'Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory'

Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.

In the car,

gym,

even sleeping.

So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live.

She saved so much, she got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them.

Sort of.

You were made to scream from the front row.

We were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary, and subject to availability, flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

Welcome to Radio Atlantic, the first podcast from The Atlantic magazine.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

In a few minutes, I'll introduce you to my co-hosts for this podcast, Matt Thompson and Alex Wagner.

We'll talk about what this podcast is going to be, or what we think it's going to be at least, and we'll also sit down with our colleagues David Frum and Molly Ball to talk about one of this magazine's main preoccupations, the health of American democracy.

First, though, I'd like to tell you a very short story about a crucial moment in the history of the Atlantic and of this country.

Stay with this.

It's going to be worth it.

So it's November 1861.

50,000 Union troops are massed outside Washington.

President Lincoln and his entire cabinet are reviewing this newly organized army, and so is a 42-year-old woman from Boston named Julia Ward Howe.

She's a militant abolitionist, and she's come to Washington to see and bless the army that is ready to wage a sacred struggle against human bondage.

At one point, the road becomes clogged with troops and Howe's carriage comes to a halt.

She listens as the troops around her sing a song in praise of the radical abolitionist John Brown, whose body, the lyrics go, lies a moldering in the grave, though his soul is marching on.

Howe's a trained singer and she joins in and the troops compliment her voice.

A minister traveling with Howe suggests that the captivating melody of John Brown's body deserves slightly more elevated lyrics.

So early the next morning, back in Washington, in her room at the Willard Hotel, Howe writes new lyrics as if in a trance.

She later describes seeing the words floating down to her in the gray morning light.

She submits this untitled poem to James T.

Fields, the editor of The Atlantic.

The Atlantic, which is then all of four years old, is the smart choice for Howe.

It's a magazine dedicated to freeing the slaves and preserving the Union and explicating what the magazine's founders called the American idea.

Fields liked the poem very much and offered Howe $4 for it.

Nearing press time, the poem still had no title.

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory was one suggestion, but Fields conjured up something even grander.

And so the cover of the February 1862 issue of The Atlantic featured a poem entitled The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The battle hymn electrified the Union.

It was martial and resolute and a testament to faith, faith in a righteous and angry God who would bring justice where there was none.

Shot through the battle hymn was an assumption that America was a chosen nation.

The American idea, as refracted through the prism of the battle hymn, was this, our country was the nation that would advance the cause of God's justice on earth.

Julia Wardhaus' poem was the best investment of $4 our magazine has ever made.

The hymn outlived the Civil War and outlived Howe herself.

It is patriotism made manifest in rhyme.

Generations of Americans have turned to the battle hymn for comfort and inspiration in times of triumph and trial.

Americans sang it during Teddy Roosevelt's campaign for president and when they were fighting in the trenches of World War I Europe.

The battle hymn gave John Steinbeck the name of his most famous work, The Grapes of Wrath.

Soldiers took it up again in World War II, and in the 1960s it became an anthem of the civil rights movement.

When President Kennedy was assassinated, Judy Garland paid tribute to him with this song.

Mine eyes have seen the glory

of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling out the vintage wear.

In a Memphis church on April 3rd, 1968, Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

leaned on the hymn for what would be his final public words.

So I'm happy tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The Atlantic has published over the course of its 160 years such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B.

Du Bois, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Robert Frost, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow.

The list is endless.

By the way, the list includes Martin Luther King Jr.

as well.

But we all know here that Julia Ward Howe's poem somehow stands apart.

A couple of months ago, my colleague Matt Thompson described the battle hymn to me as the theme song of The Atlantic.

Wouldn't it be great, he said, if we can get someone of of the caliber of John Batiste to reimagine it as the soundtrack for our podcast?

And as luck would have it, John Batiste, the New Orleans jazz genius and Stephen Colbert's bandleader, is a friend of the Atlantics, and so I called him and made a simple proposal: you, a piano, and the battle hymn.

John jumped at the chance, and we soon found ourselves in a recording studio on the west side of New York, listening to him play what you were about to hear.

He started by messing with the piano in various weird ways, and so we asked him to tell us about his process.

I'm trying to create this sound that's like the sitar,

that has this

really grainy resonance and I want the strings to sound like somebody's plucking them.

And then I'm putting paper and

my license in between the strings to create this snare drum effect because we're doing the battle hymns.

I want to have a march.

What does it represent?

What does this melody represent?

So many people have taken this melody and appropriated it or used it in different forms or made a contrafact of it.

Everybody has their own take on what it means to be here in the world and be American.

And

I think that's what the song is all about.

The battle hymn is a song that's a part of American mythology and is a true mashup of cultures and time.

You've got so many different versions.

The first version, nobody even knows its original origin.

Then it comes up and is a war song.

It's a song that's about pride.

It's a song that's about celebration.

It's a song that's making fun of a dead hero.

I mean, the song literally morphs over time and it's still morphing, which is really something that's truly American because you think about how we're a social experiment.

We put all these different cultures together and we kind of grow and evolve and we have a basis of how we govern things, but it kind of is a lot of improvisation and we have to figure out, you know, what's the next step.

So we see him take stuff out of his pockets and put it on the piano strings, his driver's license, a pair of pliers.

He'll record one track, put on the headphones, and lay the next track.

He builds an entire band out of himself and his piano.

You have that kind of sound happening in the piano and it's a prepared piano.

So I have my wallet and different devices to create these sounds and emulate these sounds through the piano.

And

just an ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere that it all sits in.

So you have that going, and then I created a snare drum sound with

my keys in the piano, and that's kind of like the marching drum.

I like to come into the studio when I'm reimagining a song or trying to create.

I like to come in with a completely blank slate and not think about anything and try not to think ever.

I follow a very intuitive, subconscious route to the finished product.

You'll hear that finished product at the end of the show.

For now, here's a brief sample.

If you stick with us to the very end of this episode, you'll hear John's full rendition of the battle hymn.

But now to our conversation.

Every week, we're going to talk with some of the smartest people around about the significant events of the day.

In a few minutes, I'll welcome my colleagues, David Frum and Molly Ball, but I wanted to begin this first episode of Radio Atlantic with a group you'll hear from every Friday, my co-hosts.

I'm here at the Atlantic's headquarters in Washington, D.C., at the Watergate complex, and across the table from me is my friend and colleague, Matt Thompson.

Hey, Matt.

Hello, Jeff.

Matt, tell our listeners what you do for a living.

I am the executive editor of The Atlantic.

That's very fancy sounding.

And then in New York City, we have...

All the way from New York City, they don't call it The Atlantic for nothing, holding down another part of the Eastern seaboard.

It's Alex Wagner.

I'm a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Welcome, welcome, Alex.

Great to hear your voice.

Welcome, welcome, Matt.

In full disclosure, I did not realize the strong links between The Atlantic magazine and the song.

I've always been a huge fan of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

We know.

And Let Me Clear My Throat.

I mean, those were in heavy rotation in high school.

You know, DJ Kuhl, DJ Kuhl does a great version of Yankee Doodle Dandy as well, by the way.

People don't know that.

That was published in The Atlantic a little bit later on.

Contributing editor DJ Kuhl.

You know, it's a good song.

It's a good song.

It's a classic for many reasons, not just because it's an incredible piece of songwriting, melody, but for this particular moment, it seems very relevant to be talking about the Republic.

I mean, the Battle Hymn of the Republic is not only the theme song of the Atlantic, because we decided on this podcast that it's the official theme song of the Atlantic.

It really goes to the heart of what the Atlantic tries to be and has tried to be for 160 years, which is the magazine of the American idea.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic posits that America has a special role to play in the world, a special providence, that it's a chosen nation in a kind of way.

And the Atlantic has always been around to try to explain America to itself and try to try to understand

what the American idea or what the American ideas are.

And I think we're trying that in 2017, just as, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell and Harriet Beecher Stowe were trying to do that in 1857.

It's a pretty weighty thing to do, as you might say.

Does that make me Harriet Beecher Stowe?

You get to play Harriet Beecher Stowe in our costume pageant, by the way.

That's excellent news.

Matt, Matt, who do you want to be?

I'm Sojourner.

I am Sojourner True.

Truth.

That was not what I was expecting to say, by the way.

That was not the answer.

She was a badass.

That was fine.

Sojourner Truth, badass, is in the next issue of The Atlantic magazine.

So, Jeff,

you are the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.

Yes, indeed.

I have a question for you.

Okay.

You act like we don't talk to each other 193 times a day, but go ahead.

This is the only time I get to hear from you, Jeff.

That's true.

What is the American idea?

Oh, come on, Matt.

This is impossible.

But

America is a country built on an idea, not an ethnic group.

Although obviously there are people who argued that from the very beginning.

It's not built around a particular religion, a particular ethnic group, a particular tribe.

It's an idea that is found in its original documents.

A group of people got together and decided that they would bring forth on this continent a new nation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You can go on our website to find the full document.

But

ever since The Atlantic was founded, I think the question that has preoccupied its editors and writers is to explain America to itself and what America owes itself, owes its citizen, and what role it should play in the world.

And I happen to think, this is self-serving, but I think it's also true, I happen to think that the Atlantic is at its best and most urgent when

questions are up for grabs,

when we are as a society debating who we are and what we should be.

And in the first months of this presidency, this very novel presidency, questions are being raised that haven't been raised in a long time.

I'm not saying that the country is as tense now as it was in 1857

when the magazine was founded, but I think there are some fundamentals here that people are debating that we thought were settled questions, including, by the way, whether we are a sort of apocalyptically oriented millenarian country with this grand vision of the way the world should be organized or whether we should leave the world alone.

These are questions that have been debated in the pages of The Atlantic for 160 years and they're being debated now.

And another question, Matt, going to this idea of what is the American idea, you know I think people are asking themselves what makes America exceptional now in

ways that we haven't asked before.

A lot of people argue that what makes America exceptional is our ability to self-correct, our ever-perfecting union.

When this magazine was founded, very, very few people had the vote.

We've seen the gradual expansion of rights through 160 years.

The Atlantic has been with that process every step of the way.

We now feel like there is a backlash against

the most expansive notions of democracy.

And these are the things that we're arguing about in the pages of the Atlantic and on the website and now in our podcast.

You bring up a good point, Jeff, which is that fundamental question of what is the American idea?

Or as I like to say, what's the idea with America?

And

I would, you know, I think that's a good question.

Thank you for giving the podcast episode a name, Alex.

What's the deal with America?

Anyway.

You know,

I would also say that as we sort of grapple with

that very, very big question in the pages and online at theatlantic.com and on other Atlantic franchises like this podcast.

I think that the sort of like, if you had asked Americans that question even last year,

their conception of what this country is all about has changed pretty dramatically.

I mean, I myself can say, you know, if you'd said, Alex Wagner, what is the American idea in 2016?

I would have said, oh, you know, it is America is all about a commitment to a certain set of equalities and freedoms and inalienable rights.

And today, I'd say it's much more basic than that.

It's really an experiment in self-governance.

And the idea is that, I mean, you know,

what you're implying is that it's an experiment that still could fail.

Yep.

And it's much more tenuous, I think, than a lot of people in this country, maybe even a lot of our readers and listeners.

assumed it to be even nine months ago.

And this conversation about what the American idea is has huge import for the rest of the world.

We've lived for 70 years in this post-World War II American-led dispensation in which the ideas of American liberal democracy were assumed to be the ideas that would gradually take hold over the rest of the world.

And

I think that we're moving in a slightly different direction, or the arrow isn't flying, the arrow of history isn't flying straight ahead anymore.

And I hope that in the very near future, we're going to have our friend and colleague Tanahasi Coates on the big show to talk about this issue because he's been in an argument, as many of our listeners know, he's been in a kind of an argument with Barack Obama on

this very question.

President Obama,

optimistic for good reason, or his own personal story is an optimistic story,

has long argued, borrowing from Martin Luther King, that

the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward freedom.

And Tanahasi, in our pages, has argued something different: that the moral arc of the universe is short and bends toward chaos.

And

he and the president, the ex-president, have been in this kind of argument over the direction and the ultimate course of

American history, whether history is this arrow flying ever forward or it is just this kind of chaotic sign curve.

And these are the and the truth is, the truth is, until November, I thought that history was moving in a fairly orderly, progressive direction, and

we seem to be taking some

interesting turns.

To that point, I'm going to read you guys a few lines.

He's going to read us the Federalist paper.

Oh, is this a quiz?

I'm going to start reading you all the Federalist papers.

It's just unbelievable.

I knew there would be homework.

I did not know there was going to be a homework.

Oh, no.

Yeah, this is homework.

Go on.

Sorry.

Oh, no, no, no.

It's fine.

You got to

be you.

I want.

I want you to tell me when you think these lines were written.

These are lines from the Atlantic.

I am not revealing my story.

They're just lines that people spoke or wrote.

This is impossible.

Alex, this is the world's worst game show right now.

This is the world's worst game show.

It's impossible to cheat on this test.

Therefore, I will not take it.

I'm taking it.

Go on.

All right.

I'm not scared.

I'm not scared of you.

The Republicans wrote in their platform that America was in danger, but the fact that such an alarming statement could be made without disturbing in any way the atmosphere of optimism and merriment which prevailed at Cleveland merely shows that nobody believes that politicians can lead America to ruin.

That's September 2016.

I'm going to say it's current, yeah.

That was written in the pages of The Atlantic by Raoul de Roussi de Salle in 1936.

You tricked us with the Cleveland reference.

I did, didn't I?

Also, this is our English

broadcast.

That was

sneaky.

Wow.

1936, huh?

1936.

You choked us, Matt.

All right.

I got two more for you.

One is going to be an Alex Wagner piece from three weeks ago, right?

And you're not going to recognize it.

That's going to be the funny part.

You're going to think, that's Lincoln?

Is that Lincoln?

No, it's Roosevelt.

Or Wagner.

It's Kennedy.

Who is it?

Go ahead.

Millions of ordinary, hardworking Americans recognize that government is not dealing with the problems that are uppermost in their lives.

For most of these last decades, American liberals, of whom I am one, have been most concerned about the black, the brown, the poor, the uneducated, the young.

But today, millions of middle-aged, middle-class white working Americans are coming to understand that they have been victimized by the irresponsible politics of the recent era.

I don't know if Bernie Sanders wrote for the Atlantic.

Actually, he wouldn't talk about white working class.

That's not, yeah.

I feel like this, we're talking about like Dixiecrats here, right?

I feel like this is 60s.

60s.

I feel like this is the 1960s.

I feel like this is.

Somebody wrote in The Atlantic.

Yeah.

I give up.

That was David Broder in 1972 when he came to a piece called The Party's Over.

We were close.

I've got one last one for you.

One last one.

I did not know David Broder wrote for The Atlantic, by the way.

Yeah.

Which is sort of sad.

It's a great piece.

I recommend it.

It's called The Party's Over.

All right.

I'll put it in the show notes.

Through most of the history of ideas, the great champions of equality have been xenophobes.

Not out of bigotry, but because they believed that only a tightly bonded society could suppress the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.

I'm guessing this is now.

This is this is.

No, I was going to say that's like Teddy Roosevelt Trustbuster age stuff.

All right, who?

Alex, what was your guess?

2015.

2016.

2016?

That was actually one, a writer named David From.

I knew it.

I was going to say from.

Oh, that's cheating.

That's just totally cheating.

You can see Matt's pattern here.

He went went from the past to the present.

People did David.

I went fairly chronologically.

People named David.

Like that.

To my point.

People have been making trenchant observations about the state of America, trenchant and I would say concerned observations about the state of democracy in the pages of the Atlantic for many, many years now.

And that last author, David Fromm, is going to join us after a quick break.

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allberds continue to trust and use them.

With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into?

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/slash special offer.

Welcome back to Radio Atlantic.

I'm Matt Thompson here with Jeffrey Goldberg and Alex Wagner.

Now, in our fourth chair, we'd like to welcome our friend and colleague, David Frum.

So, David, you wrote in the March 2017 issue of The Atlantic a cover story called How to Build an Autocracy about the ways that our newly inaugurated president, Donald Trump, could turn America into something other than the democracy that it had been.

So, it's six months in now.

How have your dark visions fared?

Well, self-evaluation is always dangerous.

Let me point to a couple of things I think I got right.

And one thing where I think my fears have not yet fully been borne out.

Here's one that I got right.

In the opening,

the article opens with a fantasy of what the future could look like four years out.

And one of the things it mentions is how the Trump administration would use pressure on

the antitrust pressure on the pending merger of CNN's parent company in

an effort to sway CNN's news coverage.

And that's in the papers, I think, just today.

That is something the Trump people are actively talking about.

I think we have seen some attacks on the rule of law, for example, the omission of the appointment of any U.S.

attorneys.

I think there are now eight U.S.

attorneys nominated out of 93, and all of those eight are patronage appointments in parts of the country that are not financial centers.

The most important U.S.

attorney office in the country, the Southern District of New York, remains vacant.

And Trump's own lawyer has boasted and has been heard to boast that that seat was vacated precisely because they felt that the person who had the seat was dangerous to Donald Trump.

The thing I think that I tended to overestimate was I expected Donald Trump to be a much more single-minded wealth maximizer than he was.

I expected to see a lot more disciplined effort to make big money, not just like petty grabs at Mar-a-Lago, as he's been doing.

And so I think one of the things that has been helping the country to some degree is Donald Trump's slovenliness and disorganization.

That, in fact, he's not that organized a figure.

And in some ways, I credited him with more single-mindedness than he had.

David, one of the things that struck me is that, and this I guess is a corollary to the point you just made,

is that

what's the frame people use?

Malevolence tempered by incompetence.

They're just not very good at doing things,

good or bad.

Does the level of just sheer inability to move an agenda surprise you?

The inability to move an agenda does not surprise me.

One of the, take people behind the curtain, one of the things we agonized a lot about in writing that article was in my vision of 2021 that starts, I had said that I thought Obamacare would still be there.

And in the back and forth of editing with the brilliant Don Peck, that I kept putting that in and Don kept taking it out.

And he said,

What if he cancels it the day before the magazine will all look pretty dumb?

And so we took it out.

But I was,

I had a strong Trump was not motivated by policy.

He didn't care about any of these things.

So it's not his agenda.

He doesn't care about it.

The agenda is his hostage over the House Republicans.

They care about it a lot.

And so, in order to get from them what Donald Trump cares about, which is their complicity in his other actions, he

phones in a performance on the agenda.

David, I wonder in the piece in the cover story, you wrote, what happens in the next four years will depend heavily on whether Trump is right or wrong about how little Americans care about their democracy and the habits and conventions

that sustain it.

If they surprise him, they can restrain him.

What do you make, not just of sort of the public protests that we've seen since Trump was inaugurated, but the state level pushback and and the

pushback from the judiciary branch on his policies and withdrawals from things like the Paris Climate Accords.

Does that sustain you in this moment?

Yeah, there's a lot of good news.

There are a lot of things to be excited about.

Look, I've never worried about the courts.

The courts are the last readout of the rule of law in America.

They're incredibly hard to change.

It takes a long time for, I mean, you know, the president was recently in Poland.

The first action of the present authoritarian-leaning Polish government was to dismiss the Constitutional Court and replace it.

You can't do that in the United States.

I mean, you'd have to have 20 years in power to really change the nature of the courts, because even in four years, you make a lot of appointments, but you're still picking from people of qualifications that they earned before you came on the scene.

So the courts have been robust, as expected.

The state governments

have performed pretty well.

But the big frightening thing, they're actually the two places where I'm most alarmed.

First, day in, day out, the most important check on the executive branch is Congress, and its abdication has been total.

And we have seen a little bit of resistance from people in the executive branch.

We had a resignation in the Department of Justice of the head of corporate compliance, who made a pretty stinging statement on her way out the door.

By and large, the executive branch is not reacting as the president leaves it empty.

And when it's empty, it's unwatched.

One of the ways in which the president could be resisted and one of the checks on his power is, in fact, the bureaucracy.

But if

the agencies under the president's purview, if they are too active in dodging the wishes of the president and not carrying out what the president asks them to do,

then that poses a different long-term danger to the Republic in other ways, right?

If the president weakens the presidency by empowering the bureaucracy to defy it, to defy him.

That is such a profound, important, and correct point.

It's one of the things I worry about most.

Far and away, the most important bureaucracy in the United States government is the military.

And one of the questions I worry about a lot is, to what extent is the president of the United States now in the chain of command?

How seriously do the military take his orders?

How autonomously are the military acting independent of his orders?

And although I personally, and I suspect many people would be vastly cheered if James Mattis were president of the United States right now rather than Donald Trump, he's not.

That's very tempting.

But over the long haul, yes, we are teaching the military some bad habits.

And the thing that you can really worry about is what if Donald Trump proves not to be a one-off?

What if, in reaction to Donald Trump, the Democrats careen off to their far left, as they're very capable of doing, and nominate an Elizabeth Warren type, as they're they're very capable of doing, and she would win in 2020, as you can well imagine.

And that habit of not telling the president things, ignoring the president's unhelpful suggestions, that habit grows.

It's already happening in the sense that the president has subcontracted out huge strategic decisions about Afghanistan, for instance, to the Defense Department.

He says, you guys figure out how many troops you need and just go do that.

I mean, it's, and the military will do that.

The Pentagon will do that in isolation from other national strategic decision-making.

Aaron Powell, I wonder how much you think Trump offers a cautionary tale for the rest of the world, David.

I mean, in the piece,

you talk about Maureen Le Pen, who, of course, was defeated in France, Gart Wilder's defeated in the Netherlands.

Do you think there is some sort of silver lining for those worried about the rise of an autocratic state in the United States that we are sort of showing the rest of the world?

Well, there's a popular website called Despair.com that produces parody inspirational images.

Only David Frum is surfing the internet on despair.com.

Right.

It's sort of my, actually, it's my natural.

I'm almost sorry.

I don't own that domain name because it's

well, we'll get your despair.org

for your 501c3.

This is your cute emergency.

Right, right.

So they have these mock inspirational posters, as you'd see in a coach's office or in a salesman's office.

And one of them shows the rusty keel of a sunken ship protruding above the waterline with the slogan, does it ever occur to you that perhaps the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others?

Wow.

Talk about an inspirational poster for work.

But in the usual order of things, it's the small country that serves as a warning for the large, not the large, not the world's global superpower serving as a for medium-sized European powers.

That's not the fortunate thing here.

But David, can I lift up and ask you a very large question, which is, what is the American idea to you?

Over my lifetime, I've noticed one really striking change in the way people use this phrase, or the American dream or the American idea.

When I was young, what people meant by the American idea was the idea that just about anybody, if they worked hard and

did certain basically sensible things, could enjoy a comfortable life in the United States, and a more comfortable life in the United States than really anywhere else.

The way people I hear use those phrases now, what they tend to mean is that this is a country where exceptionally talented people can rise higher than they can anywhere else in the world.

And by the way, both of these statements were true.

It was true in 1969 that America was a place where the ordinary person could do better than just do it anywhere else on earth.

And today it is true that the United States is a place where the exceptionally talented person can rise higher than anywhere else on earth.

But the transition from one of those ideas to the others, to the other, which happened almost without comment, that is a revolution in our understanding of what it means to regard the United States as a successful country.

I know it's a whole essay question, but

I'm wondering if you have a concise answer for the future of the Republicans in this conversation.

I don't know that the Republican Party, as it existed before 2016, can emerge again.

after this.

Too many people are too deeply committed to what Donald Trump has been doing.

And those people who have been, who couldn't accept it are not going to find it easy to come back afterwards.

They're not going to be wanted back, especially if things begin to get tough for the Republicans.

A lot of people will say to those who weren't there in 2017 and 2018,

if we should try to show up in 21, 22, where were you when we needed you?

When we were fighting the liberals and the Democrats, and they were trying to drag down our president, yeah, with all of his faults.

We were here defending him, and you were spitballing him, and so we don't want you back.

And that's how party systems change.

If you were put into suspended animation in the year 1990 and unthawed a quarter century later in 2015 and looked at American politics, you would be stunned at how little had changed.

Bush, Clinton, dominant names when you were frozen.

Bush, Clinton, dominant names when you were unfrozen, still arguing about the federal budget and tax cuts.

Gingrich is still there.

It's a quarter of a century of absolute stasis.

That could not last, and it's not lasting.

And I think the future gets

suddenly very unpredictable and very murky.

I don't know.

I think I'd wake up and see a black president and be like, what?

Wake up and be like, wait, there's a website called despair.com.

Matt, you would wake up and say, there's a black president and he's not Colin Powell.

How did that happen?

That is true.

That's the surprise.

So we've been talking a lot about what's happened within the country.

But a huge part of this notion that we've been dancing around, the quote-unquote American idea, is about the stories that America tells the world about itself, the example that America tries to set in the world or has tried to set, the role that it's played.

And David, you recently wrote about what you call the souring of American exceptionalism.

And I'm curious, how do you see America's role in the world having changed?

Well, I'm speaking to you from Canada, from beautiful Belleville, Ontario, but most importantly, from a part of Canada that was settled originally by the losers of the American Revolution.

This is my

the place I stay here in Prince Edward County, which is where I am, is called Loyalist Parkway.

And that's not a figure of speech.

The names of the main farms and roads are names of people who are descended from losers of the revolutions and some Hessian soldiers who also were given land up here.

So this is a part of the world where you feel the complexity of the American experience.

You know, everyone's now obsessed with the Alexander Hamilton story because of that great musical.

But one of the themes that is not touched on in the musical that's really important was Alexander Hamilton was one of those who argued in contradistinction to people like Thomas Jefferson that America was a great power or should become a great power like other great powers and had things to learn from other great powers.

Whenever he wanted to know what to do, he would ask himself, what did the British do?

What did the French do?

What did the Dutch do?

Whereas Jefferson would say, that's not a way to think.

We're doing something completely novel here.

There are moments when one is right and there are moments when the other is right.

But I think it's a strange thing to look at the world in the year 2017 and say, America is just a radically different place from Germany or from France or from the Netherlands or from Great Britain.

Marco Rubio, when he gave the speech that sort of introduced him as a national star in 2010, described his upbringing and said that his parents were

very working class people.

He was now running for U.S.

Senate and his rise could happen nowhere else on Earth.

Actually, it could happen in almost any other OECD country.

It would not be at all.

It happens in Canada, it happens in Australia, it happens in New Zealand, it happens in Germany, it happens in France.

It's not true.

It's not true.

And in fact, fact, in most ways, America is a more class-bound society than other OECD countries.

I think this is a moment when America needs to say, you know, the great achievement of America in the truly exceptional moment in the years after World War II, when America did rebuild the world, was to rebuild the rest of the world in its own image, to rebuild a rest of the world that is influenced by American institutions,

that has shared values, and therefore

We're more like our friends than ever before, and we have things to learn from them, not just things to teach them.

Do you think, David, that

we are going to continue to play a kind of a missionary role?

Do you think we can return to that in future years?

Or do you think we're on this

inevitable ideological decline?

And by decline, I mean simply the idea that Americans are not so interested anymore in modeling certain behaviors for the world.

America in the year 1985, I looked this up for a book I wrote a long time ago.

America and its best friends, the NATO countries, Australia, New Zealand, that group, the West, although some of them are in the Pacific, produced about half the planet's economic output.

And as things are going, by the year 2025, that group of countries, which is now reinforced with Central Europe, and I'm going to throw in Mexico too, will produce something under a third of the world's economic output.

So that group is weaker in the world than it used to be.

That's going to happen.

That's happening right now.

The missionary work, and there is important missionary work to be done, but it's done by this group of countries jointly.

And that's why Donald Trump is so dangerous to America's standing in the world at exactly the moment in the world when any American president was going to find it more difficult to exert a narrowly American influence.

When America's influence is magnified only if it works in tandem with like-minded nations, you have a president who simply refuses to do that and refuses to understand it.

David Frum,

thank you very much for cheering us all up on this

episode brought to you by despair.com

and also existentialenui.org

Thanks again, David.

Bye-bye.

Welcome back to Radio Atlantic.

Joining us now in our fourth chair is our friend and colleague Atlantic Staff Raider Molly Ball.

Welcome to the table, Molly.

Thanks for having me, Matt.

Great to be here.

Hi, Molly.

Hi, Chad.

Hi, Molly.

Hi, Alex.

So, Molly, you have spent these last eight months and many of the preceding years before traveling all over the country talking to Americans about what informed their vote, what they're looking for from their president and from their government.

And

so from that vantage point,

what has or hasn't changed in how Americans are thinking of themselves at this moment?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, the big question that I am trying to answer right now and going forward is whether 2016 represented some kind of breaking point in American politics or whether the map was redrawn, whether everything changed.

Because I think there was a feeling that

something was shattered, that the previous consensus

was busted up, the establishment dethroned, etc.

And so the question is,

did the axis of our political debate actually shift?

Did we go from the debate we thought we were having between conservatives and liberals to a different debate that's more like the one they're having in Europe, a debate between open societies and closed societies, a debate that is more about borders and national identity and inclusion versus exclusion.

And I think we still don't know.

And so as I cover elections that are happening now or are going to happen, what I'm talking to people about, what I'm asking people about, is how they think of that political debate in this country.

And what I'm finding is that so far, it appears that the Trump message and the Trump

debate, in the sense, is a bit of an anomaly.

Other than Trump, you mostly do have Republican and Democratic candidates taking the traditional liberal and conservative stances, not seeking to reorient themselves around this populist paradigm.

And in fact, candidates who've tried to imitate Trump's populism and affect and positions

have mostly fallen short.

But at the same time, there's no question he has, you know, like a cannonball into a pond, there's a ripple in the whole pool, right?

And I think we're still feeling those ripples.

And I'm trying to figure out how that all plays out in the era of Trump.

Molly, in one of the pieces that you wrote right around the inauguration,

you said, or you wrote, Trump's fans hope he will master Washington, while Washington generally believes it will master Trump.

What do you, in the months that have passed, who's the master?

in this scenario?

I'm sure there are some people who would say the answer is obvious, but I kind of feel like it's still up for debate.

Aaron Powell, I think you're right.

And I think this is still the object of most of the tension in Washington.

And it's a tension you can almost feel if you talk to Republicans and Democrats in Congress, if you spend time on Capitol Hill

or in the agencies, you really feel this tug of war

between

a president who's very unorthodox and who goes against the consensus of both parties in a lot of ways,

and a bunch of seasoned, experienced politicians who have an agenda that they want to pursue.

And so for the first few months of the Trump administration, I really would have said it's Mitch McConnell's Washington and Donald Trump is just living in it.

It really did seem like he was out there sort of tweeting and saying stuff,

but McConnell was deciding who lives and who dies, right?

McConnell was deciding, yes, we will give you your Supreme Court justice.

No, we will not give you your voter fraud commission.

And in

especially.

And so when you have a president who does not seem to have a large attention span or to be particularly focused on any particular policy outcome,

it is pretty easy for people who know the game to work around him.

I think now, though, we've reached a point where McConnell is also having trouble because of the pre-existing divisions within the Republican Party and because of the president's unpopularity and because the president, frankly, isn't helping.

What I hear from Republicans on Capitol Hill a lot is they would love it if President Trump devoted the energy to campaigning for health care reform that he does to attacking the media because maybe then he would be able to bring these factions of the party together.

So I really think

there's still a lot of tension there.

And it is, you know, I talk to a lot of Republicans in Congress and on Capitol Hill.

And

in fact, I wrote a piece with the headline a few weeks ago how Trump is torturing Capitol Hill because they really do have a sense that they start working on something, they get a little ways, and then he creates some other huge explosion that they all have to talk about instead.

Aaron Ross Powell, and that's his version of mastery.

Right.

Aaron Powell, right.

Do you have any insight, Molly, into why he didn't do a thing people thought he would do, which is to say govern as a populist, more of a populist, say more

health care for everyone, huge infrastructure spending to put the white working class back to work, why he seemed to, to the extent he got captured by Capitol Hill Republicans, why he got captured that way.

It's interesting.

There's been so much reporting on the Kremlinology of this White House, the personality conflicts on Trump's team and in his inner circle,

and nobody has won yet in the fight for Donald Trump's soul.

And he is not enough of a policy wonk to have set out very clearly, this is whose side I'm taking when it comes to, you know, Ivanka's on one side and Steve Bannon's on the other or Gary Cohen

or Bryan's Priebus.

And so, you know, he has staffed the administration with a lot of traditional Republicans.

And that's why what you see the agencies doing is the most conservative successes that have come out of this administration have been deregulation, either through Congress or through the agencies.

And you have all these agency heads, people like Tom Price and Scott Pruitt, who have been very strongly ideological conservatives for a long time and are, in fact, working to, as Bannon put it, dismantle the administrative state.

They really do believe that by rolling back what they view as onerous regulations, they can unleash the shackles on the American economy.

As you said, there's clearly something in Trump that isn't there, right?

There's something, not to say something missing, but that is not in that place.

Well, there's an alternative history in which he's at 50 or 60 percent approval rating because he's done a bunch of things that

populist ideology would say you should do.

But I have the $64,000 question for you, which is, what do you think Donald Trump thinks is the American idea?

Does it have to do with individual liberty?

Does it have to do with being a shiny sitting on a hill?

Does it have to do with every every man who's strong enough can get his?

I mean, what do you think he thinks the undergirding idea of America is?

Or do you think this is not a question that rises in his mind?

Jeff, I can't believe you don't know this.

It's right there on the hat.

It wants to make America great again.

No, but I think that's a good idea.

You know what?

I'm somewhat serious.

I'm a Beltway elitist.

I don't see the hat that way.

You don't wear trucker hats or golf hats or whatever.

Maybe if he made a MAGA beret,

because that's what we do around here at the Atlantic League.

He always has that beret.

I hope somebody listens to this and makes a beret, an embroidered beret.

We sell it on our website, don't we?

I think there really is something there, though, this idea of American greatness.

And it is a nostalgic idea, and it is a nationalistic idea,

perhaps even a jingoistic idea.

The idea of Americanness and American identity.

It's an American exceptionalism that is an American supremacy.

And I think it is founded on a bygone image of who Americans are and what our country is.

But it's rooted in nothing high.

I mean, Ronald Reagan had a beautiful vision of America, the shining city on the hill, the example, the beacon for the world, for people who want to be free.

None of that language evinces itself naturally, organically, from Donald Trump.

So maybe you're right.

Maybe it's just jingoistic, chauvinistic.

We're better than you, leave us alone.

Well, it's tribalistic as well.

You know, I think there's a lot of resemblance to the ethno-nationalist populist movements in Europe that have said, we are our tribe, and we keep out the members of other tribes, and we protect our own, we take care of our own, and we pursue our own interests, and everybody else in the world is pursuing the interests of their tribe and the people within their borders.

And so that's the idea of protectionism.

I think it's very much about protecting,

you know, his economic agenda is literally protectionism.

His border security is building a literal wall to protect us from whatever is outside of America.

And I really do think that, that is his idea.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Emali, you've had the experience of going all over the place and talking to a lot of people.

One of the things that you said pretty frequently over in the year running up to the presidential election was that what's most interesting is not necessarily Trump himself, but the Trump phenomenon, right?

How have the people that you've spoken to, how have they responded to the actual fact of the administration?

And what sort of an appeal does that sense of protectionism you just described continue to have when

ostensibly the protector is in the White House?

Aaron Powell, so there definitely is this hard core of Trump supporters who are not

who belong exclusively to him, right?

They

believe in him the way they believe in their sports teams.

It's a deep identification that is much more identity-based than it is about any particular policy, any particular agenda, a feeling that he speaks for them and no one has spoken for them before.

Trump kept campaigning after the election was over.

He got some kind of psychic satisfaction from the rallies and his aides who were tired of him rattling around the White House and giving them conflicting directives, sent him on the road to sort of get them out of their hair, I think, in some part.

So I went to the first one of these.

It was in December of last year and it was in Cincinnati because I wanted to know exactly the answer to this question.

First of all, who goes to a presidential campaign rally after the election and why?

And second, what?

Besides Molly Ball.

I mean, I'm getting paid.

I don't think these people are getting paid.

But then, second of all, what do they want from him, right?

Given that they exerted such passionate devotion for this particular candidate, what does he have to do for them?

And so, and the most interesting conversation that I had, I had a lot of conversations with people at this rally, and it was packed.

He didn't fill the arena, but there were thousands of people there on a cold night in Cincinnati.

And this one man that I spoke to

talked about

how important it was that someone now was speaking for people like him.

He said, you know,

the lesbians and the transgenders and everybody else is allowed to advocate for their rights.

Why don't people like me get to stick up for our own?

And then he said, and I said, so what does Trump have to do?

And he said, well, he has to build the wall.

I mean, he was so clear about that.

It's so clear that he has to build the wall.

If he doesn't do that within three years,

he's really going to take a beating.

But of course, I understand if there's some reason he can't do it.

And that was the moment where I said, wow,

all he has to do.

And the other thing this man said was that

he had a feeling of ecstasy on election night.

It was like a transformational moment.

These core Trump supporters

won when he won the election.

They got so much psychic satisfaction from that that he doesn't really have to do anything.

Merely by winning and by putting his enemies in their place, he has given them what they wanted.

And in that sense, their expectations for the next four years are pretty low.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So he can't lose because even when he loses, it's going to be the fault of outside, dark, nefarious conspiratorial forces.

Aaron Powell, well, he can't lose these people, right?

And Obama had a base for whom he could do no wrong as well.

Obama had a base that identified very deeply with him, and I think that got the same kind of psychic satisfaction from the mere fact of him being installed in power.

So

I think it's important to point out: this isn't everyone who voted for Trump.

This is a sliver.

This is a hardcore of some of them former Democrats or disaffected independents.

It's not the same as the Republican base.

And

it's probably 20 to 25 percent percent of the electorate at most.

So you can't win an election with it.

And that's the problem that he's having now is that

he's only seems to be speaking to those people.

And the broader electorate, not just Democrats, but Republicans,

conservative Republicans

who are more on the traditional Republican end of the spectrum, the Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney Republicans, as well as independents, Trump doesn't seem to care what they think.

He's talking to his base.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Molly, when we talk about the base,

David Graham had an analysis of a recent study about Trump's base and their relationship to sort of facts and figures and quote-unquote the truth.

And the study found that Trump voters do not, in fact, seem impervious to the truth, present them with a falsehood from their man, and they will acknowledge he was wrong, but that doesn't have much effect on their support for Trump.

My question to you is:

does that surprise you?

And given the fact that his base isn't impervious to the truth, why such animosity and why the narrative around fake news, for example?

Well, the animosity is a combination of two things.

It's a combination of the distrust of the media that already existed

and was pretty widely shared on the left and the right, although I think it was more acute on the right.

And then a president who is uniquely inflammatory in this regard.

Politicians have always criticized the press and often had antagonistic relationships with the press, but the attempt to delegitimize the press, the overt waging of war on the press, the singling out of individual reporters,

and the insistence on

blatant falsehoods and

conspiracy theories in the face of contrary evidence, that is a new level.

And when the President of the United States, who commands a large following,

continues to sound those themes, he is going to increase the people's attitudes in that way.

But do you think that

that base can be brought back into the fold of facts, figures, and mainstream media narratives?

Or is it?

Well, but you just said they're already there.

They do believe the facts.

They just don't care.

And I think that that's a really important thing to realize.

It's not that these people don't know that he's not telling the truth or exaggerating or whatever.

They do know.

They just think that on some deeper level he's right or on some other things

he's better than the alternative or whatever.

So, you know,

I don't think America elected Donald Trump because they didn't realize that he doesn't always tell the truth.

They knew that and they wanted to elect him anyway.

Aaron Powell, so

when you talk to folks and across the political spectrum, because part of what we've been saying is that partisanship, the identity of your team is a meaningful identity, is a particularly meaningful identity for many Americans at this moment.

And

for whomever you're talking to, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Whigs, Tories, you know, you name it,

which do you think is the more powerful identity right now?

Being a member of that team or being an American?

I don't know that I can answer that big question, but I do think it relates to

one thing that I'm trying to figure out, which is on the one hand, you do have this increasing polarization, this increasing partisanship, people antagonistic toward the other team and defining themselves in negative terms against their enemies on the other side.

And, you know,

90-some percent of people are going to vote for the same party up and down the ticket their whole lives.

And essentially, there aren't any swing voters.

On the other hand, nobody trusts or likes the parties, and the parties are historically weak as institutions.

And we really saw the party establishments on both the Democratic and Republican sides be profoundly shaken and disrupted in the 2016 election.

And you have young people increasingly not identifying with

a particular political party, distrustful of institutions such as political parties.

More and more people don't consider themselves members of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, even if they're very partisan in their views.

I feel like those trends have to collide at some point.

There has to at some point,

and maybe it already happened, right?

Maybe in the way that he was able to disrupt the Republican establishment and then the Democratic establishment in 2016, maybe Trump shattered those institutions.

But then the question is, do they crumble as teams and in identities as well?

And I don't know.

know.

Is there anything right now besides sharing this big old landmass that binds us all together?

I think so, but that's just a theory.

I have to go out and report it to find out.

But no, I mean.

Do I think that there's anything that binds us all together?

Do you think there's still something that unifies us?

I do.

I mean, I think that

besides an external enemy, which would have a clarifying effect on the way people feel about that.

I think that is one thing.

Yes, an external enemy.

I think that

we have tended to define that enemy internally.

But I also think we've always treated, we Americans have always treated the Constitution as a pretty mythic document, as a document that has the power of myth and legend, the document that we believe in.

It is an American,

it is near-biblical in its power over us.

Inviolate, holy, yeah.

I think people really want to believe in America.

Whatever that means to them,

people have not become cynical about the idea of America.

I think the best political ad of 2016 was the Bernie Sanders America ad with the Simon and Garfunkel song and the swelling crowds.

And that was on the far left, but it was the same sentiment that was being called up of

feeling an American, a sense of patriotism.

And,

I remember speaking to Newt Gingrich around the time of the Republican Convention when they were trying to draft a platform that somehow

grafted Trump's ideas onto the Republican Party,

which was kind of hard to do.

And what Gingrich said was, you know, Ronald Reagan knew this.

Americans are nationalistic people.

And

the elites may have made nationalism a dirty word, but people are nationalistic.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, and I think you're seeing nationalism, though it wouldn't be necessarily called that,

on the left.

Even in the, you know, in the face of a Trump administration, people are attempting to sort of

double down on their idea of what this country is all about.

So

I had this thought the other day.

So many of our recent elections, particularly midterm elections, have been backlash elections, right?

Where the opposition is galvanized by losing.

And isn't that an amazing statement about democracy?

That when you lose an election, your reaction is to double down on democracy, to participate even more, to say, okay, we just have to work harder and then we'll be the ones who win.

Instead of giving up, instead of saying, well, obviously they are the powerful and we are the powerless.

I think that's pretty amazing.

I don't think we can get much better than that.

We're ending at least on a note of opposition.

That is hope, hopefulness, hopefulness.com.

You're welcome, America.

Molly Ball, thank you very much.

That was Molly's Battle Hymn Hymn of the Republic.

Yeah.

That's what that was.

Julia Ward Howe couldn't have done it.

I didn't ever have to sing.

Thank you.

Do we need Molly for anything else?

I think so.

Any game.

I can sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Do it.

Do it.

Do it.

Do you know?

So I learned this from Pray Home Companion.

I don't know if you know that I'm a Garrison Keeler Super fan.

Oh, boy.

But this is apparently an old

commercial.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

He is driving round the corner in an early model Ford forward with his hand around the throttle and another round a bottle of line and Kugel's beer.

That's the outro.

That's the outro by the way.

By the way, you're welcome to capture that.

It's going to be deployed in ways you can't even imagine.

And that'll do it for Radio Atlantic.

In just a moment, we'll play John Batiste's more reverent version of the battle hymn.

But in the meantime, enjoy this wonderful version, which he also recorded for us.

First, a few thanks.

Our producer for this inaugural episode of Radio Atlantic was Kevin Townsend, with production support from Kim Lau, Katie Green, and Alice Winkler, audio engineering by A.K.

Adams, and additional audio support from Paul Ruist at Argo Studios in New York.

Thanks to my co-hosts, Alex Wagner and Jeffrey Goldberg, and to our colleagues, Molly Ball here in DC and David Frum, who joined us from Quint Broadcasting in Belleville, Ontario.

If you like the show, please be sure to subscribe and tell your friends.

You can reach out to us at theatlantic.com slash radio or facebook.com slash radioatlantic.

And now, in its entirety, for the very first time, here's John Batiste's Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Oh

glory

My eyes to the warmest of the coming of the Lord.

Here traveling, defending where the red and rattlesnake

had lost the faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war,

His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Hallelujah.