The American Ideal

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2000

⏱️ 43 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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0:45.0	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 in
0:55.8	1999 in 19 President Woodrow Wilson said sometimes people call me an idealist. Well that is the way I know I'm an
1:00.0	American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
1:05.2	What is the ideal that underwrites that idealism and how has it driven the phenomenal
1:09.9	influence that the USA has gained culturally, economically and diplomatically across the globe.
1:15.4	And was it ever ideal and is it ideal any longer?
1:18.2	With me to discuss the nature of the American project and its future in the 21st century is the American
1:22.2	writer Susan Sontak, whose new novel
1:24.0	in America is published today.
	...

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