Can America’s Problems Be Fixed By a President Who Loves Jon Meacham?

The Mother Jones Podcast

Mother Jones

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🗓️ 23 June 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has spent the last two decades pounding out bestselling accounts of American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and George H.W. Bush. In June 2019, Joe Biden invited Meacham to Newark, Delaware, for a conversation about the biographer’s recent volume, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, a 416-page meditation on how enlightened political leaders, propelled by a civic-minded citizenry, have rescued America at its darkest hours. Meacham explained that the country’s soul “is not all good or all bad” but rather an abiding conflict between “our better angels” and “our worst instincts.”

Two months before Biden announced his third run for the presidency, the intellectual underpinnings of the campaign were already in place. His ensuing candidacy was an exercise in moving Meacham’s thesis from the page to the stump: Biden cribbed Meacham’s book title for his campaign framing, a “battle for the soul of the nation,” and Meacham occasionally weighed in on the narrative and thematic elements of Biden’s major speeches.

On today’s episode, listen to an exploration of how Meacham has lingered on as a sort of historical and spiritual adviser to a White House beset by crisis, written by Mother Jones reporter Kara Voght. This is our first in a biweekly Summer series of read-aloud investigations, produced by our partners at Audm. You can read Kara’s piece from April on MotherJones.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, Jamila here, Post of the Mother Jones Podcast.
0:05.8	Jumping back in for a quick note about hot back summer and what it means for America.
0:14.8	We here at the Mother Jones Podcast like you are gingerly making our way back into the physical
0:20.3	world and all of the wonderful social stuff that we weren't able to do during the height of the
0:25.2	pandemic. And we're not the only ones. President Joe Biden's administration is hard at work and
0:31.2	doing that work much more quietly than his predecessor. But there's one phrase we keep hearing
0:37.5	and we heard it throughout the 2020 campaign again and again and again. We're in a battle for
0:43.8	the soul of this nation. Today we engage once again in a battle for the soul of the nation.
0:51.9	And I say it here today. We are in a battle for the soul of this nation.
0:58.0	It was kind of a Biden catch cry. And it makes winning this battle for the soul of our nation
1:04.2	that much tougher. That we're in a fight for the soul of our nation. We will win the battle for
1:10.7	the soul of this nation. We're the United States of America. There's not a single thing beyond our
1:16.8	capacity if we stand together and get up and remember who we are. This is the United States of
1:23.2	America. Period. Thank you and may God protect our truth.
1:32.0	That's a pretty lofty fight. But who influenced Biden in coming up with this particular philosophy?
1:39.5	Today we look at the man who's helped shape how Biden thinks about his presidency. He's become
1:46.0	something of a go-to for thinking about this thing called the soul of the nation.
1:52.8	In the first of our summer series in partnership with Autumn, you'll hear our recent story by
1:57.7	KeraVote, read aloud, and full. It's about how a pop historian, John Meacham,
2:03.8	helped shape the soul of Biden's presidency. Stay tuned.
2:08.4	Autumn presents
2:18.4	Can America's problems be fixed by a president who loves John Meacham?
	...

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