Name: "We're In A Moral Crisis" - Jon Meacham On America's Fragile Democratic Experiment
Uploaded: 2026-01-16T17:05:34.000Z
Duration: 8 min 8 s
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My next guest is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer who's just written a new book, American Democracy, Dissent and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union.

Please welcome back to THE Late Show, Jon Meacham.

Thank you for lending your dignity and your glory to us.

It's not every audience in late night that's excited for John Meecham to be here.

I'm usually at assisted living facilities slotted in between Murder, She Wrote and Jeopardy.

Congrats on the new book that's coming out February 17th.

American Democracy, Dissent and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union.

The book charts America's long, often painful history through division and debate.

And I'm curious, as you are about to release this book, which is full of people speaking to their national moment, what do you make of our national moment?

Look, the founders anticipated that we would have seasons of fear, we'd have seasons in which we would not obey the rule of law, that our appetites and our ambitions would overcome what Lincoln called our better angels.

I don't know if they quite had this in mind.

I mean, in the Federalist Papers there are descriptions of people very much like absolutely men of sort of pure ambition who basically ride the crowd into power.

And the Constitution did everything in its power to anticipate how to check that grab for power.

And the first three words are the animating words of the Constitution.

The document is only as good as the people doing the voting, the people we vote into office and then the people who act as checks and balances.

I think that we have too many of us have decided to put our own interests ahead of a constitutional order that is based on a rule of law and is based on our actually not just taking everything we want right when we want it.

If I like your tie and I want it and I just grab it, yes.

What I should do is say, that's a pretty good tie.

I'd like to go make enough money to be able to go into the marketplace and buy that tie.

Needed my tie for national security, or else China or Russia were going to come in and take my tie.

Isn't it the right thing to just take my tie?

This is why God put you right here, I think.

Look, if you ever wanted an example of why the character of the person you send to the presidency of the United States matters, I refer you to the last 361 days, however long it's been, feels like a lot longer.

Because, again, the Constitution, the norms, people like me who look like me talk about norms and people think, oh, that's boring.

It's not because a norm is a synonym for doing the right thing, not because you're told to, not because the letter of the law says you have to do it, but

because you obey the spirit of these documents that I wanted to go back and pull together here.

The most important idea in the American experience was the one that Thomas Jefferson wrote in June of 1776, that all men are created equal.

Every generation that has advanced the cause of liberty has lived into that sentence.

The generations that have pulled us back, and there have been, are the ones that have forgotten that.

Patriotism is loyalty to an idea, to a creed, a creed that anybody who comes here, as Ronald Reagan said, all the lost people from all the lost pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness toward home.

Ronald Reagan said that in his farewell address.

Ronald Reagan couldn't be nominated by this Republican Party.

Well, in this book, as I said, this is a collection of many Americans from many points of view, addressing their moment in the American story.

And are there one or two in here that especially feel instructive for today?

See, Frederick Douglass is always instructive, I think the most important American of the 19th century in many ways.

Imagine what it takes for a person born into enslavement in 1852 to stand up and say, I, for one, do not despair of this Republic.

The fiat of the Almighty, let there be light, has not yet spent its force.

And he called the Constitution a glorious liberty document because he saw that it was the user's guide, if you will, for that mission statement.

The Declaration of Independence is our mission statement.

And one thing we have to remember, all of us, is that there's nothing guaranteed about America making it to tomorrow.

This is a fragile experiment because it's human.

And what I want everybody to try to do at this point is think about what do you want the future to say about us?

We're at risk of being a generation that loses the ethos that sent men to Omaha beach, that sent people into Gettysburg, who sent people to Selma, Alabama, to broaden the definition and understanding of what the country can be.

it's also vitally, was never supposed to be about the whims and the ego of a single person.

His book, american struggle, is out February 17th and available to pre order now.