Ken Burns Thinks We’re Heading for Another Civil War

BUCK: Here’s something. I wish I could say that optimism felt like it was on the rise in the country right now, but Clay and I are often discussing, it certainly feels like we’re heading in the wrong direction under the Biden administration. That’s putting it mildly, a gentle way of saying it. And right now, if you were to look for the most recent data insofar as you can even encapsulate these things, we’re not the only ones who feel like things are trending toward the negative.

The American psyche is under some degree of duress about what the future is gonna look like. NBC, just last week, had a series of polls out from before and immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They compared those with where we are now. What you find is that about six out of 10 people right now think the country is on the wrong track.

So, that’s not just Republicans. There’s a pretty big chunk of independents and even Democrats that agree with that. So, 60% of the country, it seems, thinks we are on the wrong pathway. Right after 9/11, 72% of people… Think about this. We just suffered our worst terrorist attack. It felt like the nation was heading in the right direction, and there was a unity in the country.

We were at least unified in the face of that enemy. Right now, it seems increasingly clear that the Democrats believe the enemy is within. The enemy are white nationalist Trump supporters, January 6 insurrectionists, all of that. There’s also the feeling that you get when you listen to Ken Burns, who, when he was just speaking earlier this week about the toughest times in our history — Civil War, Depression, World War II. He says right now we are in a similar moment to that.

BURNS: The three great crises before this: The Civil War, the Depression, and World War II. This is equal to it. Lincoln gave this great talk when he was very, very young to the Young Men’s Lyceum. It was an afternoon conversation about foreign policy. He said… This is when he’s like not even 29. He’s a lawyer in Springfield.

He said, “Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?” And then he answered his own question. “Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live through all time or die by suicide,” and we’re… (snickers) Y’know, we’re looking right down the muzzle of that gun.

BUCK: The covid response, Clay, feels like a pathway of national death by suicide if it continues on indefinitely with the division and just the general destruction of individual freedom.

CLAY: Here’s my hope — and, by the way, Ken Burns, how well was that said? The quote from Lincoln there. He’s done so many amazing documentaries over the years contextualizing American history on so many different levels, whether it’s baseball, whether it’s the Civil War, whether it’s… I think he’s got a new documentary out about Muhammad Ali now.

The reason why I think for historical analogy, I think covid is the Vietnam War. See if you buy into this theory. Covid is the Vietnam War, in the same way that Vietnam led to, in many ways, a destruction of the existing world order in the United States. It ended the comfort of the 1950s and the 1960s and put us into the Lyndon Johnson administration, which then led to a furtherance of Vietnam.

But what emerged ultimately was some form of stability. We had mostly Republican presidents, and we had Ronald Reagan, who I think really kind of set the country back in terms of a comfortable direction.

BUCK: Set it right.

CLAY: Yeah, set it right. But even the Clinton presidency, the Bill Clinton presidency was predicated on repudiating the excesses of the Democratic Party in the 1960s which had made Democrats virtually unelectable except for — except for Jimmy Carter who got elected in the wake of Watergate.

BUCK: With the Republican revolution in the House in 1994 and Newt Gingrich as speaker, Bill Clinton didn’t really have a whole lot of choice. But yes.

CLAY: But he ran in ’92 as a Democrat who believed in business. There’s no Democrat right now who believes in business. And you’re right. I mean, he won again in ’96 after the ass kicking that he got in ’94, brought in Dick Morris, started trying to triangulate everything. My point on that is, you can make an analogy that Biden is an accidental president.

He’s an accidental president in the same way that Jimmy Carter became president because of the chaos surrounding that moment — Watergate, Vietnam all connected — led to Jimmy Carter. I think you can make an argument that covid led to Biden, that he was otherwise unelectable but for crazy historical circumstance. And then after him, there was a return to normalcy. That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m not sure who the return to normalcy is in 2024.

BUCK: My biggest concern about the country right now in the era of covid isn’t even really a function… I’ve always assumed that the Democrat left in this country are a bunch of emotionally driven, power-mad lunatics who will shred the Constitution the moment that it is something that stands in their way on any issue — who don’t ever think there’s enough government, enough taxation, or enough intrusion in your life.

So none of that surprises me. I’m annoyed by it. I’m fighting against it. We’re fighting against it here day in and day out. But what has been a shock to me is the amount of people who will go along with all of this stuff as long as they have, and not understand that they will not stop. The people asking you to mask up on a plane? They will not stop until power is taking out of their hands.

They will not stop until the American people engage in mask noncompliance. And I gotta say, I know there are a lot of people who right now are feeling very, very strongly about the vaccine mandates. I think the vaccine mandates are a grotesque overreach and they’re wrong. As far as the Biden’s concerned, their incrementalism on vaccines is pretty much on schedule.

They lied to us six months ago and said, “We’ll never mandate it.” Now they said, “We are mandating it for military, for health care workers.” Now some states and cities are getting involved. You know, the temperature that the frog in the boiling pot is feeling keeps getting turned up.

And I am deeply disappointed in how much… Just the fact that I see people walking around in masks outside in New York City. I just want to look at them and say, “Honestly, what is wrong with you? What part of this do you not understand?” I actually find it now (chuckles) kind of offensive. I’ve gone beyond the normal.

CLAY: Well, and I think that the argument that I just laid out as the positive one, that there is a Ronald Reagan-like figure out there who is going to in some way —

BUCK: Maybe his name is Ron.

CLAY: (chuckles) Could be. That there is in some way a resurgence that is going to occur to normalcy. The flip side, Buck, is, we may just be starting. The divisions may be so ingrained at this point that it doesn’t matter who the president is in 2024 or 2028, that we are fundamentally broken as a country based on being able to rely on logic and reason at all.

And there’s 40% of the country that’s gonna believe one thing, and there’s 40% that’s gonna believe the other thing, and the other 20% are gonna split basically even — which is what’s happened for the last 50 years or so — and there’s no way to get out of the rut that we’re in right now.

BUCK: I had always thought that there would be some clarifying moments in this process of dealing with covid, and it seems to me that no matter how often and how wrong Fauci and all the other mask worshipers and lockdowners are, there are a lot of people who will not change their minds on this. But the points of clarity.

After 9/11, Clay, I remember seeing leftists — and this was pretty common. There were leftists who were basically saying — this was written a lot of places by different people — America more or less got what it deserved. That was a left-wing narrative that you would hear after 9/11, which was horrific beyond words.

It was a reminder that there were people who were actually in America, hated America. That was a real thing. Some of them were intellectuals with followings. Some of them were people who were professors, were writers. With covid, when I see someone who sees a crying child having a mask pulled over, a 4-year-old or a 3-year-old’s face on an airplane and they say, “What’s the big deal?”

There’s something that is deeply unsettling about that. That any American could see that and not say, “What the heck are we doing?” That’s where I am now. I’ve started to feel like those areas where we should have true commonality and outrage at what is being done to us, there are people who go, “No, it’s not that bad. It’s not that bad.”

You see how in other countries and other eras and times, folks in the masses go along with a lot of things that in retrospect seem so immoral and so clearly some. It’s been very troubling to see that play out here. Your case for optimism, by the way, I hope you are right.

CLAY: I hope I’m right too. That’s my thought process of where we are, that we’re gonna come out of this like we did the 1960s and the Vietnam War with a lingering, dominant, traditional leader who is going to echo the history of America as a fabulous place. The fear is that we’re going to get more divided, and we don’t have that leader.