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Speaker 1: simply safe. Welcome to Plate America. I'm Jon Favreau on
Speaker 1: today's show my good friend and fellow speechwriter for Barack Obama,
Speaker 1: Ben Rhodes. America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday has been
Speaker 1: on my mind a lot lately, especially since Donald Trump
Speaker 1: seems intent on making the country's semi quincentennial all about himself,
Speaker 1: his parties, his name on everything, his guests, and his
Speaker 1: version of the American story. But of course there's another
Speaker 1: version of our story that resonates with at least half
Speaker 1: of us, likely more at the very least. Americans have
Speaker 1: been engaged in an argument about what this country is
Speaker 1: and who belongs since we declared independence two and a
Speaker 1: half centuries ago. Ben has written an incredible timely book
Speaker 1: about that argument. Truly, it's fantastic. I read the whole
Speaker 1: thing in about a day, and you all know what
Speaker 1: a big reader I am these days, So that's saying something.
Speaker 1: The book is called All We Say, a History of
Speaker 1: the United States in fifteen speeches. In it, Ben traces
Speaker 1: the history of America through some of the nation's most
Speaker 1: consequential speeches, from a long forgotten speech from a Native
Speaker 1: American chief and Lincoln's second inaugural to I Have a Dream,
Speaker 1: and speeches from Barack Obama and even Donald Trump. It's
Speaker 1: a beautiful book about the ways in which, in the
Speaker 1: words of our old boss, this union may never be perfect,
Speaker 1: but generation after generation shows it can always be perfected.
Speaker 1: Ben and I were psyched to have this conversation, both
Speaker 1: because we get to nerd out as former speech writers
Speaker 1: and dig into what the two of us talk about
Speaker 1: when we're not in front of a mic, how those
Speaker 1: of us who don't love being governed by Donald Trump
Speaker 1: can win the argument about what this country is and
Speaker 1: where it needs to go, about how we close the
Speaker 1: gap between America's best ideals and our current fairly bleak reality.
Speaker 1: It was a great conversation and we'll get to it
Speaker 1: in a minute, but before we do, please consider becoming
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Speaker 1: and please subscribe. Let's get to it. Here's Ben Rhodes.
Speaker 1: What's up, Ben, John.
Speaker 2: This is the interview I was looking forward to since
Speaker 2: I finished my book.
Speaker 1: I have to tell you, honestly, I was going to say,
Speaker 1: I love when we have an excuse to pod together,
Speaker 1: especially this time because you wrote a book about speeches,
Speaker 1: which is perfect for the two of us. For people
Speaker 1: who don't know, I know a lot of you probably do.
Speaker 1: But Ben and I wrote speeches for six years together,
Speaker 1: sometimes quite literally together, like side by side with our
Speaker 1: laptops open till three am. But this is also a
Speaker 1: book about American identity and an argument over the American
Speaker 1: story that's been raging for two hundred and fifty years,
Speaker 1: which has also become an obsession of mine as of flate.
Speaker 1: But I want to start with something you wrote about
Speaker 1: the book, and you wrote that it's the third in
Speaker 1: a trilogy that started with your memoir, then your book
Speaker 1: about authoritarianism, and now this, and that finishing this one
Speaker 1: means you're ready to let go of your past identities
Speaker 1: as a White House staffer, foreign policy advisor, and speech writer.
Speaker 1: Say more about that. Why you're letting go.
Speaker 2: I actually really thought about this, John, because I wrote
Speaker 2: my memoir, which was a very kind of raw experience, right.
Speaker 2: It was like I didn't digest it at all. I
Speaker 2: wrote that in a year that came in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: Then I very much for my last book was in
Speaker 2: my kind of foreign policy global politics pod Save the World,
Speaker 2: if you will self in terms of traveling around and
Speaker 2: understanding what had happened in Russia and China and Hungary
Speaker 2: under Victor orbon and I was literally using the experiences, contacts,
Speaker 2: networks I had from being in that world. And then
Speaker 2: this one is entirely I wanted to go back into
Speaker 2: history because I had a sense that I could find
Speaker 2: a lot there that you could understand this argument that
Speaker 2: we're having now by tracing it back from the beginning.
Speaker 2: And frankly, my original conceit was Obama and Trump kind
Speaker 2: of encapsulate represent two different opposing stories that we've had
Speaker 2: throughout our history and competition with each other. And I'm
Speaker 2: not in his Storian. And so the vehicle I knew
Speaker 2: that I would choose is speeches. And I found myself
Speaker 2: kind of returning to that core identity, that guy who
Speaker 2: showed up in the Obama campaign office when you know
Speaker 2: you were the chief speechwriter. You're my boss. I remember
Speaker 2: walking in from my Think ten culture in DC, and wow,
Speaker 2: my boss is wearing a T shirt, you know, like
Speaker 2: like this is a different vibe.
Speaker 1: You know, we're in a T shirt and he doesn't
Speaker 1: know shit about foreign policy up here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I see this actually seriously to you, like,
Speaker 2: because you know you've been through this, you kind of
Speaker 2: don't want to go through life as like Jon Favreau
Speaker 2: or Ben Rhodes's comma former Obama X. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I kind of feel like I've mined it now,
Speaker 2: you like I've done this is not a memoir at all,
Speaker 2: but like it drew deeply on all the things we
Speaker 2: did in speech writing, and so I felt like but
Speaker 2: kind of more fundamentally and existentially to I think I
Speaker 2: finally came to terms with how it all ended, you know,
Speaker 2: in the sense that Trump was this kind of rebuke
Speaker 2: of the inevitability of progress, right of the arc of
Speaker 2: the moral universe bending towards justice kind of on its own,
Speaker 2: if you will. And I think reliving all of American
Speaker 2: history kind of allowed me to situate our experience in
Speaker 2: a continuum where it's actually not that unusual that this happened.
Speaker 2: You know, reconstruction was followed by segregation. You know, civil
Speaker 2: rights movement was followed by backlash. So for all those reasons,
Speaker 2: I really did internally like you have to trick your
Speaker 2: you know, as a writer, and you are a writer,
Speaker 2: you know, you have to kind of tell yourself a story.
Speaker 2: And my story was this is the third the trilogy.
Speaker 2: It kind of completes both my various Obama identities and
Speaker 2: kind of, you know, is me coming to terms with
Speaker 2: how our chapter ended, and yeah, now I can move on,
Speaker 2: see what happens next.
Speaker 1: So I read the book, I started it Sunday night
Speaker 1: and we got back from Love It's Wedding, and then
Speaker 1: I read most of it yesterday and last night. We're
Speaker 1: recording this on Tuesday. You're listening to it probably on Sunday.
Speaker 1: First of all, I absolutely fucking loved the book. It
Speaker 1: is incredible. Everyone should read it. I also it did
Speaker 1: give me this sense of hope and also peace, like
Speaker 1: you say, you came to terms with it, sort of
Speaker 1: peace about like the last ten years and where it fits. Yes,
Speaker 1: because you read when it's the speeches you selected were
Speaker 1: specifically selected because they each tell a story about American
Speaker 1: identity and this argument over what America is that we've
Speaker 1: been having since the founding. And when you lay it
Speaker 1: all out like that, along with the different characters, you
Speaker 1: really do get this sense that we have been here before,
Speaker 1: and people in these moments have been able to, you know,
Speaker 1: speak and march and fight their way out of these moments.
Speaker 1: And I don't think it's it's not Pollyannish at all,
Speaker 1: but it's sort of like a hard earned hope that
Speaker 1: you get from reading it. But I thought it's outstanding.
Speaker 1: You open the Book of all People. JD. Vance and
Speaker 1: his speech last summer at Claremont about American identity, which
Speaker 1: listeners to this show and especially offline, know that I
Speaker 1: can't stop talking about. Austin is nodding his head very
Speaker 1: knowingly right now. I think you and I had a
Speaker 1: few conversations about this, about the JD. Vance speech when
Speaker 1: you were thinking about opening the book with it. What
Speaker 1: made you finally decide that Vance's speech was the way
Speaker 1: into a book about two hundred and fifty years of
Speaker 1: American identity.
Speaker 2: So a prologue for a book is a fascinating thing
Speaker 2: because you kind of have to telegraph your argument. You know,
Speaker 2: the book starts in real time with Benjamin Franklin, which
Speaker 2: we can get to, but I don't want to drop
Speaker 2: people in there, you know. I wanted to give people
Speaker 2: a sense of kind of what the argument of the
Speaker 2: book is. And I always had in mind when I
Speaker 2: was literally selecting these speeches, which was an interesting process,
Speaker 2: and as I was writing a chapter after chapter that
Speaker 2: if you really distill it down, there are two stories
Speaker 2: of what American identity is, you know, with obviously their
Speaker 2: permutations are not all exactly the same, but I think
Speaker 2: you can simplify and say there is one story that
Speaker 2: is a nationality of inheritance that you know, you can
Speaker 2: call it originalism, you can call it blood and seol nationalism,
Speaker 2: but essentially, this was a white Christian nation founded by
Speaker 2: a particular set of people, the particular set of beliefs.
Speaker 2: And now I'm literally quoting jade Evan's and it's the
Speaker 2: inheritor of kind of Western civilization. Sometimes that's Western supremacy.
Speaker 2: And sure other people live here of different races and ethnicities,
Speaker 2: but they kind of have to subordinate themselves to this
Speaker 2: original identity. And American exceptionalism is just a given, like
Speaker 2: we are exceptional because we're American. We are the city
Speaker 2: on a hill, we're in some ways God's chosen people.
Speaker 2: We can do whatever we want to the people in
Speaker 2: this country, whether they're Native Americans or black people or immigrants,
Speaker 2: and we can do whatever we want to other countries. Right,
Speaker 2: And again I'm casting it negatively, but I frankly think
Speaker 2: that that at a core, that that is a strain
Speaker 2: that runs through American history. And then the opposing story
Speaker 2: is one of progressive nationalism, that we've never lived up
Speaker 2: to the creed in the Declaration of Independence that all
Speaker 2: men are created equal and that American history is a
Speaker 2: story of peace, people trying to change the country for
Speaker 2: the better, trying to make a more perfect union, to
Speaker 2: use a phrase, and that's how you get the abolitionist
Speaker 2: movement and the suffrage movement, in the civil rights movement,
Speaker 2: and the labor rights movement, all these things. JD. Vance
Speaker 2: comes along and decides to tell the first version of
Speaker 2: the story for me because that speech is literally yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, when I knew I was going to use
Speaker 2: it is when he said we are not a nation
Speaker 2: founded on a creed, and he name checks the Declaration
Speaker 2: of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal.
Speaker 2: He says, no, that is not American identity. We are
Speaker 2: a particular people from a particular place, with a particular
Speaker 2: way of life. And he said the quiet part out loud.
Speaker 2: Now he didn't say white, but you know what particular people?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Do we think he's talking about? And he has this
Speaker 2: kind of logic way where, well, who could argue with
Speaker 2: us being a particular place and a particular people. I
Speaker 2: can argue with it because we were thirteen states at
Speaker 2: the beginning on the northeast coast. We weren't. Our geography
Speaker 2: is wildly different today, the people in this country today
Speaker 2: don't look at anything like the people in those thirteen states,
Speaker 2: and the way of life I mean, walk down the
Speaker 2: street in my neighbor in Venice. There's a ton of
Speaker 2: ways of life there, right, And so I actually think
Speaker 2: that JD did the service of framing the other story
Speaker 2: for me, and so I literally opened with it.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that, and then other people have to be
Speaker 1: subordinate to sort of this white Christian identity. And I've
Speaker 1: heard people say, and I've talked to people about this
Speaker 1: that JD. Vance when he spouts this like anti immigrant
Speaker 1: xenophobic rhetoric is full of shit and doesn't really believe
Speaker 1: it and couldn't really believe it because his in laws
Speaker 1: are immigrants from India. His wife is a first generation American.
Speaker 1: But there is another possible explanation here you touch on,
Speaker 1: which is this obsession Vance has and he does it
Speaker 1: in the speech and we've heard him do it, and
Speaker 1: he's like mocked for it and other times and other places.
Speaker 1: With the need for everyone to show gratitude, particularly foreign
Speaker 1: born American citizens immigrants, that if you're here and we
Speaker 1: let you come here, then you need to show gratitude
Speaker 1: to the people who've been here the longest, or to
Speaker 1: the or to our ancestors, or to like this way
Speaker 1: of life and this culture. And I do think that's
Speaker 1: how you reconcile, like because if you ask jd Vance
Speaker 1: he would say, well, I'm for immigration, I'm for you know,
Speaker 1: like a diverse country. That's fine. But his problem is
Speaker 1: that if you haven't, if you don't have seven generations
Speaker 1: of ancestors buried in Kentucky, which he said at the
Speaker 1: at the Republican National Convention, then you don't get to
Speaker 1: complain about this country. I mean, is he basically he
Speaker 1: said that about Mamdani too. Mamdanni had some like Fourth
Speaker 1: of July message where he was like, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: we got to continue to improve this nation and something
Speaker 1: very mild about perfecting or improving the nation. And jadvancel
Speaker 1: was like, how could he do that? We let him
Speaker 1: in here and blubb blah, it's like really fucking crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you believe that, because he said that, you
Speaker 2: have to show gratitude in that speech. And I posed
Speaker 2: a question in the Pearlog gratitude to whom who were
Speaker 2: we for?
Speaker 1: What? Who were everyone for?
Speaker 2: These people? Yeah? Because actually immigration was a much bigger
Speaker 2: theme than I actually expected it would be in this book,
Speaker 2: because you keep bumping into that. And you know, Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 2: his father was an immigrant. You know, he left religious
Speaker 2: persecution behind as well as seeking economic opportunity. And then
Speaker 2: you run through the other people in this book. You know,
Speaker 2: Lewis Brandeis was a Jewish immigrant who left anti Semitism
Speaker 2: behind in Europe. Mary Leesee, a populist, was a poor
Speaker 2: came from a poor Irish family that fled, you know,
Speaker 2: the oppression of the British, you know, and you know,
Speaker 2: obviously you get up to the twentieth century. Interestingly, Dolores
Speaker 2: Squerta comes from a family and this is something people
Speaker 2: don't think about enough. John A part of her family
Speaker 2: weren't immigrants. That border just got redrawn and brought them
Speaker 2: into the United States. There are a lot of brown
Speaker 2: people in this country that were here before a lot
Speaker 2: of white people, and we just you know, expanded and
Speaker 2: redrew the border around places like you know, New Mexico
Speaker 2: for instance, and and and fundamentally it comes down to
Speaker 2: the question of do you believe that someone Zoormumdani, for example,
Speaker 2: is as American as someone whose family's been here for
Speaker 2: seven generations, right, I genuinely do. Yeah, and I'm not.
Speaker 2: That's not a virtue signal, that's just a how can
Speaker 2: citizenship not be equal?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: How can some people be more American than other people?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: We are supposed to be a nation anchored in laws,
Speaker 2: the Constitution and a creed, the Declaration of Independence, which
Speaker 2: suggests not that we should have open borders, which is
Speaker 2: how Jdvans kind of shorthands it. He says, well, if
Speaker 2: everybody who believes in the Declaration in Dedependence is American,
Speaker 2: and then we'd have billions.
Speaker 1: Of don't we have to admit them all? No, we don't.
Speaker 1: That's not what.
Speaker 2: We can have a border, and we can seal that
Speaker 2: border at times for you know, I mean I don't
Speaker 2: necessarily agree with that, but we can by a matter
Speaker 2: of policy. But the people who are American are American,
Speaker 2: and they're equally American. And frankly, the thing we should
Speaker 2: be grateful for is that we're a nation that is
Speaker 2: able to have all these different people come here and
Speaker 2: enrich this country. I mean, how boring would this country
Speaker 2: be it was just comprised of people like JD. Vance,
Speaker 2: you know, like like I I just I think fundamentally
Speaker 2: I felt myself because you kept encountering you know, people
Speaker 2: didn't like the Irish when they came here. People didn't
Speaker 2: like Chinese people when they came here, like people some
Speaker 2: people have never liked black people being here, even though
Speaker 2: they were brought here mostly against their will, like the
Speaker 2: people didn't like Jewish people when they came here. And
Speaker 2: guess what you've rolled the tape forward? Does anybody think
Speaker 2: that this nation is not better for having Chinese Americans
Speaker 2: and Jewish Americans and Irish Americans. No, I don't think
Speaker 2: even Jade Vance would would make that argument. So what
Speaker 2: are we really talking about here?
Speaker 1: And it's been said many times by many people, But
Speaker 1: that is what that the core of American exceptionalism is
Speaker 1: all about, which is we can't we can go live
Speaker 1: in Germany and live in Japan. We can't become German
Speaker 1: or become Japanese, but anyone can come to America and
Speaker 1: become American and like that. That is a very that
Speaker 1: is a unique exceptional quality of America, and that is
Speaker 1: the experiment.
Speaker 2: I think we're also different because we were founded by
Speaker 2: people who immigrated here, like we were founded, not by
Speaker 2: the indigenous people here, and I think that that does
Speaker 2: kind of create an additional legitimacy for the idea that
Speaker 2: if this is not a nation of Indigenous Americans, then
Speaker 2: it is by definition a nation of people who have
Speaker 2: chosen an identity and set up a government that could be,
Speaker 2: you know, flexible enough to absorb different people. You know,
Speaker 2: a lot of the speeches that spoke about the virtue
Speaker 2: of immigration, Frederick Douglas, Lewis Brandeis, they talked about the
Speaker 2: fact that the decision to come to America is like
Speaker 2: the first step in becoming American, Like that's a strive
Speaker 2: And again there's an inherent striving in that. You know,
Speaker 2: I want a better life. I want to be a
Speaker 2: part of something different. I want to be a part
Speaker 2: of this project. I want to sign up for this
Speaker 2: creed And yeah, you have to go through the process. Again,
Speaker 2: not the JD. Van saying to let everybody in, but
Speaker 2: that idea of striving self improvement type people is kind
Speaker 2: of is ingrained in American identity and is something to
Speaker 2: defend at a time when with ice, you know, we're
Speaker 2: seeking to kind of push that out.
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Speaker 1: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin the first speech you open the
Speaker 1: book with, of all the founders, you pick Franklin and
Speaker 1: the speech is his closing argument for the Constitution. And
Speaker 1: then you bookend at the end of at the end
Speaker 1: of the book Trump's second inaugural with Franklin's warning about despotism.
Speaker 1: What what made Franklin sort of unlock the book for you?
Speaker 1: And and and why him among the founders?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Franklin and unlock is exactly the right word,
Speaker 2: because I went through a really interesting process where I
Speaker 2: must have read, I don't know, a couple hundred speeches
Speaker 2: and and how do you tell the story. And as
Speaker 2: you know as a speech writer, if you know the
Speaker 2: beginning of the story and have some idea at the
Speaker 2: end of the story, you're gonna it's gonna make a
Speaker 2: lot easier to fit the pieces in. And I came
Speaker 2: across this Franklin speech that I had not really read before.
Speaker 2: It's a closing argument at the Constitutional Convention. Franklin has
Speaker 2: chosen because he's the old wise man. He's also the
Speaker 2: most famous American in the world, and he's kind of
Speaker 2: the de facto host of the convention in Philadelphia. And
Speaker 2: he gives a speech that does not say a word
Speaker 2: about the Constitution itself. It's pretty remarkable, Like he doesn't
Speaker 2: talk about it anything in it. The entire speech is
Speaker 2: about the virtue of compromise itself, and he essentially says,
Speaker 2: when you get a bunch of people together to benefit
Speaker 2: from all of their wisdom, you're also assembling all their
Speaker 2: different interests, all of their selfish interests, all their prejudices.
Speaker 2: You're getting the good and bad, and out of that
Speaker 2: kind of assembly, you can't have some kind of perfect agreement.
Speaker 2: We have to compromise if we want a union. And
Speaker 2: to me that and he doesn't he has rhetorical tricks
Speaker 2: John that are really interesting because he basically takes on
Speaker 2: infallibility and dogma or the kind of antagonists in the speech,
Speaker 2: and he says, you know, and this is actually why
Speaker 2: we're not found out on religion. You know, each religion
Speaker 2: thinks it's got the answers, and if we have that
Speaker 2: same mindset, then this place will never be a home
Speaker 2: for people that might not agree with exactly that version
Speaker 2: of things. And so inherent in the Constitution is compromise
Speaker 2: and imperfection. Now, that compromise allowed the Union to be made,
Speaker 2: but it also set in motion all of the conflict
Speaker 2: and competition that followed because we compromised about really big things.
Speaker 2: We essentially compromised about identity. There was still slavery, There
Speaker 2: were uncertain questions about immigration. You know, different states had
Speaker 2: different immigration policies. Obviously women did not have the rights
Speaker 2: of citizenship at that time, and so we kind of
Speaker 2: pushed those issues out. Franklin very interestingly, the first, the
Speaker 2: last public act he did, which is one of the
Speaker 2: first things he did after the Constitution, because he didn't
Speaker 2: live very long, was petition Congress to abolish slavery. So
Speaker 2: he was living his own theory of the case, which
Speaker 2: is compromise, set up the union, and then work within
Speaker 2: the system to change it. Now, he also had this
Speaker 2: warning that I found very chilling, which is he said,
Speaker 2: this new government can only end in despotism, as other
Speaker 2: forms have done before it when the people should become
Speaker 2: so corrupted as to need despotic government being incapable of
Speaker 2: any other. And that landed like a two by four today.
Speaker 2: And I followed that away and I said, I think
Speaker 2: I might end the book with that line, and I do.
Speaker 2: And now it helped that Trump got elected that that
Speaker 2: kind of And that doesn't mean I think that that's
Speaker 2: happened fully. It's more warning that if we don't arrest
Speaker 2: this direction, that's where we could end up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that Franklin speech basically shows that the
Speaker 1: conflict and the argument that we've been having for the
Speaker 1: last two hundred and fifty years was like a function
Speaker 1: of the design of the government, like it was preordained.
Speaker 1: Because of course, if you're going to have a country
Speaker 1: where people of such different backgrounds come from different places
Speaker 1: to try to make a home and want to live
Speaker 1: in freedom from you know what they escaped from in
Speaker 1: Europe then, and you're gonna have the only government that's
Speaker 1: gonna make that work is one where different people have
Speaker 1: a voice, different people with different opinions, who are going
Speaker 1: to be at war with each other, or at least
Speaker 1: not or be in argument with each other, right, fight
Speaker 1: with each other. And it can't be any different than that. Right.
Speaker 1: And so then you look through the whole twound and
Speaker 1: fifty years, you're like, well, yeah, slavery, the Civil War, everything, like,
Speaker 1: of course we were going to have these arguments because
Speaker 1: that was the that was sort of the idea behind
Speaker 1: the government that they created.
Speaker 2: It was and it so the pieces fit in. Just
Speaker 2: to take the first, I brooke the book into thirds.
Speaker 2: Each has five speeches for a certain period of American history.
Speaker 2: And so the first five are, okay, we set up
Speaker 2: this constitution. Then I have Red Jacket saying, wait a second,
Speaker 2: we're not in your constitution, leave us alone. Then I
Speaker 2: have a woman named Maria Stewart who's an abolitionist, a
Speaker 2: remarkable kind of penniless woman who came out of nowhere
Speaker 2: and became a superstar speaker on the circuit in Boston,
Speaker 2: who says, we wait a second, Like black people deserve
Speaker 2: equal rights. She's an abolitionist and a feminist. Women need
Speaker 2: to be empowered. We need to be teaching black people
Speaker 2: and women the same way we teach white people, and
Speaker 2: we need to claim our rights. Then I have Alexander Stevens,
Speaker 2: Vice President of Confederacy, saying, wait a second, No, No,
Speaker 2: this equality thing, we don't believe in that white supremacy.
Speaker 2: Is this the cornerstone of the Confederacy. He said that,
Speaker 2: I'm not projecting leftism onto him. That's what he said.
Speaker 2: And then Lincoln resolves it all in the second inaugural
Speaker 2: and says, no, we are an abolitionist nation, like we
Speaker 2: fought this war to right the wrong in our constitution,
Speaker 2: and in the most radical sense ever spoken by an
Speaker 2: American president, says, essentially, if every drop of blood drawn
Speaker 2: by the lash must be paid for by a drop
Speaker 2: of blood drawn by the sword, essentially, still let it
Speaker 2: be done. A president United States saying if we all
Speaker 2: have to die to atone for slavery, that'd be okay.
Speaker 2: I mean imagine saying that today. So that's just in
Speaker 2: those five speeches, you see the tug of war, and
Speaker 2: then Lincoln tries to resolved and then it starts all
Speaker 2: over again, right, And you know, and we've gone through
Speaker 2: the cycle of reconstruction to segregation to FDR starts all
Speaker 2: over again, civil rights movement to backlash the civil rights
Speaker 2: movement to Obama to Trump, and so we're just living
Speaker 2: different versions of the same argument. And I would argue
Speaker 2: in this book speeches are actually the place where we
Speaker 2: have most prominently done that. Yes, you know, standing up
Speaker 2: in front of somebody as an activist or a politician
Speaker 2: and making your argument is different than writing a book
Speaker 2: or an op ed or something, because that's inherent in
Speaker 2: persuading people about who we are.
Speaker 1: I want to sort of dive into some of that
Speaker 1: that you just mentioned. Alexander Stevens, right, So he's this
Speaker 1: who I hadn't heard of, by the way, before this book,
Speaker 1: Vice President of the Confederacy. Fascinating character. He's a Georgia
Speaker 1: politician who goes from wanting to avoid secession to then
Speaker 1: standing up in Savannah, Georgia in eighteen sixty one and
Speaker 1: delivering this speech, which, like you said, is just literally
Speaker 1: a case for white supremacy, that the superiority of whites
Speaker 1: over blacks is a He says, physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Speaker 1: What I found fascinating about that is this is in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty one. Even at the time slavery defenders were
Speaker 1: already learning to publicly talk in code, states rights, economic
Speaker 1: way of life, northern aggression. He just says the quiet
Speaker 1: part out loud. What did you make of that as
Speaker 1: a rhetorical and political strategy in the context of that time.
Speaker 2: So I found the speech and I was like, I
Speaker 2: gotta do this because he says the quiet part out loud,
Speaker 2: and I I think those are the best speeches, so
Speaker 2: the most interesting ones and for each chapter, and I
Speaker 2: think you'll appreciate this. As a speech writer, I kept
Speaker 2: in mind what makes a speech unique and consequential one.
Speaker 2: We have to understand the person who gave it, what
Speaker 2: is their whole life story that allowed them to give
Speaker 2: this speech, and then what is the cause or movement
Speaker 2: that they're speaking to. Now. Alexander Stevens was against secession
Speaker 2: precisely because he believed rightly that slavery was going to
Speaker 2: be more easy to protect inside the Union than outside
Speaker 2: of it. Right, So it wasn't a virtuous anti secessionism.
Speaker 2: But after you know, Georgia, his home state, succeeds he
Speaker 2: signs up. He says, okay, I'm going along with this,
Speaker 2: and he becomes a co author of the Confederate Constitution,
Speaker 2: which is kind of a cut and paste of the
Speaker 2: American one, except it makes very clear that despite all
Speaker 2: the talk about states rights, no states shall abolish slavery.
Speaker 2: So so much for states rights. And what's so interesting
Speaker 2: about that speech is, you know, he gave the kind
Speaker 2: of normal stuff about we're going to get rid of
Speaker 2: these tariffs and these things we don't like that the
Speaker 2: North imposes on us. And but then he gets to
Speaker 2: slavery and white supremacy, and he doesn't defend it as
Speaker 2: a necessary evil. He doesn't say, well, we have to
Speaker 2: have this for our economy to work, or you know,
Speaker 2: we're going to have we'll keep this for a period
Speaker 2: of time. He turns white supremacy into like a progressive
Speaker 2: Enlightenment discovery, philosophical moral truth. As you quoted. He compares
Speaker 2: the discovery of the supremacy of the white race. He
Speaker 2: literally compares that to Enlightenment discoveries of you know, free markets,
Speaker 2: and you know the way that the astronomy works, you know,
Speaker 2: and it seems bizarre to read now, but you see
Speaker 2: he's trying to tell people, you're actually ennobled by believing
Speaker 2: that you're superior to black people. He's speaking to an
Speaker 2: audience that includes a lot of poor white people who
Speaker 2: don't own slaves, who are probably going to have to
Speaker 2: go fight for slave power, and he has to give
Speaker 2: them something to fight for. And so what he's giving
Speaker 2: them is not just that they can feel better than
Speaker 2: somebody else, that's a huge thing he's giving them, but
Speaker 2: also that they're good, they're doing what's right. And he
Speaker 2: actually framed this is good for black people too, like
Speaker 2: they need to learn from us, you know. And I
Speaker 2: found it so interesting because we progressives sometimes can forget
Speaker 2: that what can appear to be the most reactionary, ugly ideas,
Speaker 2: those people actually think that they're, in their own way
Speaker 2: quote unquote progressive ideas, and not in the terms of left,
Speaker 2: but in terms of like this is evolution in a
Speaker 2: positive sense. He even says in that speech that this
Speaker 2: discovery will spread around the world, that other countries are
Speaker 2: gonna come to see the necessity of white supremacy. And
Speaker 2: I found that so interesting because the same technique that
Speaker 2: I admire in like FDR pivoting to four freedoms to
Speaker 2: give the nation a bigger purpose. Alexander Stevens could do
Speaker 2: this for white supremacy. Now, of course, after they got
Speaker 2: their ass kicked in the war, he repackaged it as
Speaker 2: states rights and lost cause and all the rest of
Speaker 2: it and was reabuilty and it worked. Re elected to
Speaker 2: Congress and it worked, you know, So yeah.
Speaker 1: I know. That was the other thing I thought about
Speaker 1: from that speech is and reading you close the book
Speaker 1: with Trump's second inaugural, and I had forgotten he did this,
Speaker 1: probably because I was like half blacked out when Trump
Speaker 1: was giving it, because I coudn't believe we were going
Speaker 1: through it again. But Trump was like and today's Martin
Speaker 1: Luther king Day. And I have a dream too, and
Speaker 1: like this ability and tendency for reactionary politicians and reactionary
Speaker 1: forces to use rhetoric to repackage really unpleasant, unpopular ideas
Speaker 1: into ideas that are more broadly popular and acceptable to
Speaker 1: the rest of the country, and that sort of use
Speaker 1: American symbolism in American culture and and and and the
Speaker 1: found and Founding documents and principles to kind of repackage
Speaker 1: and hide their really odious ideas and that has been Uh,
Speaker 1: you know that you can draw a through line right
Speaker 1: from Alexander Stevens right through to Donald Trump and somehow
Speaker 1: that works.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It was interesting that Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther
Speaker 2: King are both in this book and both of them
Speaker 2: have been completely kind of appropriated by conservatives in this country.
Speaker 2: Frederick Douglas did talk a lot in language that we
Speaker 2: might and by the way, Barack Obama too. Frederick Douglass
Speaker 2: did talk a lot about taking responsibility and the need
Speaker 2: for black people to kind of self empower Now. He
Speaker 2: also talked a lot about the need to have a
Speaker 2: government that allows them to do that. That they cannot
Speaker 2: do that if they are kept down systems of segregation
Speaker 2: or systems where they can't own property or they can't
Speaker 2: get an education. That part is left out. You know.
Speaker 2: King did talk about the fact that we want to
Speaker 2: live in a nation where you are not judged by
Speaker 2: the color of your skin, by the content of your character.
Speaker 2: But in order to get to that kind of nation,
Speaker 2: you need a government that keeps its promissory note. As
Speaker 2: he said in the I Have a Dream speech, that
Speaker 2: we're going to treat black people equally. We're going to
Speaker 2: allow them to be in a nation where they're judged
Speaker 2: by the content of their character. Obama got criticized sometimes
Speaker 2: for practicing quoe unquote responsibility politics too when he talked
Speaker 2: about the need for the black community to value education,
Speaker 2: but it was always coupled with having a government that
Speaker 2: provided opportunity equally to people. And so it shows you
Speaker 2: how the two stories I talked about are in competition.
Speaker 2: They draw from each other, you know, so the more
Speaker 2: reactionary story needs to take the heroes of the progressive
Speaker 2: story and kind of pull them into their narrative. You know,
Speaker 2: Reagan loved to cite King and you know, the content
Speaker 2: of your character, not the color of your skin, while
Speaker 2: leaving out those parts. And I think that that you
Speaker 2: have to keep an eye on that because if you
Speaker 2: go back and actually experience these people in their times,
Speaker 2: they were radicals. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were
Speaker 2: absolutely radical figures, like fringe figures at times who have
Speaker 2: now been kind of repackaged as people that were like
Speaker 2: welcomed at the time, and that was not the case.
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Speaker 1: Betterhelp dot com slash psa. That's better h e LP
Speaker 1: dot com slash psa. But also the flip side of
Speaker 1: what Stevens did, the activists do in a way as well,
Speaker 1: and that like, one theme that comes through in the
Speaker 1: rhetoric from all the activists in the book is and
Speaker 1: you know, and you write that Frederick Douglass, instead of
Speaker 1: rejecting American rhetoric, claimed it as his own. So they
Speaker 1: don't reject the language and symbolism of the dominant culture
Speaker 1: that's oppressing them. They em as a way to highlight
Speaker 1: the gap between ideals and reality. And you know, this
Speaker 1: is different from what you hear from some activists today
Speaker 1: about America being inherently racist or imperialist. And I think
Speaker 1: we both experienced this with Obama did that all the time,
Speaker 1: but it was happening with Frederick Douglass and King with
Speaker 1: the promisary. Note, right, is that I didn't. I came
Speaker 1: here to cash because this is what the American Declaration says,
Speaker 1: and we need to live up to that. And I
Speaker 1: worship the American Declaration. And Frederick Douglas was like that too,
Speaker 1: And so they are sort of radical figures in their beliefs,
Speaker 1: but their rhetoric is very much targeted to a much
Speaker 1: broader population than just activists.
Speaker 2: That's right. We progress as do the same thing that
Speaker 2: I just said the reactionaries do. We claim parts of
Speaker 2: the other story as well. Douglas had a big falling
Speaker 2: out with William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist who helped
Speaker 2: propel Douglas's career, because Garrison rejected the Constitution because he
Speaker 2: said that was written by a bunch of slave owners.
Speaker 2: You know. He was kind of a you know, post
Speaker 2: twenty twenty look like, let's just you know, tear the
Speaker 2: whole thing down, and Douglas said, no, no, no, When
Speaker 2: I look at the Constitution, I see a document that
Speaker 2: rejects slavery. That's the part of the Constitution I'm looking at,
Speaker 2: and I can make that work for me. I want
Speaker 2: to stay inside of this system, and I want to
Speaker 2: make the Constitution my own, you know, King, the promisory
Speaker 2: note was on the Declaration of Independence. You said all
Speaker 2: men are created equal, and you've never lived up to that.
Speaker 2: And actually, frankly, almost every activist in this book, in fact,
Speaker 2: everyone uses the Declaration of Independence to make their case
Speaker 2: that they want to close the gap between the reality
Speaker 2: and that document.
Speaker 1: Which, by the way, is why it has fallen out
Speaker 1: of favor with JD. Vance and some of the national
Speaker 1: Conservatives today, because the Declaration is a fucking problem for them.
Speaker 2: It's a big problem. And now what if those activists
Speaker 2: had said that document was written by a white slave owner,
Speaker 2: you know, So, like, I can't use that rhetoric, you know.
Speaker 2: And I think there's a lesson in that for today,
Speaker 2: you know, which is if you want to persuade people,
Speaker 2: and if you want to advance rights in this country,
Speaker 2: you actually have to embrace the whole story, like even
Speaker 2: the parts we don't like. Maybe I'm not saying you
Speaker 2: embrace Alexander Stevens's worldview. But you're embracing the fact that
Speaker 2: this country was founded by flawed people that did, in
Speaker 2: some cases terrible things, certainly to black people into Native Americans.
Speaker 2: But they left enough of a foundation that we can
Speaker 2: work with, you know. Like and I mean the title
Speaker 2: of the book is taken from Martin Luther King's speech
Speaker 2: the night before he died. All we say to America
Speaker 2: is be true to what you said on paper. Like
Speaker 2: that's like almost his last words, you know, yeah, And
Speaker 2: I think that's important. Obama would always do that too,
Speaker 2: And we should talk about the race speech. But it's
Speaker 2: about just like individual people contain complexity, so does America.
Speaker 2: Nobody's perfect. How do you draw out the better and
Speaker 2: build a message in a story in a speech from.
Speaker 1: That Lincoln has a line that you quote in that
Speaker 1: chapter on the second inaugirl and the line is, if
Speaker 1: we were situated as they are, we should act and
Speaker 1: feel as they do. And if they were situated as
Speaker 1: we are, they should act and feel as we do.
Speaker 1: And we never ought to lose sight of this fact.
Speaker 1: And Obama does something similar in the race speech, clearly
Speaker 1: calls out structural, systemic racism, but then shows an understanding
Speaker 1: of and even an empathy towards the white resentment and backlash.
Speaker 1: And there is this pattern of the speakers you chosen
Speaker 1: the book, both activists and politicians, probably especially the politicians,
Speaker 1: of working especially hard to show that they understand and
Speaker 1: maybe empathize with their opponents because their larger project is
Speaker 1: to preserve this union and this country, which is much harder.
Speaker 1: It's much harder work than just being able to, you know,
Speaker 1: either secede from the country or or you know, try
Speaker 1: to you know, subjugate some other group, like trying to
Speaker 1: keep everyone together even when the people that you're trying
Speaker 1: to win support from don't believe you should have the
Speaker 1: rights that you have. That's fucking hard.
Speaker 2: I was stunned to find myself coming away from this
Speaker 2: admiring Lincoln even more. Yeah, to me too, But because
Speaker 2: he goes through this torturous process trying to figure out
Speaker 2: the meaning of it all, and he goes through tortuous
Speaker 2: process with slavery, you know, first, you know, he wants
Speaker 2: to restrict it spread, then he wants to of the
Speaker 2: union without messing with it. Then he kind of out
Speaker 2: of wartime necessity, turns to abolition and it's only later
Speaker 2: in the war that he kind of fully embraces abolition
Speaker 2: as the cause of the war, not just the preservation
Speaker 2: of the Union. He's moving in the direction of Douglas,
Speaker 2: the activist and abolitionists. Douglas was becoming more pragmatic, though
Speaker 2: he was saying he used to castigate Lincoln. Then he's like,
Speaker 2: wait a second, I think Lincoln's moving in the right direction.
Speaker 2: I'm going to kind of meet him there. And so
Speaker 2: he starts talk to Lincoln and he starts to work
Speaker 2: with Lincoln. He gets up and Lincoln gives that second
Speaker 2: inaugural address. He's about to win the war. He does
Speaker 2: not talk about that. He doesn't say like we've won
Speaker 2: these great battlefield victories. He does not talk down the South.
Speaker 2: But he does give an absolutely unapologetic and almost religious
Speaker 2: case for abolition as the second founding of the United States.
Speaker 2: The way he's saying it, the way he frames it
Speaker 2: is that is going to be good for the South
Speaker 2: and the North. This is the redemption, you know that
Speaker 2: we're finding we have this opportunity to start over, having
Speaker 2: cleansed ourselves of this sin. And there's this kind.
Speaker 1: Of well, blames blames the North, as well as the
Speaker 1: South right like a real like we were I know
Speaker 1: that we're fighting you right now and you're gonna lose.
Speaker 1: Didn't say it, but but we are all complicit. And
Speaker 1: what has happened over the last however many years.
Speaker 2: He calls it repeatedly American slavery, right, not Southern slavery,
Speaker 2: because it's North profited off of it too, you know.
Speaker 2: And there's this great scene where that night he's at
Speaker 2: the White House and he's greeting a receiving line and
Speaker 2: Douglas tries to get the receiving line to see him
Speaker 2: and gets booted out, and someone tells Lincoln. Lincoln says, well,
Speaker 2: let Douglas in. And Douglas comes in. He stands in
Speaker 2: this line and he beaches the front and he shakes
Speaker 2: Abraham Lincoln's hand and Lincoln says, what do you think
Speaker 2: of the speech? And Douglas says, I'll write your letters
Speaker 2: like a thousand people here, and he said, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: I'm more intioned what you think of this speech than
Speaker 2: anybody else. And Douglas just looks at him and says
Speaker 2: it was a sacred effort. And I read that and
Speaker 2: I was like, all right, whatever you think about this country.
Speaker 2: That happened former a former slave in the White House
Speaker 2: meets with Abraham Lincoln and has that conversation because they
Speaker 2: both evolved, they both changed, you know, Douglas became more pragmatic,
Speaker 2: Lincoln became more radical, and and Lincoln could only do
Speaker 2: that because he was able to inhabit. He could look
Speaker 2: at the world through Douglas's eyes and through Southerner's eyes.
Speaker 2: And that that was Obama. I mean, we should talk
Speaker 2: about the Race speech. I just said it. I'll tell you.
Speaker 2: I originally ended the book with the Selma.
Speaker 1: Speech, yeah, favorite, which is.
Speaker 2: Good triumphalist peroration. And after Trump is elected, you know,
Speaker 2: me and my editor were talking, We're like, well, that's
Speaker 2: probably not the right note end on, and so I
Speaker 2: just like I got in with Trump, and actually I
Speaker 2: went back to read the Race speech again and it
Speaker 2: was more relevant today than it was even in two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight when he gave it. Yeah, because he
Speaker 2: is able to He's saying, well, you know, he's doing
Speaker 2: what you're talking about, which is inhabiting through his grandmother
Speaker 2: and Reverend Wright, and through the diagnoses of the white
Speaker 2: working class and the black working class. He's saying, we
Speaker 2: all encompass these complexities, and until we can look at
Speaker 2: the world through each other's eyes, we're never going to
Speaker 2: move forward. And that's the same thing Lincoln was saying.
Speaker 1: Yep. It's funny because I was reading that chapter and
Speaker 1: just reading the whole book, sort of having flashbacks to
Speaker 1: the night when I first talked to Obama about the
Speaker 1: race speech and what he wanted to say in that
Speaker 1: and he will he laid out a lot of the
Speaker 1: thesis of your book, which is that these competing arguments
Speaker 1: that we've been having in this country since the founding,
Speaker 1: and at the very beginning was slavery and race that
Speaker 1: we've been having to grapple with. And and you know,
Speaker 1: you you write in the book, how you know. I
Speaker 1: ended up doing a draft and have the beginning and
Speaker 1: the end, and then Obama basically just does track changes
Speaker 1: and writes like an entire speech in the middle of
Speaker 1: the speech and sends it back because I think he
Speaker 1: had had that in his mind for a very long time,
Speaker 1: like he was able to, you know, analyze and talk
Speaker 1: about the Reverend Right controversy. But if you had lifted
Speaker 1: the Reverend Right controversy out, all of the other themes
Speaker 1: and things that he says in that speech were definitely
Speaker 1: running through his mind for a very long time because
Speaker 1: they were themes throughout history.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right, and as you should know you with
Speaker 2: the speechwriter on it. And by the way, I don't
Speaker 2: short trip. I mean that beginning and end got him
Speaker 2: to that middle. Right. Sometimes that's the speech ritter his
Speaker 2: job to get the principle to where he can have
Speaker 2: that outpouring of tract changes. But I think what I
Speaker 2: understood better today, both because of what's happened and from
Speaker 2: writing the book is, first of all, Reverend Wright was
Speaker 2: an more inching character to me today. In two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight, he was like a pain in the ass, like,
Speaker 2: why is this guy saying these crazy shit that's going
Speaker 2: to mess up our campaign? But actually having written this
Speaker 2: book and then having lived the post Obama experience, Reverend
Speaker 2: Wright emerges out of the Black Church tradition of the Jeremiah,
Speaker 2: which is a speech that is intended to call out
Speaker 2: a nation's sins. So what he was doing is the
Speaker 2: same thing that Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart and all
Speaker 2: the people in that tradition did. In this book, King
Speaker 2: did it often too. And by the way, someone Reverend
Speaker 2: Wright said, ages pretty well given look some of the things
Speaker 2: Trump's done. Now that said Obama fused the activist and
Speaker 2: politician in himself. And then when I look at the
Speaker 2: two key parts of that speech that he wrote in
Speaker 2: the middle, one is the famous part where he's like,
Speaker 2: I can no more disown Reverend right than I can
Speaker 2: disown my white grandmother, a woman who raised me, you know,
Speaker 2: do anything for me, but I heard her say horrible things.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying it is elgoly, He's he did. What
Speaker 2: he's saying there on an individual level is hey, we
Speaker 2: all everybody in our families is like this, Like you
Speaker 2: can love somebody and think they're a good person and
Speaker 2: not cancel them because you know they said something you
Speaker 2: disagree with, whether it's Reverend Wright or your grandmother who's white.
Speaker 2: And then he goes into the racial stalemate, as he
Speaker 2: calls it, and he describes black structural inequality in ways
Speaker 2: I don't think i'd ever heard, I mean sparingly, you know, redlining,
Speaker 2: edgetion gap, income gap. But then he talks like about
Speaker 2: the white working class more effectively than JD. Vance or
Speaker 2: Donald Trump The line where he says they don't feel
Speaker 2: particularly privileged by their race is an incredibly powerful line.
Speaker 2: That these are people whose jobs have been shipped overseas,
Speaker 2: That these are people who had to bust their kids,
Speaker 2: which is a hassle across town because of some civil
Speaker 2: rights requirement, which again I think is worth doing, but
Speaker 2: you know it's their obligation. These are people who are
Speaker 2: told that they're worried about crime, they're racists, you know,
Speaker 2: these are his white grandmother, you know. And that ability
Speaker 2: to say, like, none of this is going to work
Speaker 2: American identity, American politics unless we can have that ability
Speaker 2: to look at the world through each other's eyes. I
Speaker 2: mean that to me was the magic of that that
Speaker 2: the alchemy of that speech.
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Speaker 1: People look back now and whenever Obama comes up in
Speaker 1: the discourse and they're like, well, he's you know, he
Speaker 1: was progressive on you know, the left liked him because
Speaker 1: he was opposed to the war in Iraq, but he
Speaker 1: was much more moderate on other policies. But the race speech,
Speaker 1: to me, shows the core of what he was always about.
Speaker 1: And it is the thread that runs through a lot
Speaker 1: of these politicians and activists in your book, which is like,
Speaker 1: he was very He was more radical in his diagnosis
Speaker 1: of the problem, right in saying and talking about structural
Speaker 1: and and racism and history how history has led us here,
Speaker 1: and the fact that I mean he does a speech
Speaker 1: about his pastor that said controversial things, and he opens
Speaker 1: it by talking about slavery in the constitution, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it goes pretty deep. But to the extent that he's
Speaker 1: perceived as moderate. It's exactly what he did about white resentment,
Speaker 1: which is like, yeah, there's structural racism and inequality where
Speaker 1: black people in this country have been subjugated since it's founding.
Speaker 1: And yet that doesn't mean that resentment that white people
Speaker 1: have is unfounded, wrong, bad evil. I still want to
Speaker 1: correct the structural inequality and correct the racism. But also
Speaker 1: if I want to actually fix that, I have to
Speaker 1: earn the support of the people who have that resentment,
Speaker 1: as opposed to just telling them they are bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you don't want to become a mirror image
Speaker 2: of JD. Van's right, Like, we don't like it when JD.
Speaker 2: Vance shows up and says you can and have your
Speaker 2: way of life. You have to live the way I say,
Speaker 2: showing up and telling someone your identity is bad, you
Speaker 2: know because you come from this heritage, or you know,
Speaker 2: because sometimes you might have had certain thoughts, you know,
Speaker 2: like you have to bring those people along. I mean
Speaker 2: you and I've talked about this a lot of the years.
Speaker 2: What Obama would say to people isn't come out with
Speaker 2: your hands up and acknowledge you know your racism. He
Speaker 2: would say, this country is so great that we've been
Speaker 2: able to change over time, and we've been able to
Speaker 2: right wrongs and extend rights and advance opportunities. And actually
Speaker 2: the thing that's holding us back now is the way
Speaker 2: in which powerful forces. And here's where he's like Trump,
Speaker 2: they are these elites that divide us against each other.
Speaker 2: They don't want, you know, working class solidarity among black
Speaker 2: and white people, because then we might actually fix the
Speaker 2: economy and have universal health care and things that actually
Speaker 2: make people's lives better. They're the ones, you know, kind
Speaker 2: of creating these divisions. But you know, he tried to
Speaker 2: channel that towards progress. It was inherently incremental. You know,
Speaker 2: there's no there's no wand you can wave that can
Speaker 2: redress every inequality. You have to tackle it problem by problem.
Speaker 2: But if you're changing, and this is why I think
Speaker 2: speeches are relevant and matter and need to kind of
Speaker 2: come back. If you are telling that story and building
Speaker 2: that coalition and kind of speaking it into to action,
Speaker 2: that's how you keep moving in the right direction. And
Speaker 2: we kind of get derailed when we lose I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm using the story metaphor la here. When we kind
Speaker 2: of lose the plot, you know, and our politics on
Speaker 2: the on the left or center left becomes about either
Speaker 2: how bad they are or it becomes kind of small ball, like, well,
Speaker 2: we need these ACA subsidies or we need you know,
Speaker 2: more affordable housing, important things that I agree with, But
Speaker 2: what's the story, like, what is it? What? What? What
Speaker 2: do we? What? Who are we? You know? What? What
Speaker 2: is it American? And and how can we build the
Speaker 2: big enough coalition that we can overcome these things that
Speaker 2: are in our way?
Speaker 1: And by the way, when he condemns Reverend Right in
Speaker 1: that speech, he doesn't condemn the anger that Right expresses
Speaker 1: over what he and other Black Americans have been through.
Speaker 1: What he condemns is rights inability to see that we
Speaker 1: have the possibility to change. And like that's actually what
Speaker 1: bothers him most about what Reverend Right said, not the
Speaker 1: actual analysis of the situation, or the or the incendiary
Speaker 1: language or any of that. It's just the fundamental belief
Speaker 1: that or what he expressed was that like somehow America
Speaker 1: can't change, and I think that is notable. It also
Speaker 1: made me think, as you were just talking, that I
Speaker 1: always get annoyed with the like these days, it's like
Speaker 1: very easy for Democratic politicians to pick on the Michelle
Speaker 1: Obama when they go low we go high line because
Speaker 1: they think it's Michelle Obama saying Republicans can kick the
Speaker 1: shit out of us, and we have to just be nice.
Speaker 1: And that's not what itever, that's not what it meant.
Speaker 1: And what it meant is what you were just saying about,
Speaker 1: Like we can't we can't be like JD. Vance and
Speaker 1: Alexander Stevens and these reactionaries who say that one group
Speaker 1: is better than the other group. One group is good,
Speaker 1: one group is bad. It's it's a contest between good
Speaker 1: and evil, because that's not the vision of America that
Speaker 1: the founders had in mind. And it's a harder. It's
Speaker 1: this work is harder, right to like take a country
Speaker 1: of three hundred and thirty million people of like all
Speaker 1: different backgrounds and all different biases and warring factions all
Speaker 1: through the years and say, all right, let's somehow like
Speaker 1: hold it all together, because that's the whole Like that
Speaker 1: is a tougher project than the other project, which is
Speaker 1: to just tear it down and try to objegate people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, if you're a reactionary rooted in grievance
Speaker 2: and nostalgia, you're inherently going to win the golo fight, yes, right,
Speaker 2: because what we're trying to do is play for something bigger.
Speaker 2: Douglas and King the Douglas speech. I love this speech.
Speaker 2: He gave it during reconstruction, and it's a speech that's
Speaker 2: really about multiracial democracy, but it's a speech in defense
Speaker 2: of Chinese immigrants. Like probably the probably polled. You know,
Speaker 2: if we had a polar coaster episode in eighteen sixty seven,
Speaker 2: the advice would be like, please do not go there.
Speaker 2: It was wildly and popular, But essentially, these Chinese immigrants
Speaker 2: are being incredibly mistreated. Second, they were kind of the
Speaker 2: new slaves, you know, even though they weren't total servitude.
Speaker 2: And Douglas is saying, if I believe in multiracial democracy,
Speaker 2: I have to stand up for the rights of these
Speaker 2: people too, and he gives a beautiful, going high speech
Speaker 2: about that. Now you could say, well, Douglas failed. There's
Speaker 2: a Chinese Exclusion Act that was passed shortly after, banning
Speaker 2: Chinese people coming to this country for decades. Did he
Speaker 2: fail because look around California today, how many Chinese Americans
Speaker 2: and Asian Americans do you see? Maybe because he went
Speaker 2: high and he went big, maybe he won in the end.
Speaker 2: You know, King same thing, Like King gives this speech
Speaker 2: and it was interesting readliving the story that speech it's
Speaker 2: pretty good speech. He did promisory note, he's got a
Speaker 2: lot of good rhetoric. He did not have the dream
Speaker 2: in there. He ad lib the whole dream sequence.
Speaker 1: Oh well, this was like a speechwriter nerding out thing.
Speaker 1: But I had never heard that King's staff, someone on
Speaker 1: his staff was helping him the speech was like, don't say,
Speaker 1: don't talk about your dream, whatever you do, because it's
Speaker 1: too cliche. And then King just gives the speech and
Speaker 1: does it.
Speaker 2: So, first of all, as I'm so cal we're talking
Speaker 2: about this because it was such a speechwriter thing. They
Speaker 2: had not really worked on this speech as much as
Speaker 2: they should have because they were super busy. Everybody thinks,
Speaker 2: you know, you have a big speech, you work on
Speaker 2: it forever. They were huddled in the Willard Hotel like
Speaker 2: the night before the march, and they're literally writing the
Speaker 2: speech and this guy's like, whatever you do, Martin like,
Speaker 2: just don't tell him about that dream. It's it's cliche,
Speaker 2: you know, So they leave it out. He stays up.
Speaker 2: They finished the draft of the speech, it's done, they
Speaker 2: distribute it to the press and everything, and King's sitting
Speaker 2: there on the dais and he's and you can kind
Speaker 2: of see him in the footage. He's kind of still
Speaker 2: fiddling with his speech, and then he gets up there
Speaker 2: and he gives the speech and it's good, and he
Speaker 2: gets this moment and he kind of stops, kind of
Speaker 2: like Obama died before. He's saying amazing grace. He kind
Speaker 2: of stops and pauses, and if I had to guess,
Speaker 2: he's sitting there thinking, I'm never going to speak to
Speaker 2: a crowd this big again. The whole country's watching on TV.
Speaker 2: Most white people have never seen a black person deliver
Speaker 2: whole speech before. These people watching, some of them go
Speaker 2: back to the South and get their ass beat in.
Speaker 2: I need to give them something more. I need to
Speaker 2: give them something else. Now. The dream sequence he'd used before,
Speaker 2: by the way, was not nearly as good. It was okay,
Speaker 2: it was, it was good, but it was not the
Speaker 2: evocative language that he ended up using. And he goes
Speaker 2: so high, right, like every image that he uses is
Speaker 2: black and white coming together, Black children and white children
Speaker 2: and a nation where you're judged not by the color
Speaker 2: of skin and the content your character. He's giving the
Speaker 2: nation a sense of purpose, right, And he's you know,
Speaker 2: he's doing that because he's trying to affect John F.
Speaker 2: Kennedy to have a more ambitious civil rights bill, but
Speaker 2: also intangibly in the same way that maybe Douglas changed
Speaker 2: America over time. It's kind of hard to argue with
Speaker 2: King's dream. You know, he went so big that even
Speaker 2: today Donald Trump has to be like, yeah, I have
Speaker 2: dream too, you know, like like and I think we
Speaker 2: let's not lose that, Like it's not about just going high,
Speaker 2: it's just about going big, like a big vision for
Speaker 2: this country.
Speaker 1: Well, I was thinking about that, and one thing that
Speaker 1: connects all these speeches that go big or high or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to say, is this like deeply moral
Speaker 1: language that I, as I was reading the book, realized, like, fuck,
Speaker 1: we don't have that anymore. Like we don't hear that anymore. Right,
Speaker 1: It's not like they are trying to win arguments through
Speaker 1: logic and reason alone. That a lot of these speakers,
Speaker 1: from King to Douglas to Dolores Suerta to everyone you
Speaker 1: have in the book, that is not a reactionary, and
Speaker 1: actually a lot of the reactionaries too. They use a
Speaker 1: moral language that is both it's it's it's embedded in
Speaker 1: the founding documents, but even deeper than that. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of religious language and religion in a way that
Speaker 1: I hadn't expected, not in the way that the like
Speaker 1: the Christian right uses religion today, because a lot of
Speaker 1: the people who on the progressive side who use this
Speaker 1: religious language aren't even religious themselves. You mentioned that, you know,
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln wasn't a big fan of organized religion. But again,
Speaker 1: you know, Frederick Douglas calls his second inaugural sacred, and
Speaker 1: he reaches for this sort of religious imagery, and and
Speaker 1: it happens all the way through King and all the
Speaker 1: way through all of these all of these figures in
Speaker 1: the book. And I wonder what you thought about that.
Speaker 1: I know, you're not like a deeply religious person. I'm
Speaker 1: not a deeply like organized religious person, but it was
Speaker 1: hard to not notice that each of these speeches, especially
Speaker 1: from a left that has become, you know, fairly secular,
Speaker 1: even some of the most radical activists and abolitionists and
Speaker 1: progressive presidents throughout history have sort of like tried to
Speaker 1: ground their argument in something in this in this higher power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and there's like, look, there's some interesting particularities,
Speaker 2: like you know, churches and faiths, were often party to
Speaker 2: movements right right, but also just the language is religious,
Speaker 2: but it's it's also just moral. You know, Dolores swear
Speaker 2: to her speech. She marches from Delano, California, all the
Speaker 2: way to Sacramento with with the farm workers and Caesar Chavez,
Speaker 2: who you know, it's obviously problematic figures. I went with Dolors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you didn't know at the time, but that was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, idea. Oh, sensibly she's there to advocate for
Speaker 2: farm worker union rights, you know, like we wanted to
Speaker 2: have the right to collective bargaining, and we want you know,
Speaker 2: longer breaks, and we want healthcare and all these things.
Speaker 2: But the speech is like we are here, we embody
Speaker 2: our needs for you, you know, like it's a very
Speaker 2: visceral activist language that felt very contemporary. It was basically
Speaker 2: all lives matter kind of language, like our lives matter,
Speaker 2: like we are here, you have to see us, you know.
Speaker 2: And I think that some of it is, Yes, religion
Speaker 2: is kind of in some ways the simplest way. And
Speaker 2: I heard, you know, Revend Warnock on recently and he
Speaker 2: talks a bit about this, like religion is obviously and
Speaker 2: James Tallerico's doing this. Now, religion is is a quick
Speaker 2: way into morality, but I also think there are things
Speaker 2: you can draw from religious tradition. Like Obama used to.
Speaker 2: Obama would always say, you know, a core of his
Speaker 2: message at the beginning was I am my brother's keeper,
Speaker 2: I am my sister's keeper. That's a religious idea, but
Speaker 2: it's also a secular idea.
Speaker 1: Yes, right, Well, that's what's most interesting is the religious
Speaker 1: language that a lot of these speakers use has It
Speaker 1: could be very secular, like you don't need to believe
Speaker 1: in any specific faith to.
Speaker 2: Has absolutely has secular meaning. And I think that's the
Speaker 2: language used to have this joke. You know, I think
Speaker 2: I can tell it about kind of democratic consultant speech.
Speaker 2: You know, we want to put the middle class at
Speaker 2: the middle of our priorities, and the horrifying thing about
Speaker 2: living for the last decade is actually that we want
Speaker 2: to build an economy from the bottom up, in the
Speaker 2: middle out. You know, there's no morality in that, there's
Speaker 2: no purpose in that. There's no sense that I want
Speaker 2: to care for my neighbor, or that I have a
Speaker 2: stake in this country and its success or that I
Speaker 2: want my life to have a meaning bigger than even
Speaker 2: what I do every day. I belong to a whole
Speaker 2: that matters, you know, the Kennedy language about ripples of hope,
Speaker 2: right or I'm not free unless everybody's you know, like,
Speaker 2: I think that what's been missing in democratic politics since
Speaker 2: Obama And this isn't just like flocking for Obama. It's
Speaker 2: I think it's you know, we haven't had necessarily great speakers,
Speaker 2: or we've gotten consultant speak, or frankly, social media is
Speaker 2: kind of disincentivized this kind of speaking, But I think
Speaker 2: people are ready for it now. I think like life
Speaker 2: is pretty fucked in this country right now, rampant inequality wars.
Speaker 2: AI's coming for jobs, like your kids are on screens
Speaker 2: and friends with chatbots or something like. They want someone
Speaker 2: to come along and say, there's something bigger that we
Speaker 2: need to be about, that we need to care for
Speaker 2: our neighbor concepts of fairness and dignity. You know that
Speaker 2: our dignity is a very religious concept, that there's value
Speaker 2: in human life, which is why what Ice is doing
Speaker 2: is wrong. You know, I think that kind of language.
Speaker 2: Whoever can harness that and capture that, I think that
Speaker 2: would be very useful in a twenty twenty eight presential candidacy.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that like ideology isn't important here
Speaker 1: and policy isn't important, but like it is when you say,
Speaker 1: even when you say medicare for all or abolish ice,
Speaker 1: even if you believe those things, talking about them in
Speaker 1: that way is not the most powerful way to talk
Speaker 1: about them. Like slogans about slogans, to signal that you
Speaker 1: exist on a certain area of the political spectrum is
Speaker 1: fine for you know, signaling to certain in groups and
Speaker 1: other people paying close attention to politics that that's where
Speaker 1: you are. Fine. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying it is not sufficient anymore. And it is evidence
Speaker 1: that we are missing that bigger moral story about who
Speaker 1: we are and where we need to go that you
Speaker 1: see throughout American history that you've chronicled in this book,
Speaker 1: and I just don't. I have not heard anyone tell
Speaker 1: that story or even attempt to, which is why I'm
Speaker 1: still like.
Speaker 2: There was an interesting moment. Do you remember Bernie in
Speaker 2: I think his last campaign, he used to do this
Speaker 2: thing at rallies he started to do where he'd say,
Speaker 2: I want you to look at the person next to you,
Speaker 2: and what this campaign is about is I want you
Speaker 2: to care about that person as much as you care
Speaker 2: about yourself, and Medicare for All flows from that court, right, absolutely,
Speaker 2: So what a good politician does is absolutely the policy
Speaker 2: ideology matters. So this is not just about giving airy
Speaker 2: fairy speeches. But if you ground it in something, you
Speaker 2: anchor it in a kind of moral language and a
Speaker 2: story about America and what American identity means, it should
Speaker 2: follow naturally. Well, if you care about the person next
Speaker 2: to you as much as care about yourself, you want
Speaker 2: them to have healthcare too, you know. And that's that's
Speaker 2: I think the piece that's that's been missing to some extent.
Speaker 1: So you end the book with Trump's second inaugural, and
Speaker 1: so I think you said, originally it was probably going
Speaker 1: to be what Pat Buchanan's nineteen ninety two speech, and
Speaker 1: then Obama Selma speech, and then instead you did Obama
Speaker 1: race and then and with trump second inaugural. And you know,
Speaker 1: we've talked about how in the sweep of history you
Speaker 1: start realizing that the transition from Obama to Trump is
Speaker 1: more natural than it may have seemed at the time,
Speaker 1: because we've always had these backlashes. And that is true.
Speaker 1: I will say, after reading your whole book and then
Speaker 1: getting to Trump, his second inaugural and his presidency feel
Speaker 1: like even more of a departure, even more Unamerican then
Speaker 1: even Steven's white supremacy speech, or you have Mary Lisa's
Speaker 1: sort of xenophobic populism, or even Pat Buchanan, who you
Speaker 1: talk about, Like, yeah, and I think it's the because
Speaker 1: it's not just the xenophobia. It's not just like the
Speaker 1: issues of race that we're dealing with the Trump again,
Speaker 1: it is the the dictatorial quality of Trump's rhetoric and
Speaker 1: the actions really stand out even from all the other
Speaker 1: reactionaries in the book. And I don't know if that
Speaker 1: that struck you too, but I was. I read it
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh, we are fucked.
Speaker 2: That is absolutely one hundred percent on point. And what
Speaker 2: I would say, because look, there's some things that make
Speaker 2: a lot of sense if you look at history, the
Speaker 2: kind of populous grievance of the white working class, kind
Speaker 2: of paranoid America, first isolationism, periodic spasms of xenophobia and
Speaker 2: anti immigrant sentiment. There's a lot of currents that run
Speaker 2: into Trump where he is a departure Alexander Stevens. That
Speaker 2: was a speech. They had just had a process. Now
Speaker 2: obviously Lincoln thought it was illegal, but they voted to secede.
Speaker 2: They wrote a constitution, and he's giving a speech defending
Speaker 2: the legal framework for what they did. You know, I
Speaker 2: mean so weirdly like the Confederacy tried to have a
Speaker 2: veneer of process. Trump in that speech says, I think
Speaker 2: the most chilling line, right is I was saved by
Speaker 2: God to make America great again. And everything is I
Speaker 2: everything is like, you know, like Reagan would never have
Speaker 2: said that, you know, And I think the extremity the.
Speaker 1: Department in American history has said that, not even the
Speaker 1: George Wallace's not like none of them.
Speaker 2: Nope, nope. And he basically says, like, your job is done.
Speaker 2: You voted for me. Story's over. I won, and I'm
Speaker 2: taking custody of this country ended story. And and you're right,
Speaker 2: the extremity is not just the It's not the racism
Speaker 2: and the xenophobia and the you know, unleashed capitalis all
Speaker 2: of these things. It's the dictatorial it's the idea that
Speaker 2: I'm not playing by Franklin's rule book. You know, I
Speaker 2: don't need to follow the law. I can do whatever
Speaker 2: I want. That's the departure, and that is a departure, like,
Speaker 2: that's the radicalism of Trump is not in the underlying
Speaker 2: xenophobia populism. It's in the putting that in service of
Speaker 2: someone who believes not in the constitutional framework within which
Speaker 2: we have this competition of stories like I welcome a world,
Speaker 2: a future in which JD. Vance plays by the rules
Speaker 2: and gives versions of his Claremont speeches and we debate
Speaker 2: him yep, like that's healthy. That's good, ye like, and
Speaker 2: I welcome other people disagree with me and agree with JD. Vans.
Speaker 2: I don't have all the answers. Shit, I'm not, I'm close.
Speaker 2: What I do insist on is that we're still dealing
Speaker 2: within the compromise that Franklin and his buddies outlined, and
Speaker 2: that in his rhetoric and in his actions, Trump has
Speaker 2: has departed from that. And I think that's why this
Speaker 2: is an actual emergency. Yes, it's a backlash, just like
Speaker 2: there was a backlash to reconstruction, just like there's a
Speaker 2: backlash the Orts movement. But this this is someone saying, look,
Speaker 2: even the segregationists, you know, we're processed people, you know,
Speaker 2: States rights and these laws, and we'll you know, we're
Speaker 2: going to try to get people on Supreme Court and
Speaker 2: do this Like Trump is just saying none of this
Speaker 2: applies to me, and that's the message is rhetoric.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we can leave it here. Maybe you can
Speaker 1: react to this and then and I don't bring it
Speaker 1: up because I actually do think that that we're fucked.
Speaker 1: But I think that if we are trying to tell
Speaker 1: a story about where we go from here and continue
Speaker 1: having this argument in a way where we actually win
Speaker 1: the argument, like that's what we have. We have to
Speaker 1: figure out that what Trump represents and what he's telling people.
Speaker 1: And I don't say that to be like to refight
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four battle about like, oh, Kamala should
Speaker 1: call him a fascist and we should talk more about
Speaker 1: democracy and because obviously, like the words have all been wrong,
Speaker 1: not just from Kamma but from everyone, like we have
Speaker 1: not been Like just saying that Trump is a dangerous
Speaker 1: fascist clearly has not worked. But what is it about
Speaker 1: him and what he's doing and this departure from the
Speaker 1: rest of American history that is still that is still
Speaker 1: appealing to a big part of the country, and what
Speaker 1: is the argument to that part of the country to
Speaker 1: say that like this is like Lincoln did to the South,
Speaker 1: like this is bad for all of us. It's bad
Speaker 1: for you, it's bad for us, it's bad for the
Speaker 1: whole project, and we have to find a way out
Speaker 1: of this together.
Speaker 2: I think you see asof doing this a bit in
Speaker 2: the sense where it's not just speck corruption. What he's
Speaker 2: saying is if someone like Trump and his cronies, and
Speaker 2: actually I start the section on the speech on Trump
Speaker 2: with the tableau of all those oligarchs, it's a great
Speaker 2: stage for a reason. If there are a small number
Speaker 2: of people that are just exempted entirely from the rules,
Speaker 2: you're going to get screwed. Like, not only is that
Speaker 2: fundamentally wrong and un American, it also leads to outcomes
Speaker 2: where you're fucked because they're not going to look at
Speaker 2: they're gonna loot this country. They're not gonna, you know,
Speaker 2: do anything for the common good. You know, they're not
Speaker 2: gonna do anything to care for the neighbor. They're not
Speaker 2: going to care about the person next to them. And
Speaker 2: so I think that that we have to not have
Speaker 2: this separation of the democracy message and the kind of
Speaker 2: economic message, because they're connected. Because if some guy says
Speaker 2: I always saved by God to save this country and
Speaker 2: the laws doesn't apply to me, well, he's probably gonna
Speaker 2: build a ballroom and steal a bunch of money and
Speaker 2: set up a slush fund for his friends and leverage
Speaker 2: American foreign policy to make billions in crypto and launch
Speaker 2: crazy wars. And people are making money off of insider trading,
Speaker 2: and while you pay higher gas prices, you know. So
Speaker 2: I think the people that can tell a story that
Speaker 2: draws those connections between the radicalism of Trump and the
Speaker 2: outcomes and people's lives, I think that's probably you know,
Speaker 2: I don't claim to have the exact formulation, but that's
Speaker 2: the space. And you see Alsoft circling it, you see
Speaker 2: Warnock circling it, Chris Murphy circling it, AOCS circling in yep.
Speaker 2: I think I think the notably younger Democrats, by the way,
Speaker 2: are figuring this out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ben, I could talk to you for another couple
Speaker 1: hours about all this book, all these other questions.
Speaker 2: We don't have to make it a big exchange, just
Speaker 2: curious like you read them. What was your favorite speech.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I mean it sounds it's like an answer
Speaker 1: that so many people have given in the past. But
Speaker 1: I think, like you, I came to appreciate Lincoln's second
Speaker 1: inaugural totally agreed in like a way that I just
Speaker 1: never like, I remember when people said that. I would
Speaker 1: always be like, yeah, it's a pretty good speech, but
Speaker 1: I didn't really get why everyone loved it so much.
Speaker 1: And your your chapter on it and the story behind
Speaker 1: it has has has brought me around to how both
Speaker 1: radical and and hopeful and and and and with so
Speaker 1: much humility he delivers that speech at that time.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, totally agreed and pretty crazy, right that
Speaker 2: the most radical speech ever It was an eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 2: It just goes to show, you know, history moves in
Speaker 2: different directions.
Speaker 1: Sure does everyone go buy the book? Seriously? I know
Speaker 1: anyways say this. We have people on who buy books,
Speaker 1: and Ben's a cricket co host, But it is this
Speaker 1: book will stay with me for a long time and
Speaker 1: I will go back to it many times. And it
Speaker 1: was like such a bomb from reading the news because yeah,
Speaker 1: it really wrote, yeah, impress a real like if you
Speaker 1: care about the country and you care about politics, and
Speaker 1: you're paying attention to politics, but you want to feel
Speaker 1: something deeper and more hopeful than you see every day.
Speaker 1: Go read. Always say it's a fantastic book.
Speaker 2: Thanks John, all Right, take care, buddy.
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