What Does it Mean to Be an American?

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Over 5 million people value and trust SimpliSafe with their home security every day. Right now, our listeners will get 50% off a new system. When you sign up for professional monitoring and your first month is free, just visit simplisafe.com slash crooked. That's half off at simplisafe.com slash crooked. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. On today's show, my good friend and fellow speechwriter for Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes. America's 250th birthday has been on my mind a lot lately, especially since Donald Trump seems intent on making the country's semi-quincentennial all about himself, his parties, his name on everything, his guests, and his version of the American story. But of course, there's another version of our story that resonates with at least half of us, likely more. At the very least, Americans have been engaged in an argument about what this country is doing and what this country is and who belongs since we declared independence two and a half centuries ago. Ben has written an incredible, timely book about that argument. Truly, it's fantastic. I read the whole thing in about a day. You all know what a big reader I am these days, so that's saying something. The book is called All We Say, A History of the United States in 15 Speeches. In it, Ben traces the history of America through some of the nation's most consequential speeches, from a long-forgotten speech from a Native American chief and Lincoln's second inaugural to I Have a Dream and speeches from Barack Obama and even Donald Trump. It's a beautiful book about the ways in which, in the words of our old boss, this union may never be perfect, but generation after generation shows it can always be perfected. Ben and I were psyched to have this conversation, both because we got to nerd out as former speechwriters and dig into what the two of us talk about when we're not in front of a mic, how those of us who don't love being governed by Donald Trump can win the argument, about what this country is and where it needs to go, about how we close the gap between America's best ideals and our current fairly bleak reality. It was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute, but before we do, please consider becoming a Crooked Media subscriber if you haven't already, so that you don't miss out on any of the great content we're putting out for our friends at the pod. Subscribers get ad-free episodes of all your favorite podcasts, including this one. You also get our extra new episode of Pod Save America called Pod Save America, only friends, other subscriber-only shows like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, access to all of our excellent sub-stack newsletters like Pod Save America Open Tabs, and you get to feel good about supporting one of the few independent, proudly pro-democracy media outlets left in Trump's America. So head to crooked.com slash friends and please subscribe. Let's get to it. Here's Ben Rhodes. What's up, Ben? John, this is the interview I was looking forward to since I was a kid. Since I finished my book, I have to tell you, honestly. I was going to say, I love when we have an excuse to pod together, especially this time, because you wrote a book about speeches, which is perfect for the two of us. For people who don't know, I know a lot of you probably do, but Ben and I wrote speeches for six years together, sometimes quite literally together, like side by side, with our laptops open until 3 a.m. But this is also a book about American identity and an argument over the American story that's been raging for 250 years. Which has also become an obsession of mine as of late. But I want to start with something you wrote about the book. And you wrote that it's the third in a trilogy that started with your memoir, then your book about authoritarianism, and now this. And that finishing this one means you're ready to let go of your past identities as a White House staffer, foreign policy advisor, and speechwriter. Say more about that. Why are you letting go? I actually really thought about this, John, because I wrote my memoir, which was a very kind of raw experience, right? It was like, I didn't digest it at all. I wrote that in a year. That came out in 2018. Then I very much, my last book was in my kind of foreign policy, global politics, pod save the world, if you will, self in terms of traveling around and understanding what had happened in Russia and China and Hungary under Viktor Orban. And I was literally, you know, using the experience and the experiences, contacts, networks I had from being in that world. And then this one is entirely, I wanted to go back into history because I had a sense that I could find a lot there, that you could understand this argument that we're having now by tracing it back from the beginning. And frankly, my original conceit was Obama and Trump kind of encapsulate, represent two different opposing stories. That we've had throughout our history and competition with each other. And I'm not an historian. And so the vehicle I knew that I would choose is speeches. And I found myself kind of returning to that core identity, that guy who showed up in the Obama campaign office when, you know, you were the chief speechwriter. You're my boss. I remember walking in from my think tank culture in DC and wow, my boss is wearing a t-shirt, you know, like this is a different vibe, you know. He's wearing a t-shirt. He's wearing a t-shirt and he doesn't know shit about foreign policy. Good thing I'm here. Yeah. But I say this actually seriously to you, like, because, you know, you've been through this. You kind of don't want to go through life as like John Favreau or Ben Rhodes, comma, former Obama X, you know? Yeah. And I kind of feel like I've mined it now. You know, like I've done, this is not a memoir at all, but like it drew deeply on all the things we did in speech writing. And it's, and so I felt like, but I kind of more fundamentally and existentially too, I think I finally came to terms with how it all ended, you know, in the sense that Trump was this kind of rebuke of the inevitability of progress, right? Of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice kind of on its own, if you will. And, and I think reliving all of American history kind of allowed me to situate our experience in a continuum where it's actually not that unusual that this happened. You know, reconstruction was followed by segregation. You know, the civil rights movement was followed by backlash. So for all those reasons, I really did internally, like you have to trick your, you know, as a writer, and you are a writer, you know, you have to kind of tell yourself a story. And my story was, this is the third in a trilogy. It kind of completes both my various Obama identities and kind of, you know, is me coming to terms with how our chapter ended. And yeah, now I can move on. We'll see what happens next. So I read the book. I started it Sunday night when we got back from Lovett's wedding. And then I read most of it yesterday and last night. We're recording this on Tuesday. You're listening to it probably on Sunday. First of all, I absolutely fucking loved the book. It is incredible. Everyone should read it. I also, it did give me this sense of hope and also peace. Like you say, you came to terms with it. Sort of peace about like the last 10 years and where it fits. Because you read, when you, it's the speeches you selected were specifically selected because they each tell a story about American identity and this argument over what America is that we've been having since the founding. And when you lay it all out like that, along with the different characters, you really do get this sense that we have been here before and people in these moments have been able to, you know, speak and march and fight their way out of these moments. And I don't think it's, it's not Pollyannish at all, but it's sort of like a hard-earned hope that you get from reading it. But I thought, I thought it's outstanding. You opened the book with, of all people, J.D. Vance and his speech last summer at Claremont about American identity. Which listeners to this show and especially offline know that I can't stop talking about. Austin is nodding his head very knowingly right now. I think you and I had a few conversations about this, about the J.D. Vance speech when you were thinking about opening the book with it. What made you finally decide that Vance's speech was the way into a book about 250 years of American identity? So a prologue for a book is a fascinating thing because you kind of kind of have to telegraph. your argument um you know the book starts in real time uh with benjamin franklin which we can get to but i don't want to drop people in there you know i wanted to give people a sense of kind of what the argument of the book is and i i always had in mind when i was literally selecting these speeches which was an interesting process um and as i was writing uh chapter after chapter that if you really distill it down there are two stories of what american identity is you know with obviously their permutations they're not all exactly the same but i think you can simplify and say there is one story that is a nationality of inheritance that you know you can call it originalism you can call it blood and soil nationalism but essentially this was a white christian nation founded by a particular set of people with a particular set of beliefs and now you know literally quoting jd vance um and it's the inheritor of kind of western civilization sometimes that's western supremacy and sure other people live here um of different races and ethnicities but they kind of have to subordinate themselves to this original identity and american exceptionalism is just a given like we are exceptional because we're american um we are the city on a hill we're in some ways god's chosen people we can do whatever we want to the people in this country whether they're native americans or black people or immigrants and we can do whatever we want to other countries right and again i'm casting it negatively but i frankly think that that at a core that that is a strain that runs through american history and then the opposing story is one of progressive nationalism that we've never lived up to the creed in the history of american history and the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and that american history is a story of people trying to change the country for the better trying to make a more perfect union um to use a phrase and that's how you get the abolitionist movement and the suffrage movement and the in the civil rights movement and the labor rights movement all these things um jd vance comes along and decides to tell the first version of the story for me because that that speech is literally yeah i mean when i knew i was going to use it is when he said we are not a nation founded on a creed and he name checks the declaration of independence and the idea that all men are created equal he says no that is not american identity we are a particular people from a particular place with a particular way of life and he said the quiet part out loud now he didn't say white but you know what particular people you know do we think he's talking about and and and he has a kind of logic way where well who could argue with us being a particular place in a particular people actually i can argue with it because we were 13 states at the beginning on the northeast coast we weren't our geographies wildly different today the people in this country today don't look at anything like the people in those 13 states and the way of life i mean walk down the street in my neighborhood in venice like there's a ton of ways of life there right and and so i actually think that jd did the the service of framing the other story for me um and and so i i literally opened with it you mentioned that um and that other people have to be subordinate um to sort of this this white christian identity and i've heard people say and i've talked to people about this that jd vance when he spouts this like anti-immigrant xenophobic rhetoric is full of shit and doesn't really believe it and couldn't really believe it because his in-laws are immigrants from india his wife is a first generation american but there is another possible explanation here that you touch on which is this obsession vance has and he does it in the speech and we've heard him do it and he's like mocked for it and other times and other places with the need for everyone to show gratitude particularly foreign uh born american citizens immigrants that if you're here and we let you come here then you need to show gratitude to the people who've been here the longest or to the or to our ancestors or to like this this way of life and this culture and i do think that's how you reconcile like because if you ask jd vance he would say well i'm for immigration i'm for you know uh like a diverse country that's fine but his problem is that if you haven't if you don't have seven generations of ancestors buried in kentucky uh which he said at the at the republican national convention then you don't get to complain about this country i mean he basically he said that about mamdani too uh mamdani had some like fourth of july message where he was like yeah and then we gotta continue to improve this nation and something very mild about perfecting or improving the nation and jd vance was like how could he do that we let him in here and blah blah it's like really fucking crazy yeah if you believe that because he said that you have to show gratitude in that speech and i posed the question the prologue gratitude to whom yeah who are we for what who are they who was everyone supposed to who are these people yeah because actually immigration was a much bigger thing than immigration and i actually expected it would be in in this book because you keep bumping into that and you know benjamin franklin his father was an immigrant you know he left religious persecution behind uh as well as seeking economic economic opportunity and and then you run through the other people in this book you know lewis brandeis was a jewish immigrant who left uh anti-semitism behind in europe uh mary lease a populist uh was a poor came from a poor irish family that fled you know the oppression of the british you know um uh you know obviously you get up to the 20th century interestingly dolores huerta comes from a family and this is something people don't think about enough john a part of her family weren't immigrants the border just got redrawn yeah and brought them into the united states right there are a lot of brown people in this country that were here before a lot of white people and we just you know expanded and redrew the border around places like you know new mexico for instance and and and and fundamentally it comes down to the question of do you believe that someone zoramamdani for example is as american as someone whose family's been here for seven generations right i genuinely do yeah um and i'm not that's not a virtue signal that's just a how can citizenship not be equal like how can some people be more american than other people like we are supposed to be a nation anchored in laws the constitution and a creed the declaration of independence which suggests not that we should have open borders which is how jd vance kind of shorthands it he says well if everybody who believes in the declaration of dependence is american then we'd have billions don't we have to admit them all no we don't that's not what he says that's not what our laws say we can have a border we can seal that border at times for you know i mean i don't necessarily agree with that but we can by a matter of policy but the people who are american are american and they're equally american and and frankly the thing we should be grateful for is that we're a nation that is able to have all these different people come here and enrich this country i mean how boring would this country be if it was just comprised of people like jd vance you know like like i uh i i just i i think fundamentally um i i felt myself uh because you kept encountering you know people didn't like the irish when they came here people didn't like chinese people when they came here like some people have never liked black people being here even though they were brought here mostly against their will like the people didn't like jewish people when they came here like and guess what you've rolled the tape forward does anybody think that this nation is not better for having chinese americans and jewish americans and irish americans no i don't think even jd vance would would make that argument so what are we really talking about here and it's been said many times by many people but that is what the core of american exceptionalism is all about which is we can't we can go live in germany and live in japan we can't become german or become japanese but anyone can come to america and become american and like that that is a very that is a unique exceptional quality of america and that is the experiment i think we're also different because we were founded by people who immigrated here like we were founded not by the indigenous people here and i think that that does kind of create an an additional legitimacy for the idea that if this is not a nation of indigenous americans then it is by definition a nation of people who have chosen an identity yeah and set up a government that could be you know flexible enough to absorb different people you know a lot of the speeches that spoke about the virtue of immigration frederick douglas lewis brandeis they talked about the fact that the decision to come to america is like the first step in becoming american like that's a strive and and again there's an inherent striving in that you know i want a better life i want to be a part of something different i want to be a part of this project i want to sign up for this creed and yeah you have to go through the process again not the jd van singh way to let everybody in um but that that idea of of striving self-improvement type people is kind of is ingrained in American identity and is something to defend at a time when with ICE, you know, we're seeking to kind of push that out. 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Of all the founders, you pick Franklin, and the speech is his closing argument for the Constitution. And then you bookend, at the end of the book, Trump's second inaugural with Franklin's warning, about despotism. What made Franklin sort of unlock the book for you, and why him among the founders? Yeah, so Franklin, and unlock is exactly the right word, because I went through a really interesting process where I must have read, I don't know, a couple hundred speeches. And how do you tell the story? And as you know, as a speechwriter, if you know the beginning of the story, and have some idea of the story, you can tell the story. And if you don't know the story, at the end of the story, it's gonna make a lot easier to fit the pieces in. And I came across this Franklin speech that I had not really read before. It's a closing argument at the Constitutional Convention. Franklin is chosen because he's the old wise man. He's also the most famous American in the world. And he's kind of the de facto host of the convention in Philadelphia. And he gives a speech that does not say a word about the Constitution itself. It's pretty remarkable. Like he doesn't talk about anything in it. The entire speech is about the virtue of compromise itself. And he essentially says, when you get a bunch of people together to benefit from all of their wisdom, you're also assembling all of their different interests, all of their selfish interests, all their prejudices, you're getting the good and bad. And out of that kind of assembly, you can't have some kind of perfect agreement. We have to compromise if we want a union. And to me, that, and he doesn't, he has rhetorical tricks, John, that are really interesting because he basically takes on infallibility and dogma, or the kind of antagonist in the speech. And he says, you know, and this is actually why we're not founded on a religion. You know, each religion thinks it's got the answers. And if we had that same mindset, then this place will never be a home for people that might not agree with exactly that version of things. And so, inherent in the constitution is compromise and imperfection. Now, that compromise allowed the union to be made, but it also set in motion all of the conflict and competition that followed because we compromised about really big things. We essentially compromised about identity. There was still slavery. There were uncertain questions about immigration. You know, different states had different immigration policies. Obviously, women did not have rights of citizenship at that time. And so, we're not going to compromise. We're not going to compromise and imperfection. And so, we kind of pushed those issues out. Franklin, very interestingly, the last public act he did, which is one of the first things he did after the constitution, because he didn't live very long, was petition Congress to abolish slavery. So, he was living his own theory of the case, which is compromise, set up the union, and then work within the system to change it. Now, he also had this warning that I found very chilling, which is he said, this new government can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government being incapable of any other. And that landed like a two by four today. And I filed that away and I said, I think I might end the book with that line. And I do. And now, it helped that Trump got elected. And that doesn't mean I think that that's happened fully. It's more a warning that if we don't arrest this direction, that's where we could end up. Yeah. I mean, that Franklin speech basically shows that the conflict and the argument that we've been having for the last 250 years was like a function of the design of the government. It was preordained because, of course, if you're going to have a country where people of such different backgrounds come from different places to try to make a home and want to live in freedom, from, you know, what they escaped from in Europe, then you're going to have the only government that's going to make that work is one where different people have a voice, different people with different opinions who are going to be at war with each other, or at least not, or be an argument with each other, right? Fight with each other. And it can't be any different than that, right? And so then you look through the whole 250 years, you're like, well, yeah, slavery, the civil war, everything. Like, of course, we were going to have these arguments because that was the, that was sort of the idea behind it. The government that they created. It was. And, and, and it, so the pieces fit in just to take the first, I broke the book into thirds. Each has five speeches for a certain period of American history. And so the first five are, okay, we set up this constitution. Then I have red jacket saying, wait a second, we're not in your constitution. Leave us alone. Then I have a woman named Maria Stewart, who's an abolitionist, a remarkable kind of penniless woman who came out of nowhere and became a speaker on the circuit in Boston, who says, uh, we wait a second, like black people deserve equal rights. Um, she's an abolitionist and a feminist. Women need to be empowered. We need to be teaching black people and women the same way we teach white people. And we need to claim our rights. Then I have Alexander Stevens, the vice president of Confederacy saying, wait a second. No, no, this equality thing. We don't believe in that. Uh, white supremacy is this, the cornerstone of the Confederacy. He said that I'm not projecting leftism onto him. That's what he said. And then Lincoln resolves it all in the second inaugural and says, no, we are, we are an abolitionist nation. Like we fought this war to right the wrong in our constitution. Uh, and in the most radical sense ever spoken by an American president says, essentially, uh, if, if every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword, essentially, so let it be done. A president United States saying, if we all have to die to atone for slavery, that'd be okay. I mean, imagine saying that today. Uh, so that's just, just in those five speeches, you see the tug of war and then Lincoln tries to resolve it. And then it starts all over again. Right. And, you know, and, and we've gone through the cycle of reconstruction to segregation, to FDR starts all over again, civil rights movement to backlash, to civil rights movement, to Obama, to Trump. And so we're just living different versions of the same argument. And I would argue in this book, speeches are actually the place where we have most prominently done that, you know, standing up in front of somebody as an activist or a politician and making your argument is different than writing a book or an op-ed or something. Yeah. Cause that's inherent in persuading people about who we are. I want to sort of dive into some of that, um, that you just, mentioned, Alexander Stevens, right? So he's this who I hadn't heard of, by the way, before this book, vice president of the Confederacy, fascinating character. He's a Georgia politician who goes from wanting to avoid secession to then standing up in Savannah, Georgia in 1861 and delivering this speech, which, like you said, is just literally a case for white supremacy, that the superiority of whites over blacks is a, he says, physical, philosophical, and moral truth. And what I found fascinating about that is, this is in 1861, even at the time, slavery defenders were already learning to publicly talk in code, states' rights, economic way of life, Northern aggression. He just says the quiet part out loud. What did you make of that as a rhetorical and political strategy in the context of that time? So I found the speech and I was like, I got to do this because he says the quiet part out loud. And I. I think those are the best speeches or the most interesting ones. And for each chapter, and I think you'll appreciate this as a speech writer, I kept in mind, well, what makes a speech unique and consequential? One, we have to understand the person who gave it. What is their whole life story that allowed them to give the speech? And then what is the cause or movement that they're speaking to? Now, Alexander Stevens was against secession precisely because he believed, rightly, that slavery was going to be more easy to protect inside the country. than outside of it, right? So it wasn't a virtuous anti-secessionism. But after, you know, Georgia, his home state, secedes, he just signs up. He says, okay, I'm going along with this. And he becomes a co-author of the Confederate Constitution, which is kind of a cut and paste of the American one, except it makes very clear that despite all the talk about states' rights, no state shall abolish slavery. So, so much for states' rights. Right. And. And what's so interesting about that speech is, you know, he gave the kind of normal stuff about we're going to get rid of these tariffs and these things we don't like that the North imposes on us. And, but then he gets to slavery and white supremacy. And he doesn't defend it as a necessary evil. He doesn't say, well, we have to have this for our economy to work, or, you know, we're going to have, we'll keep this for a period of time. He turns white supremacy, into like a progressive enlightenment discovery. Philosophical moral truth, as you quoted. He compares the discovery of the supremacy of the white race. He literally compares that to enlightenment discoveries of, you know, free markets and, you know, the way that the astronomy works, you know. And it seems bizarre to read now, but you see he's trying to, to tell people you're actually ennobled by believing that you're superior to black people. He's speaking to an audience that includes a lot of poor white people who don't own slaves, who are probably going to have to go fight for slave power. And he has to give them something to fight for. And so what he's giving them is not just that they can feel better than somebody else. That's a huge thing that he's giving them, but also that they're, they're good. They're, they're, they're doing what's right. And he actually framed, this is good for black people too. Like they need to learn from us, you know. And I found it so interesting because we progressives sometimes can forget that what can appear to be the most reactionary, ugly ideas. Those people actually think that they're in their own way, quote unquote, progressive ideas and not in the terms of left, but in terms of like, this is evolution in a positive sense. He even says in that speech that this, this discovery will spread around the world, that, that other countries are going to come to see the necessity of white supremacy. And, and I found that so interesting because the same technique that I admire in like FDR pivoting to four freedoms to give the nation a bigger, bigger purpose. Alexander Stevens could do this for white supremacy. Now, of course, after they got their ass kicked in the war, he repackaged it as states rights and lost cause and all the rest of it. And was rehabilitated and reelected to Congress. And it worked, you know, so yeah, I know that that was the other thing I thought about from that speech is and, and reading it, you close the book with Trump's second inaugural. And I had forgotten he did this probably because I was like half blacked out when Trump was giving it because I couldn't believe we were going through it again. But Trump was like, and today's Martin Luther King day. And, and I have a dream too. And like this ability, this ability to, and tendency for reactionary politicians and reactionary forces to use rhetoric to repackage really unpleasant, unpopular ideas into ideas that are more broadly popular and acceptable to the rest of the country. And that sort of use American symbolism and American culture and, and, and, and the founder and founding documents and principles to kind of, you know, to kind of repackage and hide their really odious ideas. And that has been, you know, that you can draw a through line right from Alexander Stevens right through to Donald Trump. And somehow that works. Yeah. It was interesting that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are both in this book. And both of them have been completely kind of appropriated by conservatives in this country. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot in language that we might, and by the way, Barack Obama, Barack Obama did too. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot about taking responsibility and the need for black people to kind of self empower. Now, he also talked a lot about the need to have a government that allows them to do that, that they cannot do that if they are kept down in systems of segregation or systems where they can't own property or they can't get an education. That part is left out. You know, King did talk about the, the fact that we want to live in a nation where you're not judged by the color of your skin, by the content of your character. But in order to get to that kind of nation, you need a government that keeps its promissory note, as he said in the I have a dream speech, that we're going to treat black people equally. We're going to allow them to be in a nation where they're judged by the content of their character. Obama got criticized sometimes for practicing quote unquote responsibility politics too, when he talked about, you know, the need for the black community to value education. But it was always coupled with having a, a government that provided opportunity equally to people. And so it shows you how the two stories I talked about are in competition. They draw from each other. So the more reactionary story needs to take the heroes of the progressive story and kind of pull them into their narrative. Reagan loved to cite King and the content of your character, not the color of your skin while leaving out that those parts. And I think that that you have, you have to keep an eye on that because if you go back and actually experience these people in their times, they were radicals. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were absolutely radical figures like fringe figures at times who have now been kind of repackaged as people that were like welcomed at the time. And that was not the case. And I think that's what's happening in America right now. This episode is sponsored by better help. Life is a lot. Sometimes regardless of what's keeping you up at night or leaving you overwhelmed, it's easy to feel like you have to figure it out on your own, but you don't have to face these challenges alone. Having someone to listen, to understand and to support, you can make all the difference. And that's where better help comes in better help. Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U S better help does the initial matching work for you. 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Um, they have so many therapists to choose from and it's really helpful. So you don't have to traverse life's challenges alone. Find the personal support you're looking for in therapy, sign up and get 10% off at better help.com/psa. That's better H E L p.com/psa. But also the flip side of what Stevens did the activists do in a way as well. And that like one theme that comes through in the rhetoric from all the activists in the book, um, is, and you know, and, and you write that Frederick Douglas, um, instead of rejecting American rhetoric, claimed it as his own. So they don't reject the language and symbolism of the dominant culture that's oppressing them. They embrace it. it as a way to highlight the gap between ideals and reality. And, you know, this is different from what you hear from some activists today about America being inherently racist or imperialist. And I think we both experienced this with Obama did that all the time. But it was happening with Frederick Douglass and King with the promissory note, right? Is that I didn't, I came here to cash because this is what the American Declaration says and we need to live up to that. And I worship the American Declaration and Frederick Douglass was like that too. And so they are sort of radical figures in their beliefs, but their rhetoric is very much targeted to a much broader population than just activists. That's right. We progressives do the same thing that I just said the reactionaries do. We claim parts of the other story as well. Douglass had a big falling out with William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist who helped propel Douglass's career because Garrison rejected the constitution because he said that was written by a bunch of slave owners. You know, he was kind of a, you know, post 2020 look like, let's just, you know, tear the whole thing down. And Douglass said, no, no, no. When I look at the constitution, I see a document that rejects slavery. That's the part of the constitution I'm looking at. And I can make that work for me. I want to stay inside of this system. And I want to make the constitution my own. You know, King, the promissory note was on the Declaration of Independence. You said all men are created equal and you've never lived up to that. And actually, frankly, almost every activist in this book, in fact, everyone uses the Declaration of Independence to make their case that they want to close the gap between the reality and that document. Which, by the way, is why it has fallen out of favor with J.D. Vance and, you know, some of the national conservatives today, because the declaration is a fucking problem for them. It's a big problem. And now what if those activists had said that document was written by a white slave owner? Right. You know, so like, I can't use that rhetoric, you know, and I think there's a lesson in that for today, you know, which is if you want to persuade people and if you want to advance rights in this country, you actually have to embrace the whole story. Like, even the parts we don't like, maybe I'm not saying you embrace Alexander Stevens's worldview, but you're embracing the fact that this country was founded by flawed people that did, in some cases, terrible things, certainly to black people and to Native Americans, but they left enough of a foundation that we can work with, you know, like, and I mean, the title of the book is taken from Martin Luther King's speech the night before he died. All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper. Like, that's like, almost his last words, you know? And I think that's important. Obama would always do that, too. And we should talk about the race speech, but it's about, just like individual people contain complexity, so does America. Nobody's perfect. How do you draw out the better and build a message and a story and a speech from that? Lincoln has a line that you quote in that chapter on the Second Inaugural. And the line is, if we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do, and if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do, and we never ought to lose sight of this fact. And Obama does something similar in the race speech, clearly calls out structural systemic racism, but then shows an understanding of and even an empathy towards the white resentment and backlash. And there is this pattern of the speakers you chose in the book, both activists, and politicians, probably especially the politicians, of working especially hard to show that they understand and maybe empathize with their opponents, because their larger project is to preserve this union and this country, which is much harder. It's much harder work than just being able to, you know, either secede from the country or, you know, try to, you know, subjugate some other group, like trying to keep everyone together, even when the people that you're trying to win support from don't believe you should have the rights that you have. That's fucking hard. I was stunned to find myself coming away from this admiring Lincoln even more. Yeah, me too. But because he goes through this torturous process, trying to figure out the meaning of it all. And he goes through a torturous process with slavery, you know. First, you know, he wants to restrict its spread. Then he wants to preserve the union without messing with it. Then he kind of, out of wartime necessity, turns to abolition. And it's only later in the war that he kind of fully embraces abolition as the cause of the war, not just the preservation of the union. He's moving in the direction of Douglass, the activist and abolitionist. Douglass was becoming more pragmatic, though. He was saying he used to castigate Lincoln. Then he's like, wait a second, I think Lincoln's moving in the right direction. I'm going to kind of meet him there. And so he starts to talk to Lincoln. He starts to work with Lincoln. He gets up and Lincoln gives that second inaugural address. He's about to win the war. He does not talk about that. He doesn't say like, we've won these great battlefield victories. He does not talk down the South. But he does give an absolutely unapologetic and almost religious case for abolition as, you know, the second founding of the United States. But the way he's saying it, the way he frames it is that is going to be good for the South and the North. This is redemption, you know, that we're finding. We have this opportunity to start over, having cleansed ourselves of this sin. And there's this kind of insane moment. Blames the North as well as the South, right? Like a real, like we were, I know that we're fighting you right now and you're going to lose. Didn't say it, but we are all complicit in what has happened over the last however many years. He calls it repeatedly American slavery, right? Not Southern slavery, because the North profited off of it too, you know? And there's this great scene where that night he's at the White House and he's greeting a receiving line and Douglas tries to get in the receiving line to see him and gets booted out. And someone tells Lincoln, Lincoln says, well, let Douglas in. And Douglas comes in and he stands in. And he reaches the front and he shakes Abraham Lincoln's hand. And Lincoln says, what did you think of the speech? And Douglas says, I'll write you a letter. It's like a thousand people here. And he said, no, no, no, no. I am more interested in what you think of this speech than anybody else. And Douglas just looks at him and says, it was a sacred effort. And I read that and I was like, all right, whatever you think about this country, that happened. A former slave. A former slave. Meets with the president. In the White House. Yeah. Meets with Abraham Lincoln and has that conversation because they both evolved. They both changed. You know, Douglas became more pragmatic. Lincoln became more radical. And Lincoln could only do that because he was able to inhabit, he could look at the world through Douglas's eyes and through a Southerner's eyes. And that was Obama. I mean, we should talk about the race speech. To set it, I'll tell you, I originally ended the book with the Selma speech. Yeah. Yeah. Obama's favorite, which is good. Triumphalist, you know, preparation. And after Trump was elected, you know, me and my editor were talking, we're like, well, that's probably not the right note to end on. And, and so I just like, I got to end with Trump. And actually I went back to read the race speech again, and it was more relevant today than it was even in 2008 when he gave it. Yeah. Because he is able to, he, he, he's saying, um, well, uh, you know, he's doing what you're talking about, which is inhabiting. Through his grandmother and Reverend Wright and through the diagnoses of the white working class and the black working class, he's saying, we all encompass these complexities. And until we can look at the world through each other's eyes, we're never going to move forward. And that's the same thing Lincoln was saying. Yep. It's funny because, um, I was reading that chapter and just reading the whole book, sort of having flashbacks to the night, uh, when I first talked to Obama about. The race speech and what he wanted to say in that. And he w he laid out a lot of the thesis of your book, which is that this, this, these competing arguments that we've been having in this country since the founding and at the very beginning was slavery and race that we've been having to grapple with. And, and, you know, you, you write in the book how, you know, I, I ended up doing a draft and have the, have the beginning and the end. And then Obama basically just does, just track changes and writes like an entire speech in the middle of the, of the speech and sends it back because I think he had had that in his mind for a very long time. Like he was able to, you know, analyze and talk about the Reverend Wright controversy. But if you had lifted the Reverend Wright controversy out, all of the other themes and things that he says in that speech were definitely running through his mind for a very long time because they were themes throughout history. That's exactly right. And, As you should know, you were the speechwriter on it. And by the way, I don't short shrift. I mean, that beginning and end got him to that middle, right? Sometimes that's the speechwriter's job to get the principle to where he can have that outpouring of track changes. But I think what I understood better today, both because of what's happened and from writing the book, is first of all, Reverend Wright was a more interesting character to me today. In 2008, he was like a pain in the ass. Like, why is this guy saying this crazy shit that's going to mess up our campaign? But actually, having written this book and then having lived the post-Obama experience, Reverend Wright emerges out of the black church tradition of the Jeremiad, which is a speech that is intended to call out a nation's sins. So what he was doing is the same thing that Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart and all the people in that tradition did in this book. King did it often too. And by the way, some of what Reverend Wright said. He ages pretty well, given some of the things Trump's done. Now, that said, Obama fused the activist and politician in himself. And then when I look at the two key parts of that speech that he wrote in the middle, one is the famous part where he's like, I can no more disown Reverend Wright than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who raised me, who would do anything for me, but I heard her say horrible things. I'm not saying it as elegantly as he did. What he's saying there on an individual level is. Hey, we all everybody in our families is like this, like you can love somebody and think they're a good person and not cancel them because, you know, they said something you disagree with, whether it's Reverend Wright or your grandmother who's white. And then he goes into the racial stalemate, as he calls it, and he describes black structural inequality in ways I don't think I'd ever heard. I mean, unsparingly, unflinchingly, sparingly, you know. Redlining, education gap, income gap. But then he talks like about the white working class more effectively than J.D. Vance or Donald Trump. The line where he says they don't feel particularly privileged by their race is an incredibly powerful line that these are people whose jobs have been shipped overseas, that these are people who had to bust their kids, which is a hassle across town because of some civil rights requirement, which, again, I think is worth doing. But, you know, it's their obligation. These are people who are told that they're worried about crime, they're racist, you know. These are his white grandmother, you know. And that ability to say, like, none of this is going to work, American identity, American politics, unless we can have that ability to look at the world through each other's eyes. I mean, that to me was the magic of that, the alchemy of that speech. Pod Save America is brought to you by Chime. Chime is changing the way people bank. 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It only takes a few minutes. Just sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services for MyPay and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime Prime only. No minimum balance required. For more information on APY rates, MyPay, SpotMe, and travel perks, go to Chime.com slash disclosures. if you're a reactionary rooted in grievance and nostalgia, you're inherently going to win the go-low fight, right? Because what we're trying to do is play for something bigger. Douglas and King. The Douglas speech, I love this speech. He gave it during Reconstruction, and it's a speech that's really about multiracial democracy, but it's a speech in defense of Chinese immigrants. Like probably polled, if we had a Polar Coaster episode in 1867, the advice would be like, please do not go there. It was wildly unpopular, but essentially these Chinese immigrants were being incredibly mistreated. They were kind of the new slaves, you know, even though they weren't total servitude. And Douglas is saying, if I believe in multiracial democracy, I have to stand up for the rights of these people too. And he gives a beautiful going high speech about that. Now you could say, well, Douglas failed. There's a Chinese exclusion act that was passed shortly after banning Chinese people from coming to this country for decades. Did he fail? Because look around California today. How many Chinese Americans and Asian Americans do you see? Maybe because he went high and he went big, maybe he won in the end. You know, King, same thing. Like King gives a speech and was interesting reliving the story of that speech. He, it's pretty good speech. He did promissory note. He's got a lot of good rhetoric. He did not have the dream in there. He ad-libbed the whole dream sequence. I will. This was just like a speechwriter nerding out thing, but I had never heard, heard that King's staff, someone on his staff who was helping with the speech was like, don't say, don't talk about your dream, whatever you do, because it's too cliche. And then King just gives the speech and does it. So first of all, as I'm so glad we're talking about this, because it was such a speechwriter thing. They had not really worked on the speech as much as they should have because they were super busy. Everybody thinks, you know, you have big speech, you work on it forever. They were huddled in the Willard Hotel, like the night before the march. And they're literally writing. The speech. And this guy's like, whatever you do, Martin, like, just don't tell him about that dream. It's, it's cliche, you know? So they leave it out. He stays up. They finished the draft of the speech. It's done. They distribute it to the press and everything. And King's sitting there on the dais and he's, and you can kind of see him in the footage. He's kind of still fiddling with his speech. And then he gets up there and he gives the speech and it's good. And he gets this moment and he's kind of stops kind of like Obama did before he sang amazing grace. He kind of stops and pauses. And, and I, if I had to guess, he said, I'm never going to speak to a crowd this big again. The whole country's watching on TV. Most white people have never seen a black person deliver a whole speech before. These people watching, some of them are going to go back to the South and get their ass beat in. I need to give them something more. I need to give them something else. Now, the dream sequence he'd used before, by the way, was not nearly as good. It was okay. It was, it was good, but it was, it was not the evocative language that he ended up using. And he goes so, I like every image that he uses is black and white coming together, black children and white children in a nation where you're judged not by the color of your skin, the content of your character. He's giving the nation a sense of purpose. Right. And he's, you know, he's doing that because he's trying to affect John F. Kennedy to have a more ambitious civil rights bill, but also intangibly in the same way that maybe Douglas changed America over time. It's kind of hard. It's hard to argue with King's dream. You know, he went so big that even today, Donald Trump has to be like, yeah, I have a dream too. You know, like, like, and I think we, let's not lose that. Like, it's not about just going high. It's also about going big, like a big vision for this country. Well, I was thinking about that. And one thing that connects all these speeches that go big or high or whatever you want to say is this like deeply moral language that I, as I was reading the book, realized like, fuck, we don't have that anymore. Like, we don't hear that anymore. Right. It's not like they are trying to win arguments through logic and reason alone, that a lot of these speakers from King to Douglas to Dolores Huerta to everyone you have in the book that is not a reactionary and actually a lot of the reactionaries too, they use a moral language that is both it's embedded in the founding documents, but even deeper than that, there's a lot of religious language and religion. And in a way that I hadn't expected, not in the way that the, like the Christian right uses religion today, because a lot of the people who, on the progressive side, who use this religious language aren't even religious themselves. You mentioned that, you know, Abraham Lincoln wasn't a big fan of organized religion, but again, you know, Frederick Douglas calls his second inaugural sacred and he reaches for this sort of religious imagery and, and it happens all the way through King. And all the way through all of these, all of these figures in the book. And I wonder what you thought about that. I know you're not like a deeply religious person. I'm not a deeply like organized religious person, but it was hard to not notice that each of these speeches, especially from a left that has become, you know, fairly secular, even some of the most radical activists and abolitionists and, and progressive presidents throughout history have sort of like tried to ground their argument. In something in this, in this higher power. Yeah. I mean, and there's like, look, there's some interesting particularities like, you know, churches and faiths were often party to movements. Right. You know, but, but, but also just the, the language is, is religious, but it's, it's also just a moral, you know, Dolores Huerta, her speech, she marches from Delano, California, all the way to Sacramento with, with the farm workers and Cesar Chavez, who, you know, is obviously problematic. Good thing you went with Dolores Huerta. I went with Dolores. Yeah. You didn't know at the time, but that was a. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ostensibly she's there to advocate for farm worker union rights. You know, like we wanted to have the right to collective bargaining and we want, you know, longer breaks and we want healthcare and all these things. But the speech is like, we are here. We embody our needs for you. You know, like it's a very visceral activist language that felt very contemporary. It was basically all lives matter kind of language, like our lives matter. Like we are here. You have to see us, you know? And I think that some of it is, yes, religion is kind of in some ways the simplest way. And I heard, you know, Reverend Warnock on recently, and he talks a bit about this. Like religion is obviously, and James Tallarico is doing this now, religion is, is a quick way to, into morality. But I also think there are things you can draw from religious traditions, like. Right. Obama used to, Obama would always say, you know, a core of his message at the beginning was, I am my brother's keeper. I am my sister's keeper. That's a religious idea, but it's also a secular idea. Yes. Right. Well, that's what's most interesting is the religious language that a lot of these speakers use has, have, has, it could be very secular. Like you don't need to believe in any specific faith to, to, to. Has absolutely, has secular meaning. And I think that's the language. You used to have this joke, you know, I think I can tell it about kind of, you know, the Democratic consultant speech, you know, we want to put the middle class at the middle of our priorities. Right. And the horrifying thing about living through the last decade is actually that we want to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out. You know, there's no morality in that. Nope. There's no purpose in that. Nope. There's no sense that I, I want to care for my neighbor or that I, I have a stake in this country and its success, or that I want my life to have a meaning bigger than even what I do every day. I belong to a whole that matters, you know. Right. Right. So, you know, the Kennedy language about ripples of hope, right? Or I'm not free unless everybody's free. You know, like, I think that what's been missing in Democratic politics since Obama, and this isn't just like flocking for Obama, it's, I think is, you know, we haven't had necessarily great speakers or we've gotten consultants speak or frankly, social media is kind of disincentivized this kind of speaking. But I think people are ready for it now. I think like life is pretty fucked in this context. Yeah. Like rampant inequality, wars, AIs coming for jobs, like your kids are on screens and friends with chatbots or something. Like they want someone to come along and say, there's something bigger that we need to be about, that we need to care for our neighbor. Things, concepts of fairness and dignity, you know, that are, dignity is a very religious concept, that there's value in human life, which is why what ICE is doing is wrong, you know. I think that kind of language, whoever you are, you're going to have to have a voice. Whoever can harness that and capture that, I think that would be very useful in a 2028 presidential candidacy. And I'm not saying that like ideology isn't important here and policy isn't important, but like when you say, even when you say Medicare for all or abolish ICE, even if you believe those things, talking about them in that way is not the most powerful way to talk about them. Slogans to signal that you exist on a certain area of the political spectrum is fine for, you know, signaling to certain in-groups and other people paying close attention to politics that that's where you are. Fine. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying it is not sufficient anymore. And it is evidence that we are missing that bigger moral story about who we are and where we need to go that you see. throughout American history that you've chronicled in this book. And I just don't i have not heard anyone tell that story or even attempt to which is why i'm still like there was an interesting moment do you remember bernie in i think his last campaign he used to do this thing at rallies he started to do where he'd say i want you to look at the person you know next to you yes and what this campaign is about is i want you to care about that person as much as you care about yourself yep and medicare for all flows from that of course yeah right absolutely so what a good politician does is absolutely the policy and ideology matters so this is not just about giving airy-fairy speeches but if you you ground it in something you anchor it in a kind of moral language and a story about america and what american identity means um it should follow naturally well if you care about the person next to you as much as care about yourself you want them to have health care too you know yeah and that's that's i think the piece that's that's been missing to some extent so you end the book with trump's second inaugural um and so i think i think you said originally it was probably going to be what uh pat buchanan's 1992 speech and then obama selma speech and then yeah instead you did obama race and then uh and with trump's second inaugural and um you know we've talked about how in the sweep of history you start realizing that made the transition from obama to trump um is more natural than it may have seemed at the time because we've always had these backlashes and and that is true i will say after reading your whole book and then getting to trump his second inaugural and his presidency feel like even more of a departure even more un-american than even steven's white supremacy speech or you have mary lisa's sort of xenophobic and pat buchanan who you talk about like yeah and i think it's the um because it's not just the xenophobia it's not just like the the issues of race uh that we're dealing with the trump again it is the the dictatorial quality of trump's rhetoric and the actions really stand out even from all the other reactionaries in the book and i don't know if that that struck you too but i was like it i read it and i was more like oh we are fucked that is absolutely a hundred percent on point and what i would say because look there's some things that make a lot of sense if you look at history um the kind of populist grievance of the white working class kind of paranoid america first isolationism periodic spasms of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment there's a lot of currents of running to trump um where he is a departure alexander stevens that was a speech they had just had a process now obviously lincoln thought it was illegal but they voted to secede they wrote a constitution and he's giving a speech defending the legal framework for what they did you know i mean so weirdly like the confederacy like tried to have a veneer of process trump in that speech says i think the most chilling line right is i was saved by god to make america great again and and everything is i everything is like you know like reagan would never have said that you know um and and i think the extremity the departure no leader in american history has said that not even the george wallace's not like none of them nope nope and he basically says like your job is done you voted for me story's over i won and i'm taking custody of this country and its story and and you're right the extremity is not just the it's not the racism and the xenophobia and the um you know unleashed capitalism all these things it's the dictatorial it's the idea that i'm not playing by franklin's rule book you know i don't need to follow the law i can do whatever i want that's the departure and that is a departure like that's the radicalism of trump is not in the underlying xenophobia or populism it's in the putting that in service of someone who believes not in the constitutional framework within which we have this competition of stories like i welcome a world a future in which jd vance plays by the rules and gives versions of his clarion to the world and we debate him yep like that's healthy that's good yep like and i welcome other people disagreeing with me and agreeing with jd vance i don't have all the answers shit i'm not even close um what i do insist on is that we're still dealing within the compromise that franklin and his buddies outlined and and that in his rhetoric and in his actions trump has has departed from that and i think that's why this is is an actual emergency yes it's a backlash just like there was a backlash to reconstruction just like there's a backlash to the reconstruction just like there's a backlash to the rights movement but this this is someone saying like even the segregationists you know we're processed people you know states rights and these laws and we'll you know we're going to try to get people on the supreme court and do this like trump is is just saying none of this applies to me and that's the message in his rhetoric yeah and and and we can leave it here maybe you can react to this and then and i don't bring it up because i actually do think that we're fucked but i think that if we are trying to tell a story about where we go from here and um continue having this argument in a way where we actually win the argument like that's what we have we have to figure out that what trump represents and what he's telling people and i don't say that to be like to refight the 2024 battle about like oh kamala should call him a fascist and we should talk more about democracy and because obviously the words have all been wrong not just from kamala but from everyone like we have not been like just saying that trump is a dangerous fascist clearly has not worked but what is it about him and what he's doing and this departure from the rest of american history that is still um uh that is still appealing to a big part of the country and what is the argument to that part of the country to say that like this is like lincoln did for to the south like this is bad for all of us it's bad for you it's bad for us it's bad for our project and we have to find a way out of this together i think you see uh also doing this a bit in the sense where it's not just about corruption what he's saying is if someone like trump and his cronies and actually i start the section on the speech on trump with the tableau of all those oligarchs that stage for reason if if there are a small number of people that are just exempted entirely from the rules you're going to get screwed like not only is that fundamentally wrong and un-american it also leads to outcomes where you're fucked because they're not going to look at they're going to loot this country they're not going to you know do anything for the common good you know they're not going to do anything to care for the neighbor they're not going to care about the person next to them um and and so i i think that that we have to not have the separation of the democracy message and the kind of economic message because they're connected because if some guy says i was saved by god to save this country and the laws don't apply to me well he's going to build a ballroom and steal a bunch of money and set up a slush fund for his friends and leverage american foreign policy to make billions in crypto and launch crazy wars and people are making money off of insider trading and while you pay higher gas prices you know so i think the people that can tell a story that draws those connections between the radicalism of trump and the outcomes in people's lives um i i think that's probably you know i don't claim to have the exact formulation but that's the space and you see ossoff circling it you see warnock circling it chris murphy circling it aoc is definitely circling it yep um i i think i think the notably younger democrats by the way like are figuring this out yeah ben i could talk to you for another couple hours about all this book i have all these other all these other questions we don't have to make it a big exchange just curious like you read them what was your favorite speech oh wow i mean it sounds it's like an answer that so many people have given in the past but i think like you i came to appreciate lincoln's second inaugural totally agreed in like a way that i just had never yeah like i remember when people said that i would always be like yeah it's a pretty good speech but i didn't really get why everyone loved it so much and your your chapter on it and the story behind it has has brought me around to how both radical and and hopeful and and and and with so much humility um he delivers that speech at that time so yeah yeah yeah totally agree and pretty crazy right that the most radical speech ever was in 1865 it just goes to show you know uh history moves in different directions sure does um everyone go buy the book seriously i know i always say this we have people on who buy books and and ben's a crooked co-host but it is it this book will stay with me for a long time and i will go back to it um many times and it was like such a bomb from reading the news because yeah it really it's just a real like if you care about the country and you care about politics and you're paying attention to politics but you want to feel something deeper and more hopeful than you see every day go read uh always say it's a fantastic book thanks john all right take care buddy pods of america is a crooked media production our show is produced by austin fisher saul rubin mckenna roberts and ferris safari with reed churlin elijah cone and adrian hill our team includes matt de grote ben hefcote jordan canter charlotte landis carol palaviv david tolls mia kelman ryan young and naomi single our staff is proudly unionized with the writers Guild of America East.