Documentary historian Ken Burns pushed back against the idea that political division is increasing in the nation, suggesting “big differences” have occurred throughout the history of the United States.
Much of the current political division in the nation stems from opposition to President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as well as Democratic lawmakers speaking out against the administration’s deportation of illegal immigrants. Burns, however, contended that major U.S. political events and legislative efforts have always experienced a level of pushback.
“It ebbs and flows a little bit, but we’ll always have big differences,” Burns explained on CBS’s Face the Nation. “Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is not met with universal approval, the Civil War killed 750,000 Americans, we think, over the issue of slavery. We have our own revolution. There are lots of periods, the Vietnam period when we’re so particularly divided, so I think there’s a little bit of ‘chicken little: Oh, the sky’s falling, because now things are always worse now than they ever were.’”
Burns went on to state that he and other historians feel “a kind of optimism” because the division in the country has a sense of familiarity, suggesting the American Revolution is “the leverage” to how people can speak to each other to settle differences. He noted how the Bible states, “there’s nothing new under the sun,” adding that what makes the Revolution unique is how “there was something new in the world.”
On the topic of what it means to be patriotic, Burns suggested that some people have “lost a kind of connection with the glories of the American experiment” due to what they have witnessed. He contended people ought to spend more time working toward “the pursuit of happiness” through the telling of the nation’s stories and through public service.
1775 AND THE FORGOTTEN MAN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Burns’s current documentary project, The American Revolution, is a 12-hour miniseries set to air across six parts on PBS for six consecutive nights, beginning Nov. 16.
“The polling sometimes reflects just the particular anxiety, and these are shifting all the time, all the time!” Burns said. “And I can tell just in the time it’s taken to work on this film how much things have changed and gone back and changed again, and it doesn’t matter, Democrat, Republican, red state, blue state. These are superficial, binary considerations, that the more important thing is that’s the tip of the iceberg, right? It’s the massiveness of what’s underneath it, and I think a lot of people still share it.”