The Bulwark Podcast - Ken Burns: You Have To Be A Bulwark

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

A government shutdown begins, as a standoff over spending enters what could be a painful phase. And President Trump kicks off the week warning his military leaders about facing an invasion from within. Ken Burns joins Tim Miller to talk about his new documentary, “The American Revolution,” what lessons from history he tries to apply our current politics and how the country has navigated unrest in the past. Show Notes: Bulwark Live in DC (10/8) and NYC (10/11) with Sarah, Tim and JVL are on sale now at TheBulwark.com/events.

Hey, everybody, when I booked to the great Ken Burns to talk about the sweep of history and give us some perspective on where we are now. I hadn't expected the U.S. government to shut down the night before. So a couple of quick thoughts on that. I don't know. Anybody who's been listening every day knows I've just been kind of torn about this shutdown in the sense that I don't think that the strategy is very clear as far as what the exit strategy is for the Democrats.

With that said, though, I think that there is something to the fact now that we're in it, that the Democrats have an opportunity that they need to seize to use it as a rallying cry and as a flashpoint for the fight. You know, I think that a lot of people, and we discussed a little bit on the next level yesterday, people are just kind of going about their days amidst all this chaos, and it's hard to, you know, find a locust for people to get them to lock in unless they have a particular issue, you know, that is affecting them, whether it be the tariffs or, or, immigration, if you're in an immigrant community or if you're trans. But for a lot of folks, you know, there's kind of all this chaos swirling around them. And in order to galvanize them, you need an inflection point. And for some folks, this could be it. And it is truly insane that the President of the United States wants the opposition party to fund a government when he is not

going to the legislative branch to ask for approval for funding for his tariff regime. That is hurting huge sectors of our economy that's hurting farmers, as we discussed this week, hurting small business owners, hurting all consumers who go to Walmart. What he's doing is illegal, and if he wants the government to be funded, then it should go through the normal constitutional route, and he should have a vote on his tariff policy, just the way that he had a vote on his tax policy. The idea that he wants the Congress to fund these kind of massed,

nameless agents of the state that are hassling, our fellow citizens that are harassing them, that are, you know, shaking people down, shooting pepperball sprays into cars, jailing people like George Redis, who's an American citizen for three days, you know, without due process. And you could go down the list of all the other illegal acts that this government is making. If Donald Trump wants the Democrats to be a part of that, to fund that government, then he needs to come to the table and they need to negotiate. And if not, if he wants to do, as he's done in so many other ways and go around the Democrats and fund his lawless government himself with his own party, then he can do that.

And next November, voters can decide what they think about it. And so that's where I've landed on this. We'll be monitoring it more. And we have tomorrow, somebody who comes from Democratic strategist world, to talk about the strategy more deeply. But to me, the top line of this is pretty clear. And I think that it's important for folks who are opposed to this regime to be stalwart in opposition to their efforts to bully people and force everybody to be a part of their lawless government. So that's where I'm at on this. We'll have much more later this week. Keep it out on the board. We got a bunch of other food. Joe Perdicone, our man on the hill is covering this stuff. Subscribe to his press pass at the borg.com if you haven't. And check out the bork takes feed

as news drops, a lot of my colleagues will be doing breaking news analysis this week. I'm headed up to New York, so you'll probably see a little bit more of me on MSNBC. So keep an eye out for that. All right, up next. Excited to talk to Ken Burns. Stick around.

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome to the show, a documentary and film. maker you may have heard of his new series the american revolution premieres in november it's ken burns how you doing sir good how are you thanks for having me well i'm doing pretty good all things considered um you know a lot of caveats there i want to uh get into uh the documentary and kind of what how some of what you cover reflects onto are the challenges and questions that we're

dealing with today but we got to do a little news first i knew that we had you on today and i was watching that scene at Quantico yesterday, I was just like, I kind of want to put a quarter in the pinball machine and just see what comes out of Ken Burns as far as perspective on the Hegg Seth and Trump speeches yesterday. I just really want, and I assume this is in the thoughts of most of the senior brass that had gotten assembled, that I want them to read the Constitution. I want them to understand about the important role that the military plays in our history, but it's, I just was shocked and kind of stunned by it. And I've been spending a lot of time with military people in the course of my professional life

from the Civil War through the Second World War, then to Vietnam, and now back into the revolution. And the contrast is extraordinarily striking. And I think that when you begin to feel the kind of pathologies that seem to sneak up on us these days and kind of overwhelm on a daily sense, it's really good to go back and, find in the origin stories, just some guide to what it is. And it's not, it's not in the binary context that we normally deal with politics, you know, red state, blue state, or a media culture, one or a zero. It's really about trying to understand the complexity of human nature

and figuring out how to share a common past that will be able to have us digest the material. I mean, I'm sitting there working on a scene about General Gage or British General who orders several ships to Boston to not to protect them, but to police them. And the outrage at a standing army is, you know, one of the many, many causes. There's a, you know, just this scale of, you know, as Jefferson will say later on, usurpations in the declaration, just things that happen that put things. over. And one of them is the idea that the monarch, the authoritarian, would quarter troops in a city to police it. To that point, Trump, one of the lines from Trump was this yesterday, and we were taping as to as he was kind of rambling for quite a long time. And so I think this portion happened after I'd already started. And he said this, we were under invasion from within,

no different from a foreign enemy, but more difficult because they don't wear uniforms. I mean, that's a pretty ominous line. I think it is the nature. You know, there's a wonderful line in the Declaration where Jefferson says, just a few phrases after the pursuit of happiness, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. He's sort of acknowledging that this new project is, is unique. As much as you might say, we hold these truths to be self-evident, there's nothing

evident about these truths. They're completely new in the world. We're kind of saying they're self-evident in the hopes that that could become true, right? Like, we're manifesting, as the kids would say now. You made a film on Benjamin Franklin, and someone in the film said, that's the old lawyers dodge. Just tell them these are self-evident. And then maybe they'll believe there's nothing self-evident. Like Clesiasty says, there's nothing new under the sun. And so, you know, here is something really, really new under the sun. And it's the idea that people are going to be citizens and not subjects. And so what he's acknowledging is that people have been willing to put up with this stuff. And one of the hallmarks of that is to make

an enemy that doesn't actually really exist or crime that isn't as bad or anywhere near as bad as it is in order to have an enemy to distract yourself. And so what happens, the pursuit of happiness is not the pursuit of material wealth in a marketplace of objects or things. But lifelong learning, all the founders felt that. You had to have kind of continuing education as a citizenry in order to be informed and to be able to make the kind of choices. And of course, that's the opposite of the way it had always been. The subject you needed to be distracted by shiny objects, carriages and and you know the trappings of royalty you needed to be susceptible to conspiracies and kind of superstitions that's what a peasantry is and a lot of the colonists who had come to the

United States were you know their families had worked land that they didn't own for a thousand years and suddenly they owned a piece of land and it gave them a kind of footing no pun intended in in new ideas and of course this is the Enlightenment which is itself, a byproduct of the Renaissance, which is we're thinking new things. And so what becomes arguments between British people get broken out into natural rights, these self-evident truths, that are a big kind of, uh-oh for the authoritarians, that are basically the stock and trade of every single country, certainly in the Europe out of which the colonists have come. All right, cool, attempts are rolling in. I wouldn't know it here in Louisiana, but boy,

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novels about the Enlightenment and, you know, where, how we may be facing a counter-enlightenment. But just before we kind of get all esoteric, I'm just curious about a couple of other things. And you mentioned you talked to, obviously, for all these documentaries,

a lot of military folks, you know, a lot of high-ranking officers. They're the pictures from yesterday's speech, you know, that you see it's hard to, you know, know what to make of it, right? But there's the Times had a great picture this morning of a very stone-faced officer corps listening to these speeches.

And I don't know. There's something about that that gives me a little bit of hope that, you know, maybe they felt like they were enduring this, but not going along with it. But I don't, you know, also people can get acculturated to stuff very quickly. Like, that's part of the human experience as well. I don't know. I'm just going to wondering from all your conversations with top military people, how you think they process what they saw yesterday.

Well, I, you know, I haven't talked to any since that. And we spend a lot of time at West Point, less extent at the Naval Academy, even lesser at the Air Force Academy. But we've, you know, we draw on the talents of military historians and many of them are at West Point. We went and did a screening of stuff at West Point. We shared with all 4,000 cadets who come in and eat in like, you know, 14 and a half minutes, a clip from Thomas Payne sort of talking about despotism and how you can will yourself out of it. So there's a sense. that there was a hurrah at that. And then we shared with about 1,500 cadets, you know, several scenes from the film, maybe 45 minutes. And they are as attuned to this. They understand the civilian control. They understand the history of what the United States is. And yet you do feel that tension. It can go, as you're suggesting, either way. Either you've got a bulwark against the entropy that this sort of authoritarian stuff suggests. or you, little by little, you cave. And we've seen many institutions, whether it's in business or in the legislative branch,

sort of yield to the sort of seemingly irresistible force. Jefferson later on in life, you know, talked about, he hoped that the United States would be a beacon, even when the science and liberties of Europe might be extinguished, think World War I, World War II, that it might be a beacon that the feeble engines of despotism, as he called them. And they are feeble engines. I just think that they do have enough of that kind of distractions that we are constantly susceptible to that. We see this everywhere. All of human history is about that. And that our grand 249-year-old plus experiment has been an exception for a long time and has been the inspiration for almost every other democratic revolution

that's taken place in the world from first starting in Europe and then the Caribbean and South America and obviously Asia and Africa as well. You talk about those you know the ways that you know the system was designed to balance against despotism right and you know one of those you get into this kind of last episode of the revolution documentary is the architecture of the constitution and how there's supposed to be these checks and you have the branches and other news item right now is we have this government shutdown that is happening overnight where for the first time in maybe nine months the legislative branch is awake to fighting and trying to balance against the executive branch. I do wonder like how you look at all that what's happening now. I mean, you know,

there have been elements of the judicial branch that have checked Trump at times, at times that has not. I mean, the Congress up until about eight hours ago has been just completely pliant to all of his wishes, even anti-constitutionally on the tariffs and all of that. I just going to wonder how you're seeing all that. I kind of had a, I now realize in retrospect, a kind of superficial and unimpressive response. You know, a couple nights ago I was in Philadelphia. We were taping a show, Sarah Bottsine, my co-director, at the National Constitution Center. And Melody Barnes from the University of Virginia and Jeff Rosen, who's the head of Constitution

Center, were hosting. And the other guest was the conservative scholar, Yuval Levin, who had seen all 12 hours of our film and really loved it. And I think it's our kind of knee jerk, or certainly is mine, I'll take full credit for this kind of sloppy thinking that, you know, this is, you know, that founders were trying to reverse engineer against a despot. And that's true. But he said an amazing thing that he thought that if the founders come back, they wouldn't

be surprised at somebody trying to grab power in the world. the executive, they would be terribly surprised that the legislative had yielded so much over the course of that, that the whole idea was that the legislative branch was going to be sort of central. The president was going to be an administrator, a magistrate, a kind of chief executive of the laws that they are passed. So the magistrate, he, he's Yuval was saying, was sort of operating in the present, executing the laws that had been designed by the Congress, which would be a future thing. You will create this department. You will do this agency. You will conduct this war, perhaps. And then, of course, you'd have an umpire, the courts that would do that.

And I realized I'd focus more on this terrible anxiety that takes place in the summer of 1787 about unscrupulous people, somebody that wouldn't be honorable. Hamilton fought that would ride the hobby horse of popularity and sort of create chaos. And no man is above the law. And Jefferson has his own worries and everybody's sort of testing it. But what they presumed was that the legislative branch, given the experience of their revolt, this improbable revolution, the chances on April 19th, 1775 of the success are zero against the largest, the most far-flung empire on earth and the greatest naval power on earth and a huge military power. The fact that that we succeeded was stunning, but part of it was a kind of centrality and not necessarily a

primacy, but a centrality to a legislative branch. And you've always saying, and it really sort of woke me up to the superficial way I've been sort of being, you know, trapped in binaries that I decry myself to understand that their real sense was, you know, why would a legislative, which was the voice of the people, give up their power to anyone and to secede it for these things as you're suggesting tariffs and firing the librarian of Congress. The librarian of Congress is hired by the Congress, but somehow that didn't, you know, nobody got the memo. Yuval, I've been following Yuval for a while. He's been a little sanguine from my taste on the current threats we're facing now. And I've not watched what you guys did at the

Constitution Center. So just curious. It won't be released until after our series is out, but we are taping the show. Got it. So I'm just curious, like, what, what did he attribute to Congress abdicating that power? And what was his level of worry about the current state of affairs? It seemed high. I don't want to speak for him. You should definitely bring him on. What I've tried to do in my work is talk to everybody. I had a conversation. I said the same. things to Joe Rogan, as I said to the New York Times editorial board. As I said to some kids from in Albany, as we did in Detroit and Chicago school children and the public. And I'm not, I want to assure people that our histories are calling balls and strikes. And you understand

the complexity of it and the nuances of it. You know, if life and we live in a modern age where it is sort of a highlight real, Babe Ruth always hits home run. But Babe Ruth, you know, strikes out an awful lot. And he only comes up at once every nine times at bad. And so sometimes the fate of things rests in other people. And so I'm interested in telling the complexity of that and not so much parsons. And what you want is to have, not allies, but you want to have people who share the same history, particularly at a moment like this, when we're so beset with so many complicated things, so many existential questions about the existence of the United States. what it's about to go back and collect the threads is what you do with an individual in crisis.

Where are you from? Who were your parents? What was it like growing up? And sort of begin to maybe piece together what we think is a completely frayed and disintegrating tapestry. And the only thing I'll report from the hinterlands, be it New York City or Philadelphia or all the places that we've been, is that there's an appearance of division that is it belies what is a a central sort of trust in those systems. Whether those systems hold up is, you know, the $64,000 question. But I think my job is to sort of call those balls and strikes, say, yes, the most important person in the revolution is George Washington. And without him, we don't have a country. But he's a flawed person. He makes unbelievably bad tactical mistakes in the battlefield that costs the biggest battle of the

revolution is the Battle of Long Island. And he leaves his left flank completely exposed and repeats the same thing the next year at Brandywine leaving his right flank exposed. And, you know, you go, wait, this is the guy who's, and you go, yes, it is this same person who nevertheless is deferential to Congress, knows how to talk to them, knows how to pick subordinate talent, his generals. He knows how to inspire men in the dead of night to get up. He is himself unbelievably brave. You could call it rash. He rides out at Kipps Bay in. it's now Midtown Manhattan, and, you know, he's got an aide that's grabbing the reins of his horse

frayed. The commander's going to be killed. He does the same thing at Princeton, and his aide covers up his eyes not to watch the commander die, and he stops a retreat at Monmouth, and also in New Jersey that is, you know, unbelievably brave. And he gives up his power. You know, these great American example. He first resigns its military commission in 1783, and then after the government is set up, after lending his prestige, coming out of retirement to serve as the president of the Constitutional Convention accepts unanimously the presidency and leaves afterwards, understanding that he would set a precedent for the giving up a power. And George III, he was not a crazy madman as we love to portray him, in fact, said when he learned that Washington had to resign the presidency,

you know, had not run for a third term, just said then he is the most important character of the age, meaning, you know, this is the great example. So you've got, even within somebody that we tend to either make a marble statue or want to toss out for various canceling reasons, left, right or center, is just fascinating. And if you can give dimension to him and then introduced dozens of other characters, you've got now a kind of saga of the American history that is bottom up as well as top down. And I think infinitely interesting. And then perhaps everyone, regardless of who it is, can find purchase in the story to find a door to go in and say, this is my story too. Second day in a row in the podcast, the guest has brought up the

nuances of George Washington's history. So I don't know what that says about our current moment. We need to reflect on that. Dude, back to back. All right, everybody. We are sold out of tickets to all of our shows on the fall tour except for October 8th in Washington, D.C. And was on a call yesterday, planning out what we've got in store for you.

It's going to be fun. Obviously, JVL will be there. So there'll be elements of darkness. But we're also bringing in Sarah McBride for a conversation with Sarah Longwell that I'm super excited for. Maybe we might get Will Summer up to talk about some of the crazy shit that's happened on the MAGA ride. I've got some other plans in store for you. So it's not too late. Get your tickets now. Washington, D.C., October 8th. You go to the bulwark.com slash events, the bulwark.com slash events. I hope to see you all there. It's at the Lincoln

Theater. Awesome venue. Appreciate them for hosting us. And so I hope to see you all in Washington, in October 8th. I want to ask about whether we can have a shared history actually right now because my space is more of the shared our reality, our current reality, and that's fraying. I don't know that we have a shared actual reality. And so that makes me skeptical that we can believe in a shared history. Obviously there's the concerted effort to change that at the Smithsonian and other places from this administration.

and then there's just kind of the natural way that our culture is breaking into various pieces. And so I just do wonder if that goal of a shared history is even possible in the same way it might have been 30 years ago. Yeah, I think that there's always, or at least the perspective of someone, I'm not a historian, I'm an amateurist, and I'm a storyteller, but I work in American history. And I know that there is a sense always that the sky is falling right now. now, that we are all kind of chicken littles of the moment, that this is different. It's really, really different. But I can remember people commenting on the telegraph, no one will write another letter. I know that at the exact same time the telegraph was coming out, there was a guy named Pete O'Brien who said, you know, they just don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a kid.

I don't mean that the rules aren't the same. It's just the spirit has gone from. And now there's been somebody who's commented on that in every single decade of the history of the baseball. So we have been divided. Americans were divided. We forget our revolution was a bloody civil war in a way that our civil war was not. Civil wars sort of suggest large civilian deaths. And outside of Missouri and bleeding eastern Kansas, there are very few civilian deaths in our civil war. Second straight John Brown reference as well on the pod. So we're flying now. But, you know, the two people died. Civilians died at Gettysburg, which is the biggest battle ever fought in North America. But our revolution, you do not want to be in New Jersey or South Carolina.

Franklin's own son, William, was the royal governor of New Jersey, deposed, ended up in prison in Connecticut, was finally released, and presumed that he would sail back to his beloved England, seduced as his own father thought by the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy. He forms a terrorist group to kill patriots. is that were patriot groups killing terrorists. And, you know, more British and Hessian soldiers in one season died in forage, meaning they were attacked as they went out to try to find food than were killed in any of the battles. And South Carolina is even worse than that.

So I think we have to understand. I mean, we made a film on the Vietnam War. There were hundreds of bombings taking place in the late 60s, but particularly the early 70s, a sense of it coming apart. So I think one of the things you have to do is use the perspective of history, not to have a false optimism, but say, yeah, everybody said this stuff is fraying. And yet we do have these ideals. And we are approaching a 250th. And no matter how much people might want to appropriate, appropriate aspects of it to serve, you know, baser, more venal things. That story of the revolution is the story of virtue, of character, of really important values. I just spoke. to Governor Cox of Utah yesterday evening. And we probably disagree politically on just about everything,

but that's not the point. We agree on the fact that social media isn't, right? And that we agree on the importance of finding the places to come together regardless of what our particular political stuff is. So I think if we're in that political dynamic, it is just a dialectic of yes, a no good or bad. I'm right. You're wrong. And you can see this sense of peril that's going on. I live in a small town in New Hampshire and there are people of all stripes here. And you find a way to have conversations with people about everything. And the conversations we're having without, as I said

before, without altering the story, it's not suggesting that when I have a conversation with Joe Rogan is going to go any differently than I have with you. He's going, wow, I had no idea. about certain details about the revolution. And that's an exciting thing. That ought to be what storytelling is about. The novelist, Richard Powers, said the best arguments in the world, and that's all we do is argue, won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. And a good story contains complication. It has undertow. George Washington is not neither perfect nor all bad. He's a combination of things, and so is everyone. There's a marvelous moment when the black scholar Annette Gordon-Reed at the Declaration of Independence, we point out as the narrator that these things he's suggesting Jefferson can't live up to in his entire lifetime. And she said his whole life is bound by slavery and he knows it's wrong. And she comes on camera and says, so if you know something's wrong, she goes, well, that's a question for all of us. She's not letting Jefferson off the hook, but she's reminding us in the ways in which we lie, the way in which

we know the complexities of things and choose often the expedient. And so I think that there's a story to be told that permits, perhaps if we accept your pessimistic view, a way to reinvest and reinvigorate a story. And we did a screening of the film in the middle of the first episode when the troops come to Occupy Boston, the crowd went crazy. Like, no standing army, one quote from the period says. And you go, this is terrible. And the audience erupted.

This is a documentary film. I'd never seen that happen, you know, as if it was speaking exactly to the moment without us. I mean, Mark Twain is supposed to say history doesn't repeat itself. He's, of course, right about that. But it rhymes. And my job is to, in a disciplined fashion, not sort of say these neon signs, look how this is rhyming. In this moment, how it's rhyming. Because it's just foolhardy.

There's a German, the wife of a German officer. that we follow. She's delayed coming across the Atlantic to greet her husband at what she thinks will be the triumph of Burgoyne's army at Saratoga. It doesn't work out that way. But she goes optimistically, but she is anxious because Americans, she's heard, eat cats. Now, if my film had come out last fall, that would be a big thing. I think it's going to pass without notice that Americans are, I mean, so these rhymes change

and shift and whatever. And if you, it's a fool's errand to try to pay attention and say, isn't this so much like today? The totality of something is that you are reminded that human nature doesn't change. Ecclesiastes is right. There's nothing new under the sun. And yet there are moments when human engagement, particularly in our origin story, did phenomenal things that may have a kind of inspirational tenor regardless of whatever side of the political divide you find yourself on. You can't, I mean, you're implying that there's a rewriting of history that's taking place. I mean, my goodness, apparently the word annola gay, which is the name of the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb, has been dropped from websites because of the terrifying word gay.

It was just the mother of the pilot's name, you know, and so we're in that absurd thing. But I think at the end of the day, you have people who are willing, they still have to get up, put their pants on one leg at a time, go to war. It's not the first time there's been attempt to be a rewriting of history, though. I mean, you're, with the Civil War, obviously there are million examples, but the most one that comes to mind, of course, like the lost cause and the efforts after the Civil War, and you covered this a lot. I wonder, are there any lessons from that experience about ways to, it feels overshade to say combat, you know, their efforts to rewrite history,

but, you know, counter, maybe counteract. You have only one obligation, and it's, this is going to be so cliched, you're going to go, oh, why do I invite him? But to thine own self, but true, you can only do what you can do. And so I happen to be in the business of telling stories about American history. Yeah, I mean, the South won the Civil War. Militarily, they lost. Churchill said it's the victors who write the history.

It's not. You know, victors write the history most of the time. But in the case of our civil war, that is not the case. The lost cause was born in the surrender and has obtained, you know, I mean, the flag that We call the Confederate flag is not the flag of the Confederacy. That's a one battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was used in the post-Civil War raids by the Ku Klux Klan, our own homegrown terrorist organization like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. And that's the flag. You think that's it?

No, no, no. That is not flying over first Montgomery and then later Richmond, the two capitals of the Confederacy. That's not the flag. That was it. And that confederate, what we consider the Confederate flag now is went into, with the exception of Mississippi, which went in in the 1880s or early 90s into its state flag, for the obvious reasons that Reconstruction had collapsed and Jim Crow and white supremacy had been brutally reimposed in the old Confederacy. It went into all the other flags of the Confederacy in 1954. And Tim, what happened in 1954? for brown versus board of education and so you know you have to just tell these stories confederate

monuments you know very simple on a battlefield talking about general so-and-so leave them there but if you put up robertie lee in the middle of lee circle in new orleans who never visited Louisiana never went there had no contact with there but even himself understood that secession was foolhardy these are real simple decisions you can make as Mitch Landrieu did so heroically and so articulately and so beautifully when he took them down. And the guy who started the Civil War who gave the instructions, Beauregard, was from Louisiana, and he deserves a place in a museum about it. But, you know, you can just contextualize the stuff.

But the attempt is always going to be there by everyone. The kind of classic example is the Soviets, you know, photoshopping before Photoshop. you know, the guy in the Politburo who had fallen out of favor or was now, you know, buried in some unmarked grave because he was a threat to Stalin or a threat to whom ever, you know, fill in the blanks. Mitch was so good on all that. Oh, God. I was talking to Joe Manstrom about this last week about how my husband's from Union, West Virginia, Union State, and they've got a Confederate soldier up in the center of town. I'm like the town is called Union. The creation in 63 of West Virginia as a state was a gift to those people in the hills that slavery had no, you know, purpose.

There's not crop area to grow cotton or to tobacco or whatever it is. And so they remained loyal and were rewarded with a statehood. And it's so unusual to find it so deeply, deeply red. Even in my lifetime, it was a considered an incredibly liberal state that, you know, was reliably democratic, but also. liberal. And you could see, you know, in the famous documentary primary when, when Humphrey and Kennedy were, you know, stumping the state, it's a kind of an interesting switch. And I think that's where if you accept the idea that pursuit of happiness is lifelong education, then I think you have to realize that in our media culture, particularly in a, with an internet in which,

you know, Moynihan used to say everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts that opinions now just outweigh facts. And you just have to say the Battle of Gettysburg took place on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd on April 19th, 1775 is when Lexington and Concord took place. And this is when it happened. This is what happened. When people get used to basing their opinions on facts, then you have a fairly healthy democratic system. If it's not, if you've just convince yourself that up is down or that January 6 didn't happen, then you've got a lot of trouble. Well, that goes to what worries me. Let's go back to my pessimism for a second. I like, I like that you're calling me to my better angels. I have an internal battle on this that I'm playing

out daily on the show. But I think I was reading you talked to David Leanhart or one of your other interviews about this. And you were talking about kind of how the revolution happened and referencing an Edmund Burke quote. And you're saying that in some ways, we look back on on it and think that there was this sort of intentionality that happened when actually like these kind of ideals were put out into the into the world and then they ended up having a momentum of their own right and like you have a idea of revolution and you manifest it again for the second time I bring it up like it becomes reality and you talk about despotism and it manifests it becomes reality I worry now that like we're seeing the inverse right and it's

not just on the right like particularly on the right there is a now a narrative a story that liberal actually didn't work and that we need to go a different path that the American the post-world or children didn't work

and we need to do something that works more for people and you see some of this in more outscorts corners on the left but you see some of it

on the left too right that like that that we need to you know have a counter revolution against the ideals and the documentary

I kind of worry that that stuff is being put out in the air and that they end up it ends up having a momentum of its own that's hard to stop

I wonder how you'd react to that. Yes, I agree with you. And I share that pessimism. I'm just realizing that because I've spent so much time in the past, I do have that time where I've watched all of the Chicken Little thinking at various times. You know, like, you know, somebody turned, you know, to Franklin Roosevelt in the first months of his presidency and said, you know, you're either going to be the best president or the worst president. He said, if this stuff doesn't work, I'm going to be the last president. Because if you look in the 1930s in this economic, the worst economic crisis in the history of the modern world, the only precedent was the

dark ages, as a scholar told us, and that had lasted 400 years, right? So, you know, people were really, and looking, and you see the alternatives that took place, particularly in fascist, Italy and Nazi Germany and militarist Japan as ways and devices to handle crises both invented but real coming from the economic dislocation that was so total. You know, you have to be a bulwark. You have to stand. That's the whole idea of it, is that you have to be that rampart that stays true to it. And in my business, that means telling stories without, I mean, I'd love to just have propaganda. I'd love to just say this, this is, this is, this is right. But it's too easy. I remember in our jazz series, Wittemart Salas said sometimes a thing and

the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. Now, our computer one into zero, our politics can't handle that. Can't handle that. In fact, they don't seem to work with that. But good stories are about that, you know, and I just think I love the series Yellowstone, right? And if it was just the top-down theory that everybody's trying to tell us if it's just Kevin Kozner and his family. And let's remember he has a strong daughter, strong woman. He's got a son who is connected to Native Americans. He's got a Benedict Arnold's son, right? He does bad things. He murders people and gets rid of their bodies. We know his staff all the way down. They're women. They're gay. There are black people. There's all dynamics. And there's Native Americans throughout Montana and a

whole big struggle. You'd call it almost a Marxist struggle over greed and property and things like that. Those are the underlying themes of Yellowstone. Everybody loves this story. It's a really great story because it's a complex and true to kind of human nature story. And that's what you want to have. The second you begin to edit it and say, no, it can only be this, we can't talk about that, then you run the risk of becoming susceptible to those superstitions, conspiracies, ignorance that characterize a populace under authoritarian rather than democratic rule. It's very messy. A democracy is messy. And you understand why everybody, left, right and center, want to impose some sort of certainty and order on the mess of it.

And you can't do that, just like you can't do it in your own family. You can't do it in the relationships that you care the most about, there is an inscrutability and an unknowability of the people even closest to us. And so how can we pretend to sort of know how to manage human affairs when humans are themselves such gloriously contradictory things? Go back to Walt Whitman, you know, he celebrates that. You don't need to shut that down, which is the sort of inclination of the despot, but to celebrate the contradictory nature of of human affairs. Do I contradict myself? Whitman said, yes, enthusiastically answered his own rhetorical question with a yes, yes, I contradict myself. To your point about your expertise

being the storytelling and you don't want to do propaganda and all this, I just, I worry that this story that you're telling is, is getting drowned out. Not by any fault of your own. Honestly, you're doing it, but it's getting drowned out by the more negative story about the American history. And obviously there's the, I don't mean that, you know, re-looking at history and talking about America, you know, in a more nuanced way and talking about its sins and its successes. I don't, that's not what I mean. I mean that like the story that the system actually is broken. The system is bad. The system needs to be, you know, burned to the ground, right? The system needs to be arsoned and that that story is winning. And in part because

that's a cleaner story, right? Things are bad. We need to burn it down and start over than the reality. And you have, in your baseball documentary, so not any of your history documentary. in your baseball documentary, George Will talks about, like, the kind of beauty of our actual system. And he talks about in a way that you don't, that you almost never hear anymore. And I just want to play a little bit of George Bill, Will, in your baseball documentary. Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience.

That means it involves a lot of compromise. democracy is the slow politics of the half loaf baseball is the game of the long season where small incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games series seasons in baseball you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win but you also may lose there's no certainty no given you know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten the third of the time Worst team's going to win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games, that middle third.

So it's a game that you can't like if winning's everything. And democracy is that way too. I mean, the half-loaf, you have to accept losing. I quote that half-loaf thing. I hadn't heard that whole quote in a long time. So bless you, Tim, for bringing it out and letting me revel in it again. So this is a conservative, right? right who's now you know doesn't look so conservative anymore just as my conversation with yvall levin

or and i mean not the formal conversation but just the half-day-long conversation that we had just i felt i was talking to someone sympathetic i've i've recently become friends with jud ludic whose political beliefs i assume are sort of diametrically opposed to my own if you're getting into the nitty gritty but he understands you've all understand understands, George understands, this essential sense of compromise. Now, may I remind you that when the compromise that had been the genius of the American system broke down in 1861, we murdered 750,000 of our own people. We are not without the precedence of the failure of that, nor are we without, and this is the most important thing, without the repair, without the reconciliation.

And you can point to the post-Civil War and say, but we've already talked about how it wasn't and white supremacy was brutally imposed. But yes, we have figured out ways to do that, just as a storm, a fight with a loved one gets resolved and you move on. I think that it's really important to take the measure. One of the most important things you said a second ago, and I meant to comment on it, Tim, is this idea of contingency. George Washington didn't know he was George Washington. He didn't know he was going to end up on the dollar bill and the quarter and there's going to be a gigantic obelisk in Washington, D.C., named after him. There would be a state named after him, and practically every state has a Washington county somewhere. I mean, he didn't know that. Nobody knew that. By writing the declaration, Jefferson and that committee had signed their death. If they had been caught by the British, they would have been not only hung, but drawn and quartered. So you have an origin story that We know how it turned out, but you don't know and what you want to. And I remember David McCullough said this.

Good history told me this a long time ago, the late historian, he said, good history means you pay attention because it might not turn out the way you know it did. And I've had people come up to me saying, I loved your Civil War series. And I went into the ninth episode in the Ford's Theater. And I thought, maybe this time the gun would jam. Yes. You know, yes. That's what you want.

And there are moments that, you know, at the end of episode four, Saratoga happens. The French are in. They're committing, you know, the equivalent historian safety shifts as, you know, $30 billion in aid. You know, and you go, okay, it's over. And then by the end of episode five, when the British have taken over Charleston and an entire American army is surrendered, you go, whoa, maybe this isn't going to work. And George Washington doesn't think it's going to work. It's a big, uh-oh, at the end. And then even the bloodiness of the South Carolina campaigns that I was talking about earlier haven't yet happened. and they're going to happen, and you just think how out of this anarchy is anything going to happen? And then Cornwallis can't stand, South Carolina, so moves into North Carolina and Virginia, and somebody says, find a deep water port, and he picks Yorktown and Washington has already told his commanders, don't go to Yorktown. It's the worst place to defend.

And so you go, oh, I see how this ends. And then even then you're not actually sure whether Washington and Rochambeau can get from Westchester County down there without, you know, and can the French army defeat the British fleet outside of Chesapeake Bay? I mean, the French fleet and whether the big guns from Newport can slip by the British and come up the James River to then be dragged into a sea. I mean, all of that stuff is contingent, and that's the story. So all of this moment is also contingent. You do not know how it's going to turn out.

I do not know how it's going to turn out. and we have you know i believe the american revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of christ that's a big thing to say but i think there was something new under the sun for a second and i believe in the power of those ideas in the midst of all of the stuff that you genuinely have every right in the world to be you know pessimistic about and as am i But I have to actually say, let's just tell complicated stories. Let's figure out how to talk to each other above the din of the political disinformation, which, by the way, has been around since the beginning of human beings.

Maybe the first thing a human being said to another was a lie, right? Right. I agree with you what you're saying about the revolution. One last thing on the revolution. I'll be interested to see the response to all this, because I, I think about Hamilton, this might seem kind of silly, but like, but 10 years ago, whenever it came out, 15 years ago, Hamilton was corny, right? But it was also complex, but it told a quite positive story of America, right, told an uplifting one, you know, a real one as well. There's such a positive response to it, kind of a rallying around it.

And I kind of imagine a Hamilton coming out now and people rolling their eyes and throwing spitballs at Lynn Manuel Miranda a little bit. And that worried, and maybe that's wrong. I don't know. What do you think? I actually, I'm going to say right now, I think you're wrong. I want to be wrong. I think you should wake up and smell the flowers for a second. Maybe come up to New Hampshire and we'll take a walk with my dog, Chester, every morning. Can we do it somewhere warmer?

Can you come down to Louisiana with Chester? We can walk here? They have to accept the reality of the cold. I mean, weather and the continent, the size are the main characters of our film and the unpredictability and the size of it or whatever. No, you know, the most important cultural event of this very relatively new quarter century is Hamilton, without a doubt. And I have a 14-year-old granddaughter and a 14-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old daughter.

If you said to them, I will give you a million dollars, if you can recite Hamilton, two and a half hours, they will do it. And this means they know who John Lawrence is. they know what happens in New York City. They understand a tension and a dynamic between ideas like Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, the original sort of fault line of American political dynamics, big government versus states' rights, all of these sorts of individual liberties versus, you know, more confederal control.

All of this stuff, it continues to be played out again and again and again. And so, yes, there's a cast to it. people can go asteris, but the nuances about Hamilton aren't complete. There's this and that. But he gets the story, right? And it's telling a story. And that's the big thing. These are, I told us to Maureen Dowd a few months ago.

I just think a good story is like a benign Trojan horse. You know, it lets you in. After our Vietnam series, what could be more contentious than a film on Vietnam? We started a war room. Senator McCain, then living, sent us two aides. Senator Kerry sent us two aides, and we just figured we were going to be fighting off all of this. Nothing happened. Was there trolling in the extreme left and right?

I'm a Luddite. I hear there was, and so be it. But most of the people said what Joe Rogan said to me after I spent two hours and 45 minutes talking about the American Revolution, which is like, wow, I had no idea. And so I think a good story has that ability to maybe set down the things that we are positive, will destroy us, or positive that if they don't go our way, will be the death through the public, whatever it might be. We know the tyranny of the left, and we know the tyranny of the right, and maybe there is a way in which you have a shared story,

and maybe you don't, you still don't agree with. Maybe you think democracy needs a real taking to the cleaners. Maybe you don't. But I think most people understand that the blessings they understand that they enjoy are come from this messy thing. that this is, and remember, another one of these contingencies, democracy was not an object of our revolution. It's a consequence of it. This was going to be a Republican aristocracy, except, oops, the guys who actually did the fighting and dying were teenagers. And they were felons and near-do-wells, and second and third sons without the chance of an inheritance.

And recent immigrants from Germany, they weren't property donors. They, you know, and so all of a sudden people are going, you know what, we got to give them something. and that's that's the story of us you know what we have to give them something and so my job is to just tell as complex a story as possible i'm unapologetic about the complexity bottom up as well as top down giving dynamics to the people that have now become opaque because of their celebrity i.e. the george washington's and the jefferson's but also introducing you to literally scores of other people you have never heard about those teenagers 14 year old john greenwood from boston 15 year old Joseph Plum Martin from Connecticut, 10-year-old Betsy Ambler from Yorktown, who's a refugee the whole war and can't ever go back ultimately to her town because it's destroyed by the

revolution. And then all these women, central to the story, freed and enslaved, black people, central to the story, native peoples within the colonies and on the western borders. And this is a global war. France comes in on our side. We know that. Spain, too, the Netherlands. It's all over the of North America. And if you treat those native nations to our West as individual countries with as much agency as, say, a Belgium or a Netherlands, then you've got a really complex set of more than two dozen nations involved, each of them unique in their own way. And then you've got a hell of a story in which you can go into episode six of the last episodes and go, I'm really not sure how this is going to turn. And then you have a chance to maybe reestablished our

connections based on fact. And we've spent 10 years working on this, working with scholars that have spent their entire lives studying some aspect of it. And then, you know, we don't have to impose some theory of historiography that says that this is the lens and interpretive way. You just do it. You go, and then and then and then and this happened, and this happened, and yep, he lost again. Yep, he lost again, but he didn't get caught. Yep, he lost again. And he realizes I don't have to win. I just can't not lose completely, but the British have to win, and there's no way they can do that with the home office 3,000 miles away, and this continent being as big with the weather as unpredictable as it is. So my limitation stands, come to New Hampshire.

I love it. I'm coming to New Hampshire. We end the pod with the song, usually. You did a country music doc, too. So I wonder if you'd end us with one of the people you study was Towns Van Zant, a favorite of mine, maybe something you'd learn from him or anything, just dealer's choice about the country music doc something to take us out well you know that what they say about it and and you know it gets country music gets belittled because it's so simplistic but it's three chords in the truth and you know it's about it's this almost american haiku so i would submit johnny caches uh or or maybe it's hank williams i'm so lonesome i could cry i or johnny caches i still miss someone which are just simple three verses chorus stuff that are i mean

rip me apart every time I hear it because it is so elementally true to basic human things. And we can all love that. And if we can all love those things, I mean, who doesn't know, you know? Hear that lonesome whippoorwill sounds too blue to cry. The midnight train is winding low. I'm so lonesome I can cry. Well, that's kind of a downer to take us out with, but that's appropriate for the Bullard podcast. It is, but it's the truth of, I mean, look, I don't know about you, but my mother was

sick all of my life with cancer, died when I was 11, we wouldn't be talking if she hadn't died. We are formed as much in loss and absence as we are in anything else. I had a, my late father-in-law was a psychologist, eminent psychologist, and he said, look what you do for a living. You wake the dead. You make Jackie Robinson and Abraham Lincoln come alive. Who do you think you really want to wake up? And I mean, if that, it can't be called dime store psychology because he's not a dime store. He caused it a little bit more than a dime. But, you know, that's it. If she had lived, I'm a poof.

I'm not here. I'm not here. And so we can take the fact of Hank Williams being able to distill an essential sense of loss and go, this is our story. And out of that, we make things that are positive. I would suggest that the smooth sailing contributes nothing other than, you know, it's great. It's like living in a gated community, right? Yep, okay. Okay. Whatever it is, no Negroes, you know, whatever it is, whatever. No, no, no, no people that are different from me. I can't. I can't like this. But at the same time, it is the resistance. It's the force. It's the friction undercom. It's the loss absorbed. It's the transformation that human beings make, which is the whole story of us, not just the U.S., but us. That's lovely. Thank you so much, Ken Burns. Really appreciate all your time this morning. Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of a little bit.

board podcast peace here that lonesome whipp o'will he sounds too blue to fly the midnight train

is whining low I'm so lonesome I could cry I've never seen A night so long when time goes crawling by The moon just went behind the clouds To hide its face and cry

Did you ever see a robin'wee? Did you ever see a robin week when leaves begin to die? Like me, he's lost, the will to live, I'm so lonesome I could cry. with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.