#1697 The State of the Union as Political Theater

Frequent guest host David Horton welcomes Thomas Jefferson to the podcast to discuss political theater and State of the Union addresses. Although Jefferson was a master of political theater, he chose not to take his annual State of the Union messages in person to Congress. He sent his messages by courier and assumed Congress would study them at their convenience. After Jefferson makes his views clear, Clay Jenkinson breaks character to discuss the uses and abuses of modern State of the Union addresses. It was Ronald Reagan who began the tradition of the president pointing to extraordinary Americans in the gallery to honor their service and sacrifices, or to lament their sufferings. Donald Trump's recent 2026 State of the Union Message was much more like a reality television show than anything in previous administrations, including a sustained celebration of the U.S. Olympic hockey program. This program was recorded on February 25, 2026.

Clay's conversation with Char Miller, an endowed professor of environmental history at Pomona College and author of more than a dozen highly regarded books. How did America develop its public lands? Who were the key players in the formation of National Parks, Monuments, Forests, Wildlife Refuges, and Game Preserves? How fragile is the public domain at a time when the Trump administration seeks to scale back, privatize, and permit mining and other industrial activities? The conversation includes a segment on Native American sovereignty, the Land Back Movement, and the work of David Treuer, who has suggested that the National Parks and Monuments be returned to Native ownership or, at a minimum, Native co-management. The discussion also assessed the future of the Colorado River system, including the status of Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona. This episode was recorded on January 27, 2026.

Clay's conversation with Erik and Christopher Ewers, the directors of the upcoming three-part documentary on the life and achievements of Henry David Thoreau, the New England radical and the author of Clay's favorite American book, Walden. Five years in the making, with dozens of interviews and fabulous footage of Concord, Massachusetts, and the environs of Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, this documentary will be the definitive treatment of Thoreau. The directors tell Clay that he is, as they put it, "all over the film," as one of the more significant talking heads. Thoreau was one of the most original and morally courageous of American writers. He denounced slavery with a pure flame of disgust, opposed America's war of expansion against Mexico, defended John Brown after he raided Harpers Ferry, and even suggested some careful monkeywrenching in his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately and to undertake an experiment in simplicity and minimalism. He wrote some of the most famous sentences in American history, including, of course, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." This podcast was recorded on February 13, 2026.

Clay's conversation with historian Beau Breslin about the nuts and bolts of a constitutional convention in America. Neither Clay nor Beau thinks such a convention is likely, given the constitutional conservatism of the American people, but if Americans chose to hold one around the 250th birthday of the United States, how would it be organized? How would we choose delegates to ensure, this time, that they truly represent our multicultural demographics? How would we avoid letting the lobbyists, professional politicians, and the media distort the process and ruin the project? Would it be possible in our time to enforce a secrecy rule among the delegates? What sort of civics training would we want them to undergo, and by whom? If we drafted a new constitution, what would the ratification process look like? As they discuss, Thomas Jefferson urged us to tear up the Constitution once every 19 years. This episode was recorded on February 12, 2026.

Guest host Russ Eagle interviews Clay about his ambitious downsizing project. For several decades, Clay has explored the world of Thoreau's great book Walden, which calls on us to reduce the clutter of our material lives to open our spiritual arteries. Simplify, simplify, and minimize, says Thoreau. Finally, Clay decided to undertake the purge. So far, he has given away 3,000 books to a public library system in east central North Dakota, with plans to donate at least 2,000 books a year for the next 5 years. The question is, is Thoreau right that there is liberation in repurposing excess material baggage, that one crosses an invisible boundary, and that it is possible in this way to achieve a higher order of being? Towards the end of the conversation, Clay explains how the downsizing project inspired him to make a Mind Map of the authors and subjects that still matter greatly to him. With the help of ChatGPT, Clay produced a manuscript featuring 52 of his intellectual heroes, with appropriate AI-generated portraits of each author. This episode was recorded on January 18, 2025.

Clay joins journalist Jonathan Thompson, publisher of The Land Desk on Substack and author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. Thompson, who is currently living in Greece, begins by providing a European perspective on what is happening in the United States — the assault on NATO, the flirtation with taking Greenland from Denmark, the overreach of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, and European bewilderment about America's intended place in the world community. Most of the conversation is about the crisis of public lands in America — the push to open more of the public domain to resource extraction, the calls for privatizing parcels of BLM land in the West, and the recent revocation of grazing permits for the American Prairie Reserve in eastern Montana. And oh yes, the future of the Colorado River. This episode was recorded on January 28, 2026.

Clay interviews the award-winning historian Joe Ellis about America's tragic legacy of slavery, and about the dispossession of American Indians from their sovereign homelands. Professor Ellis has often argued that what happened with respect to African Americans was Shakespearean tragedy — in other words, if the better angels of American life had prevailed, things might have turned out differently; but that the dispossession and cultural genocide America wrought with Native Americans was probably inevitable. Clay has repeatedly challenged that view, and Joe Ellis suggested that Listening to America feature a serious discussion of how things might have turned out differently in both cultural intersections. The problem of what Clay calls "the Myth of Inevitability" is that it lets white America off the hook. If it could not have turned out any other way, perhaps we don't need to wring our hands too much. It's a critical discussion of agency and complicity in America's problematic history. This episode was recorded on December 15, 2025.

Clay welcomes author Matthew Davis to talk about his new book, Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore. How did it happen that a mountain in the heart of the Black Hills of South Dakota, in land sovereign to the Lakota Indians, came to be the canvas on which Gutzon Borglum carved four monumental figures in American history: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt? Should it matter to us that Borglum was a member of the KKK? Why are there no women, no African Americans, no Native Americans carved up there? What is the future of Mount Rushmore, and who, by the way, was this obscure New York lawyer, Charles E. Rushmore, who visited the region in 1885? We give considerable attention to Gerard Baker, the Hidatsa Native who served as superintendent at Mount Rushmore from 2004 to 2010 and revolutionized how we interpret the site. This episode was recorded on November 24, 2025.

Clay interviews the adventurous Brits Nat and Mikey, school teachers who got it into their heads to float the entire Missouri and Mississippi River corridor. They began on August 5, 2025, and completed their journey in the second week of January 2026. They floated more than 3,000 miles from Three Forks, Montana, to the Gulf of Mexico, where they pulled their canoe out of the water for the last time. When Clay caught up with them in mid-January, they were luxuriating in a New Orleans hotel. But the big news is that Nat and Mikey's great adventure is not over! They are now going to hitchhike to California, then fly to South America for further exploration. Towards the end of the podcast, they tried Velveeta for the first time, with the usual British condescension towards one of America's great food groups. This episode was recorded on January 18, 2025.

Clay's favorite guest, Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, makes her first 2026 appearance to discuss foreign policy in the administrations of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. America's recent incursion into the sovereign nation of Venezuela raises questions about the war powers in America. The Founding Fathers were adamant that Congress (not the executive) must initiate wars, and vote funds to pay for them, too. We discuss the crisis of the French Revolution in America, Washington's famous Farewell Address in 1796, the Quasi-War with France during the John Adams administration, and Adams' heroic decision to seek peace rather than war with the French Republic. We explore Jefferson's idealism as voiced in a letter he wrote in 1799 and his famous First Inaugural Address in 1801. Jefferson believed it was too late in the world's history to solve our disputes through bloodshed, and yet he sent marines and a naval squadron to North Africa to bloody the nose of the Pasha of Tripoli. This episode was recorded on January 5, 2026.