For more than four decades, Ken Burns has served as one of America’s most influential storytellers—an unofficial national historian whose films shape how millions understand the country’s triumphs, failures, myths, and contradictions. From The Civil War to Vietnam, from The Roosevelts to Baseball, Burns has chronicled the nation’s most defining moments with a blend of moral clarity and emotional generosity that is uniquely his own. Now, as he turns to The American Revolution, Burns once again returns to one of his central themes: that despite its hypocrisies, tragedies, and betrayals, America remains a perfectible experiment—unfinished but improvable.
In an age of political polarization, cultural cynicism, and the erosion of shared narratives, Burns’ conviction that the United States can still live up to its founding ideals is both radical and countercultural. It stands against the prevailing mood of dysfunction and despair. Yet for Burns, this belief is not naïveté but an interpretation rooted in history itself.
The American Revolution as a Mirror
Burns’ new documentary does not treat the Revolution as a triumphalist origin myth. Instead, it approaches the founding era as a complex, deeply flawed moment in which soaring ideals coexisted with profound moral failures. Freedom was proclaimed even as slavery was expanded. Equality was celebrated even as disenfranchisement was codified. The Revolution produced a language of universal rights while simultaneously denying those rights to the majority of the population.
Yet Burns argues that this contradiction is precisely the point. The Revolution’s intellectual power came from ideas that were bigger than the people who produced them, ideas that later generations would invoke to dismantle the very injustices the founders perpetuated.
The American project, he suggests, was never meant to be complete. It was meant to be iterative, stretched and strengthened by generations willing to confront the nation’s own contradictions.
A Historian of Hypocrisy and Hope
Burns has often said that American history is best understood as a tension between two forces: the promise of equality and the reality of inequality. This tension fuels nearly every one of his films. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the country could reject the racial hierarchy embedded in its founding. The Great Depression revealed the fragility of social and economic justice. The Vietnam era exposed the limits of American power and the dangers of political deception.
But throughout these stories runs a recurring thread: Americans, when forced into crisis, have repeatedly chosen renewal, reform, and reconstruction over collapse.
Burns sees this pattern not as evidence of American exceptionalism but of American self-correction—a national habit of reinvention. It is, in his view, the true heart of the country’s identity.
What We Are Missing Today
When asked what is absent from modern American political life, Burns speaks not of policy but of the erosion of shared civic values. He believes the country has lost its sense of common purpose—its ability to see the collective good as something greater than partisan identity.
Three deficits trouble him most:
1. A Loss of Historical Literacy
Burns argues that many citizens no longer understand their own history—its complexity, its violence, or its achievements. Without this fuller story, political debates collapse into simplistic narratives that fuel division rather than reflection.
2. A Collapse of Empathy
Burns’ films are built around human stories—letters, diaries, voices of ordinary people. He believes that modern political debate has lost this emotional dimension, replacing empathy with suspicion and contempt.
3. A Crisis of Civic Imagination
Perhaps most critically, Burns sees a deficit of imagination: a collective inability to envision a politics that is more humane, more inclusive, and more truthful. The founders, he notes, were flawed men with limited views—but they possessed a sweeping imagination about what a republic might become. Today’s political culture, by contrast, often reduces politics to a zero-sum game.
Why He Still Believes in Perfectibility
Burns’ optimism is rooted not in the present but in the long arc of American experience. Again and again, the nation’s best chapters have emerged from its darkest moments. The Civil Rights Movement grew from a century of segregation. The New Deal arose from economic catastrophe. Progressive reforms followed periods of deep social unrest. The American story, to Burns, is not linear—it is cyclical, defined by repeated confrontations between aspiration and reality.
He does not deny the scale of today’s challenges: democratic backsliding, political extremism, economic inequality, disinformation, and cultural fragmentation. But he sees these not as signs of inevitable decline but as part of an ongoing struggle over the meaning of the American experiment.
For Burns, perfectibility does not mean perfection. It means the capacity to improve, to recognize injustice, and to change course—however slowly, painfully, or unevenly.
The Role of Art, Storytelling, and Historical Memory
Burns’ belief in America’s perfectibility is inseparable from his belief in storytelling as a civic act.
He has long maintained that history is not merely about documenting events—it is about shaping a shared memory that can hold complexity without collapsing into bitterness or myth. Good history, he argues, helps citizens see themselves not as isolated actors but as inheritors of a collective journey.
His documentaries aim to build this shared memory by revealing how ordinary people navigated extraordinary times. In their letters and voices, he finds the emotional truth that political rhetoric often obscures.
In a country divided over what story it tells about itself, Burns insists that the story must be big enough to hold us all.
Conclusion: The Work of Becoming Ourselves
Ken Burns’ belief in America’s perfectibility is neither nostalgic nor blindly patriotic. It is rooted in an understanding that the United States has always been a contradiction—an experiment built on ideals it has never fully realized, yet continually strives toward.
His new work on the American Revolution underscores a timeless lesson: nations are not defined by their origins alone but by their willingness to confront, repair, and reimagine themselves. For Burns, the Revolution’s legacy is not the mythology of a flawless founding but the enduring challenge it set forth: to become a country worthy of the principles it professes.
In a political moment when cynicism feels easier than hope, Burns’ view may seem almost old-fashioned. Yet it is precisely this enduring faith—in the people, in the process, and in the unfinished nature of the American story—that keeps the idea of a more perfect union alive.
And for Ken Burns, that is a story still very much worth telling.
