Feb 21, 2025 By Brittany Simms 4 min read

PITTSBURGH – Jon Meacham says he is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, has written about presidents as removed in time and temperament as Andrew Jackson and George H.W. Bush, makes biblical references when discussing America’s history and emphasizes that the country was not founded on ethnicity or geography but “on an ideal.”

So, how does he view this moment in American life?

“I believe we are in a serious but survivable crisis of American democracy and institutions,” Meacham said. He explained at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh Wednesday that President Donald Trump and his team were put in office through a democratic election, but one month into Trump’s second term in the White House, “autocratic forces brought to power by democratic means” have placed democracy at risk.

Meacham said, “We are facing, I believe, a fundamentally moral question – are enough of us going to see each other not as rivals, or as foes, but as neighbors? Without a sense of neighborliness, this does not work.”

The 55-year-old, Pulitzer Prize winner and a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University was at the Heinz History Center as part of Washington & Jefferson College’s Symposium on Democracy. A private event for W&J students, faculty, alumni and invited guests, Meacham was the symposium’s keynote speaker.

One of the most visible and accessible historians in America, Meacham has contributed essays and op-eds to The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post and a host of other publications. He won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2009 for “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” Some of his other books include “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” “His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope” and “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.”

With his historian’s perspective, Meacham explained that the 2020s share some similarities to the 1920s – both decades were marked by “disorientation, shifting demographics, changing technologies and the internationalization of news.” Meacham also pointed out that the 1920s were marked by isolationism, high tariffs, and widespread skepticism about people and institutions, following the devastation of World War I and influenza pandemic that swept across the globe in 1918 and 1919.

“It’s the most analogous period to our own, I believe,” Meacham said.

Meacham also believes that President Trump’s rise to power and his domination of America’s politics over the last decade can be credited to some numbers. He said that in 1965, 77% of the American people trusted the federal government to do the right thing. By the 2010s, that had cratered to just 12%.

Then there are the economic realities confronting many families – the Commerce Department has said that a family of four should have an annual income of about $130,000 in order to attain a middle-class life. The actual annual median income of American households is $80,000. Meacham said the $50,000 gap “is reflected in that dip in trust in government.”

“You have gasoline on the floor for the populist fire,” Meacham said. “And the details don’t matter very much. People feel because globalization is so big, so complicated, it’s very, very hard to follow what is happening to the country, what is happening to one’s life.”

With his two presidencies, Trump has been trying to create “a real life version of professional wrestling,” Meacham said, “where there is conflict, where there are characters, there are storylines, there are heroes and there are villains. But most of all, there is action.”

He added, “That is not democracy. That is exhausting.”

Thanks to the long view that comes with writing about and thinking about history, Meacham also said that no moment in our political and cultural life is everlasting.

“There is no permanent victory,” he said. “We live in a fallen, frail and fallible world. And we must fight and struggle for victories that are necessarily provisional.”