The Atlantic editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, kicked off the opening night of the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University in conversation with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and foreign policy journalist George Packer on the war in the Middle East.
The second half of the “America at 250” event switched gears as Goldberg spoke with biographer Walter Isaacson, filmmaker Ken Burns, best-selling author Clint Smith and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed on the evolution of the American experience.
The three-day festival will feature 220 speakers on 10 concurrent stages and continue on Tulane’s Uptown campus through Sunday, March 15.
The speakers wasted no time diving straight into hard topics, starting with a discussion between Goldberg, McChrystal and Packer on the war in Iran. In thinking about how the war will conclude, Packer said he fears the attack may turn Iranians against their regime into Iranians against the United States.
“I want the [Iranian] regime to collapse. It is not collapsing. Regimes don’t seem to collapse under air power. It’s sort of a lesson of history,” Packer said.
McChrystal said he was not confident that Trump decided to attack Iran in good faith, which Goldberg called an understatement.
“These wars become very personal. You just start a war for political reasons, and then pretty soon, somebody kills your comrade or someone in your family, and it gets a different intensity for you,” McChrystal said. “I don’t want this war to have a braggadocious [attitude] to it.”
Packer said he is seeing signs that the Trump administration is acting without restraint and lying to the public, specifically about a recent American attack on a school in Iran.
“We can’t believe what we’re hearing,” Packer said. “In a way, the lying and the utter contempt for human values go together …They’re both a sign that all the rules are off, that the restraints are gone and without restraint, what happens in the world?”
Goldberg also asked the panelists about the Trump administration’s recent orientation towards other nations, including Venezuela, Nigeria and Greenland. McChrystal responded that the current ethos is one in which the U.S. can take over territories just because it can, and expressed concern that such tactics will degrade longstanding relations of trust between the U.S. and its military allies abroad.
After a brief intermission, Goldberg welcomed Burns, Isaacson, Smith and, after a brief delay at the airport, Gordon-Reed to the stage to discuss 250 years of American independence.
Burns released his six part documentary series, “The American Revolution,” in November of last year. Although he acknowledged that current events in national politics can be unsettling, Burns said that the overall effect of studying history is palliative.
“The complexity now doesn’t actually hold a candle to the complexity [then],” Burns said, referring to the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century.
Smith addressed the Trump administration’s push to revise patriotic education at sites of national significance, calling this vision of patriotism “narrow,” as it effectively eliminates the darker and ultimately most didactically valuable portions of the country’s history.
This version of history, Smith said later in the talk, is a “set of mythologies,” the loss of which creates something of an existential crisis for the Americans who have inherited the stories through generations.
“America is a place which has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunity for millions of people,” Smith said, “It has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been inner-generationally subjugated.”
Of the different realities of the American experience, Gordon-Reed said that the existential crisis Smith spoke of may stem from the fear of losing privilege and seeing success as a zero-sum game, when the reality is that all people can prosper.
Isaacson suggested that the main divide is in fact between those who embrace the diversity of America and those who disapprove of it. He cited media, and social media in particular, as over-emphasizing the differences between Americans and being at the source of this divide.
“We’re all human … If we want to be less divisive as a nation, we have to cut people slack,” Isaacson said.
Burns said that from an aesthetic point of view as well, films that embrace the complexity of the past are more compelling to watch, and that, in his experience, people embrace these narratives over simpler ones. “Just tell the stories,” he said.
Smith concurred and added that his strategy as a teacher was to simply lay out all the relevant information for his students so that they could come to their own normative conclusions about the characters of American history.
Isaacson spoke about New Orleans as a microcosm of the best parts of America, as a diverse city that emphasizes “neutral ground,” and as Burns suggested, as the birthplace of jazz, an art form that centers on collaboration and continuous recreation.
To close out the talk, Goldberg asked Gordon-Reed what she would change about the current state of affairs, to which she responded, “complacency.”
“There’s a lot wrong with America, but there’s a lot right with America,” Gordon-Reed said. “You can lose the country by not paying attention, turning aside from the problems that we’re facing.”