Can We Please Celebrate America's 250th Without Whitewashing the Past?
Alexis Coe on why we struggle so deeply to accept the complexity of the nation's origins
Approaching the 250th anniversary of the United States brings up a familiar tension over whether we should celebrate our triumphs or relentlessly critique our failures. Most citizens tend to view the past with a thick lens of nostalgia, convincing themselves that earlier eras were inherently better than our current political moment. But this rigid binary between blind patriotism and total deconstruction leaves us trapped in endless arguments that prevent actual progress.
Presidential historian Alexis Coe joins host Zachary Karabell to unpack why we struggle so deeply to accept the complexity of the nation’s origins. Coe, the author of a bestselling George Washington biography, grounds this conversation in her own experiences confronting historical gatekeepers. She shares the story of having her book quietly pulled from the shelves at Mount Vernon after she publicly pointed out their lack of diverse leadership, and explains her accidental coinage of the term “thigh men” to describe male biographers who fetishize the physical attributes of the founders.
Karabell and Coe explore how this tendency to romanticize figures like Washington or John F. Kennedy obscures the genuine, messy reality of American history. They discuss the current political landscape, noting how the modern electorate craves authenticity even in its most flawed forms, and why the emerging political divide is less about left versus right and more about the top versus the bottom.
Acknowledging the shadows of our history does not mean abandoning pride in the American project. By learning to hold both our national achievements and our profound shortcomings at the exact same time, we can finally stop looking backward and start doing the hard work of building a more integrated future.
Watch the full conversation below:
All episodes of the What Could Go Right? podcast are available here.
Transcript
Zachary Karabell: I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, and this is What Could Go Right?, my weekly podcast.
We are on the verge of America celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776. We’ve had these celebrations before. Of course, if we’re 250, we’ve had 249 of them. Well, not really, because we didn’t celebrate those first 10 or so. You get the drift.
One of the things that continues to animate the United States every time we have one of these birthdays is: Who are we? Are we raking ourselves over the coals, or are we triumphing in our glories?
And I thought about this a lot. I taught American history for years to a lot of different students at different levels, and there was always a tension — and I certainly felt it, too — of: Do you want to tell a redemptive narrative, or do you want to tell a narrative that is both true but also uplifting because you want to believe in who you are collectively in order to continue to be the better angels of your nature, but you also don’t want to whitewash all the things that have been negative. It’s incredibly difficult for a teacher to find the right balance between looking at all these things we’ve done that are incredible while also acknowledging many of the things we’ve done that are not.
And I’m going to talk today with someone who is also in the business, literally, of trying to unpack American history as an historian, who’s written a couple of books so far, one of which is about George Washington, and is also working on a book about the young John F. Kennedy — Alexis Coe, who is a fellow at New America, and comments a lot on our past with an eye toward finding the right balance.
Alexis, it’s great to have you on the show.
By the way, you have one of the best titles of any first book ever — which is, oddly enough, You Never Forget Your First, which is about George Washington, of course. Of course it’s about George Washington. What else would it be about?
Alexis Coe: My second book. The title You Never Forget Your First —
Zachary Karabell: Your second book. I’m sorry. I forgot. Alice is your first book.
Alexis Coe: Yeah, it’s Alice + Freda Forever.
Zachary Karabell: How did it happen, that title?
Alexis Coe: It was a joke. It was the subject line to my agent because I wanted to discuss my second book, and I knew that he would immediately say — you know, he is a fancy agent. He represents Ken Burns and many other luminaries, and he’s good at saying no. For example, a book that you were able to write, I am forever trying to get him to allow me to do, which is a book on Chester A. Arthur. He’s like, don’t even mention it.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, he may be right on that one. Just saying.
Alexis Coe: So it was the subject line to my agent because I knew that he would resist this idea. Why do we need another book on George Washington?
Zachary Karabell: And you said?
Alexis Coe: I said something like, you can’t tell me he was the great general. You can’t tell me that he married Martha Washington. I don’t want to hear about the presidency. I don’t think I said at the time the peaceful transition of power because it wasn’t quite a to-do. But what else can you tell me about him? And the cherry tree, obviously not.
He just wrote back, all right. Let’s have lunch.
Zachary Karabell: We’ve all been thinking a lot — and you’ve been thinking a lot — about America at 250, its birthday. Jill Lepore had an amusing piece in The New York Review of Books a little while back about how Americans prepared for the centennial, how they prepared for the... whatever you call the 150th. The sesquicentennial? No ... I forget all the names.
Alexis Coe: Yes. Yes.
Zachary Karabell: And of course the bicentennial, which I happen to remember. I was a little kid, and I was really excited to see the tall ships in the harbor.
In retrospect, that whole period of tall ships going down the Hudson, and a lot of the celebrations were derided as over-budgeted, under-appreciated, but at least from one kid’s vantage point, it was incredibly exciting to see all those ships come in this regatta.
So what are we to make of this? You did a tour, right, of America, and asked people what they thought. What do people think?
Alexis Coe: So usually Presidents’ Day is a really big bender for me. You know, it goes on for like a week. This has been years now, in which I have been... I’m concerned about my mental health come July.
I launched in 2023, I think, in preparation, so literally three years ago. I did a cross-country tour — 13 stops for the 13 colonies — and I wanted it to be a discussion rather than where I’m the one answering all the questions. I wanted it to be an engaging conversation, and I also wanted to get out of my echo chamber.
So New America sponsored this tour, along with other places, and I felt like what I was reading and what I was studying, and what people were saying they wanted in a president on the news, in those silly New York Times articles, “man on the street,” person in a diner, those sorts of things, I couldn’t reconcile it with what I was seeing the electorate actually doing when they got to the polls.
And so I asked these open-ended questions: How should a president be? And I got some of the answers you always expect. A president should be a great listener. Okay.
This was right before Trump was elected, and it was after the first Trump presidency. And they would go on and on, but one thing that kept coming up that needled me, and it took me a minute to accept, I must say, was the idea that authenticity was really important to voters and that they saw Trump as more authentic than Biden.
Zachary Karabell: There’s something to that, right?
Alexis Coe: Absolutely. And I actually think there’s a through line between Trump and Mamdani. It’s not that you believe they’re going to achieve everything they say they’re going to do. In fact, you know that they’re not, the same way you know that’s true with every politician who opens their mouth. But you do think they’re going to try their hardest to make it happen.
They feel like, I think it’s a general problem with the Democrats, and it’s true with the Republicans, too, they just lean more into religion, where you can sort of talk about being forgiven, and there are all these things that sort of help them out. But Democrats, in general, tend to virtue signal. They tend to use a lot of moralizing language and a lot of shaming.
And when someone like President Biden … I learned this on this tour, that he had a grandchild that he had never met and didn’t speak to. So when you see him as someone who’s really about family values and calls his grandchildren every day, there’s a certain subset of the population that thinks that. But he doesn’t talk to one of them. He’s never even met them. She’s just a child.
And then Gaza came up a lot, and those things were sort of ricocheting in my brain for sure during the first presidential debate.
Zachary Karabell: What about how people see the American past? Is there a theme, a throughline there?
Alexis Coe: At New America, we had wanted it to be about three things, and I don’t think it was. I think they were these three things separately and not together, which is essential: pride in the founding, a reckoning and acknowledgment of the ways we’ve fallen short, and aspiration towards a better future.
What you have instead is — and I have to really be quick when I say “pride in the founding,” and then I have to go really quickly to, “a reckoning for the ways we’ve fallen short.” But what you have is these extremes. There’s the pride-in-the-founding section. There’s the people who think we’ve just fallen short. And then there are the people who think we need to tear it all down in order to move forward.
And so those things didn’t happen. I would say, not to be dramatic, that I have been looking forward to our 250th, I wouldn’t say since I was a little kid, but since I became a historian.
Zachary Karabell: So what were you looking forward to? What does that even mean, in the sense of, what’s that feeling of anticipation, what this moment will mean, and therefore now what does it mean?
Alexis Coe: I knew there would be a certain amount of, you know, I don’t want to say mindless celebration, but mindless celebration. I could never have envisioned it would be like WWE wrestlers and all of that.
Zachary Karabell: That would’ve been on very few people’s bingo cards. The octagon on the South Lawn was not, I think, in your top 10 things that you expected for the 250th.
Alexis Coe: No. I don’t often deal in message-in-a-bottle situations. It’s against my ethos, one might say.
At the same time, I thought that, for better or worse, the commander-in-chief is our historian-in-chief, and I had hoped that this would be a situation in which we would get to talk about the founding. Obviously, there are a lot of historical moments in which we have not really reckoned with the past, and that we would be able to talk about slavery and Japanese internment and hold all these things at once.
I mean, maybe you could just call me Pollyanna. But I thought maybe, just maybe, that there could also be an educational factor and that we might engage with materials and show people, you know, particularly coming, even if almost anyone else had been president, we’ve come out of this era of misinformation. We’re still in it, not just because of a person, but because of the emergence of AI and a lot of other factors. So I wanted this moment, kind of like when yellow journalism died, in which we all learned how to sort of agree on facts. I wanted a lot, and I got very little.
Zachary Karabell: I mean, I share that kind of romantic notion of, we can sit down, confront our warts and weaknesses, integrate them into a story that’s more nuanced, more complicated, maybe a little more like what we need to do with our own personal narratives, which is accept the shadow side and embrace everything else.
That clearly is a tall order for a society, and most societies never fully get there. I mean, maybe Germany got there in its own way, in the 1950s.
Alexis Coe: South Africa.
Zachary Karabell: South Africa, for a brief period. And then that tends to also fade. Once the generation that experienced this kind of collectively really ugly moment dies, the next tend to forget. Same thing happened in Japan to some degree. Same thing happening, obviously, in the United States. So that probably is a tall order, even though I share it.
There is this issue, and I wonder what you think about it, that I confront when I think about the challenge of talking about something in more positive terms in the world today. It’s the “yes, but” problem.
You just said we get to talk about celebrating the founding, but we’ve got to reckon with our issues. Why can’t we just do what some of the Republicans and MAGA people say we should do, which is just take a moment and celebrate?
Alexis Coe: I mean, we are. We have been doing that all the time. I mean, how much do you get out of the Fourth of July?
Zachary Karabell: Not nearly as much as you do.
Alexis Coe: Well, my Fourth of July is spent trying to be a human with friends and family and then running back in front of this. So I’m wearing, like, jean shorts underneath a blazer, kind of thing.
I agree. But for me, complexity has never been a liability. Life would be so much easier if it was, so I don’t recommend it.
Zachary Karabell: Don’t do as I do.
Alexis Coe: No. I would like to take a vacation from my own brain, so I get it. But I don’t find it difficult to hold these things at once, or else I couldn’t possibly spend years with someone like George Washington.
Zachary Karabell: So what do we do about the fact that human beings don’t like complexity? I mean, many of the biographies that sell best are elegiac, heroic, glowing. Every now and then there’s kind of a takedown biography that people love because it’s salacious or catty. Kitty Kelley writing about royals and Reagans in the ‘80s was hardly a paragon of hagiography, but everyone loved it because she just dug up the dirt.
But in general, there is a tendency, particularly when writing biography, to like the person, admire the person. There’s also a commercial constraint there, right? You’re someone writing books for an audience that buys books, and often that audience doesn’t want the complexity that you just talked about, doesn’t want the nuance. So, like, what do you do about that?
Alexis Coe: It’s so hard because … okay, by the way, as an aside with Kitty Kelley, she’s part of this organization I’m a part of called Biographers International. Except every year I let my membership lapse intentionally because I know I’m going to get an email from Kitty Kelley, and it’s just like, you know, I get my kicks where I can, kind of thing.
Zachary Karabell: Okay. Note to people listening, this was not a setup question. That was a totally serendipitous connection. Hilarious, but serendipitous.
Alexis Coe: And I think those books sell well, and certainly if I was genuflecting in the direction of one of these great men, I would probably be higher up on the bestseller list, and let’s say Mount Vernon wouldn’t be boycotting my book.
Zachary Karabell: Seriously? They don’t carry your book at Mount Vernon?
Alexis Coe: Not anymore. They did. I had my launch there. It was their bestseller. And then, during the summer of George Floyd, I did the unspeakable, which is point out publicly available information, which is that they don’t have a single Black person on staff who doesn’t play an enslaved person or work on the grounds. The entire senior leadership, the library, they didn’t even start giving fellowships to Black people until, like, three years ago. And it’s really hard to miss unless you never notice that sort of thing.
Zachary Karabell: Did they make a point of yanking your book from the bookstore?
Alexis Coe: Yeah. And people call all the time and ask, and they’ll report back. They’ll say, I can’t believe I went to Mount Vernon and they didn’t have your book.
Zachary Karabell: Wow. I didn’t know that.
Alexis Coe: Their two bestsellers, myself and Erica Dunbar, we won’t associate with them until they, like, hire someone. And they’re fine with it because they love to talk about how they don’t receive government funding. It’s because the government, in other times, would not give them funding.
But my point is, I also really like those guys. If those guys didn’t do what they did, I would not have half as many jokes to make. Like the “thigh men,” which unexpectedly became a thing.
The thigh men, for people who wouldn’t naturally know what that is, was a nickname I gave Washington biographers, and it was not intended to be in the final book. I had the term in brackets, and I thought I was going to come up with a more serious phrase, the kind that we studied in graduate school. One aspires to create something that other historians use and reference. Particularly because you will spend, as I speak from experience, the rest of your life with people coming up to you and saying it. So my life is spent with people saying, “thigh men,” or, usually, they get it wrong, they say, “thigh guys,” which is maybe better. It rolls off the tongue.
Zachary Karabell: Okay, explain for us. What is it a reference to?
Alexis Coe: Washington biographers like Ron Chernow go hard on his body in a way that’s completely unnecessary and sounds a lot like a romance novel.
If I had written something like that, they would’ve said, this isn’t a serious presidential biography. This is for ladies. And so they talk about how the muscles ripple through his jaw, and how his thighs really, the way they grip the flanks of a horse. It’s like borderline inappropriate.
Because of the way they all obsessed about his thighs, which are, like, fine. They’re, as far as founding thighs, they’re nice enough, you know? I wouldn’t say that they were any better or worse.
Zachary Karabell: Given a choice between a series of thighs, his were just fine.
Alexis Coe: Yeah. I have other opinions on the founders. It’s not top 10 where I’m going to be like, I don’t know, but he had really nice thighs.
Zachary Karabell: Fair. Totally fair.
Alexis Coe: I’m more of a calf person myself. I appreciate their work, but I think I wouldn’t study someone that I liked that much, and I wouldn’t study someone I didn’t like that much.
Zachary Karabell: It’s interesting, the United States’ sort of fetishizing reverence for the founders is unusual in most countries. You get that a little bit in communist countries. You certainly had that about Lenin. You have that a bit in China about Mao and the Long March. There are countries that have a kind of reverential, never-ending obsession with the set of individuals, men, who create this new country.
The Washington part has always fascinated me because he seems the most cipher-like. I know he doesn’t seem that way to you because you’ve really looked into it, but optically he’s somebody who you can project a lot onto, depending on what you think and what you believe.
And then there are a couple of great speeches, and the no entangling alliances, and the Farewell Address about parties, and there’s a certain wisdom that echoes down through the ages. I feel like “echoes down through the ages” is really a cliché we ought to stop, even though I just did it.
But is your fascination with him the same, you feel, as a kind of general fascination of who are we, how did we get here, what was our founding DNA? Or were you also motivated by something, I don’t know, other?
Alexis Coe: It takes me years to write a book and years to decide I need to write that book. Every subject has needled me for a while. My first book was based on a story I found in graduate school, and I didn’t write it until, I don’t know, five, 10 years later. Washington, I visited Mount Vernon when I was in grad school. I did not leave thinking I would write a book about George Washington. I thought, well, that was a Sunday somewhat well spent.
But at the same time, to answer that, I have to say that the reason I’m interested in the founding is the same reason I think people are too invested in the founding in America.
We have such a young country that I am able to look at our founding and trace it to the present. And then we have such a young country that some people only want to look at the founding and then have a direct sort of jump over everything that comes between to the present.
And that causes people to romance it. There are some hard truths that somehow people feel really invested in, as if they are the heirs to the founding sins as well. I don’t feel that way. I feel as if this is a part of our shared collective history, and so I’m very interested in it, but I don’t feel the same connection.
I don’t know if that’s because I didn’t have family here at that point. I mean, I’m sure we can trace it and find someone somewhere. But I just think there is this sort of personalization that happens, and that’s where it gets a little bit touchy, if you will. And I just don’t have that. It just doesn’t bother me, which is not to say, I am otherwise the world’s most sensitive person. But in a few different ways, particularly historically speaking, I’ve got no feelings, I guess, of that nature.
Zachary Karabell: So how does this segue to writing your next book about a young John F. Kennedy, the pre-presidency John F. Kennedy? In fact, even the pre-Senate John F. Kennedy, right? You sort of end, or just as he gets elected.
Alexis Coe: Yes, 1957. So he’s entering the Senate.
It’s interesting. I am the child of boomers, and I grew up thinking of him defined by his death because I got to hear about when and in what period this happened, and not a lot else. So that was very much fixed in my mind.
I was never as interested in him as I was in other presidents because I just felt like he’d been done. But then, when I would read books about him, they would race through his early life and go straight to the presidency, which is fair enough for most people.
But when Trump was elected the first time, I kept thinking about how it didn’t totally make sense. I was still finishing the Washington book, so I wasn’t touching it yet. This is sort of years ahead of time.
Zachary Karabell: The gestation.
Alexis Coe: Yeah.
These are the second sons who were then the first sons because something happened with their older brothers. They were born to these men who were not quite self-made but got their way, and then their sons became even more successful. There’s a good amount of, well, of course, there’s womanizing and other things. These are not perfect people. But they go very different directions.
The thing I came to think about, and this is also related to the founding era, is the reason there is the 35 age limit, that that’s the floor and there’s no ceiling, is that in order to get people to sign the Constitution, one man who didn’t even end up signing it was like, we need it to be 35 so that people can go through Congress. Obviously, no one’s going to come out of nowhere, like from the private sector, and just become president. Who would do that? Congress will be their college. It’ll be their training ground.
I reread Nigel Hamilton’s JFK: Reckless Youth, which was sort of, you know, lambasted and dragged by Doris Kearns Goodwin. There’s this great, like, if you want to get into ‘80s or ‘90s fights between historians, read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s letters to the editor in The New York Times in reference to Nigel Hamilton’s book, which was very good, but it’s in the British way, and so once in a while it just completely goes off the rails. But otherwise it’s very good, and so it’s kind of frustrating.
So I was reading that, and I was thinking, oh, this is good, but it’s not, again, totally hewn to the landscape. It’s not rooted here. And it was 11 years in Congress, a Purple Heart, service in World War II, a Pulitzer. And I thought, why do we treat that like a flyover state? He had these moments. He was in Congress at the same time as McCarthy. As McCarthy’s star fell, Kennedy’s rose, and the way they went about things was totally different.
Zachary Karabell: With all this in mind, as we kind of look to this neat bow of 250 years, I think it’s pretty common now for most Americans to think that we were better in the past, we’re worse now, and the future is going to be even worse than our present, more or less.
I mean, there are some partisan differentials there, but in general this is not a period of time where Americans are thinking, hey, we’ve got this. We’re great. We’re doing it. Much more like 1776 than 1876, for instance.
What do you feel about all this? I mean, do you look at this and go, oh my God. You just referenced Trump versus Washington, Trump versus JFK. There is a set of Americans who think Trump is the greatest president ever and embodies something that has never heretofore been embodied in the presidency. I think we can all agree on that neutral statement.
But, you know, in general, most people are not looking to our present as an icon of America, as a moment in time where we can celebrate, like, this is our apex. We’ve reached the mountaintop. Glory, glory, hallelujah. What do you feel about all this?
Alexis Coe: I don’t want to inflate a letter from Thomas Jefferson, but I do think it’s worth noting that after 1800, he pretty consistently seemed to believe that we should rewrite our Constitution every 20 years. So the fact that we’ve had so few amendments, that our country has not grown and changed with the population, is very much against the founding logic.
So I think the problem with today is not that we need to go back to the past, but rather that we haven’t progressed toward a better future as we should.
Zachary Karabell: Nicely put.
Alexis Coe: Oh, thank you.
I think there hasn’t been an accountability for the presidency, and with that I’m going to pass the buck to Congress because Congress is, I think we can also all agree, is kind of the worst.
If they would hold the presidency accountable and limit it in the way that they should, no matter who is in charge, because neither party does that. And also themselves. Whenever they do that, like with the Presidential Records Act, they then exempt themselves. They said the president has to keep everything, has to turn everything over, and then they shoehorn this little bit in that says, but Congress only has to turn over papers they mark as professional, not personal. But they have the power to decide what’s personal and what’s professional. So this is not a trustworthy entity.
There are no rules. There have been times where people have said, we’re having another civil war. This is a national divorce. And in some ways it does seem that way because we’re stuck in the same conversation, the same arguments constantly. And rules are really good at solving that kind of thing.
Zachary Karabell: So this is not a trick question. It’s an honest question. Would you rather live in any other moment in American history than America at 250?
Alexis Coe: No. I’m a woman. I wouldn’t be here for a lot of situations. I wouldn’t be allowed to speak to you face to face. I think no. Although I had more rights in recent history than I have now, so that would be a good time. So, no. I never want to time travel. It’s too risky for me. That’s some white male privilege.
Zachary Karabell: Maybe America 240.
Alexis Coe: I love that question, by the way.
Zachary Karabell: You’ll take 240, but maybe that’s about it.
Alexis Coe: No matter who asks me it, they’re setting themselves up for that. There’s very rarely been a time when I haven’t been able to toss that back.
Zachary Karabell: But what does that then say about our kind of current dyspepsia, which is very much predicated on, things suck?
Alexis Coe: I like that you used a fancy word, and you ended the sentence with “things suck.”
It takes about a second to dissuade anyone of that. There’s not a person alive who I can’t point out how their life would’ve been much worse.
So I think that there’s a real resistance to reality, and I would say that’s our greatest problem. I don’t know if this is a part of our attention span, because I think there were always people who were nostalgic for the past. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, kind of thing. But I think that what plagues us about our nation is the same thing that plagues us about ourselves, which is an inability to see ourselves from a different perspective.
We are also so isolated as a country compared to others that we don’t tend to see how we affect the world.
My last column was on empire, and I was thinking so much about how we call something national security, and other empires would call it imperial interests. We say we’re securing a region. They’re invading. They have colonies. We have bases. We’re not that different. And I think that doesn’t mean that we are inherently bad or that we need to implode or stop being ourselves or be absorbed into Canada. But I do think that we need to take a good look at ourselves in general, personally and professionally and patriotically.
Zachary Karabell: And do you feel that this period of time will be a crucible whereby we will then do that retrospectively? We are living through a 10-year Trumplandia, first and second season of The Trump Show. He is clearly the dominant figure in American politics since 2016. That is unequivocally true. And he has created a version of America that I think you and I would agree has always been there, just hasn’t been there quite this way, with quite this flavor. Do you anticipate that we’re going to be looking back at all this quietly in our gulags, passing notes, going, well, that happened?
Alexis Coe: I mean, are we going to be fighting some sort of resistance? I was in Amsterdam and went to the Resistance Museum and was like, I’m not cut out for this.
Zachary Karabell: I am not doing Anne Frank for four years. Forget it. I am not living in an attic.
Alexis Coe: No. I mean, that would be a great situation. I could live in an attic. I could do that for sure. Not the other stuff.
But I think we have examples of this from other countries. When people say McCarthyism ended, I always like to think, for who?
Because the people… it didn’t. The tools of the trade were there, and they had been popularized stateside. But more importantly, the people who had lost their jobs, who had lost their homes, whose marriages had been destroyed, often they had to leave the country to find work, and it just happened to be in a country like China or Mexico or someplace where there was, like, oh, guess it was true after all. These people, their lives were ruined. So that didn’t end.
And so when Trump is gone, however he is gone, however he goes, he will never actually be gone. The ripple effects will be there forever. Our institutions are certainly enervated. The issue going forward is what happens next. If this was the reaction to Obama, then what will happen if we get, like, a Mamdani in the other direction? Will we just swing back and forth like a lot of other countries, this pendulum?
We see this in other countries, like Hungary. Will we just have one extreme to another, and that will be our reality, which doesn’t offer us the kind of lives that our parents and our grandparents had? Or will we actually improve? Will we embrace who we are in all of our complexity? And I think that will determine the future.
Zachary Karabell: Love that. Totally agree.
Will we be able to integrate ourselves, which requires integrating a lot of what Trump has exposed as unresolved issues — class issues, geographical fissures that never really closed, they just were papered over as if they were closed. I think that remains an open question.
I have more faith that we will be able to integrate that somewhat more. But it’s going to require a lot on the part of the left as well to recognize that simply using a lot of extreme language to describe the Trump years doesn’t get you to that integration. It just gets you to what you just talked about, the oscillation from one extreme to another, back and forth, back and forth.
That’s my focus because that’s the people I can talk to, right? I don’t have a lot to say to MAGA-land, and they don’t have a lot they’re going to listen to that I might have to say, even though that would be great for the podcast.
Alexis Coe: I don’t know if we will have a left versus right as much as we’ve had in the past. It does seem as if, and this is obviously true in New York, but this is true throughout the country, as people like James Talarico are... he’s also doing something that Democrats never do. He’s got a good slogan, and he repeats it over time. And so one of the things he keeps saying is, “It’s bottom versus top. It’s top versus bottom.” I think that is definitely true.
There was something Trump recently said. He was asked, are you concerned that a war with Iran, if it continues to go on, will really affect the pocketbook of average Americans? He said, no, that is not at all influencing me.
There are people who are having trouble because they’re clearly MAGA. I mean, they’re obviously horrified when they’re shown the clip. Again, this speaks to the top versus bottom, and we’ll see where this goes. But that does leave an opportunity for some Democrat, any Democrat, to seize, or any opposition party. I don’t care. We’ve had other parties.
Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Maybe we’ll have another one again. That’s a whole other issue and conversation.
So historians really don’t like historical adaptations. I can remember one of the biggest brouhahas, hullabaloos. I got to use “brouhaha” and “hullabaloo” in the same sentence.
Alexis Coe: In one sentence.
Zachary Karabell: Was when Oliver Stone’s JFK film came out.
Alexis Coe: Wow.
Zachary Karabell: And you’re doing a book about the young JFK as opposed to the dead JFK. But that was a huge film and a massive controversy because it clearly did play fast and loose with the facts and go into conspiracy theories. But it got a lot of people to think about JFK. No? Maybe?
Alexis Coe: No, I don’t think so. It just makes me angry.
So I testified before Congress, and he went right before me, and I was like, I should have been on the panel with him. I have some words for him.
That one is so bad because it just invents things for long periods of time. So there’s this monologue in which someone who’s supposed to protect the president describes the advance team, and he goes on for, like, 15 minutes, and literally nothing he says has ever happened in the history of presidential security. And because that gives so much weight to conspiracy theorists, I take issue with that.
But having said that, while my standard, as anyone who’s read one of my book reviews knows, is very high for literature, for books, for nonfiction. When it comes to other creative adaptations, I’m a Pride and Prejudice girlie. I love Poldark. I love the worst series. I love Turn.
Zachary Karabell: Bridgerton?
Alexis Coe: Yes. Not as much.
Zachary Karabell: There is a line there. Outlander, Bridgerton. I mean, somewhere in there.
Alexis Coe: If there are cousin suitors, if someone’s going to be ruined, if any of these things are going to happen, they’re going to the Continent, someone has to go to London — all these things are wonderful to me, even if they are not rooted in the landscape. So I’m okay with that.
There were some things with the Death by Lightning series that I didn’t love but had to forgive. But there are also choices that maybe some other people made in their books about Chester A. Arthur, like not to include a certain young woman who was buried in a grave.
Zachary Karabell: I didn’t include the letters. I mean, it was a strange elision. What can I say?
As for you, we’re just going to use, forever and anon, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Alexis Coe, in possession of spare time, is in search of a costume drama.
Alexis Coe: Anything. I won’t even waste a minute. Tha algorithm knows me. It says, you like this, so you’ll like this garbage, and I’m like, yes, I will.
Zachary Karabell: That, for people who otherwise were not aware, is a reference to the first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that I shamelessly cribbed from.
Alexis Coe: I once used that line as the introduction to a book review: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Kennedy author in possession of excess material must be in want of a new book deal.”
Zachary Karabell: That’s very good. I like that.
Alexis Coe: And I can’t use it again. So when you just casually used it, I was like, ugh, I spent it.
Zachary Karabell: I have wasted my opportunity to do this yet again.
I want to thank you, Alexis, for your time and insights. Everyone should read her two books, and her third, which is yet to be forthcoming, but will at some point, forthcome. Thank you, Alexis, and happy 250th birthday, America.
Alexis Coe: Thank you.
Zachary Karabell: So, as anticipated, we did not come to a simple, tied-up-neatly-in-a-bow answer to who are we, what are we, what are we going to be, but I hope we did come to a greater appreciation for that yin and yang I mentioned at the very beginning, for that need to hold two truths to be self-evident simultaneously.
I want to thank, as usual, the team at Kaleidoscope for producing these episodes. I want to thank my team at The Progress Network for making all of it possible. Please, please, please send me your comments, send me your tired and your hungry, to theprogressnetwork.org, or to my email at info@rivertwice. Sign up for my Edgy Optimist column.
It’s free, unless you want to pay, in which case it’s not, at Substack. Happy 250th anniversary, America, birthday, whatever, and we will be back with you next week.
What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.
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