Can We Please Celebrate America’s 250th Without Whitewashing the Past? | with Alexis Coe

Approaching the 250th anniversary of the United States brings up a familiar tension over whether we should celebrate our triumphs or relentlessly critique our failures. Most citizens tend to view the past with a thick lens of nostalgia, convincing themselves that earlier eras were inherently better than our current political moment. But this rigid binary between blind patriotism and total deconstruction leaves us trapped in endless arguments that prevent actual progress.

Presidential historian Alexis Coe joins host Zachary Karabell to unpack why we struggle so deeply to accept the complexity of the nation's origins. Coe, the author of a bestselling George Washington biography, grounds this conversation in her own experiences confronting historical gatekeepers. She shares the story of having her book quietly pulled from the shelves at Mount Vernon after she publicly pointed out their lack of diverse leadership, and explains her accidental coinage of the term "thigh men" to describe male biographers who fetishize the physical attributes of the founders.

Karabell and Coe explore how this tendency to romanticize figures like Washington or John F. Kennedy obscures the genuine, messy reality of American history. They discuss the current political landscape, noting how the modern electorate craves authenticity even in its most flawed forms, and why the emerging political divide is less about left versus right and more about the top versus the bottom. 

Acknowledging the shadows of our history does not mean abandoning pride in the American project. By learning to hold both our national achievements and our profound shortcomings at the exact same time, we can finally stop looking backward and start doing the hard work of building a more integrated future.

What Could Go Right? is produced by The Progress Network and Kaleidoscope.

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