order to do good history. And that is to say, not take what I would say would be the lazy academic. In academics, you would call it the historiography filter. The thing that you would triumphal or sort of tragic filter that you would add to it and be umpires calling balls and strikes. That requires a passionate language, love of the game, but not with a thumb on any scale. And that, that is a discipline we have all tried to adhere to. And the Wii is not royal. It's my co director Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, very notably Jeffrey Ward, who I've been collaborating with for 45 years, who wrote the script, a number of really talented editors and, and people who've been digging with us to find the, the maps, to find the documents, to find the drawings, the paintings, to do the live cinematography. All, all of that is going on. So to me, using a base, continuing the baseball metaphor, you know, if you're just going to reduce Babe Ruth to hitting home runs, that's, that's one way to do it. You can also just say he struck out a lot, and that's also true. But you can also just show the balls and strikes and also that Babe Ruth only comes up once every nine times at bat. And so you, you have suddenly, as Lincoln would say in 1862, you've disenthralled yourself from the old sort of narrative that had. And you don't have to do that. You have to say there is, without George Washington, we don't have a country. But this is a deeply flawed rash, riding out on the battlefields, risking his life in the cause in several instances, Kips Bay and Princeton and Monmouth notably. And he also makes two gigantic, at least two gigantic tactical mistakes on the battlefield. In the largest battle, Long island, where he leaves his left flank exposed. And in another huge battle, Brandywine, where he lives, his right flank exposed. And he should have known better. He's a survivor surveyor, as Rick Atkinson says. But it's also true, and I think this is the problem, that we live in a place in which we are so wedded, addicted, devoted to binaries, right? It's either one thing or another. And the novelist Richard Powers said the best arguments, which are of course binaries, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that, he said, is a good story. So good story suggests that it's able to contain contradictions within it, that there can be undertow on our, on our editing room wall we've had for years that I put up a neon sign in lowercase cursive that says it's complicated. There's not a filmmaker in the world that doesn't want to, you know, leave a thing that's working alone. But we've spent our entire professional lives destabilizing stuff that already works in favor in the great tension between the facts and art, that somehow we still had to wring art out of being adherence to the facts of this thing. So all of those things that you mentioned are true. The only thing I would say is that it's even more of a kind of Grand Canyon of sedimentary layers. It's a revolution, first of all. It's an argument between British people over rights. It's then a revolution. It's then also a bloody civil war, which we don't really want to admit to ourselves. The loyalists aren't bad people. They'd be called today conservatives, those people who think, quite correctly, that the best form of government on earth is the British constitutional monarchy. And who are these crazy people who have been opening my mail for a few years and are going to do that? Two ministers, as you noted, as I'm sure you saw in episode one, are looking and said, who do you. You want to be ruled by a tyrant? One tyrant 3,000 miles away, or 3,000 tyrants not a mile away? And then it's also in addition to a civil war, and much more of a civil war than our actual civil war was. Lots of civilian deaths in the Revolution, so much in. In the American Civil War. It's a world war, so that we do it with European techniques. But George Washington hasn't got any idea how to do operate a siege. He. He's turning to his French. They've not only sent money and material and ships, but they've sent a general and thousands of troops. And it's Rochambeau who knows how to conduct a siege. And Washington is completely at his. At his, you know, mercy of how to. To do it. So I love the complexity of this, the undertow of this. And it doesn't at the end of the day, to go back, David. It doesn't diminish, in fact, it only enlarges the power of the ideas. You know, Ecclesiastes, which is the Old Testament, says, what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun that you know, but the revolution is something new under the sun.
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David Frum
Let me pause you there with something, because just in deference to my loyalist neighbors in Ontario, I don't think it's right to say that they were conservatives because of my neighbors. I'VE been interested in the subject and, and to say who were they? And the best predictor of who became a Loyalist was whether you were afraid of your neighbors. So in the north, where most especially in New England where most of your neighbors were Congregationalists and Baptists and Methodists, the Anglicans became Loyalists. In the south, where most of your neighbors were Anglicans, the Congregationalist, Methodists and Baptists became Loyalists. Up the Hubson Valley, if you were a Dutch farmer who had learned English, you probably went with the Patriots. If you were a Dutch farmer who had not learned English, you probably stayed loyal to the Crown. In, in areas where they were Huguenots, French, French Protestants. If they had learned English, they were probably Patriots. If they had not learned English, they were probably loyal to the Crown. If you were in a society where the elites had a lot of consensus like Virginia, then the elite became Patriot. If you were in a place like New York where the elites did not have a lot of consensus, then the elites tended to and so on and about and everywhere and always Indians and blacks were Loyalists.
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Ken Burns
Right. Well that, that's. Yeah, right, exactly.
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David Frum
So this is more about. Is breaking a tie a check on the power of local majorities at the cost of local minorities. And that is regarded by everyone. Is, that's, that's the cause. That's. It's not modern people versus conservative people. It's people who feel part, who feel they will be empowered if the crown is taken away versus people will feel they will be made more vulnerable if the crown is taken away. Yes.
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Ken Burns
Yeah, I agree and I, and I'm sorry because I'm guilty of the, the same reductionism. By doing that, I've been trying to understand why we had not set up the simple binaries of this person is good or this person is bad. We follow John Peters, who is a loyalist from Vermont, who's the leading man of his community, who's sent by his community in a not yet existent Vermont, politically exist in Vermont to the Continental Congress and goes, wait a second, the first one, I don't, I don't subscribe to this. And he's arrested four times on the way back home and becomes and starts eventually driven from his home and his family driven from his home, starts a regiment and of Loyalists and comes back down to fight in Burgoyne's ill fated Saratoga campaign.
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David Frum
One of the things I was struck by. And again, this is one of your binaries. There's been a long running argument in American history whether 1776 or 1787 is the crucial Year, the year of the Revolution or the year of the Constitution. And it used to be argued that the Constitution was actually a kind of counter revolution. Now that argument's gone out of fashion. I think it's sort of true. And one of the things I was struck by is that you discuss the 1780s in the last 10 minutes of the final episode. But I often wonder if a lot of our assessment of the revolution is because of the successful counter revolution of the 1780s. And if that hadn't happened, the revolution might look a little different. I'm thinking a friend of the American Revolution, Edmund Burke, said of the French Revolution, the effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please. We ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk. Congratulations. The American Revolution achieved stabilization and success. It wasn't obvious on the day of Yorktown or on the day of the treaty in 1783 that it would lead to a stable country. That only became clear after 1787.
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Ken Burns
That's correct. It's a wonderful point. We were talking before we got started about my Civil War series, and in ways, almost all of the Civil War and how we understand it is shaped by the period after the Civil War, which we call Reconstruction, which has been invented by one group to be this horrible tragedy and invented by another group to be the first experiment in Civil War rights. And it's collapsed the tragedy and whatever it is, it issued in a period of white supremacy. So it's very hard to abandon a narrative. And it was very important to us who thought we weren't going to go racing for the exits once York's Town happened and the surrender took place, but to understand the way in which the failures of the Article of Confederation replaced by the Constitution and then the government was a way to understand the. The. The ongoing tensions of how we would configure ourselves for generations to come, as well as. As sort out the winners, if you will, and the losers. The Native Americans being the worst looter losers, black Americans, women, the French, and then the British being the least losers. And. And of course the white American males being the winners of the whole shebang. So it's. It's. It's a tough narrative choice to make, but I agree with you absolutely. And what I like is we did a film a few years ago on Benjamin Franklin, spent much more time in the Constitutional Convention, much more time arguing over some of this stuff, and felt not so much that I didn't have to do it, but in this case, having won at Yorktown, I've got about 40 minutes before I'm going to run the credits. I mean, we don't think of it that way. We just look to see what can fit and what you can do. And we hinted at like the vermouth in a very dry martini. The excellent point that you've made.
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David Frum
Yeah, well, your point about the black Americans being the losers. One of the things you. In the again, final episode, you talk about very this. If I'd known this, I'd forgotten it and maybe I never knew it was the extraordinary sea lift evacuation that the British did at the end of the war. Tens of thousands of people in 18. This is something that you associate with the United states in the 20th century, where the British did a refugee evacuation on tens of thousands of people to some to the Caribbean, some to Nova Scotia. A few made it their own way to what is now Ontario. Some went back to Brazil, Britain. But the Americans said, okay, you have permission to evacuate your refugees, but we have a condition. No black people. You cannot. No black people to whom someone has a claim of property and that's part of the peace deal that the black people stayed loyal to. You must be abandoned to us.
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Ken Burns
And Clinton, who was then the military leader of all of King's forces in North America, said, no, we made promises. And it actually works out in a very ironic thing. It was just in France's tavern in Lower Manhattan just the other day and there's a room in there where they got together and they decided they had two lists of Negroes, as they recall. And what happens is families are torn apart because the mother can prove that she's been in the service of this officer or this loyalist for this long. And so they, they're the property and can go, but the child cannot. And so there are heart rending moments at dockside when families are literally being spread, pulled apart.
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David Frum
Yeah, you have a heart rending painting of one of those scenes with the child being pulled one way by a man in a tricorn hat and the mother in another way. And it was sort of a woman who went to, I think Bermuda or Bahamas and had to leave behind her stolen daughter.
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Ken Burns
Yeah. Judith Jackson. And it's, it's just, it's one. You know, it's like, like William Blake. You could find the world in a grain of sand in Judith Jackson story hold true. And there's, there's several other people that we are able to identify if we don't have a contemporary image or even a later image by the, the signatures on a, on a Line by the. The role by what? Wherever they appear, by a gravestone that. That proves their existence and adds to the complexity of the story.
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David Frum
Now, the Northern states use the occasion of the revolution to write constitutions that prohibit slavery. So there's, or they should say the New England, New York doesn't get around to abolishing slavery, I think, until the 1820s or 30s, something like that. But New England and Pennsylvania abolished slavery.
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Ken Burns
That's correct. First.
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David Frum
So the revolution has a kind of people take their words seriously, but in other parts of the country, the revolution seems to fasten the slave system even more intensely. Yes.
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Ken Burns
Yeah. And so. So there's a wonderful comment. When I was making my film about Benjamin Franklin, I had the good fortune of interviewing the late historian Bernard Bailyn and sort of baiting and switching at the end. I said, we've also been working on this film about the revolution. Would you let me talk? So he actually said something that we used in the Franklin film and then used again here, that he said that before the Revolution, people didn't talk about slavery that much. There were some people who gave voice to its evils, but it wasn't. But the second the revolution happened, because it's often the planters themselves, the large slave owners who are using the idea that the king is enslaving them, that the hypocrisy comes out, that then the quote question of slavery. And because you've broken out these British rights to now big natural rights, that all men are created equal, As U of L11 says, you know, it's not men are equal. It's all, you know, that you've opened the door and we're going to drive a truck through it. However long, four score in nine years or 144 years before women get the vote or whatever it's going to be, it's going to happen. And so then slavery is always in discussion and the people who are hearing the liberty talk, as Jane Kaminsky says, there is alive, if not more alive to the possibilities of freedom than anyone else. So you have destabilized a lot of arguments, but you're absolutely right. Slavery is making the British Empire tons of money. We say 13 colonies. There are 26 colonies. We are the least profitable the 13 in the Caribbean because they have sometimes 90% slave population. Jamaica, Barbados, they're the most profitable of all the far flung sort of revenue streams of the British Empire. And so there's, there's hypocrisy in, in Lord Dunmore offering who owns his own human beings, freedom to just the enslaved people of rebels and not to a loyalists. It's, it's an incredibly complex dynamic that we wanted to kind of represent. But yes, I think what happens is that when you have suddenly opened the door to these Enlightenment thoughts that transcend the argument here, it's going to be gone. It's going to take longer for the people who are making a lot of money to do that. And in fact, it gets re. Entrenched because even, I mean, you could, you could say that Jefferson and Washington are anti slavery. They know it's wrong. And Annette Gordon Reed has this wonderful thing, well, how could Thomas Jefferson know something was wrong and still do it? And she goes, well, that's a question for all of us. Not letting Jefferson off the hook, but putting the rest of us on the hook. But by the time you have an abolitionist move movement in the early part of the 19th century, then the slave, the enslavers are digging in and saying, no, no, no, this is inferior. Not that Jefferson didn't write about that in the notes on the state of Virginia. These are inferior people. They need to be taken care of. And so you're, you're scrambling around for arguments that are, of course, even more specious than before.
- [28:01]
David Frum
Well, this is one of the notes of complexity you strike. If I recall right, the last Founding father we hear from in the whole series is, is Benjamin Rush.
- [28:08]
Ken Burns
That's correct.
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David Frum
The doctor from Pennsylvania who is, I think, the only member of the revolutionary generation who is convinced of the full moral and intellectual equality of the races. There are many abolitionists like Hamilton and Franklin, but they were not so certain about equality. Rush was. But to make it complicated, Rush was also a medical crank who killed hundreds of people.
- [28:29]
Ken Burns
Experiment.
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David Frum
Yeah, yeah. With purging and bleeding and, and was. And I mean, it wasn't. I shouldn't call him a crackpot because these were fairly common ideas at his time, but they were beginning, People were beginning to have doubts. And he was, with the medical reactionary, said, no, when someone has yellow fever, you take a razor to their arm and release some blood and that'll fix them. Oh, that, that one died too.
- [28:47]
Ken Burns
Oh, well, yeah, I know, it's, it's unbelievable. And I have another ancestor, Gerardus Clarkson, who with Rush helped found the first medical college, hopefully to learn better in Pennsylvania from, from that, from that insanity.
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David Frum
Well, let me, I want to ask you something about, and this is the most unfair, least most provoking kind of question, but about the things you didn't talk about.
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Ken Burns
Yeah.
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David Frum
So one of the things that has been a fixture of American history for 200 years has been the comparison of the American Revolution to the French Revolution. Why did the American Revolution work? And why did the French Revolution, seemingly, at least in the opinion of most Americans, not work? But a thing Americans are not interested in is what I would have thought is the much more salient question of why did the American Revolution work when the contemporary South American revolutions did not work? That people are ready to compare Washington to the heroes of French liberty. They're not so willing to compare Washington to Bolivar.
- [29:41]
Ken Burns
To Bolivar. Right.
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David Frum
And I've got some thoughts on this, but I'd like to hear how do you integrate the Latin? Or I should say, because in Mexico the Revolution actually failed until the last minute, but in South America the revolutionary succeeded, but they left behind enduring instability, unjust societies. How do you understand the difference when it happened in North America and South America?
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Ken Burns
Well, I think this is a really important thing. The first thing to understand is that unlike your world, which is the intellectual pursuit of these ideas and the history that undergirds it is a kind of additive process. What I'm involved in is a subtractive one. I'm talking to you from New Hampshire. We make maple syrup. It takes 40 gallons of SAP to make one gallon of syrup. So we're actually collecting stuff and then pulling away what, what can our story contain? And so we'd love to go off, press that Benjamin Rush button, which you can't do at the very last moment when you're hearing somebody say the American War is over but the American Revolution is still going on and go into Benjamin Rush and all of the, the cuckoo ness that you described. At the same time, as we acknowledge a few minutes before that the American Revolution is going to set in motion revolutions for the next 200 plus years around the world. First in Europe, then in the Caribbean and South America and in Asia and Africa. We're talking about all of that, but we're not at that stage. Just like at the end of the Civil War series, we could hint at this progress, this thing that was going to be called Reconstruction, but we couldn't delve into it. And so to me, I'm now working. By the way, if this is in any satisfactory a sop to you, David, I have, I've been working, thinking about for decades and now working on a film called Emancipation to Exodus which is exactly that self emancipating slaves through the Civil War to the Reconstruction, it's collapsed finally to the Great Migration. And so we'll be going Back and answering a fundamental question not dissimilar to the one you just asked me. And who knows, maybe we'll be able to say this American project ought to extend beyond the borders of just one of the Americas.
- [31:46]
David Frum
Can I test a theory on you? And I have a thought about why Washington succeeded in Bolivar failed. And I'd like to know what you, with your great study of the subject, what you think of it and again bracket Mexico. In Mexico, the Spaniards actually won. And the Mexican case, the way I compare is that imagine that the British completely beat the Americans and executed Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Franklin, firing squads, hanging. They were all, all drawn and quartered. Yeah, all. All dead. And the hero, the Spanish hero who defeated them all was General Benedict Arnold. Right. And he becomes the leader of. Of the country and then he turns against the British and crowns himself Emperor Benedict the First and declares the independence of America under his imperial rule. That's the story of Mexican independence. Yes, but. But going farther south is the name of the guy who did it. Going farther south. Here's my theory and tell me what.
- [32:37]
Ken Burns
You think of this.
- [32:37]
David Frum
In the United States, even, certainly in the north and even in the south, the white American population was big enough. They were able to lock the indigenous and people and the slaves out of politics. And they were military factors, but they were not really political factors and they were completely locked out. And when the British tried to make use of them, that only consolidated patriot feeling more against the British.
- [32:59]
Ken Burns
Very good point. Yes.
- [33:00]
David Frum
In South America, the populations were not. You couldn't walk the indigenous and the slaves out of politics. You had to bring them in in some way. And Bolivar ends up bringing them in. And the result is he triggers, he turns a political revolution into a social revolution. A revolution that is not just against Spanish rule while preserving the structures of Spanish society, but it's something that turns into a slave revolt at the same time that then the new power holders in the arm try to suppress. And the story of Latin America has been when, when you pull the South America has been when you pull the Spanish out, you uncork the bottle and then repressive forces try to put the cork in and they're never able to succeed. And the oppressed forces are never able to push the cork back out again fully either. And that's why it remains so stable. And that's the difference is that the United States, it remained a quarrel within the European Americans of European descent, and they were able to lock the others out and thus to prevent the political revolution from turning into. It was Something of a social revolution, but not a very big one. Whereas in South America was a huge one. Yeah.
- [34:02]
Ken Burns
I'm not sure I buy into just the terminology of lock the others out, but I agree with you. I think that's very, very smart. I mean, Churchill, looking back at it, said we could only do two things. We could only handle Union, we couldn't handle slavery. Right. So that, that was the revolution was making a. A simple choice. And, and, and I think what we did do, David, and it doesn't answer your question directly, but I think it places the sort of foundation on which our narrative progresses. Not on the grade school taxes and representation, which is obviously a big, huge part of it. And not to take anything away from those motivations, but about Indian land all the way through. And so you have, you know, we very much pride a place put Kanaca and his, you know, celebrations of the land that they have and the worry that the white people don't understand their relationship to the land. And his confidence in the power of his confederacy, a Union, remember, he says, never fall out one with the other. He's sort of telling us, don't have a civil war, you know. And by the end of the sixth episode, we've brought a civil war to the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, which destroys them in the name of grabbing land in upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania. So all the way through, even from our opening topic, sentence of introduction, it's not just a clash between Englishmen over Indian land, taxes and representation. There was something that I insisted on because I think that's the way to understand it, because you have Native peoples living in separate and distinct nations that are like the difference between France and Prussia, who have formed alliances, they've fallen out of those alliances, and we treat them as them. And we have both assimilated and living in coexisting Native Americans within the land we've already spent the last 150 years securing. We're going to spend the next 150 years taking the rest of it. And by the way, we do not start that Congress and call it the Eastern Seaboard Congress or the Eastern Seaboard army, in which we are placing you, George Washington, in charge of, we're calling the Continental Army. We know where we're going. So I think the heart of this is less, you know, and I don't know enough about Latin or South America to be able to argue in any real way, but to say the conquering has taken place here. We're just all about uncorking Potentiality and that is. That's the whole thing that we see this as an empire in the making. And George Washington in the 80s as things are beginning to unravel because the Articles of Confederation are so toothless. He's saying, you know there's Shays rebellions as he. He's worried about dry drowning our rising empire in blood. They got. They know what they got and they got in the Treaty of Paris everything to the Mississippi and they want everything beyond that too.
- [36:54]
David Frum
Well the finance the financial stabilization of the Union depends on the Indian land. I mean how does the United States once Congress is formed, how does the United States pay its bills from the Exactly. Land sales.
- [37:04]
Ken Burns
And you have a states rights guy in Thomas Jefferson who makes the greatest land deal in the history of the world. Right. Which is like aghast. I mean even. I'm not even sure Alexander Hamilton would have had the guts to say yup. And he buys you know, doubling the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. I think. I think we have to recenter Native American land and in this story and that's what makes it different from a France and makes it different from a Haiti and makes it different from a South American. Examples that you bring up which I. I want to plead, you know, ignorance.
- [37:41]
David Frum
I'm sorry I told you it was a dirty trick to ask you about something.
- [37:43]
Ken Burns
No, no, no. It's. I'm fascinating. You're now going to send me down that rabbit hole.
- [37:49]
David Frum
I want to take it back to the story of your head and your heart because you have the American flag over your left shoulder.
- [37:55]
Ken Burns
This is actually. May I just say something to you that will help you understand all of my dancing. Whatever I do to dance on your next question. That is a Navajo blanket does not change the dynamics. That is not American. It is a representation of the American flag. It is neither a flag or even a quilt which I collect and are all over. But it is a blanket by the Navajo people. And it to me.
- [38:23]
David Frum
So now you're. Now you're intensifying the contradiction that I was about to ask you about where which is you. You say goodbye to the viewer and you make your peace with the story by saying well, you've talked about the heroism and the valor of those who fought. You talked about how those who fought came from the bottom of society. At the beginning they had property. But by the end of the war the professional Continental army is a property of. It's an army of propertyless men. The minute men were not. But all through the many hours we've spent with you. You have entertained or invited us or introduced us to many qualms and doubts about what's happening. But you end by saying, I'm going to give you a vision of the. The future of how this will all turn out that vindicates what happened. But as you are sorting this out as an historian, but also a storyteller, to the extent those are different, how do we make sense of. We have our feelings about 1781 and 1783 decided by outcomes that no one in 1781 or 1783 could know or have any confidence in, even if. Even if they had visions of what the future might be?
- [39:28]
Ken Burns
I don't know the answer to that. I know that I felt that because we had been so assiduous in trying to maintain all the complexities that we've described in our conversation, that I still had a sense that this was the most consequential revolution in history. That, as I've been saying out on the road, much to the chagrin, I assume, of some of my colleagues who are too polite to speak up, that I thought it was the most important event since the birth of Christ in all of world history. And I'm willing to sort of go there and defend it. I think it's a way to wake people up to think about it, that there's something deeply patriotic in a good way, and reclaiming the word patriotism from the scoundrels. And Samuel Johnson said, lost souls escape their loss of control and patriotism. You know, you. There's a way in which I wanted to reclaim a sophisticated. And it meant that for all the yes buts that the film is constantly throwing up in terms, those last moments, the 40 minutes after Yorktown are filled with a lot of the contradictions and the losses. It felt important to at least say, in a way, didn't we throw something forward? Couldn't we have a place where. Where we could agree that everyone. And you know, I've been out on the road, David, for months and months and months. And I have said the same thing to Joe Rogan, as I said to the New York Times editorial board, as I said to inner city kids in Detroit and kids from Chicagoland area and audiences, you know, in the evenings everywhere around the country, because I think that there's a place to have purchase, particularly in this divided time, that if you want to be clear eyed about not cure, but just getting better, you need to, you know, as any professional would do, when a person's in crisis, you go back and find out where? Who? Your parents? Where'd you grow up? What'd you do? So what's your origin story? And then you begin to reassemble your narrative in a much more positive, healthy way. So having told a more complete calling, balls and strikes, and there are some unbelievable balls and strikes, as well as some grand slam home runs, and that, that I wanted to give it back to the hopefulness of, of, you know, like Jefferson said to Adams, I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. And so we shall go on puzzled and prospering beyond example in the history of men, puzzled and prospering. And so I just, I mean, it's not in our film. I've used it in a couple of other films. Couldn't just do it again. But it's, it's really, it's, it's really the sense that there is some embedded hopefulness in this story that I wish also to not be extinguished. That I don't, I don't want to, in your original binary, sort of subscribe to the triumphal, nor do I wish to subscribe to, to, to the, to the sad story.
- [42:17]
David Frum
There's, there's a spirit of history that says that, as von Ranke said, that history is just what happened. But in reality, what actually happens is depending on what you. History is a resource in which people search for what they need. So you've referenced Lincoln a couple of times. So in Lincoln's youth, when the Constitution enshrined slavery, which he did not like, but the Declaration, the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence seemed to condemn slavery. Lincoln said, 1776 good. 1787, defective. And we have to revert from the Constitution to the Declaration. And he made a hero, Jefferson, in a way that actually didn't make a lot of sense.
- [42:57]
Ken Burns
But no, no, because he was running probably the greatest federalist government of all.
- [43:03]
David Frum
Time, but it made emotional sense. So in that era that Lincoln said and those of his ilk in the 1830s, 1840s, 1776, seven good. 1787 bad. The historians of the 1950s, fresh from the McCarthy period, said, Wait, wait a moment. You let loose the politics of every day, you're going to let loose a lot of paranoia and conspiracy theory and a lot of, like a lot of the people who fought in 1776, what they thought they were fighting for was to stop George III from turning America Catholic. And that was crazy. But it's. They, that that's what they went to war to do. They, they thought there was a Catholic conspiracy against liberties of Americans. And so the historians of the 1950s often said, 1787, good, 1776, a little more troubling. And so it goes in different historical periods. And you know, I was thinking when I was watching your conversation with my editor, Jeff Goldberg, I'm old enough to remember the 1976 bicentennial. And the mood of 1976 was the United States had been through Vietnam, Watergate, a serious, the worst recession since the Great Depression at that time. And America said we need cheering up. We need a feel good version of 1776 to cheer us up in the tougher days of 1976. So now, and I remember at the time thinking, what's the mood going to be in 50 years? And I live to see it. And the mood is, I think we're back in the mood of the 1950s, where a lot of people are saying we are not so confident anymore about what happens when you say let's loose the spirits, let's dissolve the bonds of authority, let's dissolve the bonds of, of knowledge. You know, if you want to go out into your pulpit in the backwoods and say, George III has a plot to make America Catholic, that it turned out all right. So we don't, you know, we forget. And we may be in a moment where it looks and feels more like 1958 than like 1976.
- [44:57]
Ken Burns
You know, the other evening at the National Constitution Center, I was speaking with Yuval Levin on stage and, and he was saying, you know, the founders who were trying to remember, reverse engineer an autocrat in, in their designs of the document and the writing of the code in the summer of 1787, wouldn't be surprised to come back and find that somebody wanted to take more power. That would not surprise them. What would surprise them was the acquiescence of what is Article one, which is the legislative branch. And that's the Article one. It's not Article two, that's the legislative, that's the executive branch. And so I think that we're going to be constantly moving, moving. It's a kind of centering process. And for storytellers, it's not so much we're reading the moment because we can't. DAVID I began this when Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency, and we've gone through lots of what Mark Twain would call rhymes throughout. I mean, when the wife of the German general who's with Burgoyne is coming over, she's worried about Americans eating cats. If for some thing we'd come out last fall, this would be Like a gigantic, oh, Ken Burns, you did this. Because we're talking about Springfield, Ohio, and J.D. vance, and everybody's talking about Americans, immigrants eating illegal, immigrants eating cats. That would have been a big rhyme. I think it'll pass by this fall with, you know, hardly a kerfuffle. But there'll be other things that were in the film, you know, years ago that are going to just rhyme in spectacular fashions. I don't know, but I felt my whole professional life, the movement, I mean, even Gordon Wood, in the middle of our Declaration sentence said, lincoln knew this. He said, all glory to all honor to Jefferson. That's the beginning of taking it away from the Constitution. And I could go back. One of the things I'm working on with this Emancipation to Exodus project is people do believe that the Constitution is a racist document. And actually it's people like Frederick Douglass and Lincoln who decide, you know what? It's not actually. And here's how we're going to use it. And the leverage of that is, I don't. I wouldn't say, equally as important in a big conversation of head and heart as. As Lincoln quoting Jefferson at the Gettysburg Address, which is the Declaration 2.0. We really do mean that all men are created equal. He's replacing the original catechism with a slight adjustment to it. I do think it is as much the underlying undergirding constitutional things that even Frederick Douglass can find purchase within the original Constitution to make his arguments about human freedom and equality.
- [47:40]
David Frum
Yeah, when you say the Constitution is a racist document, it's a document in which slavery is sort of the embedding problem.
- [47:47]
Ken Burns
I'm not saying. I'm saying. I'm saying that the interpretation, as you correctly said in the early 19th century, was for many that the Constitution was flawed. And therefore we should go back further and resurrect Jefferson and the Declaration.
- [48:00]
David Frum
And we've created then this imagined history where the Constitution as you have it now is the same document as it was in 1787, and it really isn't. But they were solving a problem which is how did they reassert the authority of the central government? How do they fund it? And when I said, when I. We talked about land sales, I mean, even before Louisiana, that one of the things that is a provocation of the Revolution as, as you say at the beginning is the Quebec act of 1774, which basically assigns Ohio to the. And greater Ohio to the province of Quebec with a view to stopping. Quebec has a royal governor. And so you can stop or try to stop more effectively migration westward across the Appalachians into. Into the Ohio Valley. It's. It's probably doomed never to work because the British were never going to pay the cost of actually policing it. But. But it wasn't an impediment. It was certainly an impediment, and it.
- [48:51]
Ken Burns
Was also an internal thing. It's more. It's more local consumption. They're trying to also pacify the Catholic population of. Of this new state that they've absorbed because of the Seven Years War, what we call the French and Indian War. And it's really the 1763 demarcation that you can't go over it because we can't afford to protect you. And so that's why many native tribes think because the British have beat the French and because they're supposedly keeping their own people from crossing the border, that why we might, you know, more Native Americans, you know, went in with the British than went in with the patriots. And same for black people, because they just saw perhaps more daylight in a British ambiguous position on slavery than on an unambiguous position on slavery that the patriots had.
- [49:41]
David Frum
But unlike the lands west of the Mississippi, which will be homesteaded in the 1860s, where you can just basically, you show up, you start farming, it's yours. The lands east of the Mississippi were sold, and they were sold for cash. And that was how the new government paid the debt, revolutionary debt, paid its bills, paid its army at last. And that was the problem that consumed the people of 1787, which is how do you pay the debts? Which one. Things that South American governments were never able to do, and that set them on many of their paths and that the new republic of Haiti was unable to do.
- [50:15]
Ken Burns
I think it's because they didn't have in front of them the kind of tabula rasa, the blank canvas ahead of them that was going to be not just the manifest Destiny, but it was the place where we're going to be able to create. Create the income necessary to keep things running.
- [50:30]
David Frum
Well, so then this. This is here. This is where I will end with. With your generous time. But to go back to your head question, are you with Lincoln as a man of 1776, or are you with the historians of the 1950s as a man of 1787?
- [50:43]
Ken Burns
All right, I am going to drive you crazy, David, because I'm going to. I'm going to say neither in both. So in his message to Congress in 1862, he says, fellow citizens, we cannot escape any history, the fiery trial through which we Pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. Right. And a few seconds later, he says, the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new. We must think anew, we must act anew, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we can save our country in the second inauguration. He says, if you are, I'm willing to go 500 years with this business. Right. Every drop of blood drawn by the lashes will be replaced by one drawn by the sword. As Old Testament as you can get. And then he pivots and goes, with malice towards none, with charity for all. So I am in the fact that the American project seems to be hinging, I wouldn't even say between head and heart, but between these polarities of a kind of sort of vigorous, you know, prosecution and a, and an understanding of how much the past informs where we are now, and a sense that, that, that, that the, the point is right here. And there's a kind of new tenor, New Testament generosity that you have. So I, I buy into all of it, and I'm just trying to, in Whitman esque ways, you know. You know, do I contradict myself? Yes. And I, I contain multitudes. And so I've tried to represent. It's not so much me, it's it that contains multitudes. I've tried to represent the multitudes that yell from either side of the brain or from the head and the heart.
- [52:16]
David Frum
In the American project, as you say this, maybe you are resolving another binary that we have about you, which is the question about one of the questions about Ken Barnes and maybe the one that students of your work will struggle with the most is are you first and foremost an historian or are you first and foremost an artist?
- [52:32]
Ken Burns
I am a storyteller, and historians hate contradictions.
- [52:37]
David Frum
And artists love them. Yeah.
- [52:38]
Ken Burns
No, no, no. You need to have them. You know, Wynter Marcellus, one of the great artists that I know. Dear, dear friend, we're like brothers said in jazz. Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. Like if you are trying to superimpose the historiography of one particular view of the Revolution or of the Civil War, it doesn't fit at all. And yet, you know, Keats said of, of Shakespeare, that Shakespeare had negative capability, which is a wonderful phrase, that was the ability to hold intention, a person's strengths and their weaknesses, and to postpone the decision about it for as long as you can, because that was closer to the realities of our own world in which the people closest to us remain inscrutable to us. And that, I think, is the role of art. And so storytelling, with my it's complicated sign is the winner. But it also has to be subservient, if you can believe that, to the facts of the past. We cannot mess with what happened. It's Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There's an opinion to art somewhere, I suppose, and people are entitled to that, but not to their own set of facts. And so I've spent my entire professional life trying to figure out how to fit that square peg into that round hole and still come out with a narrative that doesn't, you know, that doesn't throw it out and isn't also sort of trickily triumphant at the same time in the case of the revolution.
- [54:03]
David Frum
Ken Burns, thank you so much for your time today. It's been such a pleasure and honor to talk to you and what a remarkable legacy you have given to Americans in this coming 250th anniversary year.
- [54:15]
Ken Burns
Thank you, David. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's Premium Wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk, crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [54:47]
David Frum
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- [54:56]
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- [55:24]
David Frum
Thanks so much to Ken Burns for joining me today on the David Frum Show. I want to add a special thank you to listeners and viewers of the David Frum Show. You'll remember that in August I requested participation in a survey about what you like and what you don't like what changes, what suggestions you have for the program. Six thousand people responded to that survey and we are, all of us at the Atlantic, overwhelmed, astonished, grateful to each and every one of you. Thank you so much. It has been so helpful, so informative. We benefit so much and we are so appreciative of the enthusiasm that so many listeners and viewers feel for this program. Thank you. As mentioned, the book I will discuss this week is Benjamin Nathan's to the Success of Our hopeless cause, Princeton, 2024. To the success of Our Hopeless Cause is a history of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1960s and 1970s. To the success of Our Hopeless Cause won the Pulitzer Prize in 2025, and I'm honored to have served on the jury that recommended the book for the prize. It is amply deserving of it. It's a very substantial book and it may be more about the Soviet dissident movement than everyone will want to read all the way through. But there's a part of the book that I think is very bearing on present American problems. The book introduces us almost at the very start to an individual named Alexander Vopen, who was Alexander Volpin, who was the inspiration, the first, first breakthrough of the modern Soviet dissident movement. Volpin was born in 1924 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from. In. From Moscow State University in 1949, from Matt in mathematics. And he immediately encountered trouble with the regime. He. He wanted to live like a free human being and wouldn't accept that that was not allowed. He was sentenced to prisons, he was sentenced to mental institutions. And from that he was eventually released in the. After the death of Stalin in 1953. But he never relented in his struggle for his individual right. But he's. He based all of his opposition, all of his struggle on a startling insight that struck people as one of those things that's so brilliant that it's crazy, so crazy that it might be brilliant. Vulpin began by pointing out that the 1936 Stalin constitution of the Soviet Union granted large rights to Soviet citizens, rights of freedom of speech, rights of due process. Now, of course, everyone understood that these words were meaningless, empty, that the regime utterly ignored the laws it pretended to be bound by. Fulpin insisted, but what if we acted as if the laws meant something? What if we treated the laws as if they were real? He. He explained to his friends, Soviet laws. And here are his words ought to be understood in exactly the way they are written and not as they are interpreted by the government. And the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter. So he would be arrested or handing out a leaflet or criticizing the government in a poem, and he would argue his rights under the Soviet Constitution. Soviet courts didn't know what to make of it. No one had been so insane as argued, the Soviet Constitution gave anybody any rights, but they all knew it was a dead letter. But he would be in court insisting otherwise. And the Stalin terror was over and the regime was trying to become, if not more legal than more predictable. And sometimes he'd win because after all, it was the law. And the courts were not quite prepared to say the law didn't count for anything. Vulpin explained to his allies and comrades, who looked at him at first as if he were crazy. They said what he said. He would insist what would happen, what would happen if we acted on the assumption that the laws are binding, if we acted on the assumption that our rights are real. And again, in Volpin's words, if one person did it, he would become a martyr. If two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization. If thousands of people did it, they would be a hostile movement. But if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive. I think there's a lesson here for Americans now. I don't want to make any comparison between the Soviet Union, even after Stalin, to the United States of today. But the United States is moving in directions in which laws mean less and less, in which the authorities flat out say they are not bound by law. Due process doesn't mean anything. The laws are in trouble. They are shaking in the United States. And one of the great dangers to the freedom of citizens is that we will act worldly, we will act wise and say, well, we all know they ignore the law. Volpin reminds us they only can get away with ignoring the law if people acquiesce in the ignorance, in the ignoring of the law. But if everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive. So it's important, even as you know in your mind, that the laws mean less and less in the United States. Important to act in your heart as if the laws meant everything, and to commit your personal to commit your personal political work to the premise that the laws are binding, that your rights are real, even as you confront an authority that seems determined to shrink the laws and take away rights. Alexander Volpin went in and out of prisons in 1972, he was released to the United States. In those days, the United States did stand for freedom, and he lived a long life. He lived aged 91 and he died in the spring of 2016. Mercifully, he had a full life and died before he saw the United States begin to descend in in its own path to unfreedom. He was spared that site. I I don't know what he would have thought of it. Well, I do know what he would have thought about it. He would have said to us, as he told his fellow, his Soviet fellow citizens, laws ought to be understood in exactly the way written and not as they're interpreted by the government. And the government ought to fulfill those laws to the letter. If one person did it, you would become a martyr. If everyone did it, the state would have to become less oppressive. Let's everyone do it. Thank you so much to listening today or watching, if you watch on YouTube, the David Frum Show. Thank you for joining me. As ever, the best way to support this program and the work of all of us at the Atlantic is by subscribing to the Atlantic. I hope you'll consider doing that. You might also want to consider subscribing to a David from Alert on the Atlantic side. That will let you know whenever I post a new article on the site. And I will of course return next week with another episode of the David Frum Show. Thanks for joining. Bye bye. This episode of the David Frum show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdes. It was engineered by Dave Grime. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abayad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our Managing Editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.
- [62:24]
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