Um Peter, I'm going to start with you.

Let's talk about the importance of this moment.

250 years is a long time uh to maintain a representative democracy.

Is this is you know that it's kind of a signal achievement of the United States that it maintained this so long?

Obviously, there were problems along the way.

Um but is have we maintained fidelity to the to the principles that were the abstract principles that were formulated in Philadelphia 250 years ago?

Yeah, Jeff, thank you very much for for asking and for talking about this important subject because I think that this anniversary has become so politicized that we've lost sight of what it really is about, right?

It is about the country, not about blue America or red America, but about 250 years of this great experiment.

And I think the thing that makes America so distinctive, people often say this, it's not a a new thought, but that America, the United States, is not a country born out of an ethnicity or a religion or a tribe or a race.

It was born out of an idea.

The idea that we could find a better place to live, that we could form a more perfect union, right?

The phrase in the preamble of the Constitution, we're not perfect.

It's not perfect.

Now, we're going to talk about all the ways our representative democracy tonight is not perfect and feels threatened as we speak.

And yet, it is still the aspiration toward a more perfect union that makes us distinctive.

I was reading uh Dtoqueville's take on America.

And he actually has this, I think, remarkable quote.

He says, "What makes America special?"

I'm paraphrasing this is exactly what he said, but what makes America special is not that it's more enlightened than other countries, but that it has the capacity to repair itself.

And I think that's the story of our 250 years is our effort to try to repair ourselves and get to a better place.

Did everybody read Toqueville before they got here?

Did you put that in the assignment?

Yeah, that was in the assignment.

You never follow the assignment, but that's right.

But you read it, you read it organically.

It's great.

But I have to ask you this just this is a followup.

Um, we thought if you asked 10 years ago, 15 years ago, this the difference between credle nationalism and an ethnic-based nationalism, most people would say, well, that's a pretty settled question.

The United States is different than most countries because you join yourself to America by accepting a group of principles.

You don't have to join by blood.

Now, it's an open discussion.

Were you surprised that it's become a kind of continuing discussion or a live discussion again?

Yeah, I I would say I was surprised maybe maybe we shouldn't be because history is cyclical, right?

We do go through these periods in our history where we question what our principles are and what our values are and sometimes we go in directions that today's Americans would look back on with some degree of shame or or or regret.

Obviously, we have not always been perfect, but it is a reminder that as we go through a tough time right now, we are at least debating big things.

We're debating what our country should stand for and and that's something that in fact we do every Friday night on Washington Week in a way and I'm glad that we have the debate and that we can have this debate.

I want to get to transactionalism versus idealism in a bit, but Susan, I want to turn to you and and and note again if we're taking the long view.

Just in the last century, the United States defeated fascism and communism.

Pretty good track record.

Um many mistakes along the way, but the long night of authoritarianism might have fallen across the whole globe had it not been for the United States.

Is the United States still that beacon?

Well, first of all, I want to say thank you, Jeff, for convening us in person.

I assure you, Peter and I are not arguing over toville at the breakfast table.

I don't believe you, but I swear uh you know, because he's wrong, but no, I'm kidding.

Um I'm really I I think this is getting at the essence of it, right?

you know, 10 years into it, part of what is a struggle for so many people, I think, about the Trump era is that he seems to reject basic tenants of what we would call, you know, small D, democracy, both in his approach to governing the United States at home and also certainly in terms of his worldview.

And actually, if you do if you do a study of this and people have done this, Donald Trump even uses the language of democracy and the word democracy itself far less than than other presidents.

And it makes sense because it's not, I think, foundational to who he is as a politician.

And when you think about the sort of incredible global traumas of the last century, right, and the role that the United States played in it, democracy was not really a partisan issue uh for much of this period of time.

I mean, I think back to, you know, World War II.

It was very explicitly framed uh not just by the Roosevelt administration, but Americans viewed themselves as the arsenal of democracy and as the very much in a global conflict between the forces of what they called, you know, either dictatorship or totalitarianism at the time versus democracy.

Coming out of that, you had the creation of something like Freedom House, which was a joint project initially of Elellanena Roosevelt and Wendel Wilkkey, who ran against FDR in the election and lost, the Republican nominee teaming up with Elellanar Roosevelt.

And it was a it was a sort of a bipartisan idea about what the US stood for globally.

Ronald Reagan was sort of the next wave of democracy promotion was the idea that this was America's key advantage in the Cold War was this idea of unlocking freedom for people around the world.

And so to then have the Republican party in this age of stunning reversals, you know, to have it seeming to have a leader who's walked away from the basic principles of democracy.

I think that's why a lot of people react so viscerally to Trump because it's both a foreign policy statement and a statement about what he's doing domestically.