Jill Lepore knows her stuff. She’s a staff writer at The New Yorker, a professor at Harvard, and the author of a new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, that examines the constitutional amendment process and considers what it means in this current political environment.
Katie recently consulted Lepore about the current state of the country in this rich, informative Substack live. Together, they chat about the Trump administration and how it’s both unprecedented and grounded in U.S. history. Plus, Lepore explains how her latest book can help curious readers who have long forgotten the intricacies of high school civics class but still want to better understand the Constitution. Read the highlights below and watch the full video for more insight.
Katie Couric: What the f*ck is going on in our country, Jill? Help. Please make sense of it. How is half the country OK with it, and half the country feels like it’s a five-alarm fire?
Jill Lepore: I really wish I had a pithy, brilliant, and also somehow reassuring, prophetic, brilliant thing to say to you about the state of the country. It is a mess. I’ve been traveling around and talking to people about the book, which is just a pretext to talking to people about [whether] we have the Constitution that we want as a country. Is our Constitution still alive? Are we the authors of it? Is this administration behaving unconstitutionally?
And in the last two weeks of popping around different parts of the country, it just feels like there’s a great sinking feeling. At any point over the last 10 years, we’ve reeled from crisis to crisis. I think the rhetoric of emergency and crisis is our go-to language to talk about whatever your beliefs are or the direction of the country. Whatever your politics are, the language of emergency unites people across the political spectrum.
The book feels so prescient. I think so many Americans don’t have a grounding in civics or how the Constitution really works. I don’t remember a lot of stuff about civics — and I think I got a pretty good education. Tell me why you wrote this book and what you hope it will do for people.
I had that same experience. We had a civics class in ninth grade in my public high school. Our civics teacher was drunk the whole year. I honestly didn’t learn anything. When I wrote These Truths, after it came out, I got incredibly moving letters from readers. And one of the things people were grateful for was [the] constitutional history.
I really took that to heart and it made me think that I could probably write a whole second volume, a new history of the United States told from the vantage of constitutional history. I don’t think we really have much of a sense of what the Constitution is, how it works, and what it’s for. And is it still working?
