I assume that most of you believe that the state of America has seldom been worse. Racial progress, America as a melting pot, the global alliance that has seen us through the past 75 years, character, civility, and liberal democracy itself, all seem to be under siege. While this is all true, it's also true is that we’ve been here before.

There have been many dark moment in American history. Maybe there is something in our very DNA that sets us up for it. But certainly from the Alien and Sedition acts though the Civil War, the industrial revolution, America First, the great depression, Jim Crow, the cold war and the tyranny of Joe McCarthy, we’ve seen that bad things happen to good countries.

Each time though we have emerged stronger. We have understood that the fault was not in our stars, but in ourselves and so we have reached deeply within ourselves for our better angels. But as the pundits of Wall Street ask all the time, is it different this time?  This is the heart of Pulitzer Prize winning historian and best selling author Jon Meacham's latest work The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

My conversation with Jon Meacham: