Fearing the power brokers of the coronavirus relief packages are not going to speak for the interests of those most in need, documentarian Ken Burns fears a recycling of past bad ideas.
"Struggling or working poor families are going to be hardest hit by this virus," Burns told the Daily Beast. "What are we going to do again? What kind of policies are we going to have that don't just recapitulate the same mistakes that we've had before?
"As this stimulus package gets going, the lobbyists are swarming, thinking that this is an opportunity to get a deal. You just begin to realize, 'Oh my God, this is going to be picked apart.' Who is going to benefit? Will it be the middle-men? Will it be the people with the vested interests? Or will it be directed at the people who actually need it?"
Burns, one of the most visible historians of our time with his famed documentaries, says history will not repeat itself in the age of coronavirus, but it might, unfortunately, "rhyme."
"History doesn't repeat itself — it doesn't," Burns told the DB. "Never once has history repeated itself
"But as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history rhymes. If we played to those rhymes, it would be foolish. It would destroy our story — we might as well just do a contemporary issue. But what we find is that, by doing history well, you have a chance to bring up these evergreen topics, whatever it might be."
Burns added, pointing to the biblical beliefs, the world does not repeat but human nature might amid the chaos.
"I go back to Ecclesiastes in the Bible, and it says, 'What has been, will be again. What has been done, will be done again,'" he told DB. "That suggests to me that human nature doesn't change — good and bad. It superimposes itself over the seemingly random chaos of human events. We see echoes and ghosts and themes and evergreen topics.
"With human beings, if you believe Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.