2026-07-03
36 分钟The Economist.
Hello and welcome to a special birthday episode of The Intelligence,
taking a hard look at America as it turns 250.
This is a big one.
Not just the word semi-quincentennial, which I promise only to say once.
It's big because America seems, to use common economist parlance, to be at a crossroads.
The founders worried that the American experiment they devised would soon collapse into disorder, tyranny.
And here we are, a quarter millennium later, in another time of deep anxiety.
Virtue is under threat, talk of decline is in the air.
Public life is scarred by division.
So, The Economist has gone to town on the anniversary.
This week's print edition is filled with thoughtful essays and deep analysis of that experiment.
And we, here in the podcast department, have soberly put on our birthday hats
and done some reflection too.
Consider when the Republic was barely 50 years old, and a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville
undertook what must have been one of America's first road trips.
The brilliant, insightful, kind of timeless resulting book is what my colleague John Prido relied on
when he repeated the journey for our new series, Tocqueville Road Trip.
Make some time to crisscross America today, as seen through that lens.
And John and the cast of Checks and Balance, out later today,