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Michael J. Illuzzi, "Mending the Nation: Reclaiming We The People in a Populist Age" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
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Hello, everybody.
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Hi, this is Lily Goren with the New Books Network, the New Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by my friend and colleague Michael Illuzi, who is the author of a new book, Mending the Reclaiming the we the People in a Populist Age. This was just published by the University Press of Kansas in 2025, and it is a deep dive into thinking about narrative and understanding who we are in we the People in the United States. But I'm going to let Michael tell us all about that. I'd like to welcome Michael Illuzi to the New Books Network and ask him to tell us a little bit about himself and how he came to this particular project. Hi, Michael.
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Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm Michael Illuzi. I'm an assistant professor of political science at Providence College. I do political theory and American politics. I came to this project. I think the initial point came from teaching, actually, in 2009, I was teaching and I was teaching about racial politics, and I was in a class, and then it just kind of exploded. The class did not go well. I had a student in the back. We had been talking about racial discrimination and sort of the history of white supremacy in the United States. And I had a student about a third of the way through the Semester raise his hand and say, why are we talking about this? We have a black president. And then I had another student who raised her hand and said, I can't believe in 2009 we have a student who would say that. And it was just silence in. In the classroom. And I never really got that class back. And I had to think a lot about, like, what went wrong when I was teaching that class. And what I realized was that the students did not see their own personal story in relation to what I was teaching them. And that if you want to connect with people, the story that you tell and the story that people place themselves in is of paramount importance. And when I. In future iterations of the class, I brought in stories like, I used the wire to actually teach that same class, and people could see themselves in that story. And so then I started looking at American history to see how did people. How did leaders mobilize people using stories? And that's really, you know, sort of the initial kernel that I've been thinking about for a long time.
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And I really like that because I think it's so powerful and important to think about the fact that most of us see ourselves through narrative, and particularly in politics, even if we don't sort of say, oh, it's like reading Game of Thrones, but that the sort of our understanding of what happens in the civic space and in politics is actually a narrative. And so you go deep into this, and you talk a lot about this concept of prophetic peoplehood as a kind of framework that you're exploring. And we'll get to sort of how you explore it and through whom you explore it in a moment. But I would like for you to just talk a little bit about this concept of peoplehood, because that's part of the story and the narrative.
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Yeah, peoplehood's just a fancy way of talking about we the people. And there's different ways to conceive of that. And in the United States, our Constitution says we the people. Right. And it's a sense of how do our own personal narratives fit into larger narratives. And we all have multiple overlapping identities. But in terms of telling a national peoplehood story, we all connect ourselves in one way or another to that story. And I use the term prophetic peoplehood because there's something deep in those stories when we connect our identities. Right. When my dad is from Italy, came over when he was 13, on a boat, actually by himself to New York, and, like, you know, my identity is connected to his story, and that story is also connected to the Story of the United States. Right. He came over and he had all these strange ideas, like the streets would be paved with gold. And he's like, where are those gold streets? No, no, they're not there. But our personal story is sort of intertwined with the national story. And to the extent that, you know, we had this deep story about who we are and how our, you know, for instance, how my family stories fit into the larger narrative, like, that's what I'm trying to get at with this sense of peoplehood. Like, sort of how do our overlapping identities mesh with a larger story of who we are as we the people of the United States?
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And you sort of ground the book in some of the other thinkers, recent thinkers, contemporary writers and academics who have actually taken this on, like Roger Smith and Danielle Allen. And so can you sort of talk about this sort of broader sort of construction of this idea that's both old and somewhat contemporary?
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Yeah. So the book takes the concept of peoplehood from Roger Smith and the way he defines it. And the idea is that, you know, what stories we're going to buy into are going to be stories that really have material benefits for us. Roger Smith talks about how there are economic stories, political stories, and what he calls ethnically constitutive stories. And what he means by that is when we say we the people, part of that is economic. Like, how do we actually fit into a system where we get economic benefits, we can support our families. How do we. In terms of political stories, there has to be a way for our voice to be expressed in terms of ethnically constitutive stories. You know, these can be. These could be racial stories, religious stories, or they could be like sort of a. A patriotic national story as well, where, like, we are part of this and it is part of us. Right There's. It is something that we define ourselves by. And all of those things are working together at one time. And in the history of the US One of the reasons why I lean on Daniel Allen and her research is, well, two reasons. One, she talks about how we have to interact with strangers, but we have to do it as equals. And so to do that, we have to develop trust. And she talks about this, I think, in a very. Both rich and complicated way and in the American context. In a different book, she talks about how the Declaration of Independence has served as a touch point for generations of Americans. And I was really surprised when I went into my own research and I saw that time after time after time, political leaders had invoked the Declaration's proclamation that all men are created equal as a touchstone to kind of say, look, we need to treat strangers as equals with equal moral dignity. And that becomes sort of the core of a mending story where we're going to treat these strangers and we're going to trust them, that we're all part of this larger story that we're building. And we don't know if we're going to actually be able to realize the unrealized promise of that Declaration. Right. We never have. But that is a sort of a common project, that we can all see ourselves in relation to it.
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And so you just use the terminology mending story, and you talk throughout the book about mending stories and bleaching stories as part of our thinking about the narrative of we the people. Can you explain the distinction between these two sort of descriptions for the stories that we are telling?
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Yeah, I think the simplest way to do it is the way I just was talking about mending stories. Mending stories are inclusive stories where we say, we are part of we the people, and the other people are equal. They have equal moral dignity, and we are going to recognize that. And bleaching stories fundamentally say, we are the real people, and there's other people that have sort of not. They shouldn't be there. They're not part of what makes our country great, and they are threatening what we've done, and we need to kind of keep them down. And in different periods of American history, you see these bleaching stories, you know, come out in different ways, Right? And like in the 1850s, you had Senator Hammond saying, you know, a whole swath of the population, that is black people in the United States, were the mudsill sort of this. This inferior group of people that needed to be there to support the real people, the white people in the country. And there's always been sort of this competing bleaching narrative that's been fairly strong. It's manifested itself in different ways at different time periods. But at each of these time periods, there's also a mending story that pushes back and says, no, there doesn't have to be an inferior group that's going to support a superior group. And in fact, these mending stories pull on the things that people really believe in. If you think of things like Christian morality, the idea that you should treat your neighbor as yourself, that's the same idea that's really in the Declaration that all men are created equal. And so the mending stories pull on those traditions and say, look, if we actually want to have a prosperous nation, One where people can thrive and experience human flourishing and can do that with an economic system that actually works. Right. Then we have to treat people, we have to treat strangers as equals, as neighbors. And so that's how I see the difference.
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And this is a lot of what you're sort of setting up in each of the kind of case studies that you look at at different points in American history, be it the Civil War, the Gilded Age, or the Progressive Era, that there is some sort of political leader who is crafting a narrative that is a kind of mending story that is in contrast or conflict with an established or establishing kind of bleaching story. And so I wanted to sort of get into some of these examples that you talk about. But one of the other sort of ways that you discuss this throughout the book, but also set up in the introduction is through some of the words from Dr. Martin Luther King with regard to torn and mended garments. Can you talk about how King's explanation of that is important to our thinking with regard to these kind of patriotic narratives that are in conflict with each other?
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Yeah, I love that metaphor of King. I think it does so much work. Because if you read Where Do We Go From Here, his last major book, it is not the King that I think most of us got in grade school. People read I have a Dream. But in the late 60s, he was looking at the US and he was calling people to fix it. Like the promissory note of the beginning had not really come to fruition. And so he needed people to see that this was a problem, that everyone that affected everyone, not just the black community or, you know, communities of color, but the whole United States. This was important for everyone. And so he started talking about this metaphor of the garment. And I. I like it because he's saying, look, there is no way to pull apart the country into black America, white America, Latino America. That's we. We, the people are a garment that's connected to one another. And that garment is not perfect. That garment has been torn from the start. Right. We had years and years of slavery. And then after slavery, you know, he talks about how even after Emancipation Proclamation. Right. He uses the analogy it's kind of like taking someone and having wrongly thrown them in prison and then letting them out and say, okay, without a shirt on their back, now compete. And he says, that's not justice. And he's basically calling people then to mend that garment that we've all constructed in different ways. Right. The people who are in this country have contributed to what we the people is what America is in terms of culture, in terms of economics, in terms of the politics and the political ideals. And he's basically saying we need to mend that garment in order to be full human peoples. Because the kind of exploitation that's there is a blight on society and it brings down everyone. If we don't build this beloved community and some people are suffering and we walk right past them, it does something to our souls. It does something to who we are as people. We can't be full people with human flourishing unless we kind of mend that garment.
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And it's to mend it so that the tear is still seen, but so that it is no longer a problem for the garment in the same way that it had been.
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Exactly. You can't get rid of that tear, and in fact, you're not going to mend it if you ignore it. Right. It has to be. I mean, Baldwin talks about this as. There has to be acknowledgment of that past. We have to really look at it, and we want to look away from it. We want to say that we're innocent, we didn't do this, but we need to acknowledge it. And, yeah, so that stitching is still going to be there, but that doesn't give us a pass to not do it.
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Exactly. And so in terms of sort of working out, looking at these bleaching and mending narratives, you go through Abraham Lincoln, Mayor Sam, Samuel Jones, who was mayor of Toledo.
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That's correct.
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Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, who was an organizer in Chicago during the time of Mayor Daley, the first Mayor Daley, and the Poor People's Campaign. So you've got sort of six more or less case studies that have different sort of narratives that the sort of mending organization or person was putting forward that was in response to, in a lot of cases, what was going on in terms of trying to tear the people apart in a certain sense or separate them into hierarchies. How did you come up with this particular list?
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Oh, that's a good question. I was trying to find cases where you had leaders who got together new coalitions to fight for justice. And I was trying to find cases where I could say there was actually some kind of success. And so there's a bias, I think, towards people who, you know, experience electoral success for that reason, because I wanted to have cases where people couldn't say, well, that's all nice, but I mean, did it really accomplish anything or did anyone actually care about that story? Like, yeah, the Story might have been interesting, but like, what political effect did it have? And so, you know, as I was going through different parts of American history, these are the figures that kind of stuck out to me as having really remarkable stories and sometimes on a much smaller scale, like in Toledo, Ohio, or in Chicago, but nonetheless really remarkable. I think in all of these cases, one of the things that I find heartening is there's no way you would have predicted that these people would have been able to do what they actually ended up doing through their mending stories. Like Lincoln, he was not a shoo in. He would be very unlikely to actually win that election and become president. And then he became one of the greatest presidents or Samuel Jones. He was not the candidate that most people would have thought could have won four straight mayoral elections and then transformed the criminal justice system in Toledo, Ohio. And I could go through in every one of these. And so I think they are just cases where I saw the potential that I wanted to really look at. How was it possible that these leaders were able to do it? And I think in each of these cases, they present that history where this unlikely time they brought people together. They fought for justice against bleaching stories and did so also in like, to me, it was a very surprisingly similar way over and over again.
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Yeah, I mean, Lincoln is remarkable. I mean, I view Lincoln as almost a re. Founding of the country.
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I'll go with you on that.
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He took this. He changed the way Americans view their own history. When he said the Gettysburg Address that everyone sort of has recited, it wasn't sort of super well received across the country. I think it was in Gary Will's book where he talks about the reception in Chicago of that speech. And they were like, wait a second, that's not right. The country isn't about the Declaration and all men are created equal. And that's not why those soldiers died. But because of his words and his actions fighting the Civil War, his narrative won. And that became what people believed about the United States. And I'm not saying that he's substituted some false narrative either. I think in terms of history, you could say that the framers of the Constitution believed an awful lot of different things. So when Calhoun says, you know, we didn't believe that, yeah, some of the framers didn't believe that at all. And then, you know, Lincoln, some of the framers did believe what Lincoln is talking about, but he convinced people that if you let slavery extend into these new territories and thereby basically sanction slavery, sanction that bleaching story that some people are better and will be better forever than another group of people, you have extinguished what makes this experiment worth fighting for. And if you do that, your own economic possibilities also go down the drain. Right? He got these two groups of people, the Whigs and the immigrant Democrats, to come together in this new party. And he did it by saying, look, if you go down the narrative that some people are better than others and some people need to produce the stuff that other people use, and then that you will become that group. Right? The know nothings, we're saying, you know, the Catholics, the new immigrants, they were all lesser than right, so you can be put into that out group. And so he got all of these different groups to see it was in their economic self interest to fight for equality and got them to buy into the fact that this is an experiment that's worth trying to. The unrealized promise of the Declaration is something worth fighting for. And I think from that point forward, that idea was sort of planted and has grown in many different ways.
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And so, I mean, and Lincoln, certainly words like the Gettysburg Address, obviously, or the second Inaugural and so forth are so important in our understanding of our own peoplehood as Americans. But you also are calling on examples that readers might be less familiar with, like Fred Hampton in Chicago, which I Found to be a really interesting case study. Can you talk a little bit about how that situation with Fred Hampton and Mayor Richard Daley and what was going on that you found to be really interesting in terms of the establishment of the Rainbow Coalition?
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Yeah, I thought it was remarkable, given everything that was going on in the late 1960s where racial tensions were really high. You had all of these assassination of great political leaders, including Martin Luther King. You had this person, the chairman of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, who is not railing against the evil whites. He is going to the different parts of the city and organizing all of them into a coalition. So you have these remarkable photos of these groups where you'll have, on stage white activists who have the Confederate flag on their chests, because that was part of their uniform, basically standing next to the Black Panther Party recipients, standing next to, you know, Latino activists who were organizing as well. And they were all fighting with each other. Not like they all did their own thing in their own sections of the city, but when they needed help, they banded together. And how did he do that in this time of racial strife? How did he put together this Rainbow Coalition where they were working with one another and they had the same common enemy. Mayor Daley was, you know, was oppressing them, was trying to push them out of their. The parts of their city. It was a time when urban renewal programs, you know, were basically black and Latino removal programs. And in fact, if you go to those neighborhoods now, there's, like, no remnants of them in Chicago. And so I was interested in, like, how did he do this? And then when I got into studying it, what became really fascinating to me is, I mean, the Black Panther Party was calling for radical change, and so it really surprised me. And also, they were very into Fanon and Marx, but they were using many of the similar strategies that people like Lincoln and FDR actually use. They talked about how the Declaration of independence says, all men are created equal, and that's what they stand for. They, in fact, Fred Hampton actually redrafted a Declaration of Independence using that language because he thought it was liberatory. And in the principles of the Black Panther Party, the only authorities that are, like, if you look at, who do they actually cite? The Constitution and the Declaration are two of the few that they actually do cite. Now, why are they doing that? I think they're doing that because they're trying to get people to see that what they're calling for, these radical ideas that they're calling for, are actually calling for to treat people equally. Right? They're Feeding lots of children in Chicago because children are hungry and there's not food for them. And so they're running these programs to do that. And part of that is to bring the message home. Look, who's actually caring for your children. We are, because we're fighting for the right things. And so, yeah, so I. And the other thing that I think that that particular story really brought home to me was how finding the people who are really responsible, you know, who are really supporting those bleaching narratives that are hurting people, is important. Having Mayor Daley as the opponent in. In that organizing of the Rainbow Coalition was crucial. They wouldn't have come together without that common opponent because they all the same pressures. They were being pushed out of their neighborhoods. The police were policing them in ways that were brutal, and there was no accountability at the time. And they all felt this because in their neighborhoods, they felt like their kids were not being treated lawfully. And so they could come together around issues of poverty, issues of police brutality, issues of health care. And they all face these challenges, and they all can identify one of the main sources of those was the Daley, Mayor Daley's administration. And so they could all fight against that same enemy.
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And so you trace this through, as I said, a number of different places. And I was really fascinated by this particular story as somebody who was born and grew up actually on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s, 60s, and to some degree, sort of seeing the different coalitions of individuals and groups that came together. But I also wanted to ask you a little bit about how these different examples of coalition building that has at its heart this kind of idea that's connected to the Declaration in particular and the call for equality, and how that in our current political dynamic, how do we sort of take what you've been writing about and how do we sort of look at it and apply it in our current milieu where you have these ICE raids, where you have, you know, a sort of. Lots of focus on kind of inequality and hierarchy.
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Yeah, it's a great question. I have thoughts about it. I think it's difficult to say this is the playbook, but I also think right now, the opposition to authoritarian populism has no coherent, convincing story. And even if you just look at the different slogans on the different sides. Right. I mean, if I asked the normal person on the street, like, what is the slogan of maga? Well, the slogan of MAGA hits Make America Great Again. And that is a very compelling story. It really is that, look, we made the country Great through economics, through hard work. And now that greatness is being threatened, it's being threatened by outsiders, invaders, foreigners, communities of color who aren't sort of participating as well as we do. And that's under threat. And if we don't do that, if we don't do something, our great nation is going to be threatened. So what's the slogan of the Democratic Party? I mean, Kamala Harris, her slogan, I bet no one knows it. Apparently their official one was, let's win this. Biden, who he replaced, I believe it was, let's finish the job. What's the job? I don't know what the job is. There's no story about what are we really fighting together to create or to maintain. And so to me, that story is just sort of sitting there. The story is that the country has this unrealized promise of the Declaration, and we have never been able to fully realize that. But the best parts of the United States have come from people trying to more fully realize that whether it's Lincoln in the Civil War, whether it's fighting for, you know, women's rights, the right to vote, the extension of the franchise to more and more people throughout all of these time periods. You know, we have people who have been fighting for these things, and to the extent that we, you know, when we achieve them partially, people thrive. Right. Like inequality was less from 44 through 78, you know, somewhere around there. Those were times when there was egalitarian sentiments, partially because you had, you know, the. The rebellion against Nazi Germany sort of ideology, and also the Cold War basically pushing in on us. And we're. And we wanted to kind of, you know, say, no. You know, we're not with the, you know, the Soviet Union claim us to be. But that story, I think, can still be encouraging because people still want human flourishing. They still, I think, believe that people should be treated like they should treat their neighbor as they would treat themselves. And what I don't think is getting through is when you lose that right. If we go towards Viktor Orban's system, which is what Project 2020. 2025. 2025 is, you know, it's basically scripted to do. We get court politics where you have to bow down to the leaders and kiss the ring in order to get the things that you want to be able to work for, right? You want your kids to do well, to have freedom, to have economic opportunity. That does not come from a system with bleaching stories. And so I think no Kings is a little bit better. But what is missing there Is this deeper sense of look, if we go down this path of these bleaching stories, which might feel good because people are actually doing stuff, people are acting in ways that are like they are acting on behalf of some group of people and people can see that. But if we keep continuing down that path, then economic opportunity, our political rights are our common future and then also our spiritual health. Like you can't be a person who is experiencing human flourishing when other people are being sent away in brutal conditions. Right? When children are being zip tied and taken out of buildings at night by mass ICE officers. That is not a place where you can have justice and human flourishing. And so I do think it's a ripe time for that story to take hold. But I think cynicism is really hard to overcome. And I also don't think that enough people are willing to tell that story forcefully enough because the US has all sorts of problems. And I'm not trying to say the US has been this arc of progress or anything like that, but we have a lot to lose and we have a lot to fight for. Right. We want our kids to do better than we did. Right. And most people don't think that their kids, like a majority of Americans say that they don't think that's going to happen for them. But we have the ability to change that. And we see at the Civil War, what did they actually think was going to happen during the civil rights movement? Did they know that they were going to get the Voting Rights act know. Right. You don't know what's going to happen in that next moment. And I we are at an inflection point and I don't think anyone can sort of predict what's going to happen. And I'm not confident that the mending stories are going to win out, but I'm confident it's a possibility if we all actually started to come together rather than fight each other.
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C
On that happy note, Michael, what are you working on now?
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There's a couple projects. One project that I'm trying to look at is looking at Mehrmamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as examples of mending stories. And I think they are actually quite different the way they tell their stories. And so I'm looking at the differences in how they're telling these stories. And I, I think Mamdani is trying to update this whole tradition and actually change it in very interesting ways that are attracting large groups of young people and also turning off other groups of people in a way that I think Representative Ocasio Cortez's story does not. So that's a project that I'm working on right now. And then I'm working on an edited anam, a special issue on transnational peoplehood. So how are people organizing across borders to mobilize for just causes like against climate destruction or for labor rights? How do they actually organize those stories across borders transnationally? So those are the two most immediate ones.
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C
Well, I hope when one of them turns into a book, you'll come and talk to me about them again on the New Books Network.
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Oh, thanks so much. It was wonderful to be here.
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C
Thank you for joining me today. Michael Illuzi, author of Mending the Reclaiming we the People in a Populist Age. This was published by University Press of Kansas in 2025 and is available at their website and any place else that you might buy books like Bookshop. Thank you, Michael, so much for talking to me about this excellent new book.
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Thank you. I appreciate it.