by Akim Reinhardt
Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and his speech soon made the rounds on the internet. As is the way with commencement addresses, there were signposts pointing towards what awaited the graduates, and plenty of pablum on how to live a good life. But Burns also delivered his address as the nation was staring down the barrel of the 2024 election, and so in addition to vague life advice, he offered up ruminations on the near future.
Burns’ films strive to unite modern Americans through a shared understanding of the past. Personal displays of political partisanship would make that difficult, so beyond stumping for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Burns’ has always remained publicly neutral on the day’s political events and issues. Yet during his speech at Brandeis, Burns broke with this tradition, and voiced dire political concerns. Without naming Donald Trump directly, he warned of the potential calamity a second Trump presidency would bring.
Trump’s hyper divisiveness is in direct contrast to Burns’ plaintive, gather-round-the-maypole interpretation of America. And even nearly a year ago, Burns already grasped the threat that Trumpism poses to U.S. constitutionalism and democratic institutions. In many ways, Burns and Trump couldn’t be less alike, and Burns spoke with gravitas, as if he felt duty-bound to move beyond his comfort zone and warn the nation, even if he was preaching to the choir at Brandeis.
Yet the distance between Donald Trump and Ken Burns is neither so simple nor so vast as it seems. It may sound counterintuitive, but Ken Burns’ version of U.S. history actually has quite a bit in common with Trump’s version. I say this as a professor of history, and I think that if we’re willing to look past all their obvious differences, and identify their subtle intellectual overlap, we can perhaps learn more about what it means to be American today than we ever could from Burns’ saccharine films or Trump’s racist rants alone. Read more »