The Founders’ Nightmare: Jackson Lears on How the American Republic Became an Empire

“Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body. He just wanted to fight.” — Jackson Lears

Yesterday Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us how America might bring order to global anarchy. Today’s guest thinks that Washington DC foreign policy insiders, with their imperial vision of an American brokered international order, are the problem.

The Rutgers historian Jackson Lears, who Susan Sontag said rivaled Tocqueville in his understanding of America, has an essay in this month’s Harper’s called “The Founders’ Nightmare.” Lears argues that anti-imperialism was the original American revolutionary dream, and that the United States has spent the last eighty years betraying this vision. He dates the nightmare back to 1947 — the year of the National Security Act, the Truman Doctrine, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman about using the Cold War to scare the hell out of the American people.

Lears argues that contemporary American foreign policy has been governed by the very things that George Washington warned against: passionate overseas attachments and habitual hatreds. Take, for example, he says, America’s historic attachment to Israel and its abiding hatred of Russia. He calls Gaza a genocide. He describes Putin as a serious man and a rational actor in Ukraine. He would dissolve NATO. He doesn’t think the CIA is above having killed JFK. And then there’s Iran….

So what to do? We must learn, Lears says, from the founders. Lafayette, he reminds us, was a master of the retreat. America should step back from both its passionate overseas attachments and its habitual hatreds. Given the anti-war sentiment of both left and right in the midterms, it would seem as if the vast majority of Americans agree with Lears rather than the DC foreign policy establishment.

FURTHER READING

•   “The Founders’ Nightmare” (Harper’s, November 2026) — 5,800 words, and the whole argument. Read it before you argue with it.

•   Lears’s Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the most recent of the books, after Rebirth of a Nation and Fables of Abundance.

•   The establishment this episode is answering: Charles Kupchan on governing the world to come, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.

•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Edward Luce on the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Janet Reitman on The Inheritance, and Alexander Mikaberidze on the Louisiana Purchase.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers, where he taught from 1986 to 2025, and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His books include No Place of Grace, Fables of Abundance (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History), Something for Nothing, Rebirth of a Nation and Animal Spirits</