#1610 America at 250 With Beau Breslin

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Skidmore College political scientist Beau Breslin joins Clay to discuss how America might prepare for its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. Topics include the collapse of civility and mutual respect and the breakdown of respect for American institutions, from the Supreme Court and the FBI to the media and the church. They discuss the possibility of a new constitutional convention as a way of commemorating America’s 250th anniversary. They also examine what Clay is discovering about the country’s mood as he follows John Steinbeck’s 1960 Travels with Charley journey.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to this introduction to our podcast edition of this week's program.
0:04.4	The topic is with Bob Breslin of Skidmore College and it's really America 250 and he did a kind of
0:09.6	interesting thing that I wasn't really ready for.
0:12.1	He reversed the lens and I was going to ask him questions about how he would set up courses at Skidmore about the 250th or what texts he would use, what topics have to be part of this. You know, one of the questions I've been asking is this, fill in the blank.
0:25.6	You can't understand America unless you understand X.
0:29.3	And what is that X?
0:30.5	The X might be race.
0:32.3	That's certainly at the moment one that would be at the top of most people's minds.
0:37.0	You can't understand America unless you understand X, race. You can't understand America unless you understand religion, faith.
0:44.0	You can't understand America unless you understand freedom.
0:47.0	You can't understand America unless you understand violence.
0:51.0	You can't understand America unless you understand the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the Americanization, the Europeanization of the continent.
1:00.0	Bob Breslin is a good friend of mine. We've done a number of programs you probably know. He's at Skidmore and he's written about Thomas Jefferson and constitutional questions constitutional revision. He teaches courses in which he asks students to think about how they would
1:14.6	change the Constitution and he said that young people today have a very different idea of what
1:18.9	they would want their Constitution to look like it's more participatory, it's more engaged, it's of course less corrupt and
1:24.6	corruptible.
1:25.6	This is what I'm doing, you know, and I wish I had a bigger megaphone and you can help, of course,
1:29.6	if you can, if you just have a million dollars sitting around somewhere.
1:32.6	I'm going to give the next 10 years of my life to this question of where are we, how do we get here,
1:38.1	how can we be more, how can everyone in America feel that this country works for them? I mean imagine that. Is that so wild a dream?
1:44.8	Is that so wild a thing to want that every American would feel that this country works for them?
1:50.0	That they're not in some ways subjected or subordinate or discriminated against or
	...

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