The Opinions - Ken Burns on America’s Next Story

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

President Trump’s threats to democracy have prompted a number of experts to warn that the United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. As the country grapples with how to move forward, David Leonhardt looks back to America’s founding, with the filmmaker Ken Burns. Burns’s upcoming documentary focuses on the Revolutionary War, and in this conversation he discusses the ideals of the country’s flawed founders, how he thinks about patriotism and what he says is the “greatest existential threat to the existence of the United States right now.”Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur and Vishakha Darbha. Mixing and original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opin. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion. And this is America's Next Story, a series about the ideas that once held our country together and those that might do so again. We the people, in order to form a more perfect human. Ask not what your country can do for you. That's what you can do for your country.

That America is too great for small dreams. Change is what's happening in America. And we will make America great again. God bless you and good night. I love you. Today, my guest is the filmmaker Ken Burns. And in preparing for our conversation, I found a nice quote. Ken Burns decides what America thinks of itself.

Through his documentaries on jazz and baseball, wars and politicians, he has told the story of America to America. His next project will come out this fall, and it covers the American Revolution. That revolution, our revolution, is a profoundly complicated story. It involves soaring idealism that changed the world and also terrible hypocrisies.

And both the good and the bad still shape our country almost 250 years later. In fact, every major American story since the revolution has borrowed heavily from its ideas and its language. So I thought Ken Burns would be the perfect person to ask, what should America's next story be? In the conversation that follows, you'll hear us talk about why the revolution has never really ended

and what he considers to be the greatest existential threat facing us. Ken Burns, thank you for joining me. It's my pleasure. Thank you, David. Before we talk about America's next story, I want to look back to the country's origin story. The American Revolution was many things, as you explained in the new film. It was a battle to control valuable land. It was a civil war.

But it really was an ideological struggle, too. And I wonder, what was the story that the revolutionaries told themselves and told the world about why they were risking their lives to break with England? What a wonderful question, David. It's so complicated because it is informed. by so many other, not ulterior, but just other common motives. Many people, rich and poor, wanted Indian land on the western border. And big land speculators like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and Patrick Henry.

All of them saw this as a westward thing. And then, of course, a bankrupt treasury needs more taxes, and the Americans were the least taxed. And so we know a lot of that story. So they're telling different stories about it, but it's all one of essentially not having a voice, not being heard, not having direct representation. That's what the grade school stuff talks as taxes and representation. But what happens in an interesting way is that what becomes an argument between English citizens suddenly breaks out into a discussion about natural rights. This is, after all, the Enlightenment.

And it's a really heady moment, and it's got a lot of stuff to it and undertow to it. The folks who were arguing in Philadelphia were all fairly well to do, certainly property owners, certainly assumed a kind of Republican elite aristocracy that would run this new version of things. Up to this point, the British constitutional monarchy is the best thing on earth. And so if you're a loyalist, you go, I already live under the best form of government are, why are we going to try this radical thing? And in order for that radical thing to actually succeed militarily as well as politically, you're going to have to offer other stuff. And so it means that democracy is not an intention of the revolution. It's a byproduct. It's a consequence,

perhaps even an unintended consequence of it. Because in order to win those battles, you're going have non-property owners. You're going to have second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance. You're going to have felons. You're going to have near-do-wells. You're going to have recent immigrants, none of whom sort of fit the bill of their original configuration, but are the people who, like, don't disappear when things get tough. And it's a pretty fluid and dynamic and kind of remarkable thing. You know, Ecclesiastes says, what has been will be again. what has been done will be done again, there's nothing new under the sun. That means human nature doesn't change. Mark Twain is supposed to say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I've spent

my entire professional career realizing the extent to which that human nature superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of events and we perceive patterns and themes and echoes and rhymes. But there is something new under the sun. Tell me if you think this is fair, that in many ways it start as a low-concept fight between rich Brits in England and rich Brits who are colonists. But in order to inspire people to fight the battle here in America, here in the colonies, one of the things that the American side does is summon these larger ideas of the Enlightenment. That's correct. And I don't think there's any conscious intention. I'm looking for this wonderful quote that I want to read to you that if you can permit me.

Of course. This is from Edmund Burke. And he said, the Americans have made a discovery or think they have made one that we mean to oppress them. We have made a discovery or think we have made one that they intend to rise in rebellion. Our severity has increased their ill behavior. We know not how to advance. They know not how to retreat. some party must give way.

And so rather than even attributing David, any kind of intentionality to it, you begin to see that escalating rhetoric, you're a radical, you act more radical. You're a despot. You act more despotically. These sorts of things are the kind of natural destabilization like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,

which all of a sudden, you know, becomes destabilized and crashes. And that's what happens in the American Revolution. And while you can say that there is a phenomenal appeal to this word liberty and that that becomes a huge force, it's also exchanged in letters and in newspapers and Reddit dinner tables. And people at the margins, as the scholar Maggie Black Hawk says in our film, are completely inspired by this. Jane Kaminsky, now the head of Monticello, says, you know, that liberty talk, it's heard by ever. everybody and then all of a sudden you've opened the door the second you mention gay marriage it's going to happen right you know the second you mention abolition it's going to happen it

may take an enormous cost of blood and treasure in time but it's going to happen and so the american revolution essentially accidentally on purpose opens the door so it becomes this inspiring cause, but of course the revolution never lives up to the concept of liberty that it uses. And I think that's very hard for many people to think about, because on the one hand, these ideals are so inspiring. And on the other hand, of course, the revolutionaries treat the native population, including natives who fight with the revolutionaries, just horrendously. And the sentence in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal. Well, of course, that isn't how the colonists. treated the enslaved people in the Americas.

And I think many people today can struggle to keep both these ideas in mind at once. Either they minimize the injustices of that period or they say that the injustices are everything and that the ideals never really mattered. So how can you at once view the revolution as inspiring and also take account of its deep hypocrisies? you call balls and strikes that's it that's it and it allows contradiction and undertow to obtain because that's the part of human experience

if you try to superimpose at an expository theory on it it's always going to fail babe ruth comes up once every nine times he strikes out an awful lot the highlights of everything show him hitting home runs. If you see all the dynamics here, not just of the George Washington's and the John Adams and the Thomas Jeffersons and Benjamin Franklin's, but bottom up people who themselves

wrestle with these contradictions, they are contradictory. This is Whitman-esque. Do I contradict myself? Yes. So you just permit that. You don't need to superimpose a fashion of historiography to interpret this.

you actually just have to call balls and strikes. Were there people who, because of the limited, I mean, when he says we hold these truths to be self-evident, there's nothing self-evident about these truths. Nothing. Nothing. As someone said in a film we made about Benjamin Franklin a few years ago, it's an old lawyer's dodge, right? Just say it's self-evident, you know?

But there's nothing self-evident about the idea that all men are created equal. But once you said it, you've opened the door. It's too late. and you can sit there and keep score, well, you didn't treat this right? That's true. But in fact, Washington, by the end of his life, is freeing his slaves, right?

Jefferson is saddled with the debt and sort of tries to dance around it. But Jefferson says, you know, it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You don't like it, but you dare not let it go. So there's lots of temporizing, and you just have to say it. The complicated narrative, it finds comfort in contradiction.

George Washington is an extremely flawed person. He's extremely rash. He also makes horrible tactical mistakes at the biggest battle of the revolution. And yet we do not have a country without him. Full stop. We live certainly in a computer world in which it's a one and a zero. We live in a media culture where it's an on and off switch, politics in which it's binary. There's nothing binary in human existence. There's nothing binary in nature. And so a good story, we're just a Power said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. Because good stories permit us the connection and the familiarity with all of these things.

We want so to decide, good or bad, white hat, dark hat. And sometimes you just have to go, this is the way it happened. As I often say to my kids, people are complicated. It's really important to remember. You know what, David, I have in my editing room. that main editing room that I've been working in for 34 years has a neon sign in it in lowercase cursive. And it says it's complicated. And we are offering, we being Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, my co-directors, are offering this 12 hours, six parts, as a way to say, you know, it's complicated.

But I think it's worth seeing that by revealing that complication, those ideas are not even dead. diminish, they're made more spectacular and more miraculous. Let's bring some of these strands up toward today. One of the other ideas that the film talks about is possibility. Possibility defines the American story in so many ways. Moving West, great scientific inventions, great social movements that force the country to live up to its stated values. And then you come to modern times, and, boy, I have to say, it often feels like we have lost some of our belief in possibility today.

We're so angry, we're so cynical. And so I want to ask you if you can kind of imagine a future Ken Burns in the 21st century or the 22nd, looking back on the last several decades. How would he explain how American society today has ended up as it has? Well, it's a tough, it's an impossible question. because I'd have to be 20 or 30 years out to be looking back. I mean, I go back first to the words pursuit and to more perfect, one in the declaration, one in the preamble of the Constitution.

So we're in the process of becoming. So all of those big ideas are all never realized. They're partly, they're always unrealized. And you see progress. And I think right now what we perceive is just huge backwards. movement. I don't think that the essential promise, the objective has been lost. And my feeling is you have to presume that human nature will be as it's always been, that we've looked and we've seen these institutions disintegrating before our eyes, a social contract that's sort of fraying at the

edges and undermined already by social media and other forces that we think are unique. I remember in one film we have somebody talking about the telegraph is the death of letters. In 1858, Pete O'Brien says, you know, they don't play baseball the way they used to when I was a child. I've heard that every single generation. And so we are a nation of chicken littles as well as a nation of sort of forthright, patriot, optimists, and history makes you kind of optimistic only because you can watch and see what happens. So our job now to land the plane is repair, restoration, reconciliation.

And let me add one other R, which is sort of like respiration. You know, I mean, you just have to. to breathe. These things happen in a way. I am not minimizing the existential threat to our way of life after 249 years. The Civil War, the Depression, the Second World War, these are big deals. But, you know, in the North at least, free and fair elections took place. There was an independence of the judiciary. There were other things that were intact, all of which seem now in danger of slipping away, and it just becomes our job not to fall back. Jefferson says a few phrases after pursuit of happiness, all experience has shown that

mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable. It's not that hard to parse. He means that everybody here to for has been subject to an authoritarian rule, and we basically accepted it. And it's been the want of every authoritarian to make sure that people, People are uneducated. They're suspicious. They're a peasantry. They are subjects. And we've created a new thing called citizens. And that requires all that virtue, all that lifelong learning, all that responsibility, all of that energy to overcome that. I do not think that that is gone. You have this moment in the final episode in which you explain how the founders came together to write the Constitution. The architects of the Constitution divided the federal government into three branches, the legislative, executive, and judicial, in a delicate balance by which each was meant to check the others, to ensure against overreach, that could result in tyranny.

They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment. Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion in a government like ours, he would write, no one is above the law. That certainly feels meaningful in today's America. Mark Twain would say, there you go, David, rhyming again, right? And like you, I'm an optimist, and I take optimism from history, but I also never expected our country to be in the condition.

that it is today. And so I'm curious how you think of just how significant the dangers are. I think, as I said before, I think that the increase in the executive power, it is a great, perhaps the greatest existential threat to the existence of the United States right now. I mean, the patriots, the rebels, they're mainly selecting against a despot, against an authoritarian. And they knew human nature, and they knew there was somebody would come down the point. like that would be that way. And they were trying to figure it out. Jefferson wrote from, he's in Paris, right? He's writing to Madison. And Jefferson says, what if someone should lose an election but pretend false votes and reap the whirlwind? They're like, they're not idiots.

They are really super smart. And they've been trying to guard against that. And I think that in our own small D Democratic DNA is, is all that we need in order to sort of try to write the ship. And I am optimistic, though I have never been as pessimistic as I am. We talked before about how the revolution became something different from what it began as. It became something bigger and more inspiring. And that's a reminder of just how important national narratives are to shaping the future of countries. When you look at the United States today, what do you think are the kinds of stories that today we can tell ourselves about ourselves that might help us get out of this moment? Yeah.

When I began this film and I turned and we were in the editing room on Vietnam, it wasn't completely locked yet, and I said, we're doing the revolution. And people are like, oh, no, because there are no pictures. There's no newsreel, right? But when I said that in December of 2015, Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. Donald Trump was not supposed to emerge from the next month's Iowa caucus, not a single person predicted a victory. And yet the story that we've told, and we've been so disciplined to not sort of try to do, to point to the rhymes, to say, oh, isn't this so like, today because they keep changing. There's a moment.

We follow this beautiful story of this wife of a German officer who's bringing her three little kids across the ocean to join her husband, but she's over there traveling on the Atlantic, worried that she hears that Americans eat cats. So if our film had just, by sheer luck, come out last year, oh, can you like you trying to put your thumb on the scale?

It may just go by this fall without a thought. Maybe what you read of Hamilton is more, you know, resonant, but that's not my job. I just going back to balls and strikes have to tell that. So I think that I am offering a good story. I am not offering it as a Democrat or a Republican. I'm not offering it as anything other than trying to tell a comment. complicated story to make that story come alive and that maybe it is possible to coalesce around the complexity of our origin story and revel in the complexity and reject the sort of attempt

to make it a kind of binary simple story. And within that complexity, it may be possible to draw people to the ironies, to the tragedies, to the exultant ideas because this is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ. Period. Full stop. And I'll defend that, including all of the hypocrisy that you've brought up, all of the unable to do this, all of the failure. It's all there because for the first time, there was possibility for even those who did not

have ownership of themselves. And to me, that's the essence of the liberating story of the American. American Revolution. How do you think about the word patriot and specifically for people who are worried about the turn that this country has taken? Do you think it is important for them to claim or reclaim the word patriot? Yeah, well, Patriot's an old word, as the scholar Alan Taylor tells us. It's basically those lovers of constitutional rights, the wigs in Britain. And then it becomes what we call ourselves. The British call us rebels the whole time. They do not in any way acknowledge. We're just upstart. A rabble is often the phrase. But at the very end, a German Hessian soldier

who's been dissing us all the way along just is there at the surrender at Yorktown on the wrong side and says, who would have thought 100 years ago is that a rabble could defy kings? And that's that thing. I believe that it is possible to express one's patriotism. You know, lots of ways and that by understanding and understanding the context in which the word came into being in the revolution, which I think our film communicates successfully, it is possible for everyone to find purchase with that word and to find purchase within the narrative of this that reminds us of how close we might already be despite all of this stuff. I just want to underline something you just said, which is an original

meaning of patriot is a lover of constitutional liberty. And I think that's a really important thing to remember for people who sometimes are uncomfortable with the word. You give a very prominent place to some words from Benjamin Rush, the only doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence. And you quote him in part saying, the American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed. Your country demands your services. The revolution is not over. And as I've been thinking about what kind of story our country needs today to move on, to have a new beginning, I actually think the revolution is not over is about the best idea I've heard yet. Yeah, it's why it occupies

the pride of place that it does. That's exactly right. It's back to process, right? It's back to pursuit and more perfect. I mean, everybody knew it wasn't perfect. And Washington says this. I wish it was this. I wish it was more. But, you know, it's a start, right? And so the war is over. And our film is called the American Revolution, which means it is also the war part of it. And that war ends. And then somehow you have to figure out how you're going to come together, if you're going to come together. and we do come together with some pretty difficult compromises now in retrospect to swallow. But the idea, and nobody needs to say anything after Benjamin Rush because he got it. It's complicated, and the revolution is not over.

Ken Burns, thank you very much. Thank you. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Bashaka, Darba, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzik. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro.

Additional music by Amun Sahota. The fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.