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Mia Sorrenti
where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with former White House Deputy National Security Advisor and co host of Pod Save the US Ben Rhodes. Rhodes joined us at Union Chapel to discuss America's past, present and democratic future Trust. Drawing on his new book All We A History of the United States and 15 speeches, Rhodes explores how political language has shaped America's identity from its founding to the present day. Reflecting on his years in the Obama White House, he examines the struggle over truth, democracy and national purpose at a defining moment in American history. Let's join our host, Coco Kahn, now live at Union Chapel.
Coco Kahn
Hello, thank you so much for coming out, for seeing those signs on the tube saying do not come here. Abandon ye hope. It is too hot. But you did it. So thank you so much for joining us. I think it's so important that we're here. I know you're going to blush a little bit here Ben, but I would describe you as probably one of our most urgent political commentators and I would say politics is really quite urgent right now. So listen, if you haven't met me before, I will keep this very brief. I'm Coco Kahn. I'm a podcast a writer. I write mostly for the Guardian. If you know Ben, you'll know Pod Save the World, the smash hit foreign policy podcast from Crooked Media. Well, I'm the co host of Pod Save the UK alongside the comedian Nish Kumar. Think of us as the boisterous, hungover British little cousin who occasionally calls on our wiser elders Ben and Tommy, to help us make sense of this chaos. So Ben, of course, has a new book which we'll be discussing tonight. All we A History of the United States in 1560 speeches. And speeches is, of course, something he knows very well about. He was the deputy national security adviser and speechwriter to President Barack Obama. Ben, I have so much to talk to you about. Iran, Keir Starmer's resignation, also, just your own political journey. I think it's fair to say that very few political insiders are willing to criticize their own party, to maybe even criticize their own choices. But let's start with the book. At a time where it seems like you can just say anything. They're eating the cats. Or Nigel Farage, he heard from a guy, we don't know who, that migrants were eating swans. Apparently you can say anything. So why do speeches still matter?
Ben Rhodes
Well, first of all, let me echo your thanks for coming out. I've done a lot of events recently. This is the first one I haven't worn a jacket. So I, I'm glad to be casual with you all. You know, I wanted to write this book because as I experienced the last decade of American politics and how disoriented things were, number one, I realized that what we were arguing about in the United States was bigger than policy direction. It was fundamentally about identity. And what does it mean to be an American who gets to decide that question? It's something that's happening here in the UK as well. And as someone who'd been a speechwriter, I had a sense that, first of all, speeches themselves have been the venue where Americans have adjudicated that question, had debated that question over the years. I, when I was in the White House and when I was even before that writing for Barack Obama, I used to go back and read speeches to get a better understanding of what tradition I came out of. I could not understand Barack Obama and what he wanted to say without reading the words of Martin Luther King or without reading the words of the Kennedy brothers, like the traditions he came out of, even all the way back to a Frederick Douglass. I had a sense that I was participating in an argument that had been going on throughout American history, and that when you looked at a speech, you were experiencing history in the present tense. How did people try to mobilize, to persuade, to describe what it means to be an American in a particular moment? And I also kind of felt in this moment that we're in, to answer your question very directly, like we've lost that ability. We no longer do that. That because of technology, because of social media, because the way algorithms have literally destroyed our capacity to consume an entire argument or to make an entire argument. We now experience politics, and we experience the argument about identity in clips that are packaged by algorithms and delivered to us to either make us really, really hate the other side or to be really, really reaffirmed that we are right about everything. You know, and so I wanted to kind of go back and look at how Americans have had this debate from the founding of our country until today, and to tell that story through each of these speeches. Who are the people that were able to deliver these words? What are the movements that produce them? How do these words matter in shaping who we are? And, you know, it was fascinating to do this over the course of four years. I mean, I basically wrote this in between Trump presidencies and finished it in the second one. And not only did I think I got a much richer and deeper appreciation for the arguments that we've been having and that we're continuing to have in the United States, but I actually gained a deeper appreciation for the extent to which words themselves matter and how part of the reason why we are in the situation that we're in is that nobody is telling a story that answers that question. Telling a story that can make sense of what's going on in the United States at this time, and that, frankly, the dominant storyteller of our time, Donald Trump, is kind of tailor made for this age in which information is packaged and distributed to us to fill us with either anxiety and fear or kind of rage and extreme certainty.
Coco Kahn
I had the pleasure of interviewing you this morning on our podcast. Do check it out. It's out tomorrow. And this question of social media and what it means for speeches, it really has been kicking around in my mind. I. You gave a very compelling argument, which is to say that, well, speeches have always had to change format. It doesn't change the fact they're enormously powerful. However, there is this niggling doubt at the back of my mind that says, okay, yes, they're beautiful, but so are vinyl records. Now we're in the Spotify age. Just for anyone that has that same thought, why do speeches still matter in the social media age? And can they even work in this time?
Ben Rhodes
First of all, I think they can, and they certainly matter. And I guess I put it this way. It was an interesting journey to kind of relive the history of how Americans have talked about this question of identity, this question of where the country's going, because what I experienced is how Much technology in the way that people speak and the way in which information is delivered to people has changed how words matter in debates. So at the beginning of the story, Benjamin Franklin is the first speech in this book. The only people who could hear the speech are the people sitting in the room. But the speeches were made to be reprinted in newspapers. That's how information was distributed. And so what you got are kind of carefully worded arguments that were meant to be read and digested and thought about. Then if you get further into the 19th century, we in the United States had a speaker circuit where people would literally travel from town to town and give speech after speech hundreds of times. Speakers were actually the kind of pop stars of their era. Right. A woman in this book, Anna Dickinson, who I write about, was kind of the Taylor Swift of her time. Like her image was. I'd said that to my daughters and I got a gigantic eye roll. But her image was produced on cards and collected. But then speaking led into performance. You had to perform, you had to entertain, you had to inspire. And so the way in which people spoke changed to suit that medium. Then when radio came along, what Franklin Roosevelt figured out is, I need to speak in very plain spoken, clear ways because I'm going to be in people's living rooms and, you know, I want to speak not to the audience in front of me. I want to be speaking to someone who's like sitting around a table listening to my voice. And that led to his speaking style. Then when you get television, all of a sudden, charisma and spectacle matters a lot. And I have Martin Luther King in here and John F. Kennedy, and they understood that the theater of the speech, the way in which it visually appeared to people, mattered. The I have a Dream speech as king in front of a multiracial audience of 250. And so charisma starts to enter into the equation in a different way. And the spectacle of how the speech is delivered. Now we're in this social media age, and again, what Trump has done is he'll give a one hour rant rally speech that only the most diehard Fox News viewer in the United States is going to sit there and watch that whole speech, speech. And it's not going to hang together like Lincoln's second inaugural address. But what Trump knows is that the next day, the algorithm is going to do all the work for him. It's going to cut that speech up into a million different clips and just fire it out into people's feeds and polarize them in ways that advantage Trump and so in some ways, his demagoguery, his communication style is perfect for this time. Nigel Farage, not that dissimilar in his speaking style. The clip is the thing that matters. However, I think that the mistake that Democrats have made in this age is they stopped making speeches. They stopped trying to make whole arguments about what's happening in this country. Not just what I want to do, but why I want to do it. A speech that can make people believe that we can get someplace different. Instead, we paralyze ourselves with these debates inside the party, inside the kind of Never Trump movement as well. What's the right social media strategy? And maybe I should go on podcasts and should I curse more because then I'll sound like an authentic communicator. Right? But when you only focus on the delivery system, you actually don't think enough about what you're saying, what the story is that you're telling. And so there's Trump controlling the discussion with his, you know, cluster bombs of rhetoric. Can anybody really remember a whole story that was told by Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? I think what we have to recognize is the way to actually counter program Trump is to get back to telling a story about what's going on in this country, of the United States, where we're going and how we can get someplace different. And that matters in a couple ways. Just as a matter of communications, I remember working for Barack Obama in 2008. He would refine a speech. He would give it day after day, see what is working. He would take anecdotes of people he met and put it in there, and it would get better and better and better. And then the speech became the story of the campaign. The speech was the core method of communication. Even if people didn't listen to the whole speech, every interview he gave, every social media clip that we put out, all those other forms of communication were like branches off of the trunk of the story he was telling every day on the stump. And because he knew his story, all of his communications were better. I think the other piece of this that's important is that when you're just kind of trying to think about what the most popular thing is that I can say that will be in the clip, you end up sounding very strange. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris each had this line that they used. I mentioned this on the podcast today. We want to build an economy from the bottom up to the middle out. I have no idea what that means. I'm quite sure it focus grouped well it's something about the middle class and whatever. But let's be honest, I think what we're all feeling in this country, too, is there's some big problems going on. I'm not going to curse because we're in a church. Capitalism is broken. Inequality is out of control. Artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs. I'm worried about my daughters being friends with chatbots. There's wars going on in the world. I need to hear about something more than protecting a health care subsidy or even an economy. From the bottom to the middle out. I need someone to tell me a story to make sense of what's happening and to make me believe that we can get out of the present moment, because Trump has trapped us in the present moment. And so for those reasons, I think that the people who emerge from this period are the people that are able to tell a story.
Coco Kahn
You talked earlier about identity, and certainly within the book, you talk about this historic contest between, broadly speaking, two sides about what is an American, who is an American. Right? And that persists. We're seeing that, as you say, in other countries. I feel like the conversation around identity in the UK anyway, has exploded, and I feel like it's a symptom of our economic downturn. Is national identity really that important, this shared national identity, or is it something that we only grip to, we're drawn to when the chips are down?
Ben Rhodes
That's a really good question, Coco. So I think that politics, like when you strip everything off, is always about identity. It's always about this question, who is an American, who is British? Who decides that question? In my book, what I'm focused on is, is there's fundamentally two different stories about American identity that have been in competition from the beginning. One is a very exclusive form of identity. America is fundamentally a white Christian nation, the inheritor of Western supremacy. Other people can live in the United States, but they have to kind of subordinate themselves to that identity. And if you think that's, you know, like a negative way of casting it, that's basically what, like J.D. vance says in his own words, then there's a progressive identity that America was dedicated to. The proposition that everybody is created equal. And American history has been a struggle to close that gap. Whatever period we're in to your question, that debate takes different forms, but underneath the surface, it's fundamentally about identity. Just to give a couple of examples from my book, in the populist era in the United States, I read about a woman named Mary Leese who came out of nowhere. She was this Kansas Woman from very poor background, an immigrant herself. And she gave this speech entitled Wall street owns this country. This is a country of, by and for Wall Street. Right. Suddenly my Bernie Sanders feelings are being stirred up. But she also made the point that the white working class of this country needs to reunite. We wasted far too much time in reconstruction focusing on issues like black political rights. Immigrants should not have the ability to own any foreign land in this country. And she actually had even schemes about creating economic growth by sending white people down to colonize Latin America and kind of running a plantation economy down there. So her populism was not as simple as we think about it. It's not just, yes, kind of a left wing message of redistribution, but then this kind of very xenophobic message of restoring a centrality of a white working class identity in the United States. So there was a linkage drawn between economic grievance and kind of white identity politics that feels very current and relevant to me today. Frederick Douglass is the other one I'd use who made this point at the height of Reconstruction that, you know, that essentially he gave a speech defending Chinese immigration that was very unpopular to do at the time. His argument was essentially, if I ask white people to stand up for my rights, I need to stand up for Chinese rights. But the argument he made was about the fact that if we were not allowing people to divide us by race, if we just saw the benefits of diversity to a national economy and the capacity to absorb the strivers from all around the world to the United States, we would be both culturally and societally and economically enriched. And what I found so interesting about that message is essentially the message of Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, that people have tried to divide us based on identity. That's why we don't have good health care, that's why we can't afford education in this country, and if we don't allow people to divide us anymore, we can form a big enough coalition to do those things. And so. So I do think that identity is used in different ways. Yes, a demagogue comes along and tries to use it to divide people, usually to entrench power. Right. But if you want better outcomes on economic issues, you actually need to not allow that to happen. And you need to kind of create a multiracial solidarity and coalition that is capable of insisting upon better outcomes. And so, yes, I agree with the premise that this debate gets more intense at times of disruption, but it's always right there underneath the surface. And so whenever we do have times of scarcity, of war, of economic disruption. Like we're going through right now, it's identity that comes to the forefront.
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Coco Kahn
So I wanted to talk to you about. You know you selected these speeches. I'm presuming you read a lot of speeches, not just these final 15. My understanding of what A speech is, is that it's to persuade. It's to ask the listeners, come with me. Believe in me. Where does truth sit with persuasion? One of the things I found as a journalist who's of a progressive persuasion, if we say that woke is that you can spend so long debunking what other people say that you simply don't have the time or the breath to lay out your stool about the world that you want to create, because you have to push back on what they say. People talked about Keir Starmer, that he needed to tell Britain what he was doing. And so they spent all this time saying, you feel like there's lots of migrants. No, there isn't. We deported loads of them. So where does truth and persuasion sit? If you spend time just fact checking, are you missing the bigger story or is it important?
Ben Rhodes
It's important. My own belief is that the most powerful speeches, the most powerful words that you can speak, tell people something that is a hard truth, and it's something that they kind of intuitively know to be true. Right. And you don't necessarily need to get up there and fact check. You just need to communicate in a way that resonates with people and makes them see a higher truth. And an example I'd give is Martin Luther King's I have a Dream speech, because it's an example of a different kind of truth. So King is giving this speech, and this really spoke to me as a speechwriter. They didn't really write the thing until, like, the night before the speech, which I was very sympathetic to. And so they're in the Willard Hotel across from the White House, and they're working on this speech, and they're doing the original form of truth telling. Like, if you know that speech, he's talking about a promissory note in the Declaration of Independence that black people were promised equality and they didn't get it. And he's kind of walking people through the story, right? And then someone tells him, like, martin, whatever you do, don't do that thing about the dream. It's a cliche, you know, they don't want to hear that. So he leaves it out. And so they finish the draft of the speech and they literally distribute it to the press the next morning. And King gets up on stage and he delivers a speech. It's a lot of truth telling about American history, about injustice. He's kind of walking people through the fact check of American history. And he gets to a certain moment in the speech and he stops and he's almost done. And I think I know from the research I did in this book and just from watching the video kind of what was going through his mind. Like, he looks out at the audience, and it's the biggest audience he's ever going to speak to in his life. And it's also the first time that most white people in the United States had ever seen a black man deliver a whole speech because it was broadcast on television. That was a new thing. And he also knows, as looking out at the crowd, that a lot of the people in the crowd are going to have to go down south and get beat up, get tear gas, get water cannon, get thrown in prison. And so he knew he had to give them something more. He had to give them a higher truth, not just the kind of, I'm participating in the political debate that's happening right now. And at that moment, Mahalia Jackson, who's a gospel singer who King used to call at night so she could sing him gospel songs when he was feeling down, she yells out, tell him about the dream, Martin. And he said, I just put away the text and I just riffed. And actually, I went back and read the other dream sequences he'd done, and they weren't that good because they were fact checking truth. It was like, I'm dreaming of a time when Emmett Till is not killed. And all of a sudden, he paints a word picture of what multiracial democracy is, what the truth of multiracial democracy could be. And every single image is black and white coming together, little black children and little white children joining hands, you know, one after another, this image building up to the country in which you're judged not by the color of the skin, but by the content of your character. It was so unassailably true that it kind of entered into the American consciousness. Like, that is actually the truth of what we're supposed to be, to the point that even, like, Republican politicians will have to at least pay lip service to that dream. And so what I'm saying is that there's a truth of, like, yes, we have to kind of fact check. And, you know, but what separates speech is when you can speak to a higher truth that people know that's how it's supposed to be, or that's how it could be. That's how it should be. And I think it's that second push towards a higher truth that we've lost in our politics. We can fact check all we want, and we can talk about what a nut Trump is and why he's wrong about this. Or why he told 20 lies yesterday. But the most effective way of dealing with the demagogue is to show people a truth that is higher and that they intuitively know is right. That is a bigger rebuke of someone like a Trump than just fact checking.
Coco Kahn
What would be the truth that you would like to see? We'll start with an American leader because I will move on to Britain after. But what is the, the one truth you would like to see confronted from a progressive politician?
Ben Rhodes
Whoever it may be, the one truth is this, that we actually have agency to do things in the United States. My last book was about autocracy and authoritarians. Count on two cynicism and apathy. Cynicism, nothing really matters. Apathy, nothing can change. Right now, there are a tremendous amount of forces in the United States that are being brought to bear to make people think that things cannot change. Right? Tech companies, oligarchs, Trump in his circle. You can never get money out of politics. That's just, you know, it's lost. You know, there's a Supreme Court decision. You're just going to have to deal with billions of dollars being spent. We're going to redraw congressional districts in smaller and bizarre ways to entrench ourselves in power. You can't possibly regulate artificial intelligence. Nobody understands it. Only Sam Altman understands it. Only Elon Musk understands it. Congress is dysfunctional. You can't regulate social media. It's too late. The algorithms are what they are. You're just going to have to deal with it. You know, that is BS and that is not true. That is not true. It's a democracy. If we wanted to change those things badly enough, we can change those things. We have abolished slavery in the United States. We have broken up big banks in the United States. We've broken up trusts in the United States. We have ended segregation in the United States. These were bigger things than getting money out of politics, than regulating big tech. And so I think we have to puncture the fear that is being pushed down on us that we don't have agency, that we cannot change things. That is actually the biggest lie in American politics today. And I think you're dealing with a similar thing here. Like, you're trapped here. Like there's nothing you can do. These far right people are coming and there's nothing you can do to stop them, or you'll never have a different kind of country. You have to accept this kind of shrunken British identity that is about, like, some form of sovereignty that we're recapturing and not some bigger form of what Britain can be. Right. And so that I'd like to hear people tell a story about agency and about our capacity to reach a different kind of. I think people desperately want to hear about a different future. They want someone to show them in the same way that King did. Hey, here's another place that we actually can get to if we recognize that we have agency to do that.
Coco Kahn
What's your assessment on why that hasn't happened? I mean, we've had enough instances to look at to say, okay, well, actually we need some ideas. Someone needs to communicate better. I mean, how many opportunities do we have to learn this lesson over and over again? Why isn't it happening?
Ben Rhodes
I think that there's a number of reasons. One is we are, and I mentioned this earlier, but we are suffering from an extraordinary case of presentism that we are trapped on a minute by minute basis. In our present dramas. We're on our phones, our attention spans are obliterated. We are consumed with anxieties and feelings about what is happening right now, like what somebody said yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. And so we've lost a bigger picture of if you look at the past, well, you can see all the times that we change things, or if you are able to look further into the future, you can have a horizon that you're working towards. Right. And so part of it is just because of technology and social media and the kind of nature of life in 2026. We're kind of locked in this present. I think the other thing is in this country and in the United States, people are so afraid of losing that they try to say the either least offensive or most anodyne version of the thing that they think is popular. You know, I mean, I'm sorry to wade into your politics here, but like, every time Keir Sommers spoke like it felt like he was afraid to say something that might upset the apple cart or might be provocative or might alienate a particular constituency that he didn't want to alienate. You know, Obama used to say something to us in 2008, like, if you, and you certainly see this in the politics of, say, a Zora Mamdani today, if you don't show people that there are things that you're willing to lose over, you actually won't win. Like, you have to be willing to take risks and put yourself out there and be vulnerable. Right. And it takes a lot of vulnerability and audacity and earnestness, which is another thing that we've lost to say here's where we can go.
Coco Kahn
Well, it's also about belief and confidence, I suppose, you know, the people who are mealy mouthed about things. I mean, whenever I'd hear Keir Starmer speak, it always sounded like, you know, there'd be these times you'd write an article and then the lawyers would get hold of it at the paper and then they would, you know, this may be. There used to be a joke that me and my friends would talk about, you know that phrase, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You just know where the lawyers got it. It would be, breakfast may be one of the most important meals of the day. Right. And when Keir Starmer spoke, it was a little bit like that. The lawyers had gotten. And it spoke to, for me anyway, a lack of belief, a lack of confidence. Do you think one of the reasons that people are drawn to these populist Right. Figures is because they. I hate the phrase strongman, but they seem very confident, they seem very relaxed. Is it as simple as that? Because I don't believe they have a distinct vision other than I serve myself and my friends, but they have managed to communicate in a way that's been so effective.
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I think that first of all, when people are afraid because of what's happening in the world and they're filled with anxieties, they do want to see strength. They want to see confidence. And particularly today when everybody's kind of lost trust and systems and establishments and the way things have been done, they also want to just see something, anything that looks different. Right. Anything that is not the same thing that I've seen out of politics for the last five, 10, 20 years. They want to see authenticity. Strongmen often have like an innate authenticity. Right. Like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are really not like anybody else, you know, and so that combination of projected strength, because I don't think it's real strength and authenticity and uniqueness and differentiation from the established way of doing things has a certain allure that is seductive. You know, I talked to Alexei Navalny for my last book and he used to say Putin does not need to convince people that he's not corrupt or that he's not a liar. He just has to convince people that everybody's corrupt and everybody lies. And so you might as well have a strong man who kind of hates the same people you do. Right. Or who can make you feel better by putting someone else down. Right. Particularly if it's a marginalized or vulnerable or minority group. Right. Now, I think in that kind of moment. However, you can model a different kind of strength. Like when I look at the effect of Democratic communicators right now, like if you look at Azor Mamdani, who had like a smashing success yesterday, you know, kind of upending the Democratic establishment, what's interesting is he's modeling a different kind of strength. He's not angry, he's not putting people down. He is fearless and he smiles and he's kind. Right? He is showing a strength through his fearlessness. I don't care what they call me. I don't care the forces that arrayed against me. I don't care that people tell me that I can't do these things that I say I want to do. I'm just going to keep trying to do them and I'm going to tell a story about doing them. And look, I'm having a good time. So you should be a part of this too. This is another thing people want to see a joyful fearlessness. You know, anger does not work for progressives in the way that it works for reactionaries. The last decade in America, Democratic politics that I've been associated with has been kind of grim and angry. I'm very guilty of that myself too. Like I fall into that trap all the time. That doesn't work. It doesn't attract people. It actually also doesn't make people think that things can change because your anger kind of reinforces the strongman narrative. We're afraid of these people. We're afraid of them. Well, that makes them seem really strong. But when you stand up with a smile on your face and with a joy in your politics and you tell a story about how the emperor has no clothes, we can actually do these things. There's no reason that we can have lower prices. There's no reason we can have a foreign policy that is not sending bombs for a genocide. Like, there's no reason that we can't make these changes. And I want you to be a part of that. People are attracted to that. We keep seeing that over and over again when people actually stand up and do that. And I think that that is how you undercut the narrative strength. You model a different kind of strength.
Mia Sorrenti
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Date: August 2, 2026
Host: Coco Kahn
Guest: Ben Rhodes (Former White House Deputy National Security Advisor, Author, Co-Host of Pod Save the US)
This live episode, held at Union Chapel, features a wide-ranging conversation between host Coco Kahn and Ben Rhodes, focusing on the endurance and fragility of American democracy through the lens of political language, the power of speeches, national identity, and the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump. Drawing on Rhodes’ new book, All We: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches, the discussion explores how America's self-understanding is shaped and reshaped in moments of crisis, how truth and persuasion intersect, and what progressives must learn for the battles ahead.
"I wanted to go back and look at how Americans have had this debate from the founding of our country until today, and to tell that story through each of these speeches."
— Ben Rhodes (05:34)
"When you only focus on the delivery system, you actually don't think enough about what you're saying, what the story is that you're telling."
— Ben Rhodes (13:07)
"American history has been a struggle to close that gap. Whatever period we're in... that debate takes different forms, but underneath the surface, it's fundamentally about identity."
— Ben Rhodes (16:57)
"Every single image is black and white coming together, little black children and little white children joining hands... It was so unassailably true that it kind of entered into the American consciousness."
— Ben Rhodes, on MLK’s speech (26:44)
"We have to puncture the fear that is being pushed down on us that we don't have agency, that we cannot change things. That is actually the biggest lie in American politics today."
— Ben Rhodes (30:49)
This episode delivers a rich exploration of the intersection between language and power, the dangers of presentism, the enduring quest for a meaningful national narrative, and the persistent challenge of demagoguery. Rhodes urges that only through a return to storytelling—grounded in demanding, universal truths and a belief in collective agency—can democracy resist its gravest threats.