THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

On Tuesday, President Obama will give his farewell address to the nation. It's a custom that goes all the way back to George Washington; these speeches, author John Avlon says, "serve as a bookend to a presidency."

For about 150 years, Washington's farewell speech was the most famous in American history, Avlon tells NPR's Michel Martin: "It was more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence. And yet today, it's almost entirely forgotten."

Avlon hopes to bring the speech back into the spotlight in his new book, Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations. [...]

On Washington's warnings

Washington wanted to leave his friends and fellow citizens ... a series of lessons culled from his life and his understanding of history; really warnings about the forces he feared could destroy our democratic republic.

He came up with a series of warnings that are remarkably prescient, prophetic to us today: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, foreign wars, particularly -- and this is almost eerie with the debate we're having over Russian hacking today -- the danger of foreign influence in our politics as a way of subverting sovereignty.

These were some of the forces he felt could destroy our democratic republic and he wanted to warn future Americans ... that these were the really important things to remember. ... To that extent, it's a talismanic document. It connects the past, Washington's present and the future.

On why Washington's speech isn't as famous today as it once was

It was the most famous speech in American history. It was taught in public schools. Students memorized it the way people do the Gettysburg Address today. But it's sort of the Old Testament to the Gettysburg Address' New Testament.

It's sort of these stern rules from a distant god of how to live and not this sort of hopeful, you know, poetic premonition on rebirth. So it was sort of eclipsed in the national memory. When Lin-Manuel [Miranda] brought it back for [the Broadway musical] Hamilton, it was really the first time in a long time it had gotten that kind of attention.

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