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How can Democrats persuade more voters to like them? (with Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former senior advisor)
00:42:06
Why are Democrat politicians struggling to connect with voters?
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BBC Podcast Host
This BBC podcast is supported by ads
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Ben Rhodes
outside the UK Odoo providing tools for businesses across industries into one fully integrated platform. Whatever your business needs, Odoo is committed to providing it.
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Learn more@odoo.com When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account. Like if Fatuin won the lottery.
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Podcast Advertiser/Promoter
I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is gonna be all trampoline, bro, with the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies.
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Ben Rhodes
But switching to GEICO saved me hundreds. So my bank account is safe.
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It feels good to say some hard earned cash.
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It feels good to geico.
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What's the future of the American left? What happens when Donald Trump departs the stage? There's a lot of discussion about it and we frequently talk about it on the podcast. But I'm gonna now with someone who really has thought it through and knows his stuff on this, partly because he was a member of the Obama administration. He knows how Democrats can win and can govern, but also he thinks a lot about the future of the party and the way it's got to appeal to Americans. So welcome to AmericasT with Ben Rhodes.
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AmericasT, AmericasT from BBC News.
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You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that
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sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under
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Pat Buchanan
President Trump, we are finishing it.
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Ben Rhodes
This is a big cover up and this administration is engaged in it.
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This guy has Trump derangement syndrome.
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Obama Campaign Staff/Commentator
I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.
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Ben Rhodes
I'm delighted to say I'm now in a room with Ben Rhodes and it, it really makes a difference, doesn't it? Because I talked to you a dozen times down the line. You talk a lot to the British press, don't you? You and you've done it for years. We should start off by saying then it's a real pleasure to have you
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face to face in the flesh. Not upstairs in my closet so that my kids don't walk in.
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Exactly. And we should then remind people why we talk to you so often. So under Obama, we're going back a bit now, but back in the Obama administration, I can remember the. Just when Obama came to power and it was obvious that you were going to have a big role in the White House and you did have a role and you had a very fancy title, didn't you, though, it allowed you to do various things, and I think that's going to be an important part of our conversation. But you were deputy National Security advisor.
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Yes.
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Yeah. Okay. So that focuses you on the White House under Obama. Since then, you've done a range of things. You speak a lot about the future of America. In other words, when you finished that job for Obama, you didn't go off and retire or go off and do other things and give up on the idea of America and American politics. That's important as well, isn't it? And you've written this book called all we say, which is a book essentially of speeches, but it's a bit more about than that. And we're going to get to that as well. But really crucially, as well, you're a podcaster.
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I'm a podcaster.
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And that really matters, doesn't it? Because you're still trying to make the case.
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Yep.
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For the broad left in American life.
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Yeah. No, I, you know, it's interesting because I write books, I write for the New York Times, but the podcast parts of the world, you know, all these different things I'm doing in this era that we live in are all fundamentally interconnected because it's basically just about trying to kind of hold the line in very dark times, trying to create a kind of space that is a bit of a community for people to share ideas on the center to the left about foreign policy and politics and also be trying to imagine what's on the other side of all this, you know, and so you kind of have to show up everywhere, as you know, in politics and writing and podcasting. And that's what I've been doing, which
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is one of the things the Democrats didn't do that got wrong, really, in the run up to Donald Trump's second term, isn't it?
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It is. I mean, you know, we, through the podcast company, you know, I'm parts of the world, we have pots of America, and we're kind of lonely outpost of progressive media in the United States. You know, the right wing built huge media platforms quite deliberately in the same way that, you know, we saw Viktor Orban doing Hungary or, you know, Putin obviously kind of captured the media. There's a lack of an effort to understand that you need to kind of create these media platforms and create these spaces for different voices that you kind of can't just count on your capacity to win the argument. And in legacy media, and also, like the, the media we do is also mobilization. Like, we have a dedicated effort to help People connect to and volunteer and contribute to political campaigns. It's trying to create an ecosystem that people who want to do something because of how they feel about what's happening in America, they can plug into it.
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How do you stop it being though safe and dull and plodding and. And a bit lecture y as well, because that's. That was the criticism, wasn't it, last time around? So people are saying, hey, where's this left wing equivalent of all these buzzy things happening in, in the digital space on the right? And what some people said, well, it's really difficult on the left because you'll be careful about the language you use. Yes, you've got to be careful about all sorts of things. And famously, of course, Kamala Harris wouldn't go on some podcasts. He's worried about it. Etc. Has that fixed now, do you think?
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No, I don't think it's fixed. And it's a great question. And I think there's several components to it. I mean, first of all, if you look at the podcasts that are successful on the right, most of them didn't start out as political podcasts. Joe Rogan was a comedian and a Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator who got political right. Politics was downstream of culture, to use a phrase. And the other point is that we were political in what we set up, but the whole idea was to talk about politics like normal people do, to not create a barrier to entry by using a lot of jargon or acronyms, to use humor. I think one of the problems in the Trump decade is people present on the left as angry and kind of grim. And my experience of politics, including with the Obama campaign, is if you have some humor to it, number one, that can help cut a strong man down to size. But it's also inviting. You want to be a part of something that is fun and a bit joyful. And then I think the other problem that Democratic politicians have that is connected to this point about, you know, the origin of politics being downstream from culture is that when they do go on podcasts, you know, they have these debates like, well, now we must go on podcasts, you know, and. And they go on and they sound like politicians, you know, so they go on the podcast with Joe Rogan or whoever it is, and they're using the same talking points that they would use in an interview with cnn. And the whole point is that the way media is evolving is people want to see you authentically, like, what are you interested in? Like, you know, actually whatever your views of his politics are Zora Momdani understands this, that if he's going on a sports podcast, he's going to show up to talk about sports, and then he'll get to politics. You know, like, you need to kind of meet people where they are in these kind of new.
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And you might occasionally screw up again. You saw that with Mandani, didn't you? Before he was elected mayor of New York, he went on a podcast. I can't remember the exact circumstances, but I remember people saying, oh, he shouldn't have gone on this, because he said something. I think it was possibly about Israel. He's gone too far. He said this, he said that. Actually, that's not the modern way, is it? That's not the modern politics.
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No. And I think people. People give you a lot of space to screw up. They prefer to feel like you're an authentic person. I mean, I'll be critical of my own party here. You know, like a Chuck Schumer just presents as a politician, and he may not make a mistake, but he also won't connect because of that. You know, I mean, actually, it's funny working on this book about speeches, like, thinking about the communications of recent Democratic politicians. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both use this line constantly, that they're here to build an economy from the bottom up to the middle out. Well, what does that mean? That doesn't connect with people. And actually, I think in this day and age, particularly with such saturation of information and media, people want to know who the person is. And you have to be willing to say something wrong, or you have to be willing to have an opinion that people might, like, vigorously disagree with, but at least they know that you stand for something, even if it's something that they disagree with you about. I mean, Mamdani on Israel was interesting to me, is that even if you agreed with him or disagreed, the fact that he was willing to take all the grief he took was like, well, maybe this guy will actually like to lower my prices, you know, because he's willing to be criticized about things. And in a way, Trump is the ultimate model of that. I mean, I don't. I don't like any of the things that just about any things that he was trying to do. But because he was willing to say things that seemed out of bounds, I think it made people think, well, maybe he's different.
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You know, what does that tell us then, about the choices that the party has to make running up to 2028?
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You know, I think, first of all, we're already Seeing it a bit in 2026 in that there are these politicians that Democrats keep waiting, you know, the more established Democrats, I think, keep waiting for them to implode. Like a Graham Platner in Maine.
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Or we've done a whole podcast. Epis Graham Planner. Fascinating.
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And you know what? Like, gravity is not pulling him down, like, because people feel like, well, we know who this guy is and we think he's authentic. And so maybe we think he'll actually do things at the other podcast.
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We should say. For anyone who didn't hear our podcast, episode number one is still available. You can go back. Let's do it. Number two, he's got the nomination as the Democratic nominee to be the Senate candidate. It's a Senate seat the Democrats are desperate to win this time round, and they've picked. What is he? He's an oyster farmer. He's a former soldier and Marine, is rough and tough. That's the kind of positive side of it. But he's also got quite a background. All sorts of, yeah, misogynist stuff online. So it's a risk. It was always going to be a risk.
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And I'm not saying that's the ideal, but I think that, again, people want someone who doesn't present like other politicians. They want the Democratic Party to show that it gets, that people believe. It became out of touch. It became too complacent, it became too committed to kind of defending established ways of doing things at a time when people don't like that. It certainly became resistant to generational change. So when I looked at 2028, I think who is. First of all, I feel adamantly that it needs to be a younger person, you know, that it needs to be someone who can communicate in the kind of spaces that we're talking about, and that it needs to be someone who doesn't in any way suggest that they want to kind of go back to some way of doing things before Trump, but is rather telling a story about how we can do things differently. You see? And again, I'm not picking any one person, but to take one example, Jon Ossoff, the senator from Georgia.
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Yeah. Who we've also talked a bit about in America.
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So I wouldn't be surprised if there's more and more talk about him running for president because he's telling a different story. He's connecting dots for people. Democrats have had all these debates about, do we talk about democracy or do we talk about kitchen table issues? Well, Ossoff blows apart that, you know, dichotomy. He's like, this is the same thing. If you have an oligarchy and a corrupt system that only serves a few people, well, that's the reason why you can't afford your health care. Like he tells one story about what's happening in the country that explains both why things aren't getting better on things like cost of living, but also makes you believe that we can make them better if we make certain changes to how government itself works. It's not showing up with a 10 point policy plan. And if you look at an Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, I think who'd have an uphill battle to be president.
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So she is the left wing, progressive left caucus woman. People aren't quite sure whether she's gonna stand or not. Are you convinced she will?
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I'm not sure she will either. I think she'll test the waters and see if her message can travel beyond New York City. But, but I think what people should take from her, no matter what, is there's a joyful and fearless nature to what she does. And, and these things are really important. Fearlessness is important because kind of what Trump depends upon is the idea that, you know, things can't change. They're just, this is the way they are. And they're all these kind of powerful forces and all this money that will crush people that try to move things in a different direction. She doesn't look afraid of those things. I mean, a guy who can't run is the Pope. But he got this when Trump attacked the Pope. I thought the most interesting thing is when he went out the next day, he said, I'm not afraid of this administration. And that's something that was clearly lost on all these law firms and universities and media companies that have kind of folded in front of Trump. But the other thing I like about AOC is she has a smile on her face. And I think Democratic politics the last decade has been very grim, kind of very angry. And frankly, that doesn't attract people.
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There's also an anger, isn't there though, in the broader left? You think of Luigi Mangione, who's accused of that terrible murder in New York of an insurance boss. And this kind of sense among a lot of people on the left who sort of say, oh, well, he deserved what was coming to him and all the unpleasant things said about Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated. And indeed people on the left who say, who don't believe or pretend not to believe that there was a genuine assassination attempt at least one once against Donald Trump. There's A kind of nastiness there that how big a risk is it that the left becomes as nasty as much of the right has been in the recent past?
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There is a risk, but I think that's the trap that the right is setting. Like, that's what they want, you know, and frankly, actually, oftentimes they're the ones elevating that content. Right. Like Republican politicians and media personalities are quite good at finding kind of the angriest, craziest thing that people are saying on the left and responding to it to make it a conflict. And frankly, that's not a place where the left wins, in my view, because I think you, you need to do two things. Like, one, you need to attract people. Like, I was on the Await Obama campaign, Some people may remember, that was a lot of fun. Like, people wanted to be a part of it. They wanted to volunteer, they wanted to knock on doors with their friends. You know, they wanted to be part of a cultural movement that was attractive. But the other thing is you have to be able to do. And Barack Obama, you know, far from perfect, but he did this very well, is you need to persuade. And you don't persuade people by lecturing them. You know, Obama didn't show up and say, you are racist and you must come out with your hands up and acknowledge it and acknowledge white supremacy. And then maybe we can make progress. He would say, this country is so great that we've been able to make progress before, and here's the whole history of progress throughout America and join us in this next chapter. And it was a patriotic appeal. And look, I've been very critical of America. You followed my commentary, particularly on foreign policy. But if you want to bring people along, you have to open a door for them to come in.
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It's such an important point that, isn't it? Obama gave the impression, I don't know how really was, but he gave the impression that he really liked ordinary Americans. So even when he gave that speech that it was greatly lambasted, wasn't he? Where he talked about people in small towns hankering after their guns and people seized on that and said, oh, he doesn't like the small town. Actually, he was able to get past that, wasn't he? Because it did seem as if he liked his fellow Americans. And the risks were, and we talk about it quite a lot on the pod now, the risk among some modern Democrats is that they don't really seem to like people who live in West Virginia or South Dakota or somewhere.
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Yeah, I mean, Obama, it was actually really Interesting. For this book, I went back and wrote about the race speech he gave in 2008. This is when there were clips of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, that went viral online.
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Obama Campaign Staff/Commentator
No, no, no. Not God bless America. God bless God damn America. That's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating US Citizens as less than human. God damn America. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.
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Ben Rhodes
You know, attacking America, saying it's a racist country. And he did a couple things in there that were really interesting to relive. Now, the first is he defended Reverend Wright by essentially saying, look, he's a complicated guy. He's done some wonderful things, and he's said some terrible things.
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Barack Obama (speech excerpts)
As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contained.
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Ben Rhodes
And he talked about his white grandmother who raised him. Same thing. This woman who loved me, but she said things that make me cringe.
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Barack Obama (speech excerpts)
I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother. A woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me. A woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world. But a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
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Ben Rhodes
But actually, it was a speech against cancel culture before that was even a thing.
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It was an extraordinary speech. I remember seeing it in Philadelphia. I think it was in Philadelphia. Yeah. And just to reemphasize. So this guy, the Reverend Wright, had really potentially ditched the entire Obama campaign. You must have really. Yeah. I mean, it was a big moment because all this material suddenly came out was Obama's pastor this extraordinary moment where Obama made the decision himself, didn't he?
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Obama Campaign Staff/Commentator
Yeah.
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Ben Rhodes
To make this speech and as you say, to talk about his own family in a way that was just so relatable.
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Yeah. And totally related to the point you were just making, because. So he makes a decision to give this speech, which really the whole campaign is hanging on because we were sinking like a stone in the polls. And we prepare a draft and it comes back and it's track changes. A few paragraphs in black, and then about nine pages in red. Track changes and then a few paragraphs in Black. Like he stayed up all night writing this speech himself. I don't know why he didn't accept the track changes. I think he wanted to show us,
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look what I did, the red track changes. For anyone who's over a certain age, you can alter a document and you see the changes.
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And the point about the argument he made is, first of all, I mentioned what he said about his pastor and his grandmother saying it's actually what's missing, our politics. Now, look around. None of us is perfect. We all have people in our family. We disagree with bad things. We don't have to just see the worst in people. We can see what we love in people and we can see what makes us share an identity in this country. But then he talked about black structural inequality in the United States. But then he talked about the white working class. And he said, these are people who aren't particularly privileged by their race.
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Barack Obama (speech excerpts)
Most working and middle class white Americans don't feel that they've been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned. No one handed them anything. They've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game in which your dreams come at my expense.
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Ben Rhodes
And he was able again, to your point about what the left getting into these traps to say, like, actually, instead of kind of condemning these people, I want to. They're us too. I want to put myself in their shoes and see how things look from their perspective. And I may not even agree with all their views, but we're never going to build a multiracial coalition if we don't take their concerns seriously.
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Barack Obama (speech excerpts)
So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. Like the anger within the black community. These resentments aren't always expressed in polite company, but they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger overwhelming.
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Ben Rhodes
And I think because he had a genuine, he did have a genuine affection. I mean, he, you know, you covered that campaign. The reason he could give a speech like that wasn't just because of his family. It was also because he spent a year just traveling around Iowa, which is an all white state, pretty much just meeting with people in their living rooms and knocking on their doors and enjoying being with them and kind of modeling that, hey, actually, we have a shared identity in this country, whether we're black or white. Our concerns are pretty similar. And right now, I think we've been in a period where it has suited Trump to have people only see the things that they hate in one another. Polarization benefits Trump, and obviously social media makes polarization easier.
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Here's a challenge, though. I read that speech. So that speech is one of the speeches you have in your book. And it is. When you read it again, and particularly the line about his grandmother who loved him but would say to him things about how she was frightened of black men and walked on the other side of the street and things like that that he says in the speech made me cringe.
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That's right.
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But that's part of us. When I read that, reread it in your book, I thought, I'm not sure there are many Democratic politicians now who get away with saying these kinds of things, black or white, actually, because we've become. You say it's a speech against cancel culture. Well, kind of. The cancel culture's one. There's a lot about Obama reading those speeches where you think there's an intake of breath. You think, goodness, is he really saying that? I can't imagine a Democrat saying that now being allowed to.
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Well, I'd say two things. I mean, the first thing, it's interesting because he said that this is a woman that he loved as much as anybody in the world who had these fears. When he later says, hey, white working class people like his grandmother don't like to hear their concerns about crime be dismissed as racism. He's entered that doorway through a personal place. Right. Like I was raised by a white working class woman. I think today, again, I think people are so afraid of. Of making a mistake or, you know, you have to be willing, actually, I think in this day and age, you know, Obama used to have to say something to us, too. You have to show that there are things you're willing to lose over in order to win. I think that you probably have to go through some pretty brutal controversies and show that you're willing to kind of stand by something that you said that may be uncomfortable. Because if you're not, I think Kamala Harris, you know, fell into this very careful politician and maybe didn't make a huge mistake, but because she was afraid of making a mistake. She also didn't really say anything that connected that much with people either. So I think you have to be willing to put yourself out there, be personal, be authentic. Because I think people today, they don't just want to know, you know, what you want to do. They want to know, like, why do you want to do it? Like, what in your background compels you to want to run for this office? Democrats like to skip ahead to the 10 point or this agenda or that agenda. Actually, I think Americans are more interested in, okay, why do you want to do these things? Why should I trust that you'll do these things, that you understand what I'm going through? And if you're not willing to kind of maybe even step in it or offend people from time to time, go through the controversy, then they just will see you as a typical politician. And the message we keep getting from American voters is they don't want a typical politician.
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And that's the thing that comes out from your book. I'm proud to be on the back cover of it. Because it's not a. Not a political book. It's not the Ben Rhodes view of the world. It's a view of America from a set of speeches. And your take on those speeches, and I wanted to ask you why you selected the ones you did, because I knew the Obama speech very well. And there's a Trump one there as well, which you remember because it's more recent. But actually, most of the others I'd never really come across at all. It wasn't, in a sense, the obvious ones. I think you had the Ronald Reagan speech. The one you chose was a particular one.
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Yeah, well, because it's not an anthology. It's not meant to be the greatest speeches. It's meant to tell the story of not just American history, but essentially the arguments Americans have been having about what this country is and what it means to be American from the Founding. Benjamin Franklin is the first one. But I wanted different perspectives. We're gonna have abolitionist voices. We're gonna have famous people like Abraham Lincoln and people you've never heard of, like the suffragette Anna Dickinson, and showing that the course of this argument about what the country is. So the Reagan speech I chose is the one in which he coined the phrase evil empire to talk about the Soviet Union.
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And I suppose that's the point. It's a wider speech.
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So this is what I found so fascinating about Justin, is it's not his greatest. You Know, I love the D day one about the boys of Ponde Hook, for instance, or the Challenger Disaster. But what's so fascinating to me about that is that it's famous for him calling the Soviet Union an evil empire.
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Ronald Reagan (speech excerpts)
To ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
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Ben Rhodes
But most of the speech is not about foreign policy at all. It's a speech to Christian Evangelicals, the National association of Christian Evangelicals. And he talks a lot about the centrality of Christian faith to American identity. And he kind of goes through what would be seen as kind of a pretty right wing social agenda, like banning abortion and prayer in school, but in a much folksier, genial way than we would hear today. But he's talking about how America is a nation founded in Christian faith. And that's one of the things that makes us exceptional as Americans from his perspective. I probably wouldn't share his perspective entirely on this. But then when he gets to the Soviet Union, the contrast he's drawing is not one between capitalism and communism. It's that we are people that believe in God and they're people who believe in the rule of man. And the reason they're an evil empire is because they don't believe in anything higher than the rule of the state.
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Ronald Reagan (speech excerpts)
During my first press conference as president, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that as good Marxist Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution. I think I should point out I was only quoting Lennon, their guiding spirit, who said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideasthat's their name for religion or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. And everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.
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Ben Rhodes
And actually he works in, in a quite clever way, kind of secular bureaucrats in America too, you know, there's. I don't think Reagan would have liked Doge, but it kind of foreshadows in some way this kind of republican, you know, almost fear of the administrative state. And so what you're seeing is a kind of coherent effort by Reagan to use words to build this coalition that puts a tent over Christian evangelicals, small government conservatives who don't trust the state and national Security hawks who don't like the Soviet Union. That's the coalition that dominated American politics for most of my life.
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Obama Campaign Staff/Commentator
Yeah.
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Ben Rhodes
Talking about Reagan raises something that I've seen raised. I'm not quite sure the extent to which I think this may or may not be true, but it's a fascinating idea that one of the reasons why American politics, and in a sense society has broken down to the extent that it has in recent years is that post Cold War, there wasn't anything outside America to fight against. Do you run along with this thesis you think it's true?
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Yeah. And I felt this very strongly in doing the Reagan speech because Reagan constructs this coalition that is very focused on the outward enemy of the Soviet Union.
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Ronald Reagan (speech excerpts)
Right.
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Ben Rhodes
And that can again unite this. The small government people who hate Communism, the Christian evangelicals who want a God based political system, and then these hawks who hate the Soviet Union. Well, once the external enemy is gone, all this kind of energy that has been built up kind of turns inward. Suddenly the enemy is kind of within. If you remember the Clinton years, like there's a kind of relentless and vicious political combat about like pretty small things. And I think part of it was like the redirection of that energy. One of the characters in my book, even though I don't do a full speech by him, is Pat Buchanan.
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Yeah.
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And so Pat Buchanan comes along in 1992, right after the end of the Cold War. And he should, we should explain why
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he comes along where he's in the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the great sort of country club place. And suddenly Pat Buchanan is saying what to them?
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Pat Buchanan, who's been a political operative and a political commentator, comes along and he challenges George H.W. bush in 1992 for the presidential nomination. And his basic argument is we beat the Soviet Union. But this globalization that we've created, in part our Cold War strategy, has essentially hurt the white working class.
- [30:45]
Pat Buchanan
So today we call for a new patriotism where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first. First for a new nationalism where in every negotiation, be it arms control or trade, the American side seeks advantage and victory for the United States. And the people of this country need to recapture our capital city of Washington from lobbyists and registered agents of foreign powers who are hired to look out for everybody and everything, accept the national interest of the United States. It is time.
- [31:22]
Ben Rhodes
So here's Pat Buchanan's platform. America first, literally. That was a slogan for his campaign. Isolationism, like, we shouldn't bear all these burdens abroad. We should cancel these Free trade agreements that are emptying out, hollowing out working class communities in this country. We should build a wall on the southern border to keep immigrants out. We need to fight culture wars in this country to kind of restore Christianity as like the foundation of American society. This is all Trump, like almost 20 years before Trump. And he's only able to do that because the Soviet enemy's gone. The thing that kind of held together these disparate groups is gone. And Buchanan is saying, no, this should be the core of the Republican Party.
- [32:08]
Pat Buchanan
When we say we will put America first, we mean also that our Judeo Christian values are going to be preserved. And our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations and not dumped onto some landfill called multiculturalism.
- [32:36]
Ben Rhodes
And actually, you know, again, it was interesting to relive. I have speeches by FDR and, and, and I go through the Kennedy years in this, you know, FDR to John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. Yes, there are swings, but there's, they're telling the same story at core. Like Reagan's is more conservative, more Christian. Kennedy's is more progressive and, and open to social change and about the future. FDR is, I think, is the origin of the American superpower. We kind of had an agreed upon story and I think after the Cold War, we have not agreed on what the story. America needs a story.
- [33:15]
Pat Buchanan
Right.
- [33:16]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, you guys have. Britain is anchored in a much deeper identity. You know, there's all this history. Well, America, because we're, we're not a fixed identity. Right. We were 13 states, now we're 50. And we were one particular kind of people at the beginning. Well, now look at America today. It looks nothing like it did at the beginning. We have no official religion. The story is kind of what holds the identity together. And I think in the Cold War we had a very clear common story. And part of the reason we're so disoriented is that since the end of the Cold War, I don't think we've had one.
- [33:51]
It would be remiss of me not to ask you a bit about bang up to date things.
- [33:56]
Yeah.
- [33:57]
Given your role in the Obama administration, you dealt a lot with Iran.
- [34:01]
Yeah.
- [34:02]
Is there the remotest chance, do you think, that at the end of this that there is a better agreement done by Trump with Iran than the one that Obama eventually did?
- [34:17]
I don't think so. First of all, just because whatever agreement is reached, I don't think was worth the cost of this war already in terms of life. Billions of dollars, tens and tens of Billions of dollars shortages around the world, including here. But then second, you know, the agreement that they're negotiating right now, it lacks. It's not just a substance, because the substance of the agreement, if they get to one, which is a question because, you know, in their memorandum of understanding, the nuclear shoes are punted forward. So Iran is going to get billions and billions of dollars up front just to open the Strait of Hormuz, which is a new development. Even if they get to nuclear restrictions, they're not eliminating that program. They've acknowledged that they're not bringing in ballistic missiles and support for proxy groups, which they wanted. That's off the table now. So essentially, they're trying to get to a point where there's some restrictions on the nuclear program and some inspections and they ship the stockpile out. Those are all the things that were in our deal. But what they're lacking is the kind of force of international support and law. Our deal was with the permanent five members of the Security Council, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany and the eu, and on the deal, too, the International Atomic Agency doing all these intrusive inspections. This is like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Pakistan with the Qataris and a few other countries, like, making up texts as they go. I don't trust the durability of anything that comes out of this. You know, the Iranians have seen America pull out of a deal. I don't think that they believe that they're signing up to anything that is, you know, we had a UN Security Council set of resolutions behind this deal. You know, Americans don't like multilaterals until they need it. You need it to kind of codify and build support for these things. But I think, Justin, the most likely outcome, too, is that they never get to a nuclear deal. That frankly, they won't end the war. The Iranians need money, so they're going to get a bunch of money from the sanctions relief that's on the front end. They're allowed to sell oil on the front end without making any nuclear concessions. The Iranians also know that they can probably toll the Strait of Hormuz in some way, you know, some insurance rate that they're going to charge certain countries. So they're getting money, and America just wants that straight open. They feel burned. I think Trump realizes this was a mistake. If I'm Iran, like, why am I making a bunch of nuclear concessions in 60 days? You know, I hope they do, but even if they do, I think that's kind of status quo. Anti for two years.
- [36:46]
Does it tell a wider story, though, as well? Just finally about, I was going to say about American power, but actually maybe about the power of any large country and previously militarily significant country. You think of Russia and Ukraine. You think of China. When it looks at Taiwan. Now, the kind of technicalities of warfare have changed so much that exerting power for any future American president, it's going to be a really difficult thing to do.
- [37:16]
I think that that's a really important point. And there are two components of that I think are worth pulling out. One is just on the military aspect alone. We had aircraft carrier strike groups in the region. We had all of this military hardware, the most brought to bear to the Middle east since the invasion of Iraq. And they shut down in the Strait of Hormuz with speedboats, mines and shahzad drones. Shahzad drones mattered more than aircraft carriers to the outcome of the war, full stop. Something that you can make for tens of thousands of dollars in kind of a garage. Right? And so the idea that we can project power because we have these massive systems, well, we just, I think, lost a war to people firing shahzad drums and some ballistic missiles and recognizing that they could weaponize the global economy through the Strait. I think the second thing that Trump has massively underappreciated, obviously, is, is that America's power in the world, I mean, you're always, when you're a hegemon, you're always a bit like the wizard of Oz. You're behind the curtain and making people feel like you're much more powerful than you are. The actual power came from the alignment with a whole set of countries and institutions that we built, because actually, if you look at the record of our wars, we tend not to win them. Right. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, which I was there for, freely acknowledged. Let's put that one on the list. Back to Vietnam. Our actual strength has been that we had this block of countries that was largely aligned with us in Europe and Asia and often in other parts of the world, that we had these institutions that we set up that we could channel our power through. Well, Trump is not only disrupted and he's dismantling all of that. Threatening to invade Greenland undermined his ability to project power in Iran, because who's going to want to go along with you to open up the Strait of Hormuz when you're threatening to invade a European sovereign territory? And so, I mean, I don't think we can rebuild that. I think we have to build something new. But I think the lesson is just tariffing people and bombing people. Maybe you'll get some very short term benefit, but the long term cost is that this entire system that allowed America to be the wizard of Oz and, and frankly, it's going to put a risk, even things like the dollar as a reserve currency.
- [39:30]
Ronald Reagan (speech excerpts)
Yeah.
- [39:31]
Ben Rhodes
So given that, how optimistic are you? I mean, it's, in a sense, it's a trite question, but it's a question that is raised by the book, because it's a book of an incredible achievement, really, isn't it? And it's a story, as you say, America needs a story. And it is a story. And it's a story that people admire and respect around the world. Has the story ended?
- [39:55]
Obama Campaign Staff/Commentator
No.
- [39:55]
Ben Rhodes
And that's what gives me hope. I mean, I'm pretty dark about the present. That's one of the reasons I went in the past. And I think we're in for a pretty bumpy ride the next two and a half years with Trump. I think we're not at the end of his efforts to assert himself at home and abroad. But when you go back into the past, I mean, Churchill's famous quote about America doing the right thing after it's done, everything else I'm paraphrasing, it's kind of true. In our history, if you look at the arc of American history, we go through some very disruptive times. And in part because of our ability to kind of tell a different story, like, we have to refresh what this whole project is about. We tend to come out of those darker times in a better and more interesting place. I mean, I think it's relevant to Brits, too. You've been kind of casting about for a national identity since Brexit. Right. And you can get trapped in the present like, this is crazy. We're never going to get out of this. What happened? When you kind of go back and look at the past, you see, okay, well, here's how people work through this, and here's how people were dealing in this context in this book, like with slavery and with the Gilded Age and rampant inequality and corruption and with segregation and all these ills, and they're never permanent. And so I think we have to sometimes get out of the present, learn from the better aspects of our past, and then kind of look beyond one of the things that can be very empowering. I've been trying to tell Americans this in traveling around the last month. Allow yourself to imagine beyond this. Like, we're so trapped in Trump's reality that, like, we have a hard time thinking beyond tomorrow, nevermind the next election. Like, where would you actually like to go? A lot of effort is being made to make you think that this can never change. The inequality is here to stay, that you'll never regulate artificial intelligence. Well, no, it's a democracy and Americans have done harder things than that. But I think we have to again, look beyond, like kind of to the horizon here. Trump wants us just looking at it, like his literally looking into his reflecting pool. You know, we need to look past that.
- [42:05]
Ben Rose, that's a brilliant moment at which to end. Thank you so much for talking to us.
- [42:09]
Thanks.
- [42:14]
If you've liked what you've heard today, please do consider subscribing to AmericasT. That way, of course, you'll never miss an episode and you can do this wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to get in touch, we read every single message that we get. You can send us an email. Americastbc.co.uk the WhatsApp is 443-301-239480 and you can get involved as well in the AmericasT Discord server. The link to that is in the description. Description. Until next time, bye.
- [42:58]
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BBC Podcast Host
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Ben Rhodes
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BBC Podcast Host
From posting videos on Good Bad Billionaire? We're going to find out how the world's most popular YouTuber, Mr. Ben Beast, made his fortune.
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Podcast Advertiser/Promoter
He's buried himself in a coffin for
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BBC Podcast Host
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Podcast Advertiser/Promoter
even recreated squid games, all in an attempt to go viral on the Internet.
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BBC Podcast Host
But it all started when he gave a homeless man $10,000. So is he a philanthropist reshaping capitalism
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or is he just the king of the attention economy?
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BBC Podcast Host
Find out on Good Bad Billionaire from
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Podcast Advertiser/Promoter
the BBC World Service.
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BBC Podcast Host
Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcast,