The American Ideal

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2000

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American Ideal. The Twentieth Century has been called the American Century, and you don’t have to look very far to see the evidence of its enormous success. In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson said; “Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world”. America is the world’s popular culture and its centre of the expensive higher sciences and scholarship. Its riches would make Midas weep in disbelief. Its contradictions grind the molars of intellectuals, critics within without. But its imperial, seemingly unassailable fortress is swollen with many treasures and open to many weaknesses.What is the ideal that underwrites that idealism and how has it driven the phenomenal influence that the USA has gained culturally, economically and diplomatically across the globe? And was it ever ideal and is it ideal any longer?With Christopher Hitchens, writer, journalist and author of No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton; John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Westminster and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy; Susan Sontag, cultural critics and essayists, and author of the novel In America.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our terms of use
0:05.4	Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program
0:11.9	Hello, the 20th century was called the American century and you don't have to look very far to see the evidence of its enormous success
0:18.4	In 1999 in
0:20.6	1919 sorry President Woodrow Wilson said sometimes people call me an idealist
0:24.6	Well, that is the way I know I'm an American America is the only idealistic nation in the world
0:31.5	What is the ideal that underites that idealism and how has it driven the how has it driven the phenomenal influence that the USA has gained culturally
0:39.2	economically and diplomatically across the globe and
0:41.9	Was it ever ideal and is it ideal in Ilonga with me to discuss the nature of the American project in its future in the 21st centuries
0:48.5	The American writers who's in Sontag whose new novel in America is published today
0:52.9	Rorca joined by Christopher Hitchens the writer and commentator on American affairs who's recently published
0:57.9	No one left to lie to the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton and professor John Keane director of the Center for the study of democracy at Westminster University
1:06.6	And the biographer of Thomas Payne if you're looking for American idealism Christopher Hitchens
1:12.0	Do we start with the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence?
1:16.9	Yes, it's the extraordinary thing about the United States is that it's a written country
1:20.5	I mean, there was America before there was the US there was the pilgrims for example and
1:26.4	And there was America for the pilgrims and there was America before the pilgrims indeed and which has sadly been obliterated and
1:32.6	There was a Spanish America the people didn't really know about there was a Francis Drake, but
1:38.1	America America the USA is
1:40.1	Is it is attested to in documents? It's founded on paper. It's being written still
1:45.9	It's a work in progress the most interesting thing about that Constitution is
1:51.7	It's tale it's Bill of Rights the number of amendments to the number. No, I think of 22
	...

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