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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. David discusses how he hopes Americans can find a future where we rediscover how much there is to be proud of in the American experience and offers a comparison to another turbulent time in American history: the Compromise of 1850.

Then, David is joined by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss the impending celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and whether the ideas in that document still ring true in the Trump era.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism by Abram Van Engen and the origins of the phrase “a shining city on a hill.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum:  Hello, and welcome to a special star-spangled edition of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic. We will be discussing the American idea and how it stands on this 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The book under discussion this week will also have a patriotic theme. That book is City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism by Abram Van Engen. But before either the dialogue with Jeffrey Goldberg or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on this memorable and momentous anniversary.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has been shaping up as, well, frankly, somewhere between an embarrassment and a fiasco. It’s marked by a military defeat in the Middle East: President Trump’s lost war against Iran. And at home, it’s been made ridiculous by the algae in the Reflecting Pool before the Lincoln Memorial, by the mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn, by the ripping down of the East Wing of the White House, by generally scandal and shame and embarrassment, by this underattended state fair that has been such a spectacular failure on the Washington Mall.

It all seems a kind of way of driving home that this 250th anniversary is not one of the prouder moments in American history. In fact, it’s one of the grimier moments in American history. And if that’s the way you’re feeling, if you’re not enjoying this occasion as much as you would like to, as much as you wish you should, as much as we all wish we could, I want to offer a consoling thought by taking us back to some other low—or another low—moment in American history, and a reminder of how things that seem like low moments often have strange ways of providentially working out for the betterment of Americans and for humanity.

One of the low moments in American history I often think about is the year 1850. The year 1850 is the year of the famous Compromise of 1850. That is a set of laws, five laws in total, that were passed by Congress to tidy up the rancor and disputes left behind by the Mexican-American War, that had added the entire southwest territory—what is now the southwestern states of the United States—to the United States. Among the notable elements of the Compromise of 1850 were the admission of California to the Union as a free state, but also a federal fugitive-slave law that empowered federal authorities and federal courts to seize people who had escaped bondage. Seize them anywhere in the country, even in a free state, and under federal warrants and with federal marshals to put them back on a boat and send them back to the bondage they had escaped. It was a moment of tremendous national shame. It’s a moment that still resonates with pain in American history.

The Compromise of 1850 was passed through the Senate, and one of its leading advocates was Daniel Webster, a longtime antislavery nationalist. And supporters and believers in Daniel Webster were so horrified by Webster’s seeming about-face that one of them, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, wrote a poem about the event, which I’d like to quote to you now. It sort of gives you a sense of a past moment of feelings of abandonment and betrayal. The poem is titled “Ichabod.” Ichabod is a name from the Book of Samuel in the Jewish Bible, and it’s a name that basically means “the glory has departed.” So the man who is being referred to, Daniel Webster—his glory has departed. He is now Ichabod.

I’ll read just a few lines from the poem:

How often have you thought over the past decade that when faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead, and that we are walking backward to hide the shame? And that feeling is so intense, those words are so powerful, we can feel again what it must have been like to have been a believer in the American idea in 1850 and to see your country fasten national slavery—or seemingly fasten national slavery—upon itself as a compromise of Congress. As a way to avoid civil war in the year 1850, over the spoils of the Mexican War.

So here’s the consoling thought. The Compromise of 1850 did avoid a civil war at that moment, but it didn’t avoid the Civil War forever. The war came 11 years later. But in the intervening 11 years, the North underwent a tremendous industrial and transportation expansion. Railway lines, iron manufacturing, textiles, shipbuilding, everything—the entire material basis for the ultimate northern victory in the Civil War and the destruction of slavery—that was laid down in those 11 years after the Compromise of 1850 and would not have happened if the war had come in 1850. Had the war come in 1850, the North would not have been able to impose its will on the South. The South would probably have won, the South would have separated, and slavery would have been perpetual. Instead, a grubby compromise was passed. The war was postponed. It was postponed until a time when the North could win. And all of American history, all of the best elements of American history, were made possible by the seemingly sordid act in 1850.

It’s often hard for living human beings, it’s always hard for living human beings to understand what’s around the corner. What fate may hold for them. At this moment of national grime, of national shame, of national squalor, of scandal and corruption, who knows what possibilities are building for us? And if we lose faith in the American idea that inspired so many people before, we may tarnish or compromise or even destroy the possibility of the fulfillment of the American ideal for those who come after. We have to keep believing. And even when it’s difficult, we have to believe that what was done before was more difficult than what must, must be done now. America can be itself again. America can be restored to itself again. That’s the thought I’ll be keeping in mind this coming Fourth of July.

Whittier, by the way, the man who wrote “Ichabod,” he rediscovered his faith too. He lived to see the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. And he wrote a poem about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, and I’d like to read one stanza from that maybe is applicable to our situation now.

He wrote, after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment:

Well, nothing’s ever blotted out, and sins are never truly dead and buried. They always have a way of reemerging and haunting the living. But they can be overcome, they can be left behind, and better ways can be found. The national commitment on this 250th anniversary is to find a future where we rediscover how much there is to be proud of in the American experience, in American history, and how much progress is still to be made and to achieve—not just for Americans, but for all of humanity. All of humanity has its eyes on this country. All of humanity has its hopes on this country. As America goes, so go the hopes of human freedom. Believe in that. Work for that. Hope for that. Trust in that. I hope you have a glorious Fourth of July celebration.

And now, my dialogue with Jeffrey Goldberg.

[Music]

Frum: Jeffrey Goldberg has edited The Atlantic since 2016. Under him, The Atlantic has tripled its paid circulation to almost 1.5 million and reached new heights of influence and reputation. Jeff made his reputation first as one of the great national-security reporters of our time. He won a National Magazine Award in 2003 for his reporting on Hezbollah.

President [Barack] Obama confided in Jeff Goldberg for a series of interviews that became the 2016 Atlantic cover story “The Obama Doctrine.” The most astounding scoop of his storied career popped unbidden onto a smartphone when someone added him to a super-secret Signal chat planning the Trump administration’s airstrike on Yemen. Jeff Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Memoir of Friendship Across the Israeli-Palestinian Divide, and the host of the weekly PBS program Washington Week with The Atlantic.

It’s been my honor and privilege to work with him and for him over this past decade. Jeff, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Frum: So we are posting this on Canada Day, July 1st, in anticipation—

Goldberg: Oh, obviously.

Frum: [Laughs.] In anticipation of the Fourth of July weekend, the 250th anniversary of American independence. And I want to tee up something for you that I’m going to repeat some things that are well known to you, but maybe unfamiliar or forgotten by some of our viewers and listeners.

The founding announcement of The Atlantic in 1857 described its future politics as: “The Atlantic will be the organ of no party or clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.”

Now, at this point in history, that may sound like empty rhetoric, the American idea. But in fact, in 1857, that phrase had real bite. The phrase “the American idea” was borrowed from a minister: a Unitarian minister named Theodore Parker, who had delivered a speech by the title “The American Idea” to an abolitionist convention in 1850. And as Parker expounded the American idea, it was not a vague or imprecise concept at all. Parker began by quoting the language of the Declaration of Independence, that will mark its 250th anniversary this coming weekend, about all men are created equal. And then he explained what that had to mean. And what that meant was democracy, still a very inflammatory term in 1850. And by democracy, Parker said, democracy demands—these are Parker’s words—“as the proximate organization thereof, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”

Now, most of us know that phrase from the Gettysburg Address in slightly tighter form, but it was Parker who wrote it in the first place, and Lincoln consciously borrowed it from Parker. And this phrase was meant to apply to all people, women as well as men, the enslaved as well as the free. It had foreign-policy implications, too. Parker talked about the recent war with Mexico, which he condemned. He talked about American plans to annex Cuba, which he also condemned. That American power in the world needed to be an idea for a force for freedom.

So this is all a long setup to say that phrase, “the American idea,” once had bite and purchase. Do you think, Jeff, that it still has bite and purchase today?

Goldberg: Yes. Obviously it still has bite. I don’t know if it has purchase.

And by the way, happy Canada Day in advance—

Frum: To all who celebrate.

Goldberg: Yeah, to all who celebrate. I want to wish everybody in Canada the best wishes from The Atlantic.

It has bite and real meaning. Real meaning for us, obviously, at The Atlantic. Real meaning for anyone who thinks about what it is to be an American, I would hope. It doesn’t have any particular purchase right now, especially with the most transactional, cynical executive we have ever had—I’m hesitant to say “ever had,” because I don’t know the level of cynicism of many 19th-century presidents, for instance.

But, not to jump right into it, but we have an anomalous situation right now in which we have a president who, in a weird way, to his credit, doesn’t pay lip service to ideas he doesn’t hold. There’s a strange honesty about his transactionalism and his cynicism about democracy and about America’s role in the world and about creedal nationalism and all of the rest: things I suppose we’re gonna get to talk about.

But in the absence of this kind of idealism, the absence of this goal really highlights what we’ve taken for granted in our lifetimes at least. Even in the bad times. You know—you go through good times, you go through bad times, you go through mistakes, you go through depressions, you go through periods of triumph as a country. But I think we always assumed that we were different and that we held ourselves to a higher standard, and we felt badly as a country when we didn’t meet those higher standards.

Frum: Vice President [J. D.] Vance, who was once a contributor to The Atlantic, now uses—

Goldberg: Maybe will be again.

Frum: Maybe. He goes through a lot of iterations. You never know.

Goldberg: The world is a strange place, David.

Frum: Yeah. [Chuckles.] No, I knew him when.

Goldberg: Yeah. I mean, he was a contributor to davidfrum.com.

Frum: I believe it was his first byline, was on my website, actually.

Goldberg: [Laughs.]

Frum: So that gives me a kind of a complicated relationship to his hypothetical presidency. You know, that’ll be my footnote in history.

Goldberg: I think it’s pretty hypothetical at this point, but go ahead.

Frum: Pretty hypothetical.

Yeah. Okay. So he, a past contributor to The Atlantic, where he compared Donald Trump to heroin.

Goldberg: “Cultural heroin.”

Frum: “Cultural heroin.” He now—when he wants to disparage somebody as being uninteresting or not edgy enough or not willing to tiptoe up to the bounds of whatever exciting idea they have, on whatever kind of strange website he’s reading—he will say, This is an idea that could appear in the pages of The Atlantic. And that’s his term of dismissal. And that raises this question—

Goldberg: But they’re talking about us. [Laughs.]

Frum: [Laughs.] Boy, are they talk—they’re talking about you, I would think.

Goldberg: Yeah. No, no, no. It’s interesting. It’s interesting that his frame of refer—I mean, he thinks about The Atlantic possibly more than I think about J. D. Vance, which I find interesting.

Frum: Yeah. But I think what he’s pointing at is a tension from that 1857 statement, which you often quote, which is emblazoned in the offices at The Atlantic, that says, “Of no party or clique.” That is—it’s nonpartisan, which it rejects the suggestion that it belongs to liberal America or blue America.

Goldberg: Right.

Frum: At the same time, it’s upholding an American idea that it says—and has said, explicitly in very rare endorsement editorials—this presidency is opposed to it. That this presidency is not part of the American idea.

So how do you, as an editor, how do you balance the determination to be of no party or clique—versus the fact that you say, We’re with the American idea, and the people who hold power over the country are opposed to that American idea?

Goldberg: The first thing I would say is that I believe embedded in the DNA of The Atlantic is the idea that the country is at its best, and democracy is at its healthiest, when we have, at the very least, a strong party of conservative ideas battling it out in the playing field of public opinion with a strong party of liberal ideas, right?

And The Atlantic is meant to be the playing field, to some degree. We live in, again, an anomalous situation in which the Democrats, for all of their faults and small-minded partisanship, still are putting forward a set of ideas. Fitfully—but putting forward a set of ideas. But right now, the Republican Party, the allegedly conservative party, has built itself, remade itself into almost a cult of personality around a maximum leader. So you’re not getting conservative ideas.

We are publishing—and you know this, obviously—we publish conservatives all the time. But we don’t have, right now, what I would consider a normal, healthy situation in America, and I wish that we did. And I wish that we did for any number of reasons, including the fact that then people would not often think of The Atlantic as they sometimes do, or often do now, as part of an anti-Trump resistance. We are definitely not part of an anti-Trump resistance. We are simply publishing pieces that are based on empirical truth. Observable truth about the conduct of government, and the composition and ideology—to the extent that there is an ideology that’s separate from Donald Trump—the ideology of the Republican Party.

Our colleague Adam Serwer, who comes from a different political tradition, obviously, than you do, said it best. I saw this in a social-media exchange years ago. Somebody was criticizing The Atlantic on social media by saying, “I can’t believe that the liberal Atlantic would publish X.” I don’t remember what it was. It could very well have been a piece by you, for all I know. [Laughs.] And Adam responded by saying, “The Atlantic is not a liberal magazine. The Atlantic’s not a conservative magazine. The Atlantic is a magazine.” And I thought that’s one of the best encapsulations of what we’re trying to do.

Again, everybody lives in this weird anomalous situation where you have an antidemocratic formation right now as one of the two main parties. So what we’re opposed to is not conservatism. What we are opposed to—and this goes back all the way to the roots of the abolitionist founding of The Atlantic—is that we’re opposed to illiberalism, we’re opposed to populist demagoguery, we’re opposed to authoritarian tendencies, and we’re opposed to people who willfully traffic in untruth and lies.

Frum: I want to ask you about the impending 250th anniversary and the American idea. Those words from the Declaration of Independence, they were explosive in 1776. They’re still explosive now. Periodically, we forget at the time The Atlantic was founded, the dominant party was a party that theoretically was the heir to Jefferson’s words. It was also the heir to Jefferson’s slave-owning practice, and the words seemed to be dormant. Lincoln often quoted the words again and again to remind people of their revolutionary implication. And on this 250th anniversary that is being celebrated … not as the 100th was, with a great show of American technology and industry and achievement in Philadelphia in 1876; not as the 200th anniversary, with that great show of visual beauty, the great ships, these magnificent acres of canvas spreading up and down the East Coast. This one has been commemorated by a gladiatorial contest on the White House grounds and by an, apparently coming up, a long speech by the president of the day. A rally for his party. How do we reconnect to how explosive those words were, are, and continue to be?

Goldberg: Hmm. You know, I was thinking as you were talking, I was a small kid in the bicentennial. I remember the ships. We went to see the ships in New York Harbor. But I was thinking about the date of that. It came after a crisis. Watergate at the time seemed like an enormous crisis. Obviously, we’re living through Watergates every week now. But at the time, Watergate was one of the worst crises American politics had ever, American governance, had suffered.

And, so I was wondering, I was thinking back to why the mood, as I recall it as a kid, but why the mood, as historians describe it, was relatively light in 1976. That’s because we had been past—we got through the crisis, and Gerald Ford restored some order and dignity and sanity and transparency to the presidency. So we were on the upswing.

We’re not in an upswing right now, obviously. We’re in a kind of—I want to speak advisedly because we’re both wearing ties, and I feel like this is a very serious show—but Washington—

Frum: Let it go. [Laughs.]

Goldberg: Yeah, Washington right now is just kind of—

Frum: The ties give us immunity. We’re like a Supreme Court decision. We have immunity. We can say what we want. We’re wearing ties.

Goldberg: [Laughs.] Washington, D.C., now looks like the headquarters of a freak show. The Reflecting Pool and the gladiators and the destroyed East Wing and the plans to build the arch and Donald Trump’s face hanging off the side of the Justice Department. Which is, all of this is astonishing. And it’s creating a bad feeling. And one of the things I wish liberals or Democrats wouldn’t do is cede the language and visuals of patriotism to the right. I wish that they would embrace the deeper things. And I think our lives in the next month should really be focused on embracing the deeper things and the deeper truths.

I’m extraordinarily grateful to be an American. I have countless reasons for being that. I also feel that studying history is a comfort. We’ve gone through crazy stuff before, obviously. I mean, we’re talking about the founding of The Atlantic in 1857. [Laughs.] Not exactly—I mean, precisely because 1857 was 1857 was there a need and an impetus to build a magazine like The Atlantic.

But this organization, this institution, has seen much worse times. So there is that, but put that aside. I wish that people … on the one hand, the current reality is dispiriting for any number of reasons. On the other other hand, the words of the founders are perfect, or as perfect as any human being could get words, and goals and ideals. And we have been, for 250 years, a remarkable and indispensable country. Again, one that’s made mistakes all along the way. But if you think about it, just in the last century, we defeated fascism and communism. That’s not bad. It’s a pretty good record. We’ve built the most powerful economy, the greatest scientific institutions, the most powerful military. We expanded from sea to shining sea, and our people live, relatively speaking, compared to people in other countries, in lives of comfort and relative wealth. It’s been a successful experiment overall. And I believe that America has been a force for good in the world, not least of which, American ideas have been a force for good in the world. We have a way of messing with good things, and right now we’re in one of those periods.

I didn’t mean to start going off on a tangent here, but I was thinking—I mean, I’m personally, my wife and I, we’re gonna be in Pearl Harbor on July 4th, at the USS Arizona Memorial. I mean, we’ll go out for sushi later. But we’re going to be there, and there’s a real—it makes it feel very real. The sacrifice that Americans have made to stand up to evil forces, forces of illiberalism, authoritarian forces. And it would be great if we could put meaning back into that on July 4th.

Anyway, I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but I just wish that people would practice gratitude in their lives when it comes to the country that they live in. And even if they didn’t have gratitude, I wish that they would work harder to keep this experiment going, because it’s in their own self-interest.

Frum: You mentioned the feeling of lightness that—

Goldberg: 1976. Yeah. ‘

Frum: ’76. I was 16. I was older than you. I am older than you. And I remember—

Goldberg: You remain older than me, yeah. Tomorrow, as well.

Frum: Yeah. That’ll keep going, yeah.

Goldberg: Yeah, it’s amazing how that works.

Frum: It’ll only get worse. [Laughs.]

Goldberg: No, I’ll close the gap percentage-wise, but never actual in chronology, yes.

Frum: And I remember Vietnam very vividly. I remember Watergate very vividly. I have early childhood memories of the riots of 1968 on television. They seemed very far away from the Toronto television sets on which I was watching those events. And there was something else going on that is very different from now, and maybe we have this to look forward to, maybe not. That even before Watergate burst, the period of the 1970s was a period of tremendous reform in the United States. And not all the reforms turned out to be successful. Many of the campaign-finance reforms, they quite backfired. But beginning in about 1970 and going through about 1978, there were a series of dramatic events that changed the way America had always been run. The first of them was maybe the most dramatic—it tends to sound like a joke now—but in 1970, Congress depoliticized the post office. Now, that sounds funny, but from the beginning of the republic to 1970, postmasterships were used as political chits, political rewards. That was the currency of politics. And in 1970, Congress said, That’s it. No more. It’s going to be a professional responsibility.

Goldberg: It was to the 20th century, what, like, the customs master at the port was in the 19th century; just a gift to your friend.

Frum: The postmaster general was usually also the head of your party, the head of the Democratic/Republican National Committee. Because he was the one who dispensed the favors.

Goldberg: Right. Amazing.

Frum: So Congress starts by depoliticizing the post office, and then goes through a series of reforms before Watergate, during Watergate, and culminating after Watergate. And there was this sense of—whatever had gone wrong, that Americans had their hands on it, and they were fixing it. And again, many of the reforms backfired or proved injudicious, but some of them remain powerful to this day.

And that was one of the last great periods of that kind of reform. And maybe that’s what put the wind in, literally, in the sails of the—or figuratively and also literally—in the sails of those ships. And maybe that’s the thing we’re missing now. Maybe that’s what the American idea needs to mean as we move out of this moment and into the next one.

Goldberg: Wait, so are you saying that—well, let me ask you a question. What do you see brewing among the American people—

Frum: Oh, I don’t see—

Goldberg: —that suggests that we’re going to leave this period of massive corruption behind and reinstitute the guidelines and restraints that kept democracy going well?

Frum: I don’t see any sign of that yet. That’s the thing that—

Goldberg: Well, that’s disappointing.

Frum: That’s the difference between then and now. I think what gave the hope in ’76 was there had been this tremendous scandal. Vietnam before that, economic failure, oil crisis—that was also part of the mix. ’76 was a moment of, a comparatively calm economic moment. Vietnam was over, Watergate was over. The reform era was fast-moving, and it was a reform era by—most of these reforms passed by large margins, and sometimes almost unanimously.

Goldberg: Well, what we had back then was a Congress that fulfilled its constitutional responsibilities. And we didn’t have social media, and those two things are related. Obviously, we did not have a mobocracy of information. But the key is that Watergate ended because the Republicans in the Senate and Congress needed it to end, wanted it to end. And said, All right, this is over.

The system isn’t working right now. I mean, I am extolling democracy and extolling the American experiment, but the experiment is actually not working. If this was a laboratory, we’re completely misfiring, among other reasons, because one of the three branches of government has ceased to function.

Frum: Yeah. Well, let me put a more heretical thought to you. You are celebrating the Fourth of July at Pearl Harbor. I’m gonna be celebrating the Fourth of July among the losers of the American Revolution on the north shore of Lake Ontario.

Goldberg: The loyalist stronghold.

Frum: In the loyalist stronghold of Prince Edward County, Ontario, where the main street is literally called Loyalist Parkway.

Goldberg: [Laughs.]

Frum: And there’s a certain “we told you so” element to the whole thing. [Laughs.] But one of the things that was there in 1970—

Goldberg: Oh, so the entire parade would be self-righteous Canadians?

Frum: More…

Goldberg: Smug?

Frum: Pleased?

Goldberg: Quietly smug.

Frum: A little flying the flag, of the mutant Jack as it was in 1776, saying: We told you no good would come of this.

Goldberg: It took us a while to prove the point. [Laughs.]

Frum: But here’s the point I’m driving at. One of the things that Americans came out of the Watergate scandal with … they didn’t quite say it, but that a lot of elements—not just of their arrangements, but actually of their fundamental constitutional design—had misfired. And so many of these reforms tried to create bodies that were halfway between Congress and the executive, the Federal Election Commission and others, that answered simultaneously both to Congress and the executive. And were ways, without a crisis, to say: Well, there’s a dispute about whether this election practice is fair or not. We’ll have a federal election commission made up of people appointed by Congress and the president, and they will sort things out before it rises to the level of crisis.

And one of the things that has been going on in American life since the ’70s is the Supreme Court has said, with increasing firmness, You cannot do that. Everything is the executive or the Congress, but never both. Always either; never both. We’re breaking down one by one these mediating institutions between them, and we’re heading to some big Supreme Court decisions that may completely gut the idea that, except for the Federal Reserve, that there can be any of these mingled institutions.

And so it creates a crisis. Like, that’s what this Reflecting Pool thing—there’s a deeper story there. It’s silly; it’s dumb. But what’s also true is the Constitution says Congress has responsibility for all the physical, the real-estate holdings of the United States government. And the president has been tampering with them. And by courtesy, he’s sort of allowed to have some leeway. From the end, Congress can say, You know what? Hands off the Reflecting Pool. Hands off the White House. Actually, the president’s authority over the White House is a matter of courtesy by Congress, because Congress actually is in control, constitutionally, of the White House complex too.

Goldberg: The president is actually a four-year freeloader in the White House. It’s government housing for four years. And you should not be able to put a nail into a wall in the White House as a president without seeking the permission and oversight of people whose responsibility is to keep the White House. The whole White House situation, in part because I’ve seen it a few times since the transformation, is really pissing me off.

Frum: What do you see when you go there?

Goldberg: Tacky, tacky, tacky, tacky.

Frum: Yeah.

Goldberg: I mean, you know. I was in there with Trump once with our colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer and the president. Most people, when he asks them—because he asks everybody who comes into the Oval Office—Don’t you think I need a chandelier? Or, Don’t you think I need an X? They go, Yeah, sure. Because they need something from him. He asked me, like, I wanna put a chandelier right there. And I’m like, I don’t think you should do it. And he said, Why? And my answer is, Because it’s the Oval Office. It’s the Oval Office.

And he thinks it’s boring. He thinks the Oval Office is boring. And I think the room from which FDR won World War II: not a boring place. There’s a lot of fascinating insight into his character, into his understanding of self. As we’re going back and forth about changing the Oval Office, and, the last time I was in there—it’s already incredibly tacky, and gold fixtures everywhere, just, you can imagine, right? He said, Well, you don’t understand. I have important people come in here. And I’m like, Yeah; you’re the president, though. You’re the most important one. You could do whatever you want. You could honor the…

Anyway, sorry; I don’t mean to go down the pathway. But the visual qualities of Washington, the aesthetic qualities of Washington, symbolize who we are as a people. That’s why the theory of the arch bothers me so much. There’s a conversation going on between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. The arch is gonna stand there, triumphant about—I don’t know what it’s triumphant about—and interrupt the conversation between a martyr, President Lincoln, and all of the martyrs of the Civil War who are buried on Robert E. Lee’s plantation. And they’re in a dialogue—

Frum: And Lee’s in the dialogue too, because it’s Lee’s house.

Goldberg: And Lee’s in the dialogue, too. And Lincoln is there, mournful, looking at the mistake of Lee and, like I said, in communion with the dead—starting with the Civil War dead up to today’s dead. And it’s just, it’s thoughtless and grandiose. It’s very Ozymandias.

Frum: But it’s also—and this is my point about the lack of a reform program—it’s also quite illegal. That is Congress’s land. And the idea that the president can put a trowel there without Congress, and Congress is not acting.

Goldberg: I cannot think of another instance in which a group of people handed power statutorily, or constitutionally handed power, don’t exercise their power, out of fear maybe?

In other words: You get elected to Congress as a Republican congressman, and the playbook or your HR-onboarding process is actually the Constitution. What are we supposed to do here? Well, let’s read Madison and Jefferson and all the rest, and figure out what we’re supposed to do here, and then go do it. Why would you give up power?

I mean, we know the answer. A lot of people are there now prepping for the time when they can get podcasts. It’s not service anymore.

Frum: In the really heavy teaching of this anniversary, this 250th anniversary, I think we’ve been given a glimpse of if and when the American Republican republic fails. We now see exactly how it will.

Goldberg: Wait; what do you mean? Go into that a little bit more.

Frum: Well, the way it fails is the Constitution says the use of a federal piece of real estate is Congress’s decision. But because the president has frightened Congress, Congress doesn’t raise its voice when the president puts his Albert Speer–like building project, or intends to, on Congress’s land. And that’s a glimpse.

Now, one thing we’re lucky about is that Trump has been so haphazard and aimless and unfocused—and obsessed with bizarre, petty things—that he’s never been as consistent in his consolidation of power as a more directed person could be. So he’s wasted a lot of time that he will not get back. And his political standing is now suddenly deteriorating to the point where Congress is maybe losing some of its fear, and there may be a different Congress after November.

But when the system goes wrong in the 300s, whenever that time comes, this is how it will be done. And the people of 1976 had a vision of how the system could save itself and redeem itself. We’ve had a vision of doom. This is what the doom will look like.

Goldberg: Right. Think about how the Justice Department was run—the post-Watergate Justice Department reforms, and how the Justice Department was run in 1976—and how it’s run now. And that should frighten people into understanding that what you’re suggesting about the future is already partially here.

Frum: No president except Donald Trump has ever fired an FBI director because he didn’t like what the FBI director was doing. From the J. Edgar Hoover period—and Hoover, whatever his many faults, was independent of presidents—the directors after Hoover, the presidents and the directors, always made a point that the terms overlapped. Reagan had Carter’s FBI director for seven years. It never occurred to Reagan that he could replace the FBI director.

Goldberg: [Trump] does not believe in democratic restraint on elected leaders. All presidents come into office wanting to wield power. All presidents come into office, or exist in office, frustrated by the lack of actual power the president has over most matters and most issues. And most presidents accept that. They strain against it in various ways, but they also exercise democratic self-restraint. We have a president now who’s fundamentally different than every other president we can think of. Maybe Andrew Jackson is the exception to that.

But there’s something—I have not been able to articulate this well to myself or anyone else—but there is something about the largeness of the Trump project. We can’t see it, because it’s too big in front of us. I’m not just making the point that if you’re gonna do corruption, do a lot of corruption all at once so people are overwhelmed cognitively and the systems become overwhelmed. I mean, we could sit here for an hour and name all of the things, all of the anti-democratic moves that he’s made over the last just two years; forget the first term. Last year and a half. Each one would’ve been a Watergate-sized scandal in any other presidency. So, again, I have this hard time articulating. One of the problems of human beings is also one of the great gifts of human beings: We can get used to anything. So we go about our business as if it’s normal for the president to fire the FBI director. You know what I mean? And multiply “firing the FBI director” by 1,000, because that’s the number of things that have taken place that are absolutely without a precedent in modern life.

Frum: Well, one of the things—that’s such an interesting point. One of the things I have tried to do in the place where my personal and professional life meet is retain the feeling of wrongness and strangeness.

Goldberg: That’s a good way of putting it. Retain that feeling.

Frum: When I’m planning my time in downtown Washington, I will go many blocks out of my way not to look at the White House.

Goldberg: It’s hard to see now, ’cause there’s so many fences, by the way. [Laughs.]

They fenced off Lafayette Square.

Frum: I’m always at least two blocks away. I just never—I don’t wanna look at it.

Goldberg: It’s a shame, because you worked in the White House; you love the White House. I bet you were one of those guys who every morning, when you walked up the West Wing driveway or wherever you went in, you kind of were like, I cannot believe that I’m at the White House. You were one of those guys, right?

Frum: My last day there I had lunch with my friend John McConnell, who wrote speeches for Vice President Cheney. And we sort of did a perimeter walk around the fence, and we went to the bulge in the South Ellipse and put our noses against the fence to look. I was gonna look out for one last time, because for the rest of my life I’d be looking back in.

And the symbolic language. The idea that—this is a kind of a dopey thing—but the White House is made of Ionic columns, which are civilian and symbolize learning and culture, and Trump wants to replace them with Corinthian columns, which symbolize luxury and tyranny, because the Corinthian is, above all, the Roman column.

Goldberg: Remember that commercial: rich Corinthian leather? Rich Corinthian leather.

Frum: Exactly.

Goldberg: He wants to actually encase it in rich Corinthian leather.

Frum: So here’s the last question for you. How do we get the ground back under our feet? If we do come out of this in any kinda intact way, how do we go back to the point where we reconcile the two halves of The Atlantic motto, and where you can believe both in the American idea and also say “We’re nonpartisan”? Which, for, as long as Trump has been on the scene, it’s been so hard to do. How do we get back to that?

Goldberg: Well, I don’t think it’s hard to do. I think of ourselves—look, by the way, we’re imperfect at what we do. And obviously, a lot of people in journalism make the mistake of thinking that if that party, a particular party, is not fulfilling its own mandate in a democracy, if it’s not become—if it’s no longer a party of ideas but a party of personality—that means that we have to support the other party. I think we’re doing a pretty good job of covering that other party and its flaws. We have to do a better job even than we’re doing now.

Partisanship is one thing. We are of no party or clique. That has to be true. We are also on the side of the American idea, as you articulated at the beginning. The Parker idea. The American idea as embedded in the Declaration of Independence, and the American idea as articulated through the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, obviously. We have to keep doing that as best as we can. We have to use the mechanisms of journalism to do that: reporting and fact-checked true things, in this age when the facts themselves are under assault or under discussion, as if there’s alternatives to sets of observable facts.

I think we also have to keep our balance and try to keep our balance. And not everything is a five-alarm fire. That’s important.

Are you asking me as a citizen or as the editor of The Atlantic? What does The Atlantic do?

Frum: You do it your way.

Goldberg: [Laughs.] Okay. First of all, the thing we do is keep on keeping on. Steadfastness is very important. Being the editor of anything, or being a good editor of anything, is about what you don’t publish as much as what you do publish, right? And so, that’s what we don’t have on social media. Any whack job with a phone can distort reality, and that’s not helpful.

I mean, you remember the famous notion Madison worried that democracy would not survive the rise of the daily newspaper, because a once-a-day insertion of new information and argument into the brains of the citizens would be too much for democracy to bear. People couldn’t process. People couldn’t cool down from the emotions that were generated in time for the next tranche of information.

So we have to do what we do, but even more so. Which is try to be reasonable and reasoned, try to apply logic, try to be fair, try not to straw man people on opposing sides of arguments. We also have to be very, very clear, and even bold, in calling out plainly what we see. It’s not just The Atlantic. We all have to try to buttress free journalism, independent journalism.

As a citizen, I would just like to see people vote for a better-quality congressman and senator, people who actually wanna fulfill their responsibilities. I don’t know. I mean, it’s an endless question. All we can do is tend to our little garden and keep our principles intact even while other people’s principles are disintegrating under pressure, or under the temptation of a quick buck or power. The blandishments of power, and so on.

Better angels. I mean, it’s not a cliché; it’s a beautiful term. But, we’ve gotta find a way back to the better angels, and the better angels all involve a level of self-restraint and compromise. And this is the hardest idea for some people to embrace—that no American is my enemy. That’s a very, very important principle. No American is my enemy. Could be adversaries politically; don’t have to like everybody. But the idea of turning each other into enemies is gonna be the death of us.

Frum: Jeff Goldberg, thank you so much for joining me today on the show. And may you have a glorious Fourth of July on the solemn 250th anniversary of American independence.

Goldberg: Thank you, David. You too.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Frum:  Thanks so much to Jeffrey Goldberg for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the program, my book selection this week also has a patriotic theme. The book is City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism by Abram Van Engen, published by Yale University Press in the year 2020.

“A shining city on a hill.” Many people have loved the phrase, but no one loved it more than Ronald Reagan, who used it over and over again in his campaign speeches and his presidential speeches, and most notably in his farewell address in 1989. Here’s Reagan in 1989. I’m quoting him:

Reagan usually clarified that he had not originated the phrase “city on a hill” but that he had derived it from a 17th-century sermon. Van Engen’s book tells the fascinating story of the phrase’s origin, its evolution, and its rediscovery by politicians, including Reagan in the 20th century.

Van Engen’s story starts in the year 1630. A group of would-be settlers is about to depart England for Massachusetts Bay. There, they will found the city of Boston. Before they embark on their ship to Boston, their leader preaches to them about the new society they hope to build. It’ll be a society built on the principles of Christian charity, mutual care, but also mutual surveillance.

The mutual surveillance will enforce a stricter and purer version of their Christian faith. That leader, John Winthrop, would become the first governor of the new colony. As Van Engen notes, those words of John Winthrop’s about a city on a hill did not spark excitement at the time, or indeed any time soon after.

For 200 years, from 1630 to the 1830s, nobody is recorded to have ever cited or even mentioned John Winthrop’s now-famous sermon. The sermon was published in 1838 and then immediately forgotten about for another hundred years. Only in 1930 did the city of Boston rediscover the phrase and carve it on a monument to mark the 300th anniversary of the city’s founding.

But that little flurry of excitement still did not mark any sudden change in American culture. It was only after the Second World War that the phrase emerges into very common use, and then thanks to the efforts of a Harvard professor named Perry Miller. Miller published; was the preeminent historian, after World War II, of Puritan New England. And he cited Winthrop’s phrase from his own research as the perfect example of the Puritan spirit and how it contributed to the creation of the new America.

Perry Miller’s phrase was taken up by President John F. Kennedy, who used it. And then it began to circulate more and more widely until Reagan made it his own in the 1970s and after. Reagan made it his own in another way, which is: He subtly altered the phrase. It was Reagan who inserted the phrase or the word shining before the phrase “city on a hill.”

“Shining city on a hill.” That’s not what Winthrop said, and that’s not how John F. Kennedy used it. It’s often pointed out that the “city on a hill” phrase is a reference, a passage in the New Testament. Verses 14 and 15 of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus there says—and I’m going to quote here the King James version of Jesus’s words—“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.”

Now, in the 1500s and 1600s, that phrase was often used by Catholics in their polemical war against Protestants. The Catholic argument was Jesus said the church was a light on the hill. Everybody would see it. Where had the Protestants been for the past 1,500 years? Nobody saw them. Everyone saw the Catholic Church. The true church of Christ was visible. The Catholic Church was visible. The Protestant church had been nonexistent and was now a minority faith. It was not a city on a hill, and it was not the true church described by Jesus in Matthew. Winthrop’s move in the sermon was to counter this Catholic claim: not to brag about the imminent founding of a great new nation that would be a light unto the world, but to explain, from a Protestant point of view, why the Catholic claim that the true church would be visible was not true. Winthrop’s point was that the true church was anywhere where Christians congregated together. That’s where the city on the hill was. That’s where it was a light to the world. And it could be found anywhere, literally anywhere, even so obscure and remote a place as the northwest corner of the Atlantic Ocean, in this tiny little city of Boston.

Winthrop and his followers had no idea; they could not have imagined that the city they were founding would become one of the first settlements in the mightiest economic and military power in the history of the world. That idea would have seemed to them facially crazy if anyone had even dared to articulate such a bizarre thing.

But as the United States did become such a nation, the phrase acquired a retrospective new meaning. That: Here is this new society, a new kind of society that all the world would see. The “city on a hill” language that Perry Miller discovered and that John F. Kennedy adapted was brilliantly suited to the rhetorical needs of Cold War America.

That nation regarded itself as both the center of events and as a society profoundly vulnerable to external shocks. The eyes of all people will be upon us—and those eyes could condemn as well as approve. The city on a hill could fail. Ronald Reagan seems not to have appreciated his debt to Perry Miller, which was only fair because Miller—who died before Ronald Reagan became famous in politics—Miller was a pretty fierce liberal partisan who would have had little use for the Reagan of the 1970s and 1980s.

What Reagan’s brightening of Winthrop’s phrase with the addition of that word shining subtly changed the meaning of what Winthrop said, and what John F. Kennedy said and what other Cold War people who used the phrase had said. Reagan’s creative misquotation added a kind of certainty.

The destiny of the city on the hill before all eyes—that was uncertain. But the shining city, that city was already shining. Its destiny had been achieved. Its hopes had been fulfilled. The dream had been realized. And now the task shifted from creation to preservation or possibly restoration; to scrub off any grime that dimmed the shine. Right now, on this 250th anniversary, the shining city on a hill seems a little grimy.

But the summons that Reagan spoke in 1989, that John Winthrop created in 1630, borrowing from the New Testament, the summons to build a shining city that still speaks to all of us and still summons all of us. So on this 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, may the city once again shine for Americans and all the world.

Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As ever, the best way to support the work of this program and of all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic. It’d be helpful, if you were minded, if you would share and subscribe to this work on whatever platform you use.

Thanks so much for watching and listening to The David Frum Show. See you next week. Bye-bye.