It's a struggle for the survival of the fittest in a bizarre, media-driven environment. Trump embodies an idea or a reality that strength is what matters. You know, Woodrow Wilson once said one of the tensions in the United States would be, is the Constitution going to end up being Darwin or Newton? And it's really well put. The president seems to have very little intellectual or even emotional commitment to the liberal ideas that have shaped the West for good - the rule of law, a free press.

MEACHAM: I believe it's in the most danger it's been in the United States since the 1930s. INSKEEP: Is a relatively free society actually in danger the way that some people seem to fear at this moment? He doesn't get the liberal part so well, which is that you've got this set of rules that constrain power and force you to play by the rules. He loves going to these rallies where people adulate him. And here's one of the things that he said about President Trump.įRANCIS FUKUYAMA: You know, he gets the democracy point. And one of them was Francis Fukuyama, the social historian, who talked once about the end of history - who writes a lot about not just democracy but liberal democracy, the things that make a free society. INSKEEP: So we spent the last few months asking writers and thinkers to help us understand what this moment in history is that we're all going through. MEACHAM: Well, our mutual friend Andrew Jackson was a chess player. And all the pieces are flying, and we have no idea where any of them are going to land. INSKEEP: I keep thinking of this moment almost like there's a game of chess, and there's a chess board, and someone has taken the chess board and flipped it in the air. If you care about the underlying elements of our national story, the national order, then a moment in which all of those fundamental assumptions are being questioned is a time of intrinsic interest. And I'm not being overly facile about it. JON MEACHAM: It's as though every day is Christmas. What's it been like to be a historian living through this moment in history? His books range from an exploration of religion to the life of Thomas Jefferson to a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson. He's a wide-ranging thinker and historian, former editor of Newsweek.

INSKEEP: Jon Meacham will help us on this Independence Day.

It's been a long-running conversation, and this morning, we pull the threads together.

We've asked writers and thinkers how we got here, where we are, where we might be heading. At this unsettled and for many unsettling moment in history, we've been asking for a road map. And I'm Steve Inskeep with the history of our time.

Jon meacham andrew jackson