Walter Isaacson on The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

I'm Rufus Griscom, and this is The Next Big Idea. Today, Walter Isaacson on the sentence that changed human history. The last time I read the Declaration of Independence was about a decade ago. I was standing in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. with my family, and my eyes got all teary. On Saturday... I read it again, this time quietly in a restaurant to my 15-year-old son over brunch. A tear ran all the way down my cheek. Dad, you can stop reading now, my son begged.

Please stop. Of course, I kept reading. I was holding an early copy of the latest book from Walter Isaacson, one of the great biographers, writers, and public intellectuals of our time. It's called... the greatest sentence ever written. Walter is referring to the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, with which we're all familiar. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I tried to explain to my son why these words were making me all verklempt. I think it's the knowledge that the men who wrote them were risking their lives. They knew as they signed their names that they might hang from ropes in the public square if they failed.

But the possibility of creating a new and better society in which people enjoyed freedom as well as common ground, a society in which people took care of each other and respected each other's liberties, it was worth dying for.

I think I was even more emotional this time around when I read these words because I fear we've forgotten them. Not just the words, but the context. Our founding fathers knew that creating a successful democracy would only be possible with compromise, painful compromise, and it feels like we've lost the capacity. to do this, even lost some of our certainty that democracy is important.

In a recent survey conducted by researchers at Tufts, only 36% of several thousand 18 to 29-year-olds said they agreed that democracy in the U.S. can solve the country's problems. This is why Walter chose to write this book and publish it now, to remind us of the context in which the Declaration of Independence was written, what the words meant to our founding fathers, and what we can learn from them today.

Unlike Walter's prior books, this one is a slim volume, just 67 pages long, but it packs a hefty punch. Despite its brevity, or maybe because of it, it will undoubtedly provoke weighty conversations. That's why we picked it as our final Next Big Idea Club selection for 2025. We consider the greatest sentence ever written to be one of the six most important books of the year, and I'm delighted to have the chance to talk about it with Walter.

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with Hilton. Hilton for this day. Terms apply. Walter, welcome back to the next big idea. It's good to be back with you, Rufus. Thanks a whole lot for that intro. Walter, when you read the Declaration of Independence, does it trigger an emotional response for you, or am I just overly sentimental?

Well, definitely. I mean, especially that second sentence you read, which forms a common ground, the common beliefs we share. And then, as you mentioned about, you know, the ropes would be there to hang them.

That very ending, when they pledge their lives and their sacred honor. I'm guessing you call this the greatest sentence ever written, which, of course, is a big claim. Presumably, not because... of its beauty, although it's very nicely crafted, but because of the power of the sequence of words to inspire people to take action, to risk their lives, to change the course of history.

Is that true? Well, it becomes a mission statement for what becomes a new type of nation on Earth, one that we're still struggling to defend around the world today. But a nation, as Lincoln said, four score in seven years.

After they wrote this sentence, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all people are equal and that we have certain rights. And that was new in 1776, that our rights... came from we, we hold these truths, and the notion that the individual with individual rights would come together in a compact and then create a nation.

That changed the world. Implicit in this assertion it's the greatest sentence ever written is maybe the claim that this country, though imperfect, has had a profoundly positive... impact on the world. Would you say that? Well, yeah. I mean, I think that if you look around the world starting in 1776 and to today, there are a lot of nations that believe in individual rights, the rule of law. treating people equally before the law, having a sense of liberty.

for each individual, and yet at the same time, having a sense of the commons, common ground. What are we going to do together in common? And that type of democracy, that type of... constitutional republic form of a democracy depending on individual rights, it's still the greatest form of government we have. Over the past 250 years, it's not just in the United States, but around the world, we've moved to the ideal that was embodied in that sentence.

Do you think people have forgotten why democracy matters and why tolerance matters? Is that part of why you chose to write this book? Yeah, I mean, we're entering our 250th birthday, and we're not quite in the mood for a birthday party. We've been tearing ourselves apart. Yeah. You know, it's like every now and then a family that's really... starting to polarize and you say, oh my goodness, we all have to get together for this big birthday party.

You say, all right, well, let's plan for this big birthday party and see what we can do that would unite us. And these words, this notion of our mission statement. A mission statement to respect the rights of individuals, but to understand what we have in common and to treat everybody equally before the law. Yeah, that's gotten a bit ragged and people have lost faith in democracy to some extent. You quoted some of the statistics, but democracy is not...

just there because it's useful. It's there because it's moral. We are all individuals. Whatever your religious beliefs, we came onto this mortal realm as individuals endowed with certain inalienable rights. And democracy is what protects those rights. Even if you think, well, democracy is messy or the state should run all of the economy. No, that's just not the way.

you know, inbred in us, almost in the DNA of our nation, is this notion that we're going to have a democracy based on the rule of law and based on the rights of individuals.

Let's get into the words that comprise the greatest sentence ever written. We hold these truths to be self-evident, starting with we, as you do in the book. Who is we? Who are we talking about? It's interesting that it begins with the word we, and 11 years later, when they write the Constitution of the United States, it also begins with we, the people. And you think, well, what do they mean by we? And Jefferson, Franklin.

Adams, the people who crafted that sentence, who were on that committee, they all were reading the English philosophers of the time, such as John Locke and David Hume. And those philosophers... We're trying to figure out where does the power of a government come from? Where does the power of a society come from?

And up until then, it had been either the divine right of kings to rule over us or maybe the power of conquerors who had conquered a particular land. But what they harked back to was that humans. in the state of nature, they called it, before there was government, decide to form a social contract. Now, that may seem like a fancy phrase or something, but the idea of a social contract, a compact that people enter into freely, that's at the core of the type of government that...

we were deciding to do in 1776 when we were overthrowing or breaking away from the monarchy that was in England. So that phrase, we, it doesn't mean the 60 people. gathered in that hall in Philadelphia. It certainly is not yet an expansive phrase because it doesn't apply to blacks and Native Americans, but inherent in it. is that we are all going to be part of a social contract. So the cool thing about this sentence is it doesn't just say, here's...

exactly what we are, and it's perfect. It says, here's our mission statement. Here's our aspiration. So you start with the word we. And you really understand that this is implicitly some contract we are making with our neighbors to say, hey, let's get along in a society. Otherwise... As Hobbes said about the state of nature, life will be nasty, brutish, and short. I was fascinated to read some of these quotes in the book. You quote Scottish philosopher David Hume, wrote in 1752,

The people, if we trace government to its first origin in the woods, are the source of all power and jurisdiction. And they voluntarily, for the sake of peace and order, abandon their native liberty and receive laws. There's a sense that we all inherently have this kind of freedom. We have this inherent right. And we choose to give it up for something better. We choose to sacrifice some of our freedom to be part of this new thing we're building.

Absolutely. And it's hard for people to get their heads around that sometimes. They say, we should have the total freedom to do what we want or the state should. No, it's always a balance. And when you come together, you could say, all right, we'll have no rules. We'll have total. anarchy. But what Hobbes is saying is, you know, that makes life really bad. It's all against all.

by agreement, whether it's little things like when the light turns red, people stop, and when it turns green, people go, or the agreement that we'll all... tax ourselves to have national security and police departments and fire departments. These are things that impinge on our right to do whatever the hell we want.

But we voluntarily say, let's form a society in which we have both the common good in mind as well as individual rights. You point out that the we... that begins the greatest sentence ever written, did not at that time fully contemplate the rights of women and people of color. We get later to all men are created equal, endowed with rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. From today's perspective, the idea that slavery was permitted...

and the statement was being made is very hard to understand. How do we reconcile that? You don't reconcile it. You understand that these are great contradictions, and even Jefferson himself. who was the most contradictory of the founders, he understood what a horrible conflict it was. And he writes about it at times in agonizing ways. On the other hand, he's enslaved 600 people. He doesn't even free.

his slaves, most of them upon his death, not even Sally Hemings, who had been his mistress, although he does free the children that he and Sally had had. So you have this great contradiction. And that's why I say this greatest sentence isn't a sentence that describes perfectly who we are. It describes who we are aspiring to become. Yeah, it's been 250 years and we've expanded the meaning of we.

we've expanded what they meant by all men. Because when they write all men, you could say, well, that's an expansive phrase, all men. Perhaps men refers to all mankind. It's using the word men in the more generic sense. But no. They actually, when they wrote all men, they really meant it to be men. And they did not mean it to be enslaved men, and they did not mean it to be Native American. And so they understood.

That they weren't just defining a nation, they were setting in motion a process. And that was particularly true, of course, on the issue of slavery, because out of those, you know, 60 people there... More than 40, I think, owned slaves, and all 13 of the colonies permitted slavery.

Something that was new to me was to read that Jefferson, in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, called the slave trade a, quote, cruel war against human nature. I mean, this is weird because Jefferson... truly understands the abhorrence of the slave trade. And even in his first draft, he puts it in. And yet he's from Virginia. In order to get Virginia...

To sign on as one of the 13 colonies, they have to compromise on the issue of slavery. And this becomes a really big deal for our nation. which is figuring out when do you compromise and when do you have to hold true to principle. We see this happening these days. People are either unwilling to compromise or sometimes they're too willing to compromise.

There's never a perfect answer to it. But when they wrote the Declaration, and then 11 years later, when they write the Constitution, they compromise on the issue of slavery. And you can debate. Because you probably would not have had a United States without those compromises. The southern colonies in Virginia would not have joined in. You would not have won the revolution.

On the other hand, you could say by making that compromise, we're still trying to rectify that 250 years later. I love the line in your book from Franklin.

Compromise may not make great heroes, but it makes great democracies. Maybe compromise should make great heroes. Franklin used to keep a ledger of mistakes he made and how he rectified it. One of the mistakes he said he made was tolerating the issue of slavery, even at one point when he was a young printer owning two slaves, but then he lets them go.

He even tries to rectify it by becoming the president for the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania. But this notion of Franklin, he says this over and over again, but especially. when they're trying to do the declaration in the Continental Congress, and then they're trying to do the Constitution. He says, you know, these things may not be perfect. But they're as good as human hands can make them, and we should all put aside some of our doubts and try to join together. And that was his point.

that compromisers may not make great heroes, especially in the days of cable TV, talk radio, and social media. But they do make a union that is formed of we the people, a sense that we have a social contract and we have to balance. uh these things i'd also like to say that it gets to that notion of balance which is similar to compromise and i love as you know rufus writing about science and you know most of my biographies are about scientists well

Scientists understand countervailing forces, checks and balances. Yes. And so did Franklin and Jefferson. They studied Newton. They would have thought you were a Philistine. if you didn't keep up with science. And Newton taught in that century, you know, in the 1700s, how contending forces can be brought into equilibrium, how they can be used to check different forces back and forth.

And that notion of saying we can't just have one principle and fight for it and stand to the death for our way, we have to realize that there are competing values. competing principles at times, and we have to strike the best balance. And once you look upon this idea of governance and statecraft,

as being the ability to strike the right balance. Then you know that the person who's on the other side or pushing too hard in a different way, they're not your mortal enemy. They're just somebody who sees the balance differently. And perhaps that can help us say, all right, let's figure out how we balance the role of pure individual liberty with the role of... A common ground and common goods that we need to have, be it health care or police departments. I think if we refocused.

on our notion that we have to get the balance right instead of winning every fight as a matter of principle, we'd be better off too. I love your comments about...

Benjamin Franklin, and really all the founding fathers to different degrees, being such a deep believer in sort of accepting that we're imperfect, but... creating mechanisms to improve ourselves both individually and as a nation. And in some sense, I see Franklin as maybe the father of the self-help genre. Totally, totally. Something totally essential to the American character.

right? Is this idea that while the Europeans were probably looking down their noses at self-help as a genre, right? I mean, Benjamin Franklin thought, you know what? This is what we do. We think pragmatically. We keep close records of our behaviors. We accept that we're imperfect and fallible, but we work to get incrementally better as individuals. And then we build a country that has this capability. We accept our flaws, but there's a pathway here.

to improving ourselves. Brilliant. I couldn't have said it better because the notion of continuous self-improvement is the key to Franklin's life. He writes Poor Richard's Almanac, which has all sorts of words of wisdom for shopkeepers and artisans, how to do well. And then when he compiles them, it's called The Way to Wealth. It's the first self-help book there is. But he also...

created a leather apron society, people who would get together in Market Street in Philadelphia, and they'd figure out ways of self-improvement. They even made a chart. of which virtues you should have if you want to improve yourself. Diligence and honesty and frugality. And at one point, one of the people in the club said, Franklin, you've mastered all 12 of those virtues, but you should add another one. And he says, what's that? He said.

Friend says, humility. You might want to try that one for a change. And Franklin says, yes, and puts it on the list. I was never very good at humility, but I was good at the pretense of humility. I could fake it very well. And here's the ingenious part. He said, but I learned that the pretense of humility. was just as useful as the reality. It made you listen to the other people and look for ways you can improve yourself. So whether it was self-improvement, which Franklin does.

throughout his life, keeping a ledger of every mistake he had made and then how he tried to rectify it. As you said, and this is the brilliant point, that transfers not to just us as people, but to our nation. which is that it's a continuous self-improvement project.

This is what saddens me so about the statistic I mentioned at the beginning, that only 36% of young Americans in this survey of a few thousand people said they agree that democracy in the U.S. can solve the country's problems. I mean, it's one thing to say that we are deeply flawed. It's another thing to say that we don't think we have the right mechanism to solve those problems. But I think there's inspiration, like what these guys were up against.

250 years ago, the chasms they had to cross to make this country possible were just so massive. It was so improbable, right? And it seems to me that looking at this, appreciating this can inspire us to... Yeah, and let's get a grip. We've had worse problems to solve in our 250-year history, starting with the Revolution and most notably the Civil War. And solving the issue of slavery was incredibly hard.

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Let's turn to what might be, I think you, I'm going to guess you would say the greatest edit of all time. Thomas Jefferson, in his first draft, did not write, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Did he? What did he write? He wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred. And it was odd because Jefferson was not that conventionally religious.

And it was really mainly a turn of phrase. And Franklin takes his printer's pen, because as I said, he was a printer. And you can see the heavy backslash marks. in that second sentence, where Ben Franklin is crossing out that word sacred, and he writes in the words self-evident. And his point is we're trying to create a new type of nation in which our rights come from the consent of the governed, from rationality and reason, from this social contract.

not from the dictates of religion or the dogma of any religion. So it's not that these truths are sacred in the sense that they've been handed down in a religious context. It's that they are... part of the reason that we've been created. And he puts in the word self-evident, and most people say, well, that's just a fancy way to say obvious. You know, we hold these shoes to be obvious. But actually...

I love this because I think David Hume's the greatest philosopher of that period. In 1750s and 60s, Ben Franklin was over in England. a lobbyist for the colonies. And he got to be friends with David Hume. And at one point in this, I think in the early 1770s, he goes up to Scotland and he stays at David Hume's house. David Hume talks about how his cook makes the best sheep's head soup in the world. And they spend evenings talking about everything from...

how new words come into our language, to how do you make lightning rods more efficient, to the philosophy, too. And what Hume had come up with as part of his philosophy... was a notion of two types of truths one type is a truth called a synthetic truth, or it just depends on the facts you'll look at. An example of that would be London's bigger than Philadelphia, or

The Chrysler Building is shorter than the Empire State Building. The other type of truth that Hume talks about is self-evident truths or analytic truths, which are true. just by rationality and definition, such as all bachelors are unmarried. Now, if you want to know if London's bigger than Philadelphia, you have to go and you... figure out how many people live in London and Philadelphia, compare it.

But you don't have to do that if you're going to try to figure out if all bachelors are unmarried. You don't go around surveying bachelors saying, do you have a wife or not? You know all bachelors are unmarried. It's part of a self-evident truth. truth by definition. What they were trying to say is the notion that all men are created equal or all people are created equal.

was not something you looked around and said, well, let me look at Rufus and let me look at Walter and then let me look at Michael Jordan and let me look at Drew Brees and say, are they all equal? That's not what they meant. They meant we all were individuals who came together in this social contract. And so because we all came together to make the social contract and.

It depended on all of us. We all have equal political rights and rights under this system. And so that was self-evident because they were. By virtue of their creation and coming together in this social contract, it was self-evident that they were equal members of this compact.

And this was, wasn't it, to some degree, the language of the Enlightenment, of reason and empiricism that was emerging as something that was more powerful than scripture and religion. And Jefferson and Franklin, as I understand it, were deists. who saw God as a clockmaker, who designed the universe, set it in motion, but then did not intervene. Right. And especially when you see that sentence, it goes on to say they're endowed with certain inalienable rights.

And John Adams puts in by their creator. Now, he's the one who's slightly more traditional in his religion. But Franklin and Jefferson, as you say, were dais. They believe in a creator. but not a God who intervenes in our everyday lives. They believe in sort of a general providence that he started the universe. But you can't pray to him and say, can I have the Saints beat the Rams this weekend? Please, please, please. And he will perform a miracle and cause that to happen.

This notion, as you put it, of the clockmaker, the person who starts the universe, it did mean that they were not conventional even in terms of believing in the divinity of Christ. Jefferson. had what was called the Jefferson Bible, in which he took a razor and he cut out all mentions of the divinity of Christ, but left in Jesus's sayings and moral teachings.

So this is a very complex way of looking at things. But I would think that more than half the people who signed the declaration at that time were DS. which was very popular back then in what you correctly call the Enlightenment, which was sometimes called the Age of Reason or the Age of Science and Reason. And that's what informed that period, both in England and in France, France with Voltaire and Rousseau, England with Locke and Barclay and then Hume.

And then, of course, the United States, Jefferson and Franklin. These are the avatars of the Enlightenment who believe in evidence-based policies, just like they believe in evidence-based science.

The thing that emerges for me in reading this book and, of course, your biography of Franklin is that this country was really founded by internationally acclaimed scientists, right? I mean... You know, Franklin was one of the great scientists of his day. He might have won a Nobel Prize if that was around at the time, right? He was world famous for his scientific experiments. And Jefferson was also like a really significant scientific figure.

Both would have thought you were a Philistine if you didn't try to keep up with science. And that's a problem today, which is even people who love the humanities, they say how important the humanities are. But then you talk about... anything scientific. You say, what's the difference between a gene and a chromosome or resistance in a capacitor or an integral and differential equation? They'll throw out their hands and say, I don't do science. I don't do math.

Well, the good thing about Franklin and Jefferson is they were great humanists. They were great writers, great students of history and of literature. But they also felt they had to inform themselves by keeping up with the science of their day. And in turn, that science informs the country they create. You look at the Newtonian checks and balances. You look at this notion, as you said, that humans aren't...

perfect, and we need to incorporate guardrails and checks and balances. Well, that in some ways comes... From Jefferson and Franklin and their understanding, not only of Newton, but of the flow of electricity, positive and negative, batteries, charges, everything becomes... Not just a metaphor, but a way of looking at evidence. I guess I would say this. It's not just science, but the scientific method. When they're looking at whether or not the poor laws, meaning welfare.

You know, does that help people get on their feet or does it disincent work and cause people to just be lazy? And instead of debating it as we would today. Franklin goes around and looks at different places in England and in the colonies and looks at the poor laws.

and then looks at employment and tries to figure out what's the right balance. Well, that evidence-based of not simply having a dogma or a... unyielding beliefs but testing your beliefs with evidence and saying well let's look at the facts that's what they bring from their science

And this has been somewhat of a through line, I think, for you and your work. It seems to me you've consistently had an interest in this intersection of science and the humanities and how they can be married. Many of the people you've written about. have also had this interest. Do you see that as kind of carrying through your work? Yes, I didn't really see it for a while. I had written about Einstein, who of course was a great violinist and loved music.

Benjamin Franklin, who was a wonderful scientist, but also obviously a great humanist. And it was Steve Jobs who falls at that intersection as well. Somebody who loved technology but believed beauty mattered and studied art and calligraphy and dance. When I did his biography, I said, why did you want me to do it? He said, well, you stand at that intersection of the arts and technology or the intersection of the humanities and the sciences.

And whenever Steve would introduce a new product, that would be the last slide on the screen, which is the intersection of the arts and technology. He'd say, that's where Apple stands, but that's where beauty stands. And he was the one, when I was finishing up, said you have to do Leonardo da Vinci next because he's the ultimate symbol of somebody who stands at the intersection.

of the arts and the sciences. Even Vitruvian Man, that self-portrait he does of him standing naked in the circle in the square, said, you know, that's a... a work of science and of mathematics actually squaring the circle but it's also spiritual and it's also art and so i've always tried to look at this intersection of the humanities with the sciences. And it seems to me that in that intersection, we also see the intersection of the overlap between idealism and pragmatism.

which feel to me like something that perhaps is at the essence of the American sensibility, to the extent that there is one. And because we see this in the founding fathers right there. They're deeply pragmatic. They're scientifically inclined. But they're also lofty and idealistic in what they aspire to. But you've put your finger, too, at the contradiction at the heart of the...

declaration and at the heart of our nation, which is, you know, this is what they aspired to, but they were pragmatic. And even John Adams, who is an abolitionist and really, really. thinks slavery is abhorrent. He says, we have to be pragmatic. Someday we're going to have to get rid of slavery, but it's too difficult to touch right now. So that pragmatism...

to some extent, served them well. I mean, John Adams knew what he was doing when he was trying to get the Virginians in on the Declaration. But also that pragmatism meant... That we keep having this self-improvement project, and even especially on the issue of slavery and then on race, it's a struggle. And we have to look at the founders.

and say we have to both be pragmatic and we have to be principled, and sometimes we're going to get the balance wrong. Sometimes we're going to be too principled and be on a high horse and mess things up. Sometimes we're going to be too pragmatic.

And we're going to try to paper over big moral questions. And this tolerance, religious tolerance, but pluralism that was clearly necessary. at the beginning of this nation because of all the different types of people, all the different religious sects that had come here. But this is such a critical part of the story. And it strikes me that there were seeds of this religious tolerance that came from some different sources. One was...

The Dutch settling Manhattan and the Dutch valuing commerce above all and realizing that you have to accept all people if you want to be successful in commerce. And then, of course, the Quakers in Philadelphia also had this core principle. And you add Franklin to it because he opens a print shop on Market Street. And if you're a shopkeeper, you got to be tolerant of different types of people. And that was.

essential in America. Sometimes in our school kid ways, we're taught the pilgrims came over for religious freedom. Well, not exactly. original Puritans and pilgrims that come to the Bay Colony, Boston and Massachusetts, they came over because they wanted to write to practice their own religion, which was being suppressed in England. But the Puritans were not all that tolerant. If you deviated from the orthodoxy, even by a little bit...

You got expelled and had to go found Rhode Island or do something crazy. So there wasn't a lot of tolerance at first. And Benjamin Franklin runs away from the rather puritan intolerance of Boston. He gets to Philadelphia. And Philadelphia is filled, as you said, with Anglicans. You know, Catholics and Quakers and people supporting the proprietor and slaves and freed slaves and Jews and Moravians. You have.

an enormously diverse mix in Philadelphia. And Philadelphia then becomes really the heart and soul of what we become as a nation. That's really the cradle. And it comes in the fact... that there really had not been a nation state before that wasn't based on certain tribes or ethnic groups. Whereas in Philadelphia, they had to create a nation that was tolerant for all types of religions and peoples. Well, and Ben Franklin in his own life really...

displays this kind of tolerance because he ends up becoming one of the most generous supporters of all the churches in Philadelphia. And you describe beautifully the procession at his funeral. Could you share that? In some ways. That's a key to understanding the tolerance. and the respect that we have in America for others. Because during his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin donated to the building fund of each and every church that was built in Philadelphia. And at one point, they were building...

a new hall. It's still called the New Hall. It's right next to Independence Hall, and it was for visiting preachers of other faiths who might come during the Great Awakening. And he wrote the fundraising document, which is, even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send somebody here to preach Islam and teach us about the Prophet Muhammad, we should offer a pulpit.

And listen, for we might learn something. And on his deathbed, he's the largest individual contributor to the congregation Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue built in Philadelphia. So as you said, when he dies, instead of his ministry... or accompanying his casket to the grave. All 35 ministers, preachers, and priests link arms with the rabbi of the Jews and march with him to his grave. what they were fighting for back then, and that's what we still have to fight for today.

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Let's talk about the notion of the commons. This was a really interesting learning for me. One of the big questions for any nation, of course, is the How do we balance individual liberties and freedom on the one hand and the desire to take care of each other on the other? And I think I pictured in my head the early American colonies being a pretty ruthless environment of rugged individualism. But you say, and I'm quoting you from the book,

fiercely independent individuals were equally fiercely devoted to their community and its commons. And they voluntarily came together in barn raisings and knitting bees and militias and social aid societies to serve the common good. The notion of the commons goes way back. John Locke defended the concept of private property. He said,

find something in nature or you find something on earth and you add your labor to it and you make something valuable, that should be your private property. But he adds a little caveat. that says, as long as there is enough left in commons. And even though he was a very strong supporter of... free markets and private property, he said, there's certain things we have to put in the commons. When I first went up to Boston and Cambridge as a young student,

I'd go to Boston Common or Cambridge Common, and it didn't occur to me what that meant. And then I learned that the commons were originally the place set aside. so that everybody could use it to graze their herds or grow things. And that's what happened in England back in the time of John Locke, which is there were really grand landowners, you know, feudal lords and the aristocracy.

But they always put land in commons, and that's where the commoners, that's where the word commoner comes from, got to graze their herd. So the question for Benjamin Franklin and others is what do we put in the commons? Not just land. But Franklin starts this club I told you about, the Leather Apron Club. He says, what are we going to do in Commons, not just for our private stuff? And the first, I think, was the fire department.

Let's create a, instead of everybody having to put out the fire in their house, let's have the town of Philadelphia having a common fire department. And there was some discussion. Should only people who pay. have the right to have this fire department come put out fires if their house gets us on fire. And Franklin and others decide, no, it should be in the commons because we don't want, you know.

One out of three houses is just burning down that way. Likewise, a street sweeping corps they put into the commons. Police, night watchman corps they put in the commons. Defense, militia. They even create things that we're debating today, such as a widows and orphans pension fund, a health care fund, the hospital that serves as sort of a community hospital.

was put into the commons. And then he does it with education, the Academy for the Education of Youth, which becomes the University of Pennsylvania. So that's where they set the groundwork for what we still... Try to figure out what good should we have in commons. And we generally agree. Police departments, you know, are in the commons. Fire departments.

Sort of K through 12 education. It used to be community colleges were in the commons, but now I think they've priced themselves out of the commons. And of course, the fight this week even is how much of health care.

should be in the commons yeah there's not exactly an answer to get back to ben franklin and thomas jefferson it involves balance but i think once we frame the question even of health care as not all or nothing, but a question of to what extent should we all have access in common to a certain level of health care, to a certain level of K-12 education, certain level of police protection.

Then we realize these are not existential life or death struggles. These are just questions that we've wrestled with for 250 years of what does it mean to say? Certain goods, certain services, certain rights are in commons rather than purely private. Well, and the fact that they had the capacity to create those kind of common resources.

250 years ago when the resources they had available were so much more limited than ours today, right? To me, it's really striking. I mean, I think there are a lot of people, of course, who might think about the tragedy of the commons. which is a phrase we're all familiar with, which is what happens when everyone's herds graze on the commons and the grass dies and you have nothing. So I think the cynics might say,

oh, well, this is what happens when we're too generous with our commons and we need to pull back to more rugged individualism. For me, it's eye-opening to see how early this emphasis on the commons. I think the way you phrased it. It's a nice way to have the discussion, which is what happens if you go too far and everybody has almost everything in the common? What happens if you don't go far enough?

You know, you make it so that people don't have a stake in society, that they don't have opportunities. So I think... Whether you're libertarian or liberal or conservative or populist or whatever, you should frame it as, well, have we gotten the balance right of how much? police protection, how much health care we put into the commons. I also think there's a practical and a moral reason for putting things in the commons. We don't do it just...

Just because we're generous. First of all, by having certain things be in the commons, just like in feudal England, when the commoners got to graze their herds, it gives. everybody a stake in the stability of society. If you have absolutely no ability to graze your herds or do anything else, you're not going to support the stability of this. or the government that you have. And we see that now with sort of populist backlashes on the right and on the left.

where people have been, middle class has been hollowed out, all these things have happened. If you don't have enough stuff that people say, I've got a stake in making sure this society holds together. then you're going to have the fractures. And then there's a moral reason for the commons, not just being beneficent or kind to other people, but you want a land of opportunity.

I mean, that's good for everybody. If you had to say one thing we can all agree on is this should be a land of opportunity. how rich or poor you are when you're born or whatever, you should have the right to be like Ben Franklin and go from being three coins in your pocket to being quite wealthy. Well, in order... To have a land of opportunity, there has to be certain things in the commons, especially, say, education, but as Franklin said, libraries. He wanted to have libraries in the commons.

Because he said that gave everybody the opportunity to be as well educated as, you know, the princes of Europe. And you want safe streets. That should all be in the commons. You don't want some people to grow up in places where they can't even go out safely. And so by having enough put into...

our common rights, our common services, our common ground, you allow each new generation to have the opportunity to succeed, which they wouldn't be able to do if they didn't have schools, they didn't have libraries, they didn't have safe streets. And do you think this is part of what's informing some of the polarization right now? I mean, you talk towards the end of the book about the skyboxing of America.

You want to speak a little bit to that? And do you think that the commons is, yeah. Skyboxing of America, Michael Sandel used that phrase, skyboxification. In feudal England and even in colonial times. There was the commons, but there was also called enclosure laws where people could get the right to enclose part of the commons and make it private. And that actually leads to some good things. It led to an agricultural revolution with more production.

But nowadays, we're enclosing a lot of the commons that used to be the same. When I was in college in Boston, We all went to Fenway Park. We all went through the same entrances, sat in the same bleachers, ate the same soggy hot dogs and beer. Now you go to the ballpark, and I won't say guilty of it, but it applies to me.

If I get to go in the VIP line, I do. If somebody invites me to a skybox, I go there. We don't even sit in the same bleachers. And that's just one of a thousand things. We don't have the same schools sometimes. We don't have the same lines at airports. We don't have the same healthcare. And so the more you allow... Different people have different VIP treatments and opt out of being with everybody else, opt out of jury duty, opt out of standing in line.

The fabric that holds us together, that makes us feel we're all part of this together, that begins to fray. And you're seeing this. resentment that comes from people who think I'm getting screwed and other people are making out like bandits in this global economy. Or I admit it, when I go to the airport, assuming the airports are open,

I get to go to that TSA pre-line or whatever. But you look at people on the other lines and they're kind of resentful. Those type of resentments build up day after day. And we have to be a little bit careful about... remembering that we're all in this together. Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way.

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I loved your comments earlier in the conversation about how the current challenges we face when you look at them by comparison to... what we went through in the Revolutionary War and in the Civil War. We face bigger problems. Our problems today are manageable if we can. choose to put them in perspective, which I think is part of what you're doing with this book. That's the whole point of this sentence is it helps us put things in perspective. And that's the point of the...

Two concepts I try to use in this book that arise out of we hold these truths to be self-evident, you know, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which is the commons, which we talked about. And then the second is the American dream. which is land of opportunity. How do we make it so this becomes a land of opportunity? There's a whole lot wrong with our society today, especially when it comes to opportunities for people born.

in the past 20 years compared to when I was born. However, the issues that have so polarized us, You know, I mean, what were they fighting over shutting down the government and things? It was important things like how much health care insurance and how much subsidy for it. But. These were things that are manageable, in my opinion, if you have good faith and you say, I get it, we're trying to strike a balance here. And the problem we face now, the...

Two big problems are a lack of ability to have civil discussion between people of different political opinions. We've made everything political. Everything's ideological. Everything is polarizing. That's done by the algorithms of social media, is done by talk radio and cable TV, is done by gerrymandering, is done by our politics. We tend to make everything a polarized issue, even should you wear a mask, you know, during COVID.

Instead of saying, okay, let's look at the facts. Facts have shifted somewhat. Maybe cloth and masks don't really work. Maybe you do need them. Instead of doing it that way, it all of a sudden became an ideological battle, these types of things. Well, that's silly. You know, we should not make everything into a political ideological battle. The other huge problem we're facing as a nation is this land of opportunity thing, which is we all believed that we were a land of opportunity.

And then, for pretty good reasons, we bought into free trade, free movements of people, immigration and stuff. Well, that hollowed out a middle class over the past 60, 70 years. If you were born in the 1950s, you had an 80% chance of making more than your parents did. If you were born in 1990s or so, you have... Less than a 50% chance. Well, if people have less than a 50% chance of doing better than their parents, then we've created an economy that's leaving too many people behind.

And to some degree, I think you might say that we've been a victim of our own success in creating a meritocracy. I mean, you describe sometimes, I think maybe with a little bit of nostalgia. how accessible science was 250 years ago, right? That we could all be tinkerers and we could learn about the scientific process and invent things. But of course, the challenge of contributing to our increasingly technologically sophisticated economy have become...

The level of education that's required to be a winner in our economy has become greater and greater and greater. And the meritocracy, to some degree, has created a new aristocracy. based on education. Is that part of what we're dealing with? Yeah, I think we created an economy in which if you outsource manufacturing and you have free trade so that...

You know, the shirt I'm wearing now instead of being made in Maine by L.L. Bean is, you know, made in Bangladesh or something. That leads to a richer economy. You got more consumer goods. I'm, you know, I got. probably more shirts than I have before. On the other hand, it leaves people... behind in being able to have good jobs they can get up in the morning and go to. They might be able to buy a cheap flat screen TV set at Walmart.

but there's no longer the Maytag plant or the Whirlpool plant or whatever in town where they have jobs. That benefited what you call the meritocracy, meaning... People who went to college, did well, went into finance, whatever, they benefited a lot by this. But the 60% of people in this country who didn't graduate from college, they're the ones who got hollowed. And by calling it merit, that really creeps me out in some ways, meaning I'm...

I'm about as much of the meritocracy as you can get using that word, meaning I did well enough in high school that I got to go to a good college, that I got a good job and stuff. But that wasn't merit. It wasn't like... The fact that I was born with an ability to take a multiple choice test or that I was, you know, Franklin described merit. And he was arguing with Jefferson, who said merit is this natural aristocracy of the smartest people. Franklin said true merit is...

doing the best of your ability to serve your community and your country. And we should be encouraging true merit. And so I think this notion that somehow if you were being left behind by the globalization of the economy, it was, well, you didn't go to college and it was somewhat your fault. You didn't have the merit. Yeah. I think if we're going to get this country back on track, we have to make sure that any person, whether they want to go to college or not, whatever their talents are.

As Benjamin Franklin would have it, we do the best to make sure they can use the talents in the best way possible for their community and their country. There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle right now who are concerned about the stability. of our democracy certainly in my lifetime i've never heard people talk about our american democracy as being actually fragile and imperiled Do you see our democracy as facing a real threat of not surviving? And is that part of what...

inspired you to write the book? Yeah, I mean, it's what inspired me to write the book. I do think when you quote statistics of young people saying they don't believe in democracy, or you see people voting for authoritarian types, or... whatever they may want because they don't believe democracy delivers. That's a problem. And that's sort of why I wanted to write this book.

which is to show that there's a spiritual component to understanding we're all in this together. There's a moral component. There's a practical component. And it is the DNA of this country. It's not just, quote, democracy. But it's that founding creed that we're going to create a land of opportunity where every person gets to participate. That's what the democracy part is. Everybody has equal rights to participate in figuring out how we're going to govern ourselves.

And that's more than just saying, I'm a socialist, I'm authoritarian, I'm a democracy supporter. No, I'm an American is what I'm trying to say for our 250th birthday. Let's get back to that concept that we've tried to create a land of opportunity. in which all are created equal, and they have certain rights as individuals, and that includes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, Walter, it's been two years.

if you can believe it, since you and I last spoke about your last book, there was just a biography of Elon Musk. Leon. He was a controversial figure then. He's even more of a controversial figure today. Do you think that the subject of your last book, Elon Musk, is a threat to the project at the heart of your new book, Maintaining a Healthy Democracy? No, I mean, I don't think it's that simple. I do think that...

One of the threats to our democracy is social media that uses algorithms that tend to bring us down our own echo chambers that tend to divide us. If you're somebody who's following Fox News on X, it'll bring you through an algorithm and soon you'll be with Tucker Carlson. And after that, you know, go down a rabbit hole. I think.

Social media has become divisive. And I would hope that Musk, who controls one of the most important social media platforms in what I think are his good mindsets, always says, OK, how do we use it? to make sure we get to the truth by having everybody have a good discourse. And sometimes I think he's letting it become a cesspool. So there are many things. But by the way, sending rockets into orbit and...

recreating the internet and outer space. I think that's amazing. And I think that's a type of America of risk taking and entrepreneurship that we have to have. So, you know, our founders were complex people. Even Jefferson, not all good or bad. I think Shakespeare teaches us to understand the complexities of humans, that all of our heroes— They have some grand flaws. Henry V kills all the prisoners. All of our villains have backstories. I mean, Iago, Shylock. So I would urge us not.

to try to fall prey to the current practice of making everybody in 140 characters or in a clip on cable news a hero or a villain, evil or grand. That's not true of Musk and probably wasn't true of even some of our founders. I hope we can learn from Musk's entrepreneurial risk-taking. Because we used to be a nation of risk takers that built a whole lot of things. And now we're more a nation of regulators than risk takers. But likewise, I would hope we could learn.

People like Elon could learn from Benjamin Franklin and say, I'm going to get up every morning and say, what can I do best to unite my community? to bridge the divides in our society, and to hang together, as Franklin put it, as a nation. I wrote the book so we can perhaps be more like Benjamin Franklin than Elon Musk. Well...

I love the idea that we can all incrementally get better. Individually, we can incrementally get better as a nation. And I love your metaphor at the opening that we're coming up on a big birthday party, folks. Well, that's the main reason I wrote it. I'm thinking, I'm old enough, you're not, to remember in 1976, we had come out of Vietnam.

We had come out of the civil rights movement and the riot. We had come out of Watergate. We had come out of things that were, you could say, almost as bad as we have now. And what happens for our 200th, our bicentennial, with Gerald Ford and everybody else? We take a breath. We calm down. We realize what unites us in the bicentennial.

was a great celebration after the years of Watergate, Vietnam, and riots. Now we have the chance, one more chance, won't come for another 50 years or so, to say this is a big birthday party. Let's all, as Franklin said, you know, we must all hang together for most assuredly we'll hang separately. Let's use this birthday party as a chance to. try to heal some of the divides. And for me, the small contribution I make to this is...

One exercise is just learn that greatest of all sentences and learn why each of those words is so inspiring. And maybe, as you say, in this metaphor, it's like getting together for a family reunion and we have the in-laws and the weird aunt, uncle, with whom we don't get along. But maybe what we do is we reach out with a phone call. We connect with each other.

And we prepare for this big birthday party to make it a great one. And usually those sometimes painful family reunions turn out to be better than we think. So hopefully that's where we're headed, Walter. And thank you so much. We're a pretty good family. We'll figure it out. I think so. Thank you so much, Walter. What a wonderful little book that packs a big punch. The greatest sentence ever written. Thank you for this. Thank you.

Walter Isaacson's new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, was published today. And as I mentioned at the top, it's our latest selection for the Next Big Idea Club. What does that mean exactly? Well, it means that if you become a Next Big Idea Club executive member today, we will send you a signed copy of Walter's new book, along with an invitation to attend a members-only Q&A with Walter on December 5th.

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Go to nextbigideaclub.com and use the code podcast to get 20% off your membership. There's also a link in the episode notes. Today's episode was produced by Caleb Bissinger and Michael Kovnat. Sound design by Mike Tota. I'm Rufus Griscom. See you next week.