Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Jon Meacham gave a talk on the Center of the Arts (CFA) mainstage Wednesday night about American democracy, history and the upcoming presidential election to kick off UB’s ‘24-25 Distinguished Speakers Series.
Meacham has written multiple New York Times bestselling books that explore the lives of various American presidents and political figures, including Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and John Lewis. He was also the first person to be named “Canon Historian” at the Washington National Cathedral in 2021.
Meacham currently serves as a contributing editor at TIME. He is an informal advisor to U.S. President Joe Biden, and occasionally helps in writing Biden’s campaign speeches.
At the beginning of his speech, Meacham described America as an “incredibly young democracy” and an “experiment” where enough people did the “right things just long enough” to make the experiment worth pursuing.
“This is a big, complicated, disputatious, maddening, thrilling, tragic, terrible and wonderful country, and when we get things right, it’s magical,” Meacham said. “And when we get things wrong, it's heartbreaking. Our task is to get more things right than we get wrong.”
According to him, history is the means of “telling and showing that story.”
“History, I do not believe, is a GPS. I don’t think you could put in the coordinates and say you want to go left and right, and then you’ll get a certain piece of legislation. But I do think it’s a diagnostic guide,” Meacham said. “There are certain symptoms that recur that are discernible…that suggests the presence of an underlying condition that has proven susceptible to treatments in the past and may therefore, by the workings of rationality, prove susceptible to them again.”
Meacham then narrated some of the darkest moments of American history, such as racial violence and planned political insurrections, but also highlighted times when people publicly spoke out against those moments. He diagnosed some of the recurring symptoms that appear throughout the American story, specifically patriotism and nationalism.
Meacham called patriotism an “allegiance to a creed” and nationalism a “support for your own kind.” He emphasized that Americans must fulfill the promise of one of the Declaration of Independence’s main themes: “All men are created equal.”
“The point is it’s supposed to work out for everybody, and we voluntarily, unilaterally put that promise at the heart of the patriotic enterprise of the American project,” Meacham said. “The first major nation to be based not on ethnicity or solely geography, but on an idea.”
With the upcoming presidential election, Meacham argues that the election holds a decision that would either follow the creed promised in the Constitution or align with America"s ethnic nationalist legacy.
“The American story has been punctuated by dark and dangerous and debilitating hours, and it has been also marked by hours in which we have, in fact, decided to do the right thing,” Meacham said. “There’s no mystery. There’s a constitutional choice, and there is an ethnic nationalist choice.”
Meacham said this election and America are “shaped fundamentally” by a moral choice.
“The choice is, do we really want to live into the implications of the most important sentence ever originally rendered in English, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, a sentence that has changed more lives around the world than any other and continues to do so,” Meacham said. “Are we willing to live under a rule of law where we defer our immediate gratification in the service of ongoing order and liberty under law? That’s the question that’s on the ballot.”
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Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor at The Spectrum. Outside of getting lost in Buffalo, she enjoys practicing the piano and being a bean plant mom. She can be found at @my_my_my_myliennnn on Instagram.
