Washington Wednesday: The quarter millennium moment

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 9th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Washington Wednesday.

Next July 4th, 2026, America turns 250!

The semiquincentennial is shaping up to be quite a show. There’s talk of staging high-school football on the National Mall. And a full-blown UFC title match on the White House lawn, per the president.

TRUMP: We have a lot of land there … Dana [White] is going to do it … We’re going to have a UFC fight. Think of this—on the grounds of the White House. Twenty-five thousand people. That’s going to be a big deal

MAST: But there’s more at stake than spectacle. The way a country celebrates its founding reveals something deeper: about what it remembers, what it values, what it’s still fighting over.

SALAZAR: It’s important to celebrate and announce to the world what this group of Founding Fathers did 250 years ago.

EICHER: Florida Congresswoman Maria Salazar is on the America 250 Commission. She’s the daughter of Cuban exiles…and she told WORLD’s Leo Briceno she hopes more Americans come to appreciate what makes their nation unique.

SALAZAR: Others are just like people in critical race theory and all those, you know, the people born in the United States and they’re despising what the system represents. Oh, have them go to Cuba for two weeks. Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and they’ll appreciate where they were born.

Joining us now: Hunter Bake. He's a regular World Opinions contributor. He's provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University. Hunter Baker is also author of several books on political thought, including the latest post liberal Protestants. He's a lawyer and political theorist, and we are happy to have him. Good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Thank you. Happy to be with you today.

EICHER: Hey, Hunter, let's begin with the big picture. You and I were kids back at this time for America's Bicentennial, 1976 although I was a much older kid, I have to admit so I'm expecting that your recollections are a little more informed by what you read and studied than so much by what you experienced as a young kid. But talk about the mood back then, and compare that, if you would, with today's lead up to 250.

BAKER: Yeah. Well, so first of all, I just want to say, even as a kid, a young kid, six years old, the Bicentennial looms large in my memory. And so, yeah, I've thought about it a lot as we've approached this semi, semi quincentennial.

EICHER: Rolls off the tongue.

BAKER: 250 I've seen people calling it the quarter mil. So maybe, maybe the quarter mil will catch on. But I've been thinking about it, and you know, so on one hand, you could think, well, this is so different. People are so divided now, and we've had so much political controversy and strife.

But then I started thinking back on 1976 and what, what is 1976 Well, it's after Watergate. It's after the only president forced from office in the entire history of the country. It's after the humiliation of Vietnam and all of the difficulties that came with that. And yet the Bicentennial was able to be, I think, very effective actually, at uniting the country and attracting people's attention. It really intruded into popular culture, and I think that people who are above a certain age, like you and me, remember it fondly.

MAST: Hunter, the kickoff event was in Iowa. You're hearing a little sound from that, but President Trump was the main event. Lee Greenwood performed. We heard that plug for the UFC a few moments ago. What does all of that tell you about the cultural temperature that we can expect with this celebration?

BAKER: Well, so, I mean, look on one hand, anytime you think of something patriotic, you think of somebody non divisive or identified with unabashed patriotism, like Lee Greenwood. I don't know if anybody has ever gravy trained a single song, the same way that Lee Greenwood has, but I think that it's a good thing that you have a president who is patriotic, right?

You know, whatever else you want to say about the parties and the divisions between them, I think that Donald Trump does love America. I think that he is a, he is a creature of this country. I mean, in certain ways, he embodies certain things about this country. But I think that he is very excited about being the person who is the president at the time of the 250th anniversary. And I think that they're going to make a huge attempt, you know, you're looking at somebody who was on prime time NBC for, I think a dozen years, you're going to see a major attempt made to to sort of capture the cultural imagination of Americans with this celebration

EICHER: Hunter, you know, in the several months leading up, speaking of President Trump, leading up to his victory in 2024 this really was a feature of the outgoing Biden administration. There was this sense after he won in 2020 a lot of American history was being rewritten, diversity, equity and inclusion. That was all the rage critical theory in the schools. You had the 1619 project, and clearly there was a lot of pushback to that, and Trump rode that to his second term, his current term. But that stuff didn't just go away. How divided do you think we are today? We talked about how divided we were in the 70s, but how divided do you think we are today?

BAKER: Well, as somebody who has spent his career teaching political science courses at different levels, the one thing that has come back to me again and again is that we suffer from division, that really, we lack something to really pull us together. When I was young, I think there was a major effort made to convince me of the value of the American experiment. I think that probably the Cold War was the driving force there.

But to convince me that the United States was worth fighting for, worth preserving, that freedom was worth having, and we need something like. At now, right? And it doesn't mean sort of being bubble headed and pretending that the United States was always a fairy tale. That's not the case. I mean, you can read Alexis de Tocqueville and his famous book, Democracy in America. It celebrates this country. It celebrates, celebrates democracy. But he also, even then, is noting the treatment of the slaves and the treatment of the Native Americans and some of the flaws of democracy and how Americans can mistake being in the majority for being right.

It's not a perfect country, but at the same time, it's an important country, and it's a country that has done a lot for the development of democracy and for belief in constitutional law and and one thing that I think that we can emphasize, and everybody should be able to agree with, is that this country played a decisive role in the 20th century, without the United States in the 20th century, it's not entirely clear that totalitarians of different stripes, whether Nazis or Soviets, would not have prevailed. So I think that the world does owe a debt to United States as as really a force for freedom in the last century.

EICHER: Now, that sounds like something that you have written about, which is the notion of America as a moral project. And maybe I'm just trying to get back to this question of division. What happens when we don't agree on what the moral foundation is?

BAKER: Yeah, we have to have the ability to work through it. I mean, one of the things that was so frightening about 2020 is that it felt less like we were having a discussion and more like we were having a witch hunt of some kind, right? You know that we're sort of in some sort of a post rational phase where, you know, numbers or power, cultural sway seemed decisive.

And I think that what we have to get back to is an understanding that politics between free people requires a degree of civic virtue and patience and reasoning and working through things. One of the worst things about this period that we kind of went through was a disregard for free speech. No, the you know, the answer for bad speech is more speech and good speech, but, but it's not. It's not to to ban speech or outlaw speech, which is sort of what started to happen. And so I think that we have an opportunity to sort of recover from that kind of disastrous period and rebuild our commitment to the virtues and habits that are necessary for a constructive democracy.

MAST: Hunter, you teach a lot of young Americans, what do you hope that Americans, and particularly young Americans, will take away from the 250th celebration? Is there still a shared story to be told here, and how do you see that unfolding?

BAKER: Yeah I think that this is an opportunity to try to bring back civics. It seems to me, just kind of observing. I think that young people know less about civics than they did 25, 3040, years ago. I think that, I think that there was an effort in the past to inculcate an understanding of our system and its virtues and how to participate in it, much more so than now.

I love that old Norman Rockwell painting the Freedom of Speech. If you've ever seen it, there's this, he's like a factory worker. He's at some kind of town meeting at night, probably held in a school room, and he's he's got on his leather jacket from work, and he looks like a more handsome Abraham Lincoln, and he's standing up to speak to the gathered assembly, and everyone is perfectly attentive. They're all looking at him, waiting to hear what he's going to say. I want to recover that right? I want to I want to get back to that sense of the value of talking and listening to each other and trying to work through our problems. And I want young people to understand how special that is, because a lot of people will never have that opportunity in the country in which they live, but they've always had.

EICHER: While we have you…some news out of Washington that’s causing consternation in some corners of the Republican party. Last week, the Pentagon paused some air defense weapons deliveries to Ukraine, saying American stockpiles are getting low. Then this week, President Trump reversed that decision and said the U.S. would continue sending Ukraine weapons. Now, many in the Republican base are split on aid to Ukraine, and the President’s pivot here to continue that aid. What’s your read?

BAKER: Yes. Well, so first of all, why the consternation?

Well, I think the reason for that is that Trump has really sold himself as a different U.S. President. For a long time, we’ve sort of been the global policeman, the provider of global defense. A lot of other countries, particularly the NATO countries, have been able to free ride on American efforts.

A big part of what Trump has done is to say to the European countries, we’re not going to do that anymore, right? We are—the American people are not going to bear the burden of your defense to the same degree that they have in the past. Therefore, you cannot count on us to always intervene. Your problems are going to be, to a larger degree, your problems.

So for Trump to say, “I’m not going to pause the weapons, I’m going to get more involved,” that seems like a divergence from that policy to some degree.

But the other side of it is that Trump is the consummate dealmaker and negotiator. I think that his interpretation of the situation is, A) he may feel that Ukraine has got to have this in order not to lose, but B) he may feel that his own negotiating stance with regard to Putin is stronger if Putin cannot accurately predict what he’s going to do.

I think that’s part of what’s going on here, too. It’s: “You know, Vladimir Putin, you can’t take me for granted. You can’t just assume you know what I’m going to do.”

MAST: Another story in the news…For months, the Department of Justice has promised to release files on Jeffrey Epstein…the business mogul charged with trafficking young women to powerful men around the world. You’ll remember he died in prison in 2019… under mysterious circumstances waiting for his trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

The DOJ promised to release thousands of files, but now this week is saying there is no client list and nothing to see here.

Hunter, what do you make of this? We don’t know about what’s in the DOJ’s filing cabinets, but we can see the political pressures of the moment.

BAKER: First of all, I would not put myself forward as the person who automatically knows what exactly has happened here. I think it’s impossible to know what exactly has happened.

As we’ve watched it unfold, it does remind me of the fact that a lot of politics is about sort of an economy of attention—getting ears and eyeballs and minds paying attention to something.

It has been useful to build up this idea of a conspiracy, you know, a conspiracy involving billionaires and very shady conduct. So I think that to some extent what may have happened is—maybe like Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s vault—you build up this big thing, and then when we finally see what’s behind the door, there’s nothing there.

I think that we may need to be ready for the fact that that could be what’s going on here.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and academic and contributor to world opinions. It's great to catch up with you. Thanks so much.

BAKER: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.