The 250-year experiment: America’s birthday
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What does the 250‑year anniversary reveal about the current state of American democracy?
The Economist.
Hello and welcome to a special birthday episode of the Intelligence, taking a hard look at America as it turns 250.
This is a big one, not just the word semi-quincentennial, which I promise only to say once. It's big because America seems, to use common economist Parlance, to be at a crossroads. The founders worried that the American experiment they'd devised would soon collapse into disorder, tyranny. And here we are, a quarter millennium later, in another time of deep anxiety. Virtue is under threat. Talk of decline is in the air. Public life is scarred by division. So The Economist has gone to town on the anniversary. This week's print edition is filled with thoughtful essays and deep analysis of that experiment. And we here in the podcast department have soberly put on our birthday hats and done some reflection too.
Consider when the Republic was barely fifty years old, and a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville undertook what must have been one of America's first road trips. The brilliant, insightful, kinda timeless resulting book is what my colleague John Pritto relied on when he repeated the journey for our new series, Tocqueville Road Trip. Make some time to crisscross America today as seen through that lens. And John and the cast of checks and balance out later today will be looking at the separation of powers across the branches of government. Another founding father preoccupation that's worth examining now. But here today I'm going to be joined by three colleagues to chat through three narrowly defined facets of America, then and now the state and the resilience of its democracy, its perennial fits of policy on immigration, and its undeniable status as a mammoth exporter of culture.
So in our London studio is our deputy editor, Robert Guest. Down the line in Atlanta we have our Southern correspondent Rebecca Jackson, and in Chicago, Daniel Knowles, our Midwest correspondent. Hi everybody.
Hey.
Hello.
Hey, it's great to be here.
Now I want to start with a big question, perhaps the biggest question, and one for all of you to get started. How would you characterize the state of American democracy as it stands two hundred and fifty years in?
I think it's in better shape than it looks. There's obvious stuff you can see. We have the president who shows the least respect for tradition, for the law, who's enriched himself more than any other president in history and who has a very tenuous relationship with reality. But so far the institutions are holding up reasonably well. I mean, only this week the Supreme Court said to him. You think you can abolish birthright citizenship, but it's there in the constitution. No, you can't. And if you're gonna be pessimistic, you say they also reaffirmed his power to sack a bunch of people within the government. But you're looking at the back and forth, I think a lot of this would have been familiar to the founders.
They would have said, yeah, it's a difficult project, but it's lasted 250 years. It's battle tested. I think it'll last the next two and a half.
I feel profoundly pessimistic about American democracy and the birthright citizenship ruling. Unlike that being a source of optimism as it is for Robert, for me that just seems terrifying that four out of nine Supreme Court judges decided that the president can apparently just go against the plain text of the constitution with an executive order. That seems to me a real, real threat. And that's one of an awful lot of things. So I I actually disagree with Robert. I am really pessimistic.
I'd say I fall somewhere in between the two of you. I think that from my perspective, one of the things that has scared me most recently is the fight over redistricting that we're seeing playing out across America this spring. Another massive Supreme Court ruling was that the court curtailed the reach of the Voting Rights Act, which for decades had put constraints on politicians who wanted to rig the maps entirely in their favor.
How do the founders’ fears of tyranny compare to today’s political anxieties?
And basically now what we're seeing is that Both Republicans and Democrats are in this what we're calling, you know, sort of an arms race to the bottom.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does the 250‑year anniversary reveal about the current state of American democracy?
0:03–4:23
2
How do the founders’ fears of tyranny compare to today’s political anxieties?
4:23–8:46
3
What are the main arguments for and against the health of U.S. democratic institutions?
8:46–12:39
4
How have recent Supreme Court rulings reshaped immigration policy and birthright citizenship?
12:39–18:21
5
Why is redistricting described as an ‘arms race to the bottom’ and what does it mean for voters?
18:21–23:28
6
How has America’s immigration stance shifted from the 19th‑century waves to today’s backlash?
23:28–27:46
7
What makes U.S. cultural products – from literature to music – such a powerful global export?
27:46–32:26
8
Which everyday American inventions do the panelists consider iconic cultural exports?
32:26–36:02