4.6 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
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0:00.0 | Last week, the House passed a resolution formalizing the impeachment inquiry, clearing the way for televised hearings this month. |
0:09.9 | In response, the Senate announced it was preparing for its role in the process, a possible Senate trial, |
0:16.2 | over which Chief Justice John Roberts would preside. |
0:20.4 | All these different branches of government bracing to exercise their powers as laid out in the founding documents. |
0:28.6 | It seems we're always going back to them, interpreting and reinterpreting them, |
0:33.6 | in what's become an increasingly arduous effort to govern ourselves. But seriously, can we |
0:40.4 | govern ourselves? John Adams didn't think so. He said that any political system, monarchy, democracy, |
0:47.6 | aristocracy, all were equally prey to the brutish nature of mankind. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor, New York staff writer, and prize-winning historian, |
0:59.1 | released a sweeping history of the American experiment called These Truths. |
1:05.7 | We're offering you another chance to hear that conversation about America's contested, confounded truths because it was a tonic. |
1:14.9 | Oh, thanks so much for having me. |
1:17.2 | Alexander Hamilton wondered whether societies of men really were capable of, quote, |
1:24.0 | establishing good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever |
1:29.3 | destined to defend their political constitutions on accident and force. You said that was the |
1:37.5 | question when the Constitution was being sold in the autumn of 1787 and every autumn since. |
1:44.3 | That is the question of American history. For Hamilton and for the framers of the Constitution, |
1:50.6 | they had the past as a historical record available to them to know that all other experiments had |
1:55.8 | failed. And that's the incredible sense of fragility with which they greet this new experiment. |
2:01.4 | I mean, they have this enlightenment and paracism, but they also have a lot of political wisdom from the study of history that leads them to believe that what they're undertaking is quite a tenuous endeavor. |
2:11.7 | If anything, we're almost crippled by our sense of the stability of our arrangement because it hinders us from undertaking reform when reform is so urgently necessary. |
2:22.5 | So the framers, they're not on bended knee worshipping the sacred document of the Constitution. |
2:27.3 | In their lifetimes, they're rejiggering it. They're confronting its deep and fundamental inadequacy to address the problems of inequality that is failure to address the institution of slavery represent. |
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