Latest / Pod Save America / What Does it Mean to Be an American?

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What Does it Mean to Be an American? · Pod Save America

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  Speaker 1: slash crooked. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. Welcome to Pod
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. On today's show, my good
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: friend and fellow speechwriter for Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes. America's
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: 250th birthday has been on my mind a lot lately,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: especially since Donald Trump seems intent on making the country's
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  Speaker 1: semi-quincentennial all about himself, his parties, his name on everything,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: his guests, and his version of the American story. But
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: of course, there's another version of our story that resonates
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  Speaker 1: with at least half of us, likely more. At the
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  Speaker 1: very least, Americans have been engaged in an argument about
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  Speaker 1: what this country is and who belongs since we declared
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  Speaker 1: independence two and a half centuries ago. Ben has written
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  Speaker 1: an incredible, timely book about that argument. Truly, it's fantastic.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: I read the whole thing in about a day. You
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: all know what a big reader I am these days.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: So that's saying something. The book is called All We Say,
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  Speaker 1: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches. In it,
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  Speaker 1: Ben traces the history of America through some of the
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  Speaker 1: nation's most consequential speeches, from a long-forgotten speech from a
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  Speaker 1: Native American chief in Lincoln's second inaugural to I Have
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  Speaker 1: a Dream, and speeches from Barack Obama and even Donald Trump.
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  Speaker 1: It's a beautiful book about the ways in which, in
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  Speaker 1: the words of our old boss, this union may never
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  Speaker 1: be perfect, but generation after generation shows it can always
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  Speaker 1: be perfected. Ben and I were psyched to have this conversation,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: both because we got to nerd out as former speechwriters...
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  Speaker 1: and dig into what the two of us talk about
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: when we're not in front of a mic, how those
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  Speaker 1: of us who don't love being governed by Donald Trump
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  Speaker 1: can win the argument about what this country is and
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  Speaker 1: where it needs to go, about how we close the
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  Speaker 1: gap between America's best ideals and our current, fairly bleak reality.
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  Speaker 1: It was a great conversation, and we'll get to it
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: in a minute, but before we do, please consider becoming
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  Speaker 1: So head to cricket.com slash friends and please subscribe. Let's
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: get to it.
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  Speaker 2: Here's Ben Rhodes. What's up, Ben?
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: John, this is the interview I was looking forward to
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  Speaker 3: since I finished my book, I have to tell you, honestly.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: I was going to say, I love when we have
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: an excuse to pod together, especially this time, because you
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: wrote a book about speeches, which is perfect for the
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: two of us. For people who don't know, I know
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: a lot of you probably do, but Ben and I
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  Speaker 1: wrote speeches for six years together. sometimes quite literally together,
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  Speaker 1: like side by side with our laptops open until 3 a.m.
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  Speaker 1: But this is also a book about American identity and
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: an argument over the American story that's been raging for
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  Speaker 1: 250 years, which has also become an obsession of mine
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  Speaker 1: as of late. But I want to start with something
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  Speaker 1: you wrote about the book. And you wrote that it's
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  Speaker 1: the third in a trilogy that started with your memoir,
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  Speaker 1: then your book about authoritarianism, and now this. And that
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  Speaker 1: finishing this one means you're ready to let go of
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  Speaker 1: your past identities as a White House staffer, foreign policy advisor,
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  Speaker 1: and speechwriter.
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  Speaker 2: Say more about that. Why are you letting go?
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  Speaker 3: I actually really thought about this, John, because I wrote
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  Speaker 3: my memoir, which was a very kind of raw experience, right?
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  Speaker 3: It was like, I didn't digest it at all. I
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  Speaker 3: wrote that in a year that came out in 2018.
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  Speaker 3: Then I very much, my last book was in my
• 5:10
  Speaker 3: kind of foreign policy global politics, pod save the world,
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  Speaker 3: if you will, self in terms of traveling around and
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: understanding what had happened in Russia and China and Hungary
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: under Viktor Orban. And I was literally using the experiences, contacts,
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  Speaker 3: networks I had from being in that world. And then
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  Speaker 3: this one is entirely, I wanted to go back into history.
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: because I had a sense that I could find a
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  Speaker 3: lot there, that you could understand this argument that we're
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  Speaker 3: having now by tracing it back from the beginning. And frankly,
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  Speaker 3: my original conceit was Obama and Trump kind of encapsulate,
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  Speaker 3: represent two different opposing stories that we've had throughout our
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  Speaker 3: history in competition with each other. And I'm not an historian.
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  Speaker 3: And so the vehicle I knew that I would choose
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  Speaker 3: was is speeches. And I found myself kind of returning
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  Speaker 3: to that core identity, that guy who showed up in
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  Speaker 3: the Obama campaign office when, you know, you were the
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  Speaker 3: chief speechwriter, you're my boss. I remember walking in from
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  Speaker 3: my think tank culture in DC and wow, my boss
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  Speaker 3: is wearing a t-shirt, you know, like, like this is
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  Speaker 3: a different vibe, you know, he's.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Wearing a t-shirt and he doesn't know shit about foreign policy.
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  Speaker 2: Good thing I'm here.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: But I, I, I say this actually seriously to you, like,
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  Speaker 3: cause you know, you've been through this, you kind of
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  Speaker 3: don't want to go through life as like John Favreau
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  Speaker 3: or Ben Rhodes comma former Obama X, you know?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: And I kind of feel like I've, I've mined it now,
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  Speaker 3: you know, like I've done, this is not a memoir
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  Speaker 3: at all, but like, it drew deeply on all the
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  Speaker 3: things we did in speech writing. And, uh, and so
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  Speaker 3: I felt like, but I kind of more fundamentally and
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: existentially too. Um, I think I finally came to terms
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  Speaker 3: with how it all ended, you know, um, in the
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  Speaker 3: sense that Trump was this kind of rebuke of the
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: inevitability of progress, right. Of the arc of the moral universe,
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  Speaker 3: bending towards justice kind of on its own, if you will. And, um, Uh,
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  Speaker 3: and I think reliving all of American history kind of
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  Speaker 3: allowed me to situate our experience in a continuum where
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  Speaker 3: it's actually not that unusual that this happened, you know, um,
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  Speaker 3: reconstruction was followed by segregation, you know, uh, civil rights
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  Speaker 3: movement was followed by backlash. So for all those reasons,
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  Speaker 3: I really did internally, like you have to trick your,
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  Speaker 3: you know, as a you have to kind of tell
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  Speaker 3: yourself a story. And my story was, this is the
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  Speaker 3: third in a trilogy. It kind of completes both my
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  Speaker 3: various Obama identities and kind of is me coming to
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  Speaker 3: terms with how our chapter ended. And yeah, now I
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  Speaker 3: can move on. We'll see what happens next.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: So I read the book. I started it Sunday night
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  Speaker 1: when we got back from Lovett's wedding. And then I
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: read most of it. yesterday and last night. We're recording
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  Speaker 1: this on Tuesday. You're listening to it probably on Sunday.
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  Speaker 1: First of all, I absolutely fucking loved the book. It
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  Speaker 1: is incredible. Everyone should read it. I also, it did
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  Speaker 1: give me this sense of hope and also peace. Like
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  Speaker 1: you say, you came to terms with it, sort of
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  Speaker 1: peace about like the last 10 years and where it fits.
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  Speaker 2: Yes.
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  Speaker 1: Because you read when you, it's the speeches you selected
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  Speaker 1: were specifically selected because they each tell a story about
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  Speaker 1: American identity and this argument over what America is that
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  Speaker 1: we've been having since the founding. And when you lay
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  Speaker 1: it all out like that, along with the different characters,
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  Speaker 1: you really do get this sense that we have been
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  Speaker 1: here before and people in these moments have been able to,
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  Speaker 1: you know, speak and march and fight their way out
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  Speaker 1: of these moments. And I don't think it's it's not
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  Speaker 1: Pollyannish at all, but it's sort of like a hard
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  Speaker 1: earned hope, um, that you get from reading it.
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  Speaker 2: But I thought, I thought it's outstanding.
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  Speaker 1: You opened the book with, uh, of all people, JD
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  Speaker 1: Vance and his speech last summer at Claremont about American identity, um,
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  Speaker 1: which listeners to this show and especially offline know that
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: I can't stop talking about Austin is nodding his head
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: very knowingly right now. Um, I think you and I
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: had a few conversations about this, about the J.D. Vance
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  Speaker 1: speech when you were thinking about opening the book with it.
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  Speaker 1: What made you finally decide that Vance's speech was the
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  Speaker 1: way into a book about 250 years of American identity?
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  Speaker 3: So a prologue for a book is a fascinating thing
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  Speaker 3: because you kind of have to telegraph. your argument. You know,
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  Speaker 3: the book starts in real time with Benjamin Franklin, which
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  Speaker 3: we can get to, but I don't want to drop
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: people in there. You know, I wanted to give people
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  Speaker 3: a sense of kind of what the argument of the
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  Speaker 3: book is. And I always had in mind when I
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  Speaker 3: was literally selecting these speeches, which was an interesting process,
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  Speaker 3: and as I was writing chapter after chapter, that if
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: you really distill it down, there are two stories of
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  Speaker 3: what American identity is. With, obviously, their permutations, they're not
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  Speaker 3: all exactly the same, but I think you can simplify
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  Speaker 3: and say there is one story that is a nationality
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  Speaker 3: of inheritance. You can call it originalism. You can call
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: it blood and soil nationalism. But essentially, this was a
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  Speaker 3: white Christian nation founded by a particular set of people
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  Speaker 3: with a particular set of beliefs. And now I'm literally
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  Speaker 3: quoting J.D. Vance. And it's the inheritor of kind of
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: Western civilization. Sometimes that's Western supremacy. And sure, other people
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: live here of different races and ethnicities. but they kind
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: of have to subordinate themselves to this original identity. And
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  Speaker 3: American exceptionalism is just a given. Like, we are exceptional
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  Speaker 3: because we're American. We are the city on a hill.
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  Speaker 3: We are, in some ways, God's chosen people. We can
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: do whatever we want to the people in this country,
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  Speaker 3: whether they're Native Americans or Black people or immigrants, and
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: we can do whatever we want to other countries, right?
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  Speaker 3: And again, I'm casting it negatively, but I frankly think
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  Speaker 3: that at a core, that is a strain that runs
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  Speaker 3: through American history. And then the opposing story is one
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  Speaker 3: of progressive nationalism that we've never lived up to the
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  Speaker 3: creed in the declaration of independence that all men are
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  Speaker 3: created equal. And that American history is a story of
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  Speaker 3: people trying to change the country for the better, trying
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  Speaker 3: to make a more perfect union, um, to use a phrase.
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  Speaker 3: And that's how you get the abolitionist movement and the
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  Speaker 3: suffrage movement and the, and the civil rights movement and
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: the labor rights movement, all these things.
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  Speaker 2: Um, J.D.
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  Speaker 3: Vance comes along and decides to tell the first version
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  Speaker 3: of the story for me. Because that speech is literally,
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  Speaker 3: I mean, when I knew I was going to use
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  Speaker 3: it is when he said, we are not a nation
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  Speaker 3: founded on a creed. And he name checks the Declaration
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  Speaker 3: of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal.
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: He says, no, that is not American identity. We are
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: a particular people from a particular place with a particular
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: way of life. And he said the quiet part out loud. Now,
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: he didn't say white, but what particular people do we
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: think he's talking about? And he has this kind of
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: logic way where, well, who could argue with us being
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  Speaker 3: a particular place and a particular people? Actually, I can
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: argue with it because we were 13 states at the
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: beginning on the northeast coast. Our geography is wildly different today.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: The people in this country today don't look at anything
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: like the people in those 13 states. And the way
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: of life, I mean, walk down the street in my
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: neighborhood in Venice, there's a ton of ways of life there, right?
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  Speaker 3: And so I actually think that JD did the service
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  Speaker 3: of framing the other story for me. And so I
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  Speaker 3: literally opened with it.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: You mentioned that other people have to be subordinate to
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: sort of this white Christian identity. And I've heard people say,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: and I've talked to people about this, that J.D. Vance,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: when he spouts this anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric, is full of
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: shit and doesn't really believe it and couldn't really believe
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: it because his in-laws are immigrants from India. His wife
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: is a first-generation American. But there is another possible explanation
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: here that you touch on, which is, this obsession Vance has,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: and he does it in the speech and we've heard
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: him do it. And he's like mocked for it and
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: other times and other places with the need for everyone
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: to show gratitude, particularly foreign born American citizens, immigrants, that
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: if you're here and we let you come here, then
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: you need to show gratitude to the people who've been
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: here the longest or to the, or to our ancestors
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: or to like this, this way of life and this culture.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: And I do think that's how you reconcile like, Because
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: if you ask J.D. Vance, he would say, well, I'm
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: for immigration. I'm for, you know, like a diverse country.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: That's fine. But his problem is that if you haven't
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: if you don't have seven generations of ancestors buried in Kentucky,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: which he said at the at the Republican National Convention,
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: then you don't get to complain about this country. I mean,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: he basically he said that about Mamdani, too. Mamdani had
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: some like Fourth of July message where he was like, Yeah,
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: and then we got to continue to improve this nation
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: and something very mild about perfecting or improving the nation.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: And J.D.
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  Speaker 1: Vance was like, how could he do that? We let
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: him in here and blah, blah. It's like really fucking crazy.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, if you believe that, because he said that you
• 15:11
  Speaker 3: have to show gratitude in that speech. And I posed
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: the question in the prologue, gratitude to whom?
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, who are we?
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: For what?
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Who was everyone supposed to thank? Who are these people?
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because actually immigration is, was a much bigger theme
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: than I actually expected it would be in this book,
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: because you keep bumping into that. And, you know, Benjamin Franklin,
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: his father was an immigrant, you know, he left religious
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: persecution behind, as well as seeking economic opportunity. And then
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: you run through the other people in this book, you know,
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: Louis Brandeis was a Jewish immigrant who left anti-Semitism behind
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: in Europe. Mary Lise, a populist, was a poor It
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: came from a poor Irish family that fled the repression
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: of the British. Obviously, you get up to the 20th century. Interestingly,
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: Dolores Huerta comes from a family, and this is something
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: people don't think about enough, John. A part of her
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: family weren't immigrants. The border just got redrawn and brought
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: them into the United States. There are a lot of
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: brown people in this country that were here before a
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: lot of white people And we just expanded and redrew
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: the border around places like New Mexico, for instance. And fundamentally,
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: it comes down to the question of, do you believe
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: that someone, Zohra Mamdani, for example, is as American as
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: someone whose family's been here for seven generations? Right. I
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: genuinely do. And that's not a virtue signal. That's just a,
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: how can citizenship not be equal? How can some people
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: be more American than other people? We are supposed to
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: be a nation anchored in laws, the Constitution, and a creed,
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: the Declaration of Independence, which suggests not that we should
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: have open borders- which is how J.D. Vance kind of
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: shorthands it. He says, well, if everybody who believes in
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: the Declaration of Independence is American, then we'd have billions
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: of people.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Don't we have to admit them all? No, we don't.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: That's not what our laws say.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: We can have a border. We can seal that border
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: at times. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that,
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: but we can by a matter of policy. But the
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: people who are American are American, and they're equally American.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: And frankly, the thing we should be grateful for is
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: that we're a nation that is able to have all
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: these different people come here and enrich this country. I mean,
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: how boring would this country be if it was just
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: comprised of people like JD Vance? I think fundamentally, I
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: felt myself, because you kept encountering You know, people didn't
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: like the Irish when they came here. People didn't like
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Chinese people when they came here. Like some people have
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: never liked black people being here, even though they were
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: brought here mostly against their will. Like the people didn't
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: like Jewish people when they came here. Like, and guess what?
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: You've rolled the tape forward. Does anybody think that this
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: nation is not better for having Chinese Americans and Jewish
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: Americans and Irish Americans? No, I don't think even J.D.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: Vance would make that argument. So what are we really
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: talking about here?
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: And it's been said many times by many people, but
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: that is what the core of American exceptionalism is all about,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: which is we can't, we can go live in Germany
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: and live in Japan. We can't become German or become Japanese,
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: but anyone can come.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: To America and become American.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: And like that, that is a very, that is a
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: unique exceptional quality of America.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: And that is the experiment.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: I think we're also different in, Because we were founded
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: by people who immigrated here. Like we were founded not
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: by the indigenous people here. And I think that does
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: kind of create an additional legitimacy for the idea that
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: if this is not a nation of indigenous Americans, then
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: it is by definition, a nation of people who have
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: chosen an identity and set up a government that could
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: be you know, flexible enough to absorb different people. You know,
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: a lot of the speeches that spoke about the virtue
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: of immigration, Frederick Douglass, Louis Brandeis, they talked about the
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: fact that the decision to come to America is like
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: the first step in becoming American. Like that's a strive.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: And again, there's an inherent striving in that, you know,
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: I want a better life. I want to be a
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: part of something different. I want to be a part
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: of this project. I want to sign up for this creed.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: And yeah, you have to go through the process. Again,
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: not the JD Van Singh way to let everybody in.
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: But that idea of striving self-improvement type people is ingrained
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: in American identity and is something to defend at a
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: time when With ice, you know, we're seeking to kind
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: of push that out.
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  Speaker 1: when you head to smalls.com slash crooked. You mentioned, uh,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin, the first speech you opened the book with
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: of all the founders, you pick Franklin, um, and the speeches, uh,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: his closing argument for the constitution. Um, and then you,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: you bookend at the end of the, at the end
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: of the book, uh, Trump's second inaugural with Franklin's warning
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: about despotism. Um, what, what made Franklin sort of unlock
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: the book for you and, and, and why him among
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: the founders?
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: So Franklin and unlock is exactly the right word because
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: I went through a really interesting process where I must've read,
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: I don't know, a couple hundred speeches and, and, and,
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: and how do you tell the story? And as you know,
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: as a speech writer, um, if you know the beginning
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: of the story and, uh, have some idea at the
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: end of the story, um, you're going to, it's going
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: to make a lot easier to fit the pieces in.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: And I came across this Franklin speech that I had
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: not really read before. It's a closing argument at the
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: Constitutional Convention. Franklin is chosen because he's the old wise man.
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: He's also the most famous American in the world. And
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: he's kind of the de facto host of the convention
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: in Philadelphia. And he gives a speech that that does
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: not say a word about the constitution itself. It's pretty remarkable.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: Like he doesn't talk about anything in it. The entire
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: speech is about the virtue of compromise itself. And he
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: essentially says, when you get a bunch of people together
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: to benefit from all of their wisdom, you're also assembling
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: all of their different interests, all of their selfish interests,
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: all their prejudices, you're getting the good and bad. And
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: out of that kind of assembly, you can't have some
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: kind of perfect agreement. We have to compromise if we
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: want a union. And to me, he has rhetorical tricks, John,
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: that are really interesting because he basically takes on infallibility
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: and dogma, or the kind of antagonist in the speech.
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: And he says, and this is actually why we're not
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: founded on a religion, each religion thinks it's got the answers.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: And if we had that same mindset, then this place
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: will never be a home for people that might not
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: agree with exactly that version of things. And so inherent
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: in the constitution is compromise and imperfection. Now that compromise
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: allowed the union to be made, but it also set
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: in motion all of the conflict and competition that followed
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: because we compromised about really big things. We essentially compromised
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: about identity. There was still slavery. There were uncertain questions
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: about immigration. Different states had different immigration policies. Obviously, women
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: did not have rights of citizenship at that time. And
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: so we kind of pushed those issues out. Franklin, very interestingly,
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: the last public act he did, which is one of
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: the first things he did after the Constitution because he
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: didn't live very long, was petition Congress to abolish slavery.
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: So he was living his own theory of the case,
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: which is, compromise, set up the union, and then work
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: within the system to change it. Now, he also had
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: this warning that I found very chilling, which is he said,
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: this new government can only end in despotism, as other
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: forms have done before it, when the people shall become
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: so corrupted as to need despotic government being incapable of
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: any other. And that landed like a two by four today.
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: And I filed that away and I said, I think
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: I might end the book with that line. And I do.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: And now it helped that Trump got elected. And that
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: doesn't mean I think that that's happened fully. It's more
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: a warning that if we don't arrest this direction, that's
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: where we could end up.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that Franklin speech basically shows that the
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: conflict and the argument that we've been having for the
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: last 250 years was.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Like a function of the design of the government. Like
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: it was, it was, it was preordained because of course,
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: if you're going to have a country where people of
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: such different backgrounds come from different places to try to
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: make a home and want to live in freedom from,
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: you know, what they escaped from in Europe, then you're
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: going to have the only government that's going to that's
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: going to make that work is one where different people
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: have a voice, different people with different opinions who are
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: going to be at war with each other, or at
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: least not, or be an argument with each other, right.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: Fight with each other. And it can't be any different
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: than that.
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: And so then you look through the whole 250 years,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: you're like, well, yeah, slavery, the civil war, everything like,
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: of course we were going to have these arguments because
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: that was the, that was sort of the idea behind
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: the government that they created.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: It was.
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: And, and, So the pieces fit in just to take
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: the first, I broke the book into thirds. Each has
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: five speeches for a certain period of American history. And
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: so the first five are, okay, we set up this constitution.
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: Then I have Red Jacket saying, wait a second, we're
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: not in your constitution. Leave us alone. Then I have
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: a woman named Maria Stewart, who's an abolitionist, a remarkable
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: kind of penniless woman who came out of nowhere and
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: became a superstar speaker on the circuit in Boston, who says,
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: wait a second, black people deserve equal rights. She's an
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: abolitionist and a feminist. Women need to be empowered. We
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: need to be teaching black people and women the same
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: way we teach white people, and we need to claim
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: our rights. Then I have Alexander Stevens, the vice president
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: of the Confederacy, saying, wait a second, no, no. This
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: equality thing, we don't believe in that. White supremacy is
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: the cornerstone of the Confederacy. He said that. I'm not
• 28:25
  Speaker 3: projecting leftism onto him. That's what he said. And then
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: Lincoln resolves it all in the second inaugural and says, no,
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: we are an abolitionist nation. Like we fought this war
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: to right the wrong in our constitution. And in the
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: most radical sense ever spoken by an American president says, essentially,
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: if every drop of blood drawn by the lash must
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: the sword, essentially, so let it be done. A president
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: of the United States saying, if we all have to
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: die to atone for slavery, that'd be okay. I mean,
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: imagine saying that today. So that's just in those five speeches,
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: you see the tug of war, and then Lincoln tries
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: to resolve it, and then it starts all over again.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: And we've gone through the cycle of reconstruction to segregation
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: to FDR, starts all over again. Civil rights movement to
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: backlash to civil rights movement to Obama to Trump. And
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: so we're just living different versions of of the same argument.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: And I would argue in this book, speeches are actually
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: the place where we have most prominently done that. Standing
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: up in front of somebody as an activist or a
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: politician and making your argument is different than writing a
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: book or an op-ed or something. Because that's inherent in
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: persuading people about who we are.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: I want to dive into some of that that you
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: just mentioned. Alexander Stevens, right? So he's this, who I
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: hadn't heard of, by the way, before this book, vice
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: president of the Confederacy, fascinating character. He's a Georgia politician
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: who goes from wanting to avoid secession to then standing
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: up in Savannah, Georgia in 1861 and delivering this speech,
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: which like you said, is just literally a case for
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: white supremacy that the superiority of whites over blacks as a,
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: he says, physical, philosophical, and moral truth. What I found
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: fascinating about that is, this is in 1861, even at
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: the time, slavery defenders were already learning to publicly talk
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: in code, states' rights, economic way of life, Northern regression.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: He just says the quiet part out loud. What did
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: you make of that as a rhetorical and political strategy
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: in the context of that time.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: So I found the speech and I was like, I
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: got to do this because he says the quiet part
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: out loud. And I think those are the best speeches
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: or the most interesting ones. And for each chapter, and
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: I think you'll appreciate this as a speech writer, I
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: kept in mind, well, what makes a speech unique and consequential? One,
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: we have to understand the person who gave it. What
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: is their whole life story that allowed them to give
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: the speech? And then what is the cause or movement
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: that they're speaking to? Now, Alexander Stevens was against secession
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: precisely because he believed, rightly, that slavery was going to
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: be more easy to protect inside the Union than outside
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: of it. So it wasn't a virtuous anti-secessionism. But after Georgia,
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: his home state, secedes, he just signs up. He says, okay,
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: I'm going along with this. And he becomes a co-author
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: of the Confederate Constitution, which is kind of a cut
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: and paste of the American one, except it makes very
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: clear that despite all the talk about states' rights, no
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: state shall abolish slavery. So much for states' rights. And
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: what's so interesting about that speech is, you know, he
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: gave the kind of normal stuff about we're going to
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: get rid of these tariffs and these things we don't
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: like that the North imposes on us. But then he
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: gets to slavery and white supremacy. And he doesn't defend
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: it as a necessary evil. He doesn't say, well, we
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: have to have this for our economy to work or
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: we'll keep this for a period of time. He turns
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: white supremacy into like a progressive enlightenment discovery, philosophical moral truth,
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: as you quoted. He compares the discovery of the supremacy
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: of the white race. He literally compares that to enlightenment
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: discoveries of you know, free markets and, you know, the
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: way that the astronomy works, you know, and it seems
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: bizarre to read now, but you see, he's trying to
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: tell people you're actually ennobled by believing that you're superior
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: to black people. He's speaking to an audience that includes
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: a lot of poor white people who don't own slaves,
• 33:12
  Speaker 3: who are probably going to have to go fight for
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: slave power. And he has to give them something to
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: fight for. And so what he's giving them is not
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: just that they can feel better than somebody else. That's
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: a huge thing that he's giving them. But also that
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: they're good. They're doing what's right. And he actually framed,
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: this is good for black people too. Like they need
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: to learn from us. And I found it so interesting
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: because we progressives sometimes can forget that what can appear
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: to be the most reactionary, ugly ideas, those people actually
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: think that they're in their own way, quote unquote, progressive
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: ideas and not in the terms of the left, but
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: in terms of like, this is evolution in a positive sense.
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: He even says in that speech that this discovery will
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: spread around the world, that other countries are going to
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: come to see the necessity of white supremacy. And I
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: found that so interesting because the same idea technique that
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: I admire in like FDR pivoting to four freedoms, um,
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: to give the nation a bigger, bigger purpose. Alexander Stevens
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: could do this for white supremacy. Now, of course, after
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: they got their ass kicked in the war, he repackaged
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: it as states rights and lost cause and all the
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: rest of it and was rehabilitated and reelected to Congress
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: and it worked, you know?
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, I know that that was the other thing
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: I thought about from that speech is, and, and reading
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: you close the book with Trump's second inaugural. And I
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: had forgotten he did this probably because I was like
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: half blacked out when Trump was giving it because I
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: couldn't believe we were going through it again. But Trump
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: was like, and today's Martin Luther King day. And, and
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: I have a dream too. And like this ability and
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: tendency for reactionary politicians and reactionary forces to use rhetoric
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: to repackage really unpleasant, unpopular ideas into, uh, ideas that
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: are more broadly popular and acceptable to the rest of
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the country. Um, and that sort of use American symbolism
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: and American culture and, and, and, and the founder and
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: founding documents and principles to kind of repackage and hide
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: their really odious ideas. And that has been, uh, uh,
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: you know, that you can draw a through line right
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: from Alexander Stevens right through to Donald Trump and somehow
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: that works.
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah. It was interesting that, uh, Frederick Douglas and Martin
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: Luther King are both in this book and both of
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: them have been completely kind of appropriated by conservatives in
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: this country. Frederick Douglas did talk a lot, uh, In
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: language that we might, and by the way, Barack Obama
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: did too. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot about taking
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: responsibility and the need for black people to kind of self-empower. Now,
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: he also talked a lot about the need to have
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: a government that allows them to do that, that they
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: cannot do that if they are kept down in systems
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: of segregation or systems where they can't own property or
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: they can't get an education. That part is left out,
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: you know? King did talk about the fact that we
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: want to live in a nation where you're not judged
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: by the color of your skin, by the content of
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: your character. But in order to get to that kind
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: of nation, you need a government that keeps its promissory note,
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: as he said in the I Have a Dream speech,
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: that we're going to treat black people equally. We're going
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: to allow them to be in a nation where they're
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: judged by the content of their character. Obama got criticized
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: sometimes for practicing quote-unquote responsibility politics too when he talked
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: about the need for the black community to value education.
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: but it was always coupled with having a government that
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: provided opportunity equally to people. And so it shows you
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: how the, the two stories I talked about are in competition.
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: They draw from each other, you know? So the, the,
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: the more reactionary story needs to take the heroes of
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: the progressive story and kind of pull them into their narrative.
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: You know, Reagan loved to cite King and, you know,
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: the content of your character, not the color of your
• 37:23
  Speaker 3: skin while leaving out that those parts, um, And I
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: think that you have to keep an eye on that
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: because if you go back and actually experience these people
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: in their times, they were radicals. Frederick Douglass and Martin
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: Luther King were absolutely radical figures, like fringe figures at
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: times who have now been kind of repackaged as people
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: that were like welcomed at the time. And that was
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: not the case.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: BetterHelp Therapists work according to a strict code of conduct
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• 39:23
  Speaker 1: slash PSA. But also the flip side of what Stevens did,
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: the activists do in a way as well. And that
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: like one theme that comes through in the rhetoric from
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: all the activists in the book is, and you know,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: and you write that Frederick Douglass is instead of rejecting
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: American rhetoric, claimed it as his own. So they don't
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: reject the language and symbolism of the dominant culture that's
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: oppressing them. They embrace it as a way to highlight
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: the gap between ideals and reality. And, you know, this
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: is different from what you hear from some activists today
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: about America being inherently racist or imperialist. And I think
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: We both experienced this with Obama, did that all the time.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: But it was happening with Frederick Douglass and King with
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: the promissory note, right? Is that I didn't, I came
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: here to cash because this is what the American Declaration
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: says and we need to live up to that. And
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: I worship the American Declaration and Frederick Douglass was like
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: that too. And so they are sort of radical figures
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: in their beliefs, but their rhetoric is, is very much
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: targeted to a much broader population than just activists.
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: That's right. We progressives do the same thing that I
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: just said the reactionaries do. We claim parts of the
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: other story as well. Douglass had a big falling out
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: with William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist who helped propel
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: Douglass's career because Garrison rejected the constitution because he said
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: that was written by a bunch of slave owners. He
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: was kind of a Post-2020, let's just tear the whole
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: thing down. And Douglass said, no, no, no. When I
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: look at the Constitution, I see a document that rejects slavery.
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: That's the part of the Constitution I'm looking at. And
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: I can make that work for me. I want to
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: stay inside of this system. And I want to make
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: the Constitution my own. King, the promissory note was on
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: the Declaration of Independence. You said all men are created equal,
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: and you've never lived up to that. And actually, frankly,
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: almost every activist in this book, and in fact, everyone,
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: uses the Declaration of Independence to make their case that
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: they want to close the gap between the reality and
• 41:51
  Speaker 3: that document.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: Which, by the way, is why it has fallen out
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: of favor with J.D. Vance and some of the national
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: conservatives today, because the Declaration is a fucking problem for them.
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: It's a big problem. And now, what if those activists
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: had said, That document was written by a white slave owner.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: So I can't use that rhetoric. And I think there's
• 42:16
  Speaker 3: a lesson in that for today, which is if you
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: want to persuade people and if you want to advance
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: rights in this country, you actually have to embrace the
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: whole story. Like even the parts we don't like. Maybe
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: I'm not saying you embrace Alexander Stevens' worldview, but you're
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: embracing the fact that this country was founded by flawed people.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: that did, in some cases, terrible things, certainly to black
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: people and to Native Americans, but they left enough of
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: a foundation that we can work with. The title of
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: the book is taken from Martin Luther King's speech the
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: night before he died. All we say to America is
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: be true to what you said on paper. That's almost
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: his last words. I think that's important. Obama would always
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: do that too. We should talk about the race speech,
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: but it's about Just like individual people contain complexity, so
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: does America. Nobody's perfect. How do you draw out the
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: better and build a message and a story and a
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: speech from that?
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Lincoln has a line that you quote in that chapter
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: on the second inaugural. And the line is, if we
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: were situated as they are, we should act and feel
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: as they do. And if they were situated as we are,
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: they should act and feel as we do. And we
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: never ought to lose sight of this fact. And Obama
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: does something similar in the race speech, clearly calls out
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: structural systemic racism, but then shows an understanding of and
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: even an empathy towards the white resentment and backlash. And
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: there is this pattern of the speakers you chose in
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: the book, both activists and politicians, probably especially the politicians,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: of working especially hard to show that they understand and
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: maybe empathize with their opponents because their larger project is
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: to preserve this union and this country, which is much harder.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: It's much harder work than just being able to, you know,
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: either secede from the country or, you know, try to,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: you know, subjugate some other group, like trying to keep
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: everyone together even when the people that you're trying to
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: win support from don't believe you should have the rights
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: that you have, that's fucking hard.
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: I was stunned to find myself coming away from this
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: admiring Lincoln even more.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, me too.
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: But because he goes through this torturous process, trying to
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: figure out the meaning of it all. And he goes
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: through a torturous process with slavery. First, he wants to
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: restrict its spread. Then he wants to preserve the union
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: without messing with it. Then he kind of out of
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: wartime necessity turns to abolition. And it's only later in
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: the war that he kind of fully embraces abolition as
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: the cause of the war, not just the preservation of
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: the union. He's moving in the direction of Douglas, the
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: activist and abolitionist. Douglas was becoming more pragmatic though. He
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: was saying he used to castigate Lincoln. Then he was like,
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: wait a second. I think Lincoln's moving in the right direction.
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: I'm going to kind of meet him there. And so
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: he starts to talk to Lincoln. He starts to work
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: with Lincoln. he gets up and Lincoln gives that second
• 45:32
  Speaker 3: inaugural address. He's about to win the war. He does
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: not talk about that. He doesn't say like, we've won
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: these great battlefield victories. He does not talk down the South,
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: but he does give an absolutely unapologetic and almost religious
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: case for abolition as the second founding of the United States.
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: And Lincoln, But the way he's saying it, the way
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: he frames it is that is going to be good
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: for the South and the North. This is redemption that
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: we're finding. We have this opportunity to start over having
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: cleansed ourselves of this sin. And there's this.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: Kind of insane moment- I know that we're fighting you
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: right now and you're going to lose, didn't say it,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: but we are all complicit in what has happened over
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: the last however many years.
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: He calls it repeatedly American slavery, right? Not Southern slavery,
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: because the North profited off of it too, you know?
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: And there's this great scene where that night he's at
• 46:44
  Speaker 3: the White House and he's greeting a receiving line and
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: Douglas tries to get in the receiving line to see him.
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: And gets booted out. And someone tells Lincoln. And Lincoln says, well,
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: let Douglas in. And Douglas comes in. And he stands
• 46:55
  Speaker 3: in this line. And he reaches the front. And he
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: shakes Abraham Lincoln's hand. And Lincoln says, what did you
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: think of the speech? And Douglas says, I'll write you
• 47:04
  Speaker 3: a letter. There's like 1,000 people here. And he says, no, no, no, no.
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: I am more interested in what you think of this
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: speech than anybody else. And Douglas just looks at him
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: and says, it was a sacred effort. And I read that.
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: And I was like, all right. Whatever you think about
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: this country, that happened.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: A former slave meets with the president.
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: A former slave in the White House meets with Abraham
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: Lincoln and has that conversation because they both evolved. They
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: both changed. You know, Douglass became more pragmatic. Lincoln became
• 47:37
  Speaker 3: more radical. And Lincoln could only do that because he
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: was able to inhabit. He could look at the world
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: through Douglass's eyes and through a southerner's eyes. And that
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: was Obama. I mean, we should talk about the race speech.
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you, I originally ended the book with the
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: Selma speech.
• 47:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: Obama's favorite, which is good.
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: Triumphalist, you know, preparation. And after Trump was elected, you know,
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: me and my editor were talking, we're like, well, that's
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: probably not the right note to end on. And, and
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: so I just like, I got to end with Trump.
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: And actually I went back to read the race speech again,
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: and it was more relevant today. than it was even
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: in 2008 when he gave it. Because he is able to,
• 48:18
  Speaker 3: he's saying, well, he's doing what you're talking about, which
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: is inhabiting through his grandmother and Reverend Wright and through
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: the diagnoses of the white working class and the black
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: working class, he's saying we all encompass these complexities. And
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: until we can look at the world through each other's eyes,
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: we're never going to move forward. And that's the same
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: thing Lincoln was saying.
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: It's funny because I was reading that chapter and just
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: reading the whole book, sort of having flashbacks to the
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: night when I first talked to Obama about the race
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: speech and what he wanted to say in that. And
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: he laid out a lot of the thesis of your book,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: which is that these competing arguments that we've been having
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: in this country since the founding of And at the
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: very beginning was slavery and race that we've been having
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: to grapple with. And, you write in the book how
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: I ended up doing a draft and have the beginning
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: and the end.
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: And then Obama basically.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: Just does track changes and writes like an entire speech
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the speech and sends it back.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: Because I think he had had that in his mind
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: for a very long time. He was able to you know,
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: analyze and talk about the Reverend Wright controversy. But if
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: you had lifted the Reverend Wright controversy out, all of
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: the other themes and things that he says in that
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: speech were definitely running through his mind for a very
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: long time because they were themes throughout history.
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: That's exactly right. And as you should know, you were
• 49:58
  Speaker 3: the speechwriter on it. And by the way, I don't
• 50:01
  Speaker 3: short shrift. I mean, that beginning and end got him
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: to that middle, right? Sometimes that's the speechwriter's job to
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: get the principle to where he can have that outpouring
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: of track changes. But I think what I understood better today,
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: both because of what's happened and from writing the book,
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: is first of all, Reverend Wright was a more interesting
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: character to me today. In 2008, he was like a
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: pain in the ass. Like, why is this guy saying
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: this crazy shit that's going to mess up our campaign?
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: But actually, having written this book and then having lived
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: the post-Obama experience, Reverend Wright emerges out of the black
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: church tradition of the Jeremiad, which is a speech that
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: is intended to call out a nation's sins. So what
• 50:46
  Speaker 3: he was doing is the same thing that Frederick Douglass
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: and Maria Stewart and all the people in that tradition
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: did in this book. King did it often too. And
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: by the way, some of what Reverend Wright said ages
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: pretty well, given some of the things Trump's done. Now,
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: that said, Obama fused the activist and politician in himself.
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: And then when I look at the two key parts
• 51:12
  Speaker 3: of that speech that he wrote in the middle, one
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: is the famous part where he's like, I can no
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: more disown Reverend Wright than I can disown my white grandmother,
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: a woman who raised me, you know, would do anything
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: for me, but I heard her say horrible things. I'm
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: not saying it as elegantly as he did. What he's
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: saying there on an individual level is, hey, we all,
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: everybody in our families is like this. Like, You can
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: love somebody and think they're a good person and not
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: cancel them because they said something you disagree with, whether
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: it's Reverend Wright or your grandmother who's white. And then
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: he goes into the racial stalemate, as he calls it,
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: and he describes black structural inequality in ways I don't
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: think I'd ever heard.
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: I mean, maybe Jesse Jackson, but- Unsparingly, unflinchingly.
• 51:56
  Speaker 4: Unsparingly.
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: Redlining, education gap, income gap. But then, He talks like
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: about the white working class more effectively than J.D. Vance
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: or Donald Trump. The line where he says they don't
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: feel particularly privileged by their race is an incredibly powerful
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: line that these are people whose jobs have been shipped overseas.
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: These are people who had to bust their kids, which
• 52:21
  Speaker 3: is a hassle across town because of some civil rights requirement, which, again,
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: I think is worth doing. But, you know, it's their obligation.
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: These are people who are told that they're worried about crime.
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: They're racist, you know. These are his white grandmother, you know?
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: And that ability to say, like, none of this is
• 52:38
  Speaker 3: going to work, American identity, American politics, unless we can
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: have that ability to look at the world through each
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: other's eyes. I mean, that to me was the magic
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: of that, the alchemy of that speech.
• 53:00
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• 54:20
  Speaker 1: People look back now and whenever Obama comes up in
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: the discourse and they're like, well, he's, you know, He
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: was progressive on, you know, the left liked him because
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: he was opposed to the war in Iraq, but he
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: was much more moderate on other policies.
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: But the race speech to me shows the core of
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: what he was always about.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: And it is the thread that runs through a lot
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: of these politicians and activists in your book, which is
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: like he was very he was more radical in his
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: diagnosis of the problem.
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: In saying, in talking about structural inequality and racism and
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: in history, how history has led us here. And the
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: fact that, I mean, he does a speech about his
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: pastor that said controversial things and he opens it by
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: talking about slavery and the constitution, right? Like it goes
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: pretty deep, but the, to the extent that he's perceived
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: as moderate, it's exactly what he did about white resentment,
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: which is like, yeah, there's structural racism and inequality in
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: where black people in this country have been subjugated since
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: its founding. And yet, that doesn't mean that resentment that
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: white people have is unfounded, wrong, bad, evil. I still
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: want to correct the structural inequality and correct the racism.
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: But also, if I want to actually fix that, I
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: have to earn the support of the people who have
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: that resentment as opposed to just telling them they are bad.
• 55:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: Cause you don't want to become a mirror image of
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: JD Vance, right? Like we don't like it when JD
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: Vance shows up and says, you can't have your way
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: of life. You have to live the way I say, um,
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: showing up and telling someone your identity is bad, you know,
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: because you come from this heritage or, you know, because
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: sometimes you might've had certain thoughts, you know, um, like,
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: you have to bring those people along. I mean, you
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: and I have talked about this a lot over the years.
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: What Obama would say to people isn't come out with
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: your hands up and acknowledge your racism. He would say,
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: this country is so great that we've been able to
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: change over time. And we've been able to right wrongs
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: and extend rights and advance opportunities. And actually, the thing
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: that's holding us back now is the way in which
• 56:36
  Speaker 3: powerful forces, and here's where he's like Trump, there are
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: these elites That divide us against each other. They don't want,
• 56:43
  Speaker 3: you know, working class solidarity among black and white people
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: because then we might actually fix the economy and have
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: universal health care and things that actually make people's lives better.
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: They're the ones, you know, kind of creating these divisions. But,
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: you know, he tried to channel that towards progress. It
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: was inherently incremental. You know, there's no, there's no wand
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: you can wave. that can redress every inequality. You have
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: to tackle it problem by problem. But if you're changing,
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: and this is why I think speeches are relevant and
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: matter and need to kind of come back, if you
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: are telling that story and building that coalition and kind
• 57:22
  Speaker 3: of speaking it into action, that's how you keep moving
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: in the right direction. And we kind of get derailed
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: when we lose, I mean, I'm using the story metaphor
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: a lot here when we kind of lose the plot,
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: you know, and the, our politics on the, on the
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: left or center left becomes about either how bad they are,
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: or it becomes kind of small ball. Like, well, we
• 57:44
  Speaker 3: need these ACA subsidies or we need, you know, more
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: affordable housing, important things that I agree with, but what's
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: the story? Like, what is it? What, what, what do we, what,
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: who are we? You know, what, what is it American?
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: And how can we build a big enough coalition that
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: we can overcome these things that are in our way?
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: And, By the way, when he condemns Reverend Wright in
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: that speech, he doesn't condemn the anger that Wright expresses
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: over what he and other Black Americans have been through.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: What he condemns is Wright's inability to see that we
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: have the possibility to change. And that's actually what bothers
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: him most about what Reverend Wright said, not the actual
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: analysis of the situation or the, or the incendiary language
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: or any of that.
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: It's just the, the fundamental.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: Belief that, or, or what he expressed was that like
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: somehow America can't change. Um, and I think that is notable.
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: It also made me think, as you were just talking
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: that I always get annoyed with the, um, like these days,
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: it's like very easy for democratic politicians to pick on
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: the Michelle Obama.
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: When they go low, we go high.
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Um, Line because they think it's Michelle Obama saying Republicans
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: can kick the shit out of us and we have
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: to just be nice. And that's not what it ever
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: that's not what it meant. And what it meant is
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: what you were just saying about like, we can't, we
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: can't be like JD Vance and Alexander Stevens and these
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: reactionaries who say that.
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: Um, one group is better than the other group. One
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: group is good. One group is bad.
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: It's a contest between good and evil because that's not
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: the vision of America that the founders had in mind.
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: And it's a harder, it's, this work is harder, right?
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: To like take a country of 330 million people of
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: like all different backgrounds and all different biases and warring
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: factions all through the years and say, all right, let's
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: somehow like hold it all together because that's the whole,
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: like that is a tougher project than the other project,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: which is to just tear it down and try to
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: subjugate people.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: I mean, if you're a reactionary rooted in grievance and nostalgia,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: you're inherently going to win the go low fight, right?
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: Because what we're trying to do is play for something bigger.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: Douglas and King, the Douglas speech, I love this speech.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 3: He gave it during reconstruction and it's a speech that's
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: really about multiracial democracy, but it's a speech in defense
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: of Chinese immigrants. Like probably the, probably polled You know,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: if we had a polar coaster episode in 1867, the
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: advice would be like, please do not go there. It
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: was wildly unpopular, but essentially these Chinese immigrants were being
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: incredibly mistreated. They were kind of the new slaves, you know,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: even though they weren't total servitude. And Douglass is saying,
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: if I believe in multiracial democracy, I have to stand
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: up for the rights of these people too. And he
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: gives a beautiful going high speech about that. Now you
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: could say, well, Douglass failed. there's a Chinese Exclusion Act
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: that was passed shortly after banning Chinese people from coming
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: to this country for decades.
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: Did he fail?
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: Because look around California today. How many Chinese Americans and
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: Asian Americans do you see? Maybe because he went high
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: and he went big, maybe he won in the end. King,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 3: same thing. King gives a speech, and it was interesting
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: reliving the story of that speech. It's a pretty good speech.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: Promissory note. He's got a lot of good rhetoric. He
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: did not have the dream in there. He ad-libbed the
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: whole dream sequence.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: Well, this was just like a speechwriter nerding out thing.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: But I had never heard that King's staff, someone on
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: his staff who was helping with the speech was like,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: don't say, don't talk about your dream, whatever you do,
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: because it's too cliche. And then King just gives the
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: speech and does it.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: So first of all, I'm so glad we're talking about
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: this because it was such a speechwriter thing. they had
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: not really worked on the speech as much as they
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: should have. Cause they were super busy. Everybody thinks, you know,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: you have big speech, you work on it forever. They
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: were huddled in the Willard hotel, like the night before
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: the March. And they're literally writing the speech. And this
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: guy's like, whatever you do, Martin, like, just don't tell
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: him about that dream. It's, it's cliche, you know? So
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 3: they leave it out. He stays up. They finished the
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: draft of the speech. It's done. They distribute it to
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: the press and everything. And King's sitting there on the
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: dais and he's, And you can kind of see him
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: in the footage. He's kind of still fiddling with his speech.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: And then he gets up there and he gives the
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: speech and it's good. And he gets this moment and
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: he kind of stops, kind of like Obama did before
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: he sang Amazing Grace. He kind of stops and pauses.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: And if I had to guess, he's sitting there, he's thinking,
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 3: I'm never going to speak to a crowd this big again.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: The whole country is watching on TV. Most white people
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: have never seen a black person deliver a whole speech before.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: These people watching, some of them are going to go
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: back to the South and get their ass beat in.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: I need to give them something more. I need to
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: give them something else. Now, the dream sequence he'd used before,
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: by the way, was not nearly as good. It was okay.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: It was good, but it was not the evocative language
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: that he ended up using. And he goes so high, right?
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: Like every image that he uses is black and white
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: coming together, black children and white children in a nation
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: where you're judged not by the color of your skin,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 3: the content of your character. He's giving... nation a sense
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 3: of purpose, right? And he's doing that because he's trying
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: to affect John F. Kennedy to have a more ambitious
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: civil rights bill, but also intangibly in the same way
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: that maybe Douglas changed America over time. It's kind of
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: hard to argue with King's dream. He went so big
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: that even today, Donald Trump has to be like, yeah,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: I have a dream too. You know, like, like, and
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: I think we, let's not lose that. Like, it's not
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: about just going high. It's also about going big, like
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: a big vision for this country.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: Well, I was thinking about that.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: And one thing that connects all these speeches that go
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: big or high or whatever you want to say is
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: this like deeply moral language that I, as I was
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: reading the book, realized like, fuck, we don't have that anymore.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: Like we don't hear that anymore.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: It's not like they are trying to win arguments through
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: logic and reason alone, um, that a lot of these
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: speakers from King to Douglas, to Dolores Huerta, to, to
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: everyone you have in the book that is not a
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: reactionary and actually a lot of the reactionaries too, they
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: use a moral language that is both, um, it's, it's in,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: it's embedded in the founding documents, but even deeper than that,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of religious language and religion in a
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: way that I hadn't expected, not in the way that
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: the Like the Christian right uses religion today because a
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: lot of the people on the progressive side who use
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: this religious language aren't even religious themselves. You mentioned that
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln wasn't a big fan of organized religion. But again,
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: Frederick Douglass calls his second inaugural sacred and he reaches
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: for this sort of religious imagery and it happens all
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: the way through King and all the way through all
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: of these figures in the book. And I wonder what
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: you thought about that. I know you're not like a
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: deeply religious person. I'm not a deeply like.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 2: Organized religious person. But it was hard to not notice.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: That each of these speeches, especially from a left that
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: has become, you know, fairly secular, even some of the
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: most radical activists and abolitionists and progressive presidents throughout history
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: have sort of like tried to ground their argument in
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: something in this higher power.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, and there's like, look, there's some interesting
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: particularities like, you know, churches and faiths were often party
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 3: to movements, right? But also just the language is religious,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: but it's also just moral. You know, Dolores Huerta- Her speech,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: she marches from Delano, California, all the way to Sacramento
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: with the farm workers and Cesar Chavez, who is obviously
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: a problematic figure.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 2: Good thing you went with Dolores Huerta.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: I went with Dolores, yeah.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 2: You didn't know at the time, but that was a.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Ostensibly, she's there to advocate for farm worker union rights.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: We wanted to have the right to collective bargaining and
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: we want longer breaks and we want healthcare and all
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 3: these things. But the speech is like, we are here,
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: we embody our needs for you. You know, like it's
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 3: a very visceral activist language that felt very contemporary. It
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: was basically all lives matter kind of language, like our
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 3: lives matter. Like we are here, you have to see us,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 3: you know? And I think that, Some of it is, yes,
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: religion is kind of in some ways the simplest way.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: And I heard, you know, Reverend Warnock on recently, and
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: he talks a bit about this. Like religion is obviously,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: and James Tallarico is doing this now, religion is a
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: quick way into morality. But I also think there are
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: things you can draw from religious traditions. Like Obama used to,
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: Obama would always say, you know, a core of his
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: message at the beginning was, I am my brother's keeper,
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: I am my sister's keeper. That's a religious idea, but
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: it's also a secular idea, right?
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: Well, that's what's most interesting is the religious language that
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: a lot of these speakers use could be very secular.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: Like you don't need to believe in any specific faith to.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, it has secular meaning. And I think that's the language.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: You used to have this joke, I think I can
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: tell it, about kind of democratic consultant speech. We want
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 3: to put the middle class at the middle of our priorities.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 3: And the horrifying thing about living through the last decade
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 3: is Actually, we want to build an economy from the
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: bottom up and the middle out. There's no morality in that. Nope.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: There's no purpose in that. Nope. There's no sense that
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: I want to care for my neighbor or that I
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: have a stake in this country and its success or
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 3: that I want my life to have a meaning bigger
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: than even what I do every day. I belong to
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: a whole that matters. The Kennedy language about ripples of hope, right?
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: I'm not free unless everybody's free. You know, like I
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 3: think that what's been missing in democratic politics since Obama,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: and this isn't just like flocking for Obama. It's I
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 3: think is, you know, we haven't had necessarily great speakers
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: or we've gotten consultants speak or frankly, social media is
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 3: kind of disincentivized this kind of speaking. But I think
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: people are ready for it now. I think like life
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 3: is pretty good. fucked in this country right now like
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: the rampant inequality wars ai's coming for jobs like your
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: kids are on screens and friends with chat bots or
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 3: something like they want someone to come along and say
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 3: there's something bigger that we need to be about that
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: we need to care for our neighbor things concepts of
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: fairness and dignity you know that our dignity is a
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: very religious concept that there's value in human life which
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: is why what ice is doing is wrong you know
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: um I think that kind of language, whoever can harness
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 3: that and capture that, um, think that would be very
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: useful in a 2028 presidential candidacy.
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that ideology isn't important here and
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: policy isn't important, but when you say, even when you
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: say Medicare for all or abolish ICE, even if you
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: believe those things, talking about them in that way is
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: not the most powerful way to talk about them. Like
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: slogans about slogans to signal that you exist on a certain, um,
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: area of the political spectrum, um, is fine for, you know,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: signaling to certain in groups and, and, and other people
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: paying close attention to politics, that that's where you are fine.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying it is
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: not sufficient anymore. Um, and it is, it is evidence
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: that we are missing, um, that bigger moral story about
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: who we are and where we need to go that
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: you see throughout American history that you've chronicled in this book.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: And I just don't, I have.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: Not heard anyone tell that story or even attempt to,
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: which is why I'm still like.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 3: There was an interesting moment. Do you remember Bernie in,
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 3: I think his last campaign, he used to do this
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 3: thing at rallies he started to do where he'd say,
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 3: I want you to look at the person.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 3: You know, next to you.
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: Yes.
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 3: And what this campaign is about is I want you
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 3: to care about that person as much as you care
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 3: about yourself.
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 3: And Medicare for all flows from that.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 3: So what a good politician does is absolutely the policy
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 3: and ideology matters. So this is not just about giving
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 3: airy-fairy speeches, but if you ground it in something, you
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 3: anchor it in a kind of moral language and a
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 3: story about America and what American identity means, it should
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 3: follow naturally. well, if you care about the person next
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: to you as much as care about yourself, you want
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: them to have healthcare too, you know? Uh, and that's, that's,
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 3: I think the piece that's, that's been missing to some extent.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: So you end the book with Trump's second inaugural. Um,
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: and so I think, I think you said originally it
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: was probably going to be what, uh, Pat Buchanan's 1992
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: speech and then Obama Selma speech. And then instead you
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: did Obama race and then, uh, and with Trump's second inaugural. And, um,
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: You know, we've talked about how in the sweep of history,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: you start realizing that the transition from Obama to Trump
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: is more natural than it may have seemed at the
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: time because we've always had these backlashes.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: And that is true.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: I will say, after reading your whole book and then
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: getting to Trump, his second inaugural and his presidency feel
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: like even more of a departure, even more un-American than
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: then even Stephen's white supremacy speech, or you have Mary
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: Lisa's sort of xenophobic populism, or even Pat Buchanan, who
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: you talk about, like, and I think it's the, because
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: it's not just the xenophobia, it's not just like the
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: issues of race that we're dealing with with Trump again.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: It is the.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: Dictatorial quality of Trump's rhetoric and the actions really stand
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: out even from all the other reactionaries in the book.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: And- I don't know if that, that struck you too,
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: but I was like, it, I read it and I
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: was more like, Oh, we are fucked.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: That is absolutely a hundred percent on point. And what
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: I would say, because look, there's some things that make
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 3: a lot of sense. If you look at history, um,
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: the kind of populist grievance of the white working class
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: kind of paranoid America, first isolationism, periodic spasms of xenophobia
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: and anti-immigrant sentiment. There's a lot of currents of running
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: to Trump. Um, where he is a departure, Alexander Stevens.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 3: That was a speech they had just had a process. Now, obviously,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: Lincoln thought it was illegal, but they voted to secede.
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: They wrote a constitution, and he's giving a speech defending
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: the legal framework for what they did. So weirdly, the
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: Confederacy tried to have a veneer of process. Trump, in
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 3: that speech, says... I think the most chilling line, right,
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: is I was saved by God to make America great again.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 3: And everything is I. Everything is like, you know, like
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: Reagan would never have said that, you know? And I
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: think the extremity, the departure.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: No leader in American history has said that. Not even
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: the George Wallaces.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: No.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: Like, none of them.
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 4: Nope. Nope.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: And he basically says, like, your job is done. You
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 3: voted for me. Story's over.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 4: I won.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: And I'm taking custody of this country and its story.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 4: And.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: And you're right. The extremity is not just the it's
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 3: not the racism and the xenophobia and the, you know,
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 3: unleashed capitalism, all these things. It's the dictatorial. It's the
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 3: idea that I'm not playing by Franklin's rulebook. You know,
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: I don't need to follow the law. I can do
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 3: whatever I want. That's the departure. And that is a departure.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 3: Like that's the radicalism of Trump is not in the
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: underlying xenophobia or populism. It's in the. putting that in
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: service of someone who believes not in the constitutional framework
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 3: within which we have this competition of stories. Like I
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 3: welcome a world, a future in which JD Vance plays
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 3: by the rules and gives versions of his Claremont speeches
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 3: and we debate him. Yep. Like that's healthy. That's good.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 3: Like, and I welcome other people disagreeing with me and
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: agreeing with JD Vance. I don't have all the answers. Shit.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 3: I'm not even close. What I do insist on is
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 3: that we're still dealing within the, compromise that Franklin and
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 3: his buddies outlined. And that in his rhetoric and in
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: his actions, Trump has departed from that. And I think
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 3: that's why this is is an actual emergency. Yes, it's
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 3: a backlash, just like there was a backlash to Reconstruction,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 3: just like there was a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 3: But this is someone saying, even the segregationists, we're processed people.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 3: States' rights and these laws, and we're going to try
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 3: to get people on the Supreme Court and do this.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: Trump is just saying, none of this applies to me.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: And that's the message in his rhetoric.
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we can leave it here. Maybe you can
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: react to this. I don't bring it up because... I
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: actually do think that we're fucked, but I think that
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: if we are trying to tell a story about where
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: we go from here and continue having this argument in
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: a way where we actually win the argument, like that's
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: what we have. We have to figure out that what
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: Trump represents and what he's telling people. And I don't
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: say that to be like, to refight the 2024 battle
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: about like.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, Kamala should call him a fascist. And we should
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: talk more about democracy.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: And cause obviously like the words have all been wrong,
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: not just from Kamala, but from everyone. Like we have
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: not been like just saying that Trump is a dangerous
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: fascist clearly has not worked, but what is it about
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: him and what he's doing and this departure from the
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: rest of American history that is still, um, uh, that
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: is still appealing to a big part of the country.
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: And what is the argument to that part of the
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: country to say that this is, like Lincoln did to
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: the South, this is bad for all of us. It's
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: bad for you. It's bad for us. It's bad for
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: the whole project. And we have to find a way
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: out of this together.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 3: I think you see Ossoff doing this a bit in
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 3: the sense where it's not just about corruption. What he's
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 3: saying is if someone like Trump and his cronies, and
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: actually I start the section on the speech on Trump
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: with the tableau of all those oligarchs at stage for
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 3: a reason. If there are a small number of people
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: that are just exempted entirely from the rules, you're going
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 3: to get screwed. Like not only is that fundamentally wrong
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 3: and un-American, it also leads to outcomes where you're fucked
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 3: because they're not going to look at, they're going to
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 3: loot this country. They're not going to, you know, do
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 3: anything for the common good, you know? They're not going
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 3: to do anything to care for the neighbor. They're not
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 3: going to care about the person next to them. And
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 3: so I think that we have to not have the
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 3: separation of the democracy message and the kind of economic
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: message because they're connected. Because if some guy says, I
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 3: was saved by God to save this country and the
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 3: laws don't apply to me, well, he's probably going to
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: build a ballroom and steal a bunch of money and
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: set up a slush fund for his friends and leverage
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 3: American foreign policy to make billions in crypto and launch
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: crazy wars and People are making money off of insider
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 3: trading while you pay higher gas prices. So I think
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 3: the people that can tell a story that draws those
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 3: connections between the radicalism of Trump and the outcomes in
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 3: people's lives, I think that's probably– I don't claim to
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: have the exact formulation, but that's the space. And you
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 3: see Ossoff circling it. You see Warnock circling it. Chris
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 3: Murphy circling it. AOC is definitely circling it.
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 3: I think the notably younger Democrats, by the way, are
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 3: figuring this out.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: Ben, I could talk to you for another couple hours
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: about all this book. I have all these other questions.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 3: We don't have to make a big exchange. Just curious,
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: like you read them, what was your favorite speech?
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow. I mean, it.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: Sounds, it's like an answer that so many people have
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: given in the past, but I think like you, I
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: came to appreciate Lincoln's second inaugural.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 3: Totally agree.
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: In like a way that I just had never, like,
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: I remember when people said that I would always be like, yeah,
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: it's a pretty good speech, but I didn't really get
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: why everyone loved it so much. And your, your chapter
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: on it and the story behind it has, has, has
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: brought me around to how both radical and, and hopeful and, and, and,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: and with so much, humility, um, he delivers that speech
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: at that time.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 2: So, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 3: Totally agree. And pretty crazy, right? That the most radical
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 3: speech ever was in 1865. It just goes to show,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: you know, uh, history moves in different directions.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: Sure does. Um, everyone go buy the book. Seriously.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: I know, I know you say this, we have people
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: on who buy books and, and Ben's a crooked cohost,
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: but it is, uh, it, this book will stay with
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: me for a long time and I will go back
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: to it, um, many times. And it was like such
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: a bomb from reading the news because it really, it's
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: just a real, like if you care about the country
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: and you care about politics and you're paying attention to politics,
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: but you want to feel something deeper and more hopeful
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: than you see every day, go read All We Say.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: It's a fantastic book.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 3: Thanks, John. All right.
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: Take care, buddy.
• 1:19:37
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• 1:19:39
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