Opinion | Jill Lepore: ‘Most Forms of Tyranny Do Come to an End’

The Harvard historian Jill Lepore worries that citizens have become too passive, waiting for change to happen to them. She is on a mission to revive what has become a lost art in American politics: amending the Constitution. In this conversation with David Leonhardt, an editorial director for New York Times Opinion, Lepore argues that demonizing Donald Trump inevitably backfires for the left and says that turning the page on the Trump era will require not just hope but determination.

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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

David Leonhardt: It’s great to have you, Jill.

Jill Lepore: Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Leonhardt: As I was reading your book, the word that anchored my thinking was “progress.”

My background is mostly in covering economics, and as I was thinking about this period in which we haven’t changed the Constitution or our government very much over the last 50 years or so, it made me think about some aspects of our economy. I’m in my 50s, and when I think about how the economy and day-to-day life in this country have changed in my life, I actually think in many ways it’s less than they changed in my grandparents’ lives.

My grandparents lived through the introduction of mass automobile travel. They lived through the introduction of the airplane. They lived through the introduction of birth control. I mean, they lived through real earthquakes in daily life. And your book made me wonder whether we in certain ways have lost the ability to imagine change of the scale that used to be normal in the United States.

Lepore: That’s really intriguing because I think even the words we use to discuss and describe change have changed. The 18th-century idea of progress really meant moral progress, moral improvement. The 19th-century idea that replaces it is evolution — we’ve become obsessed by the idea that change happens by way of organic evolution. The 20th century is really committed to economic growth, and our era is really only able to see or anticipate — and kind of index — change as technological progress or, to use what was the fashionable term some years ago, disruptive innovation.

So when you narrow an idea of progress, that includes amendment. Amendment is a moral term as much as anything else. It’s not just about cleaning up your prose. You mend your ways, you make amends. When you narrow the idea of progress to the latest update on your iPhone, or do you have ChatGPT 5 or 4, then you are only the object of change and never the subject of it. Change happens to you, but you don’t make change.

So I’m always fascinated to see in my students that if you ask them about a particular era, they sort of want to index it around — that’s when we first got our own phones, or that’s the year that I got to be on Facebook. We have just a real, quite painful passivity about change being done to us, and are being molded to be better and more efficiently acted upon as consumers than to think of ourselves as actively participating in the construction of a civil society as citizens.

Leonhardt: And that if we could reclaim a moral language, we could see ourselves more as actors, I think is what you’re saying?

Lepore: I think that’s right. And I don’t mean a moralistic language, I just mean the language of care and community that is really no part of our public discourse.

Leonhardt: There does seem to be a conundrum here, which is that in some ways we are stuck. We’re stuck politically. We haven’t amended our Constitution. And yet you just look around, and boy, Americans seem hungry for change. I mean, Barack Obama and Donald Trump don’t have much in common, but they both clearly represented change. It is curious to me that we are simultaneously living in an age when the establishment and the status quo is deeply unpopular and we seem incapable of achieving major political change, or at least major productive political change.

Lepore: So constitutional change does happen all the time. It doesn’t happen by way of amendment. It happens — until very recently — exclusively by way of the Supreme Court and its interpretations. We live in an era now where if the president says the Constitution means this, that somehow we’re supposed to accept that the president has that power, which of course, under the terms of the Constitution, the president does not have that power.

So let’s say there isn’t change happening, but I think the rhetorical move of a certain brand of conservatism is to insist that the change that it is implementing is not change, but restoration — that we are returning to a better America. That is the four-word argument of Make America Great Again, right?

I think it is essentially a marketing decision to package your brand of change as a restoration. So it’s not that there hasn’t been a lot of change. I mean, this administration, the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, are characterized by nothing so much as tumult. It’s chaos. I remember the first time as an American historian, not the kind of person in anyone’s Rolodex that anyone called to ask a question, but someone must have said to me after the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision: Is this unprecedented?

And I was like: Well, kind of but not really. Very few things are unprecedented. But we are living in a time now where I think, day to day, I think you get on your bicycle or in your car, you walk to work, whatever, get on the subway — every goddamn thing feels unprecedented.

Leonhardt: This is a series of conversations about what our next story might be, and very clearly we’re trying to ask: What might a post-Trump story be? He’s not going to be president forever. You’ve thought about this really directly. One of your previous books is called “The Story of America,” in which you investigate the changing nature of the American story.

I’m curious: How do you think about what might be a plausible story that is less dark and more hopeful and more constructive than the terrible story that Donald Trump tells? But one that also resonates with the American people? Can there be a national story that is not Trump’s and that people embrace?

Lepore: Sure, there absolutely can be, but I think defining it as oppositional to Trump’s story dooms it from the beginning. I’ll tell you a story. I’m a historian who likes to tell stories. So in 2016, I covered the conventions. I’d never been to the conventions. I’ve never been since I was never asked to go. So the Cleveland one came first, the R.N.C., where Trump was nominated, and then there was Philadelphia — City of Brotherly Love — with Hillary Clinton.

They’re truly the opposite of one another. And so one of the ways that the Democrats had tried to play on this was they’re the party of hate and we are the party of love.

Leonhardt: Yeah, “Love Trumps Hate” was the sticker.

Lepore: “Love Trumps Hate” was the sticker. It was very rainbowy. And the night that Clinton accepted the nomination, she came out in this white suffragist-type suit and Chelsea Clinton introduced her. Chelsea was wearing a Valentine-red dress, and then red and white balloons came down and I found it to be the most reprehensible political theater I have ever seen, and that counts Trump’s acceptance speech.

I just thought it was the most depraved, cynical manifestation of a complete failure of political imagination to think about the world of possibility that that administration might have brought about and instead to paint your enemies as satanic — it’s always a losing move. You might win an election; you will lose the whole country. You will lose your moral center to paint your political opponents as they’re running on hate and we are running on love when there really was very little love at that convention. I’ll have to say — I’m just saying: I don’t think I applaud what you’re doing. I just don’t think what is the anti-Trump future story is, by definition, the wrong question.

Leonhardt: I appreciate that critique. And to me the question shouldn’t be anti-Trump. It should be post-Trump, right? I love this line from David Axelrod that people often go looking for the remedy, not the replica of a past politician.

So Barack Obama was very different from George W. Bush in all kinds of obvious ways. Donald Trump was very different from Barack Obama. So I don’t mean to suggest that the next successful story will be anti-Trump; it should probably be Trump-agnostic. But it does feel like it needs to take into account Trump and yet be very different from him. Do you disagree with that?

Lepore: No, I don’t disagree with that. I don’t disagree with that. I have two things to say about it, and I’m not trying to be cantankerous. I’m spicing up your podcast by being ——

Leonhardt: We like it.

Lepore: Contrarian. I do a lot of performance of disagreement. I’m going to stake out a position. We can argue about it, but I had an assignment, the hardest assignment of my writing life last spring. I wrote this history textbook — kind of book, a big, narrative history, thousand-page history of the United States, called “These Truths.”

It was going to end with Barack Obama’s inauguration in January of 2009 and I was very excited to end the book there. It was going to be cool — like almost by the time the book came out, 10 years in the past, which feels very comfortable for a historian. You don’t know what’s going on in the present. And this was a beautiful moment. If you like Obama or don’t like Obama — it was a triumph of America’s capacity to move beyond a past of human bondage and forced segregation. So I was so excited. From Day 1 writing the book, I could picture the ending. It was really great.

And then Trump got elected and I thought: Well, I can’t really end with Barack Obama’s inauguration, because although that is one story of America, it will appear to readers to be just professional negligence, as if I was erasing Trump from the story. So I somewhat hastily added a final few pages that got us through Obama’s two terms all the way to election night 2016, when Trump wins, and it was a really different ending to the story of America that this thousand-page book told.

And people kept saying: How did you so quickly write a book that explained Trump’s rise to power? I would be like: I was explaining Barack Obama’s rise to power. It’s the same story — like, the same country elected both of those people. And the same history lies behind both of those presidencies.

And so this spring, my editor asked me if I would write a new chapter because they want to put out a new edition of the book, and the chapter has to run from the night that Donald Trump was elected to the end of Trump’s first 100 days. And you know, you have 15,000 words, you can have eight illustrations, you have to explain this period in American history to people that are living in it and who lived through it, which is really different than trying to explain Abraham Lincoln or Herbert Hoover.

It was so hard because it is an ongoing story, it is not over — but you have to kind of have an ending that could lead anywhere. It has to have a sense of possibility at the close of it. I think we don’t really have much of a sense of possibility right now because there is such — I mean, this is the author part of authoritarianism, right?

We are characters in someone else’s story is kind of how it feels. But what does that next chapter look like? I really think it is extraordinarily hard even to hold onto the contingency of the past and the present. The world that we are living in didn’t have to be this way and that things could have gone really differently — and they still could. Having that sense of contingencies, I think, is really important to having a sense of authorship of your own life.

Leonhardt: How can we reclaim a version of the American story that is patriotic and that appeals much more to the better angels of our national nature than what we’ve had recently?

I just think that many people right now are struggling to get energized by a story that has the possibility that you just alluded to. They are instead drawn to much more negative stories, and I don’t see how we solve our problems, including the kind of problems we should be solving, by amending the Constitution if we can’t get some of that sense of possibility back.

Lepore: I think it’s a little bit like the problem that all politics is national politics now, because having a sense of purpose as a community of citizens that subscribe to a particular creed about our common life together really isn’t something that most people experience nationally.

I was just reading about how Walter Cronkite had this idea that is very David Leonhardt’s that for the bicentennial there should be these things called American issues forums, because they were all worried — the bicentennial, everybody had the same question. We had just come out of this crazy war, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam War, Kent State ——

Leonhardt: Inflation.

Lepore: The 1970s, the country’s a mess. Where’s our national purpose? We have no vision. Now it’s our anniversary. Then there’s this horrible, highly commodified bicentennial, and people are really mad about it. And Walter Cronkite is like: You know what we need to do? We’re going to have — maybe it was 200 issues, but there would be, in elementary schools in the evenings or in public libraries, in cities and towns all around the country for about 200 nights, debates and public discussions about particular issues. It actually seems like such a cool idea. I was like: Wow.

So I went looking to try to figure out — how did those go? Did they do any good? How did people experience them? And it turns out they forgot to keep any records whatsoever. They happened — these meetings happened, and they maybe were hugely important to people. I don’t know. To be honest, there are a lot of organizations trying to stand up efforts like that for the America250 in 2026. There’s a lot of these organizations that call themselves bridging organizations to try to bring red and blue families together for meals and outings. So I don’t know how that scales up.

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about what they’re trying to do for America250 and one of the ideas, it was to devise a curriculum and distribute a lesson plan across the country that could be done almost at any grade level, which was to have kids research what their community has historically done to celebrate July 4. It didn’t matter if your family was there from colonial days or if you were the child of immigrants or yourself an immigrant. It was just like: What did your community do? How has your community told the story of its belonging to this country and its national project? I thought it was a really sweet idea.

We don’t have to teach what is America, what America should be — rather, let’s just figure it out right here. How did the town of Montgomery first start celebrating July 4? I think that kind of writing a story about your place in the country is maybe the easier place to begin than coming up with: An American historian issues an edict about what the national story is.

Leonhardt: That resonates in a lot of ways. I mean, when you look at some of the research about what it means when a community loses its local newspaper ——

Lepore: Yep.

Leonhardt: — Which is really alarming. One of the things you see is that everything becomes more nationalized and you think of your neighbor mostly by wondering: Is that person a Republican or a Democrat? As opposed to: We agree on this local issue, or we’re at the soccer field together. It’s much easier, I think, for people to find common ground when they’re actually dealing with other human beings rather than just being consumers of media, essentially.

Lepore: Yeah, and also our national political discourse is really mediated by corporations that own those platforms. Whereas locally — it’s the same corporations that put the local newspapers out of business. But you can have neighborhood meetings, you can physically go to the city council. You can sit next to somebody and ask: Do you really think we should spend this money on the library? Well, I do.

You have that conversation that maybe is kind of hard for you. And maybe you don’t change your mind. But that is really different than, I don’t know, getting your news from TikTok.

Leonhardt: Yeah, and that kind of sense of belonging — “belonging” is a word that Pete Buttigieg used when we chatted with him — that if we want to repair much of what ills our country, we need to give people a better sense of belonging than they now have. And you’re basically pointing out that it’s much easier to feel like you belong to something real and local than it is to feel like you belong to some sort of online community.

Lepore: Yeah. I assume you spoke about this, but belonging has been a key term of the left even while punishing people for their views. The backlash against wokeism is largely about people being really tired of everyone telling them they don’t belong because my ideas are not your ideas. So I think it’s a little hard, honestly, to reclaim belonging, because I think it’s so associated with H.R. language. I’m all about it. I believe in it, but I think the word has really, sadly, become politicized.

Leonhardt: So is there some way that the left can fix that by actually being more welcoming and less judgmental? And even if it has to change the word from belonging to something else, can it actually embody the values of being welcoming? Or do you think that’s just gone forever?

Lepore: No. It’s not gone forever. I’m just kind of bristling a little bit at the word because so much of what came out under that banner was shaming people for their various non-woke views.

Leonhardt: Do you think that what is often described as woke is a real problem, as opposed to merely a problem that the right has managed — to use another word the left likes — weaponize?

Lepore: No, I think — I am in the belly of that beast. I’ve been teaching at Harvard since 2003, and something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this: What was it that actually changed it?

Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something. This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff. I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.

Do I still deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on? I think those are crucially important. But I think it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about.

I think the place I put blame is quite different from the places that the right would put blame. I think the corporatization of higher education has been a real problem, so I have a different understanding of what has gone wrong with higher education. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.

Leonhardt: Yeah, and it’s hard to win people over when you’re making them feel that way. I want to get back to the Constitution before we close. While I was reading your book, I made a list in the back pages. I hope you don’t mind that I was writing in a copy of your book about the constitutional amendments that I thought we needed today, and I ——

Lepore: It’s the constitutional bucket list.

Leonhardt: Totally. And I will admit I set aside political feasibility, at least in the short term. I don’t want to ask you to go down the whole list and debate them, but I’m just curious about what you think of this list, whether you think it’s wrongheaded or how you react to it?

My list was: easing the amendment process. And you basically quote Antonin Scalia in the book, suggesting that it has become far too hard in modern America — and what is it, 2 percent of the population organized in the right way, electorally ——

Lepore: Yeah, that’s what his math said.

Leonhardt: Can defeat any amendment — that seems like a problem. Abolishing the Electoral College I put on my list. Putting limits on gerrymandering and changing the structure of the House of Representatives so it becomes more representative, which is in its name. Putting limits on campaign donations and changing the structure of the Supreme Court to include term limits. What do you think of my list? Crazy radical, not radical enough — how does it strike you?

Lepore: I like your list. I’m glad that you set aside feasibility because it would’ve been a pretty short list if you had not done that. Yeah, I like your list a lot. I don’t expect we’re going to be amending the Constitution anytime soon.

I think it is important to imagine that it is possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cataclysmic political world that we live in today does create enough force to push open that door. I think it’s just that people are very afraid of what’s on the other side of that constitutional door. And I think that if you think it could get pushed open, you sure as heck better have a list.

Leonhardt: Because maybe it will open.

Lepore: Maybe it will.

Leonhardt: I’ve closed some of these conversations by asking about this idea of hope, which is something that you and I already touched on indirectly, but I want to go straight at it.

I think so many people have lost any sense of hope in our political system, particularly not just it, but to some extent voting for Trump, is not really an act of hope. Or at least it’s not entirely an act of hope. And then you have so many of Trump’s critics who say: Oh, my goodness, the fact that he’s now won twice causes me to despair.

I think that we can’t solve our problems unless we retain some degree of hope, and I’m curious what your deep study of American history has left you thinking about what are the rational reasons for someone in the America of 2025 to retain some hope that maybe we can, again, amend the constitution, or maybe we can build a better society, a fairer society, a less unequal society than we have today? Because I both understand the despair that people feel, and I also feel that we have no hope of overcoming our problems if we give into that despair.

Lepore: I like the word “determination.” I think it’s important to be determined, and one way I fortify my own determination is by thinking about how women first asked for the right to vote in 1848. They got it in 1920.

That is the lifetimes of women, their children, their grandchildren — often in the same family — engaged in that same struggle over those generations. They were determined and there were millions of people subject to human bondage, living their lives, often literally in chains who fought generation after generation. Were they hopeful? I don’t think they had the luxury of being hopeful or not hopeful.

They were determined, and I think forms of tyranny succeed by destroying your determination, by destroying your imagination — your ability to picture the end of something. I often say to my little one that the reason I’m a historian is because I like to know how things began. Because if I can imagine how they began, then I can imagine they’re going to end. And I think that’s one of the great gifts of history: Most forms of tyranny do come to an end.

Feudalism, imperialism, fascism — dismantling these systems has required years and years and years of very hard work and determination. I’m not sure they always required hope, but they did require determination and imagination.

Leonhardt: Jill Lepore, thank you for this enlightening and honest conversation.

Lepore: Thanks so much. It was a lot of fun.

Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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