On “Washington Week,” NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker said the story of the 250th anniversary of America’s independence is “our effort to try to repair ourselves and get to a better place.”

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST, ‘THE ATLANTIC’ EDITOR: I want to start — we have to cover 250 years of history and then we have to predict American history 250 years into the future. So, we got to get going. Peter, I’m going to start with you. I just want to talk about the importance of this moment. 250 years is a long time to maintain a representative democracy. Is this — you know, it’s kind of a signal achievement of the United States that it maintained this so long. Obviously, there were problems along the way. But is — have we maintained fidelity to the principles that were — the abstract principles that were formulated in Philadelphia 250 years ago? PETER BAKER, ‘NEW YORK TIMES’ WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Jeff, thank you very much for asking and for talking about this importance of that because I think that this anniversary has become so politicized that we’ve lost sight of what it really is about, right? It is about the country, not about blue America or red America, but about 250 years of this great experiment. And I think the thing that makes America so distinctive, people often say this, it’s not a new thought, but that America, the United States, is not a country born out of an ethnicity or a religion or a tribe or a race. It was born out of an idea, the idea that we could find a better place to live, that we could form a more perfect union, right, the phrase in the Preamble of the Constitution. We’re not perfect. It’s not perfect now. We’re going to talk about all the ways our representative democracy tonight is not perfect and feels threatened, as we speak, and yet it is still the aspiration toward a more perfect union that makes us distinctive. I was reading de Tocqueville’s take on America, and he actually has this, I think, remarkable quote. He says, what makes America special — I’m paraphrasing, this isn’t exactly what he said, but what makes America special is not that it’s more enlightened than other countries, but that it has the capacity to repair itself. And I think that’s the story of our 250 years, is our effort to try to repair ourselves and get to a better place. GOLDBERG: Did everybody read Tocqueville before they got here? BAKER: Was that in the assignment? GOLDBERG: Yes, that was in the assignment. You never follow the assignments, but that’s all right. You read it organically. It’s great. But I have to ask you this. You join yourself to America by accepting a group of principles. You don’t have to join by blood. Now, it’s an open discussion. Were you surprised that it’s become a kind of continuing discussion or a live discussion again? BAKER: Yes. I would say I was surprised. Maybe we shouldn’t be, because history is cyclical, right? We do go through these periods in our history where we question what our principles are and what our values are, and we have not always been perfect. But it is a reminder that as we go through a tough time right now, we are at least debating big things. We’re debating what our country should stand for. And that’s something that, in fact, we do every Friday night on Washington Week in a way, and I’m glad that we have the debate and that we can have this debate.

Watch the full episode:
RealClearPolitics Videos