What Does it Mean to Be an American?

Summary

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Pod Save America – Episode Summary

"What Does it Mean to Be an American?"

Date: May 31, 2026
Host: Jon Favreau with guest Ben Rhodes (former Obama speechwriter and author)
Theme: Revisiting American identity through the lens of history, rhetoric, and the ongoing argument over who belongs and what America stands for—anchored in Ben Rhodes’ new book, All We: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the meaning of American identity and the relentless, centuries-long debate about the country's core values. Jon Favreau interviews fellow Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes on the release of his new book, which traces U.S. history through seminal speeches—from forgotten figures to presidents and contemporary politicians. Together, they analyze how these speeches reflect and shape the contest between competing visions of America, discuss the evolution of political rhetoric, and reflect on how to forge a more hopeful national story, especially amid contemporary democratic threats.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Framing the Debate: Two Competing Stories of America

• Rhodes’ Book Structure: Uses 15 consequential speeches to illustrate the ongoing battle over American identity.
• Two Grand Narratives:
  • “Inheritance Nationalism”: America as a white Christian nation tied to blood, place, and tradition, often exclusionary. Associated with figures like J.D. Vance and, historically, the Confederacy.
  • “Progressive Nationalism”: America as a project to live up to its founding ideals of equality—a diverse nation defined by striving and inclusion, epitomized by activists and reformers from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama.
• Quote: “There is one story that is a nationality of inheritance... and then the opposing story is one of progressive nationalism, that we've never lived up to the creed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal...” – Ben Rhodes (13:06)
• Why Open with J.D. Vance? Vance’s speech at Claremont crystallized the former narrative, rejecting the creed of equality and arguing for the primacy of inherited identity (10:23).

2. Immigrants & the Meaning of Citizenship

• Recurring Theme: The tension over whether citizenship is a matter of blood and belonging or of commitment to a set of ideals.
• Rhodes: “How can citizenship not be equal? Like, how can some people be more American than other people?” (17:12)
• Cites examples of immigrants and their descendants shaping America (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s father, Louis Brandeis, Dolores Huerta).

3. The Constitution and Compromise: Franklin’s Wisdom

• Why Franklin? Opened and closed the book with Ben Franklin to illustrate founding tensions and the necessity—but dangers—of political compromise.
• Franklin’s closing argument at the Constitutional Convention emphasized imperfection and the virtue of compromise.
• Memorable Quote: “He said this new government can only end in despotism... when the People shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. And that landed like a two by four today.” – Ben Rhodes (26:13)
• The endless argument was “baked in” to American governance (27:52).

4. Rhetoric & the Struggle for American Ideals

• Spotlight: Alexander Stephens’ (Confederacy) “Stone Speech”
  • Unapologetically defended white supremacy as foundational; later repackaged it in innocuous terms like “states’ rights.”
  • Notable Observation: Reactionaries often reframe extreme ideas in familiar, less offensive American language—a pattern Trump mimics.
  • Quote: “He turns white supremacy into like a progressive enlightenment discovery, philosophical, moral truth... ennobled by believing that you're superior...” – Ben Rhodes (33:05)
• The Power of Progressive Oratory
  • Both reactionaries and progressives lay claim to the symbols and rhetoric of American founding, but it’s the ability to expand the nation’s promise that marks oratory from Douglass, King, Obama, et al.

5. The Role of Empathy, Complexity, and Moral Language

• Empathy Across Divides: Lincoln’s and Obama’s greatest rhetorical strength was their ability to acknowledge the grievances and perspectives of their political opponents without ceding fundamental moral ground.
• Quote: “If we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do...” – Lincoln, as quoted by Favreau (44:07)
• Obama’s “Race Speech”: Praised for its radical honesty about American racism, coupled with an empathetic understanding of white resentment—a model for persuasive, inclusive politics (48:26).

6. What’s Missing in Today’s Politics

• Disappearance of Moral Vision:
  • Modern Democratic and left rhetoric, Rhodes argues, lacks the broad, inclusive, and moral storytelling found in past successful movements.
  • Secular, yet Sacred: Past progressive speeches liberally borrowed religious language to express universal moral truths, whether or not the speaker was personally religious. Key for building solidarity and purpose (66:05).
• Call for Ambitious Narrative: Slogans aren’t enough; people crave a bigger story grounded in care for others and shared purpose (69:37).

7. Trump’s Radical Break: Dictatorial Rhetoric and Subversion of the Process

• Trump as Qualitative Shift: More than another “backlash”—Trump’s rhetorical and political approach marks a departure from even the Confederacy’s proceduralism. His assertion that he is above the law, “saved by God,” and sole proprietor of American greatness is unprecedented.
• Quote: “It's the idea that I'm not playing by Franklin's rule book... Like that's the radicalism of Trump—it’s not the underlying xenophobia or populism. It's in the putting that in service of someone who believes, not in the constitutional framework within which we have this competition of stories.” – Ben Rhodes (75:00)
• Path Forward: The imperative is to tie threats to democracy and corruption to concrete, lived consequences for all Americans—not just critique Trump as a “fascist” (77:00).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On J.D. Vance’s Vision:
  “We are not a nation founded on a creed... we are a particular people from a particular place with a particular way of life. And he said the quiet part out loud.” – Ben Rhodes (12:45)
• On the Value of Empathy in Politics:
  “We all encompass these complexities, and until we can look at the world through each other's eyes, we never gonna move forward.” – Ben Rhodes (49:12)
• On the Enduring Need for Moral Language:
  “We want someone to come along and say there's something bigger that we need to be about, that we need to care for our neighbors... I think that kind of language, whoever can harness that, I think that would be very useful in a 2028 presidential candidacy.” (68:54)
• On Trump’s Unique Danger:
  “No leader in American history has said [he was 'saved by God to make America great again’]. Not even the George Wallaces. None of them.” – John Lovett (73:57)

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Key Timestamps

• [04:19] – Ben Rhodes joins, discusses his new book and career evolution.
• [10:23] – Explaining the two competing stories in U.S. history & why Vance’s speech opens the book.
• [17:12] – The equality of citizenship and roots of multicultural America.
• [23:37] – Choosing Ben Franklin and his speech as the book’s anchor.
• [31:24] – Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone” speech and the rhetoric of white supremacy.
• [43:50] – The art of empathy and reconciliation in Lincoln’s and Obama’s rhetoric.
• [48:26] – Dissecting Obama’s 2008 race speech and its historical antecedents.
• [66:05] – Religious/moral language in American political speech—how it builds solidarity.
• [72:54] – Trump as an historic aberration: from backlash to dictatorial threat.
• [77:00] – How to confront Trumpism: blending democracy and economic arguments, and building a broader story.

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Tone & Style

• Language: Accessible, candid, at times irreverent—but deeply reflective and passionate about American democracy.
• Atmosphere: A mix of intellectual “nerding out” over speechwriting and historical analysis, leavened with urgency about contemporary threats and hope for the country's future.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This episode is a masterclass in how speeches shape American identity and the struggle between competing visions for the country. It urges listeners—and contemporary leaders—to recover a moral, inclusive, and ambitious language that binds people together for the long haul. Rhodes’ argument: History offers hope, but only if Americans are willing to fight for it, embrace the full complexity of the nation’s past, and craft a compelling collective future.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

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[John Lovett]

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[Ben Rhodes]

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[John Lovett]

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[Ben Rhodes]

I wish I had a premier group chat. I asked them where we should have dinner last night and they left me on red. I know you saw it. It says it.

[John Lovett]

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[Ben Rhodes]

Don't walk into a surprise.

[John Lovett]

Book a top rated verbo. Stay with a premier host if you know you verbo. Welcome to Pod Save America.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau.

[John Lovett]

On today's show, my good friend and

[Jon Favreau]

fellow speechwriter for Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes. America's 250th birthday has been on my

[John Lovett]

mind a lot lately, especially since Donald Trump seems intent on making the country

[Jon Favreau]

semi quincentennial all about himself, his parties, his name on everything, his guests, and his version of the American story. But of course, there's another version of our story that resonates with at least half of us, likely more. At the very least, Americans have been engaged in an argument about what this country is and who belongs. Since we declared independence two and a half centuries ago. Ben has written an incredible, timely book about that argument. Truly, it's fantastic. I read the whole thing in about a day, and you all know what a big reader I am these days. So that's saying something. The book is called All We A History of the United states and and 15 speeches. In it, Ben traces the history of America through some of the nation's most consequential speeches. From a long forgotten speech from a Native American chief and Lincoln's second inaugural to I have a Dream and speeches from Barack Obama and even Donald Trump.

[John Lovett]

It's a beautiful book about the ways

[Jon Favreau]

in which, in the words of our old boss, this union may never be perfect, but generation after generation shows it can always be perfected. Ben and I were psyched to have this conversation, both because we get to nerd out as former speechwriters and and dig into what the two of us talk about when we're not in front of a mic. How those of us who don't love being governed by Donald Trump can win the argument about what this country is and where it needs to go. About how we close the gap between America's best ideals and our current fairly bleak reality. It was a great conversation and we'll get to it in a minute. But before we do, please consider becoming a crooked media subscriber if you haven't already.

[John Lovett]

So that you don't miss out on

[Jon Favreau]

any of the great content we're putting out for our friends at the podcast. Subscribers get ad free episodes of all your favorite podcasts, including this one. You also get our extra new episode of Pod Save America called Pod Save America Only friends. Other subscriber only shows like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, access to all of our excellent substack newsletters like Pod Save America, Open tabs and you get to feel good about supporting one of the few independent, proudly pro democracy media outlets left in Trump's America. So head to cricket.com friends and please subscribe.

[John Lovett]

Let's get to it.

[Jon Favreau]

Here's Ben Rhodes.

[John Lovett]

What's up, Ben?

[Ben Rhodes]

Jon, this is the interview I was looking forward to since I finished my book. I have to tell you, honestly, I

[John Lovett]

was going to say I love when we have an excuse to pod together, especially this time because you wrote a book about speeches which is perfect for the two of us. For people who don't know, I know a lot of you probably do, but Ben and I wrote speeches for six years together, sometimes quite literally together, like side by side. Yeah. Campaign with our laptops open till 3am but this is also a book about American identity and an argument over the American story that's been raging for 250 years, which has also become an obsession of mine as of late.

[Jon Favreau]

But I want to start with something

[John Lovett]

you wrote about the book, and you wrote that it's the third in a trilogy that started with your memoir, then your book about authoritarianism, and now this and that. Finishing this one means you're ready to let go of your past identities as a White House staffer, foreign policy advisor, and speechwriter.

[Jon Favreau]

Say more about that.

[John Lovett]

Why are you letting go?

[Ben Rhodes]

I actually really thought about this, John, because I wrote my memoir, which was a very kind of raw experience. Right. It was like I didn't digest it at all. I wrote that in a year that came out in 2018. Then I very much. My last book was in my kind of foreign policy, global politics pod, Save the world, if you will, self in terms of traveling around and understanding what had happened in Russia and China and Hungary under Viktor Orban. And I was literally using the experiences, contacts, networks I had from being in that world. And then this one is entirely. I wanted to go back into history because I had a sense that I could find a lot there that you could understand this argument that we're having now by tracing it back from the beginning. And frankly, my original conceit was Obama and Trump kind of encapsulate, represent two different opposing stories that we've had throughout our history in competition with each other. And I'm not an historian. And so the vehicle I knew that I would choose is speeches. And I found myself kind of returning to that core identity. That guy who showed up in the Obama campaign office when you were the chief speechwriter. You're my boss. I remember walking in from my think tank culture in D.C. and, wow, my boss is wearing a T shirt. This is a different vibe.

[John Lovett]

He's wearing a T shirt, and he doesn't know shit about foreign policy. Good thing I'm here.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. But I say this actually seriously to you because you've been through this. You kind of don't want to go through life as Jon Favreau or Ben Rhodes, comma, former Obama ex. And I kind of feel like I've mined it now. This is not a memoir at all, but it drew deeply on all the things we did in speechwriting. And so I felt like. But kind of more fundamentally and existentially, too, I think I finally came to terms with how it all ended in the sense that Trump was this kind of rebuke of the inevitability of progress. Right. Of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice kind of on its own, if you will. And, and I think reliving all of American history kind of allowed me to situate our experience in a continuum where it's actually not that unusual that this happened. You know, reconstruction was followed by segregation. You know, civil rights movement was followed by backlash. So for all those reasons, I really did internally, like you have to trick your, you know, as a writer and you are a writer, you know, you have to kind of tell yourself a story. And my story was this is the third in a trilogy. It kind of completes both my various Obama identities and kind of is me coming to terms with how our chapter ended. And yeah, now I can move on. We'll see what happens next.

[John Lovett]

So I read the book. I started it Sunday night when we got back from Lovett's wedding. And then I read most of it yesterday and last night we're recording this on Tuesday. You're listening to it probably on Sunday. First of all, I absolutely fucking loved the book. It is incredible. Everyone should read it. I also, it did give me this sense of hope and also peace like you say you came to terms with it. Sort of peace about like the last 10 years and where it fits. Yes, because you read when you, it's the speeches you selected were specifically selected because they each tell a story about American identity and this argument over what America is that we've been having since the founding. And when you lay it all out like that, along with the different characters, you really do get this sense that we have been here before and people in these moments have been able to, you know, speak and march and fight their way out of these moments. And I don't think it's, it's not Pollyannish at all, but it's sort of like a hard earned hope that you get from reading it. But I thought, I thought it's outstanding. You open the book with, of all people, JD Vance and his speech last summer at Claremont about American identity, which listeners to this show and especially offline know that I can't stop talking about. Austin is nodding his head very knowingly right now. I think you and I had a few conversations about this, about the J.D. vance speech when you were thinking about opening the book with it. What made you finally decide that Vance's speech was the way into a book about 250 years of American identity?

[Ben Rhodes]

So a prologue for a book is a fascinating Thing because you kind of have to telegraph your argument. You know, the book starts in real time with Benjamin Franklin, which we can get to, but I don't want to drop people in there. You know, I wanted to give people a sense of kind of what the argument of the book is. And I always had in mind when I was literally selecting these speeches, which was an interesting process. And as I was writing chapter after chapter, that if you really distill it down, there are two stories of what American identity is with obviously their permutations, they're not all exactly the same. But I think you can simplify and say there is one story that is a nationality of inheritance, that you can call it originalism, you can call it blood and soil nationalism, but essentially this was a white Christian nation founded by a particular set of people with a particular set of beliefs. And now I'm literally quoting J.D. vance. And it's the inheritor of kind of Western civilization. Sometimes that's Western supremacy. And sure, other people live here of different races and ethnicities, but they kind of have to subordinate themselves to this original identity. And American exceptionalism is just a given. Like, we are exceptional because we're American. We are the city on a hill. We're in some ways God's chosen people. We can do whatever we want to the people in this country, whether they're Native Americans or black people or immigrants, and we can do whatever we want to other countries. Right. And again, I'm casting it negatively, but I frankly think that at a core, that is a strain that runs through American history. And then the opposing story is one of progressive nationalism, that we've never lived up to the creed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. And that American history is a story of people trying to change the country for the better, trying to make a more perfect union, to use a phrase. And that's how you get the abolitionist movement and the suffrage movement and the. In the civil rights movement and the labor rights movement, all these things. J.D. vance comes along and decides to tell the first version of the story for me. Because that speech is literally. I mean, when I knew I was going to use. It is when he said, we are not a nation founded on a creed. And he name checks the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal. He says, no, that is not American identity. We are a particular people from a particular place with a particular way of life. And he said the quiet part out loud. Now, he didn't say white. But what particular people do we think he's talking about and he has this kind of logic way where. Well, who could argue with us being a particular place and a particular people? Actually I can argue with it because we were 13 states at the beginning on the northeast coast. We weren't. Our geography is wildly different today. The people in this country today don't look at anything like the people in those 13 states and the way of life. I mean walk down the street in my neighborhood in Venice, like there's a ton of ways of life there. Right. And so I actually think that JD did the service of framing the other story for me. And so I literally open with it.

[John Lovett]

You mentioned that and that other people have to be subordinate to sort of this white Christian identity. And I've heard people say, and I've talked to people about this, that J.D. vance, when he spouts this anti immigrant xenophobic rhetoric is full of shit and doesn't really believe it and couldn't really believe it because his in laws are immigrants from India, his wife is a first generation American. But there is another possible explanation here that you touch on, which is this obsession Vance has. And he does it in the speech and we've heard him do it and he's like mocked for it and other times and other places with the need for everyone to show gratitude, particularly foreign born American citizens, immigrants, that if you're here and we let you come here, then you need to show gratitude to the people who've been here the longest or to our ancestors or to like this way of life and this culture. And I do think that's how you reconcile like. Cause if you asked J.D. vance, he would say, well I'm for immigration, I'm for you know, like a

[Jon Favreau]

diverse country, that's fine.

[John Lovett]

But his problem is that if you don't have seven generations of ancestors buried in Kentucky, which he said at the Republican National Convention, that then you don't get to complain about this country. I mean basically he said that about Mamdani too. Mamdani had some like 4th of July message where he was like, yeah, and then we gotta continue to improve this nation. And something very mild about perfecting or improving the nation. And J.D. vance was like, how could he do that? We let him in here and blah, blah.

[Jon Favreau]

It's like really fucking crazy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, if you believe that. Cuz he said that you have to show gratitude in that speech. And I posed a question in the prologue. Gratitude to whom?

[John Lovett]

Yeah, who are we for what?

[Jon Favreau]

Who was everyone supposed to be?

[Ben Rhodes]

Who are these people? Yeah, because actually immigration was a much Bigger theme than I actually expected it would be in this book, because you keep bumping into that. And, you know, Benjamin Franklin, his father was an immigrant. You know, he left religious persecution behind, as well as seeking economic opportunity. And then you run through the other people in this book. You know, Louis Brandeis was a Jewish immigrant who left antisemitism behind in Europe. Mary Lees, a populist, came from a poor Irish family that fled the oppression of the British. Obviously, you get up to the 20th century. Interestingly, Dolores Huerta comes from a family, and this is something people don't think about enough. John. A part of her family weren't immigrants. The border just got redrawn and brought them into the United States. There are a lot of brown people in this country that were here before, a lot of white people. And we just, you know, expanded and redrew the border around places like, you know, New Mexico, for instance. And fundamentally, it comes down to the question of, do you believe that someone. Zohar Mamdani, for example, is as American as someone whose family's been here for seven generations?

[John Lovett]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

I genuinely do. Yeah. And I'm not. That's not a virtue signal. That's just a. How can citizenship not be equal? Like, how can some people be more American than other people? Like, we are supposed to be a nation anchored in laws, the Constitution, and a creed, the Declaration of Independence, which suggests. Not that we should have open borders, which is how J.D. vance kind of shorthands it. He says, well, if everybody who believes in the Declaration of Independence is American, then we'd have billions of.

[John Lovett]

Don't we have to admit them all? No, we don't. That's not what he says. That's not what our laws say.

[Ben Rhodes]

We can have a border, and we can seal that border at times. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that, but we can by a matter of policy. But the people who are American are American, and they're equally American, and. And frankly, the thing we should be grateful for is that we are a nation that is able to have all these different people come here and enrich this country. I mean, how boring would this country be if it was just comprised of people like J.D. vance? You know, like. Like, I just. I think fundamentally I felt myself, because you kept encountering people didn't like the Irish when they came here. People didn't like Chinese people when they came here. Some people have never liked black people being here, even though they were brought here mostly against their will. The people didn't like Jewish people when they came here and guess what? You rolled the tape forward. Does anybody think that this nation is not better for having Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans and Irish Americans? No, I don't think even J.D. vance would make that argument. So what are we really talking about here?

[John Lovett]

And it's been said many times by many people, but that is what the core of American exceptionalism is all about, which is we can't. We can go live in Germany and live in Japan, we can't become German or become Japanese, but anyone can come to America and become American and like that. That is a very. That is a unique, exceptional quality of America. And that is the experiment.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think we're also different because we were founded by people who immigrated here like we were founded not by the indigenous people here. And I think that that does kind of create an additional legitimacy for the idea that if this is not a nation of indigenous Americans, then it is by definition a nation of people who have chosen an identity.

[John Lovett]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And set up a government that could be, you know, flexible enough to absorb different people. You know, a lot of the speeches that spoke about the virtue of immigration, Frederick Douglass, Louis Brandeis, they talked about the fact that the decision to come to America is like the first step in becoming American. Like that's a strive. And. And again, there's an inherent striving in that. You know, I want a better life. I want to be a part of something different. I want to be a part of this project. I want to sign up for this creed. And yeah, you have to go through the process again, not the JD Van saying we have to let everybody in, but that that idea of striving, self improvement type people is kind of is ingrained in American identity and is something to defend at a time when with ice, you know, we're seeking to kind of push that out.

[Jon Favreau]

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[John Lovett]

You mentioned Benjamin Franklin, the first speech you opened the book with. Of all the founders, you pick Franklin and the speech is his closing argument for the Constitution. And then you bookend at the end of the book, Trump's second inaugural, with Franklin's warning about despotism. What made Franklin sort of unlock the book for you and why him among the founders?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, so Franklin and unlock is exactly the right word because I went through a really interesting process where I must have read, I don't know, a couple hundred speeches. And how do you tell the story? And as you know, as a speechwriter, if you know the beginning of the story and have some idea of the end of the story, you're going to. It's going to make a lot easier to fit the pieces in. And I came across this Franklin speech that I had not really read before. It's a closing argument at the Constitutional Convention. Franklin is chosen because he's the old wise man. He's also the most famous American in the world, and he's kind of the de facto host of the convention in Philadelphia. And he gives a speech that does not say a word about the Constitution itself. It's pretty remarkable. Like, he doesn't talk about anything in it. The entire speech is about the virtue of compromise itself. And he essentially says, when you get a bunch of people together to benefit from all of their wisdom, you're also assembling all of their different interests, all of their selfish interests, all their prejudices. You're getting the good and bad and out of that kind of assembly. You can't have some kind of perfect agreement. We have to compromise if we want a union. And to me, that. And he doesn't. His rhetorical tricks, John, that are really interesting because he basically takes on infallibility and dogma, or the kind of antagonists in the speech. And he says, and this is actually why we're not founded on religion. Each religion thinks it's got the answers. And if we have that same mindset, then this place will never be a home for people that might not agree with exactly that version of things. And so inherent in the Constitution is compromise and imperfection. Now, that compromise allowed the union to be made, but it also set in motion all of the conflict and competition that followed. Because we compromised about really big things. We essentially compromised about identity. There was still slavery. There were uncertain questions about immigration. Different states had different immigration policies. Obviously, women did not have rights of citizenship at that time. And so we kind of pushed those issues out. Franklin, very interestingly, the last public act he did, which is one of the first things he did after the Constitution, because he didn't live very long, was petition Congress to abolish slavery. So he was living his own theory of the case, which is compromise, set up the union and then work within the system to change it. Now, he also had this warning that I found very chilling, which is he said, this new government can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it. When the People shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. And that landed like a two by four today.

[John Lovett]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I filed that away and I said, I think I might end the book with that line. And I do. And now it helped that Trump got elected. And that doesn't mean, I think that that's happened fully. It's more a warning that if we don't arrest this direction, that's where we could end up.

[John Lovett]

Yeah, I mean, that Franklin speech basically shows that the conflict and the argument that we've been having for the last 250 years was like a function of the design of the government. Like, it was, it was, it was preordained. Because of course, if you're going to have a country where people of such different backgrounds come from different places to try to make a home and want to live in freedom from, you know, what they escaped from in Europe, then you're going to have the only government that's going to, that's gonna make that work is one where different people have a voice, different people with different opinions who are going to be at war with each other, or at least not. Or be in argument with each other. Right. Fight with each other. And it can't be any different than that. Right. And so then you look through the whole 250 years, you're like, well, yeah, slavery, the Civil War, everything.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, of course we were gonna have

[John Lovett]

these arguments because that was sort of the idea behind the government that they created.

[Ben Rhodes]

It was. And so the pieces fit in. Just to take the first, I broke the book into thirds. Each has five speeches for a certain period of American history. And so the first five are, okay, we set up this Constitution. Then I have Red Jacket saying, wait a second, we're not in your Constitution. Leave us alone. Then I have a woman named Maria Stewart, who's an abolitionist, a remarkable kind of penniless woman who came out of nowhere and became a superstar speaker on the circuit in Boston, who says, wait a second, like, black people deserve equal rights. She's an abolitionist and a feminist. Women need to be empowered. We need to be teaching black people and women the same way we teach white people and we need to claim our rights. Then I have Alexander Stevens, Vice President of Confederacy, saying, wait a second, no, no, this equality thing, we don't believe in that. White supremacy is the cornerstone of the Confederacy. He said that. I'm not projecting leftism onto him. That's what he said. And then Lincoln resolves it all in the second inaugural and says, no, we are an abolitionist nation. We fought this war to right the wrong in our Constitution. And in the most radical sense ever spoken by an American president says essentially, if every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword, essentially, so let it be done. A President, United States, saying, if we all have to die to atone for slavery, that'd be okay. I mean, imagine saying that today. So that's just. Just in those five speeches, you see the. The tug of war, and then Lincoln tries to resolve it, and then it starts all over again.

[John Lovett]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

And, you know, and we've gone through the cycle of Reconstruction to segregation to fdr, starts all over again. Civil rights movement to backlash to civil rights movement to Obama to Trump. And so we're just living different versions of the same argument. And I would argue in this book, speeches are actually the place where we have most prominently done that.

[John Lovett]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

You know, standing up in front of somebody as an activist or a politician and making your argument is different than writing a book or an op ed or something, because that's inherent in persuading people about who we are.

[John Lovett]

I want to sort of dive into some of that that you just mentioned. Alexander Stevens. Right. So he's this. Who I hadn't heard of, by the way, before this book. Vice President of the Confederacy. Fascinating character. He's a really interesting character. Georgia politician who goes from wanting to avoid secession to then standing up in Savannah, Georgia in 1861 and delivering this speech, which, like you said, is just literally a case for white supremacy, that the superiority of whites over blacks is a, he says, physical, philosophical and moral truth. What I found fascinating about that is this is in 1861, even at the time, slavery defenders were already learning to publicly talk in code, states rights, economic way of life, Northern aggression. He just says the quiet part out loud. What did you make of that as a rhetorical and political strategy in the

[Jon Favreau]

context of that time?

[Ben Rhodes]

So I found this speech and I was like, I gotta do this, because he says the quiet part out loud. And I think those are the best speeches or the most interesting ones. And for each chapter, and I think you'll appreciate this as a speechwriter, I kept in mind what makes a speech unique and consequential one. We have to understand the person who gave it, what is their whole life story that allowed them to give the speech, and then what is the cause or movement that they're speaking to now? Alexander Stevens was against secession precisely because he believed, rightly, that slavery was going to be more easy to protect inside the Union than outside of it. So it wasn't a virtuous anti secessionism. But after Georgia, his home state, secedes, he signs up, he says, okay, I'm going along with this. And he becomes a co author of the Confederate constitution, which is kind of a cut and paste of the American one, except it makes very clear that despite all the talk about states rights, no state shall abolish slavery. So much for states rights. And what's so interesting about that speech is he gave the kind of normal stuff about we're going to get rid of these tariffs and these things we don't like that the north imposes on us. But then he gets to slavery and white supremacy and he doesn't defend it as a necessary evil. He doesn't say, well, we have to have this for our economy to work or, you know, we're going to have, we'll keep this for a period of time. He turns white supremacy into like a progressive enlightenment discovery, philosophical, moral truth. As you quoted. He compares the discovery of the supremacy of the white race. He literally compares that to Enlightenment discoveries of, you know, free markets and, you know, the way that the astronomy works. You know, and it seems bizarre to read now, but you see, he's trying to tell people you're actually ennobled by believing that you're superior to black people. He's speaking to an audience that includes a lot of poor white people who don't own slaves who are probably going to have to go fight for slave power. And he has to give them something to fight for. And so what he's giving them is not just that they can feel better than somebody else, that's a huge thing that he's giving them, but also that they're good, they're doing what's right. And he actually framed this is good for black people too. Like they need to learn from us. And I found it so interesting because we progressives sometimes can forget that what can appear to be the most reactionary, ugly ideas, those people actually think that they're in their own way, quote, unquote, progressive ideas. And not in the terms of the left, but in terms of like, this is evolution in a positive sense. He even says in that speech that this discovery will spread around the world, that other countries are going to come to see the necessity of white supremacy. And I found that so interesting because the same technique that I admire in like FDR pivoting to four freedoms to give the nation a bigger, bigger purpose. Alexander Stevens could do this for white Supremacy. Now, of course, after they got their ass kicked in the war, he repackaged it as states rights and lost cause and all the rest of it and was rehabilitated and it worked. And reelected to Congress and it worked. You know, so, yeah, I know.

[John Lovett]

That was the other thing I thought about from that speech is. And reading you closed the book with Trump's second inaugural and I had forgotten he did this probably because I was like half blacked out when Trump was giving it because I couldn't believe we were going through it again. But Trump was like, and today's Martin Luther King Day. And I have a dream too. And this ability and tendency for reactionary politicians and reactionary forces to, to use rhetoric to repackage really unpleasant unpopular ideas into ideas that are more broadly popular and acceptable to the rest of the country and that sort of use American symbolism and American culture and, and, and, and the founder and founding documents and principles to kind of repackage and hide their really odious ideas. And that has been, you know, that you can draw a through line right from Alexander Stevens right through to Donald Trump and somehow that works.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it was interesting that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are both in this book and both of them have been completely kind of appropriated by conservatives in this country. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot in language that we might. And by the way, Barack Obama did too. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot about taking responsibility and the need for black people to kind of self empower. Now, he also talked a lot about the need to have a government that allows them to do that, that they cannot do that if they are kept down in systems of segregation or systems where they can't own property or they can't get an education. That part is left out. You know, King did talk about the fact that we want to live in a nation where you're not judged by the color of your skin, by the content of your character. But in order to get to that kind of nation, you need a government that keeps its promissory note, as he said in the I have a Dream speech, that we're going to treat black people equally. We're going to allow them to be in a nation where they're judged by the content of their character. Obama got criticized sometimes for practicing, quote, unquote, responsibility politics too, when he talked about the need for the black community to value education. But it was always coupled with having a government that provided opportunity equally to people. And so it shows you how the two stories I talked about are in competition, they draw from each other. So the more reactionary story needs to take the heroes of the progressive story and kind of pull them into their narrative. Reagan loved to cite King and the content of your character, not the color of your skin. And while leaving out those parts. And I think that you have to keep an eye on that because if you go back and actually experience these people in their times, they were radicals. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were absolutely radical figures, like fringe figures at times who have now been kind of repackaged as people that were welcomed at the time. And that was not the case.

[Jon Favreau]

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[John Lovett]

But also the flip side of what Stevens did. The activists do in a way as well and that like one Theme that comes through in the rhetoric from all the activists in the book is. And you know, and you write that Frederick Douglass, instead of rejecting American rhetoric, claimed it as his own. So they don't reject the language and symbolism of the dominant culture that's oppressing them. They embrace it as a way to highlight the gap between ideals and reality. And, you know, this is different from what you hear from some activists today about America being inherently racist or imperialist. And. And I think we both experienced this with Obama did that all the time. But it was happening with Frederick Douglass and King with the promissory note. Right. Is that I didn't. I came here to cash, because this is what the American Declaration says, and we need to live up to that. And I worship the American Declaration. And Frederick Douglass was like that, too. And so they are sort of radical figures in their beliefs, but their rhetoric is very much targeted to a much broader population than just activists.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's right. We progressives do the same thing that I just said. The reactionaries do. We claim parts of the other story as well. Douglass had a big falling out with William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist who helped propel Douglass's career, because Garrison rejected the Constitution because he said that was written by a bunch of slave owners. You know, he was kind of a, you know, post 2020look like, let's just, you know, tear the whole thing down.

[John Lovett]

Right?

[Ben Rhodes]

And Douglas said, no, no, no. When I look at the Constitution, I see a document that rejects slavery. That's the part of the Constitution I'm looking at, and I can make that work for me. I want to stay inside of this system, and I want to make the Constitution my own. You know, King, the promissory note was on the Declaration of Independence. You said, all men are created equal, and you've never lived up to that. And actually, frankly, almost every activist in this book, in fact, everyone uses the Declaration of Independence to make their case that they want to close the gap between the reality and that document, which,

[John Lovett]

by the way, is why it has fallen out of favor with JD Vance and some of the national conservatives today,

[Jon Favreau]

because the Declaration is a problem for them.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's a big problem. And now, what if those activists had said that document was written by a white slave owner? You know, so, like, I can't use that rhetoric, you know, and I think there's a lesson in that for today, you know, which is if you want to persuade people and if you want to advance rights in this country, you actually have to embrace the whole story. Like, even the Parts we don't like. Maybe I'm not saying you embrace Alexander Stevens worldview, but you're embracing the fact that this country was founded by flawed people that did, in some cases, terrible things, certainly to black people and to Native Americans, but they left enough of a foundation that we can work with, you know, like. And I mean, the title of the book is taken from Martin Luther King's speech the night before he died. All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper. Like, that's like almost his last words, you know?

[John Lovett]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I think that's. That's important. Obama would always do that, too. And we should talk about the race speech. But it's about, just like individual people contain complexity, so does America. Nobody's perfect. How do you draw out the better and build a message in a story, in a speech from that?

[John Lovett]

Lincoln has a line that you quote in that chapter on the second Inaugural. And the line is, if we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do. And if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do. And we never ought to lose sight of this fact. And Obama does something similar in the race speech. Clearly calls out structural, systemic racism, but then shows an understanding of and even an empathy towards the white resentment and backlash. And there is this pattern of the speakers you chose in the book, both activists and politicians, probably especially the politicians, of working especially hard to show that they understand and maybe empathize with their opponents because their larger project is to preserve this union and this country, which is much harder. It's much harder work than just being able to, you know, either secede from the country or, you know, try to, you know, subjugate some other group, like trying to keep everyone together. Even when the people that you're trying to win support from don't believe you should have the rights that you have.

[Jon Favreau]

That's fucking hard.

[Ben Rhodes]

I was stunned to find myself coming away from this, admiring Lincoln even more into it.

[John Lovett]

Me, too.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because he goes through this torturous process trying to figure out the meaning of it all. And he goes through a torturous process with slavery. First he wants to restrict its spread, then he wants to preserve the Union without messing with it. Then he kind of, out of wartime necessity turns to abolition, and it's only later in the war that he kind of fully embraces abolition as the cause of the war, not just the preservation of the Union. He's moving in the direction of Douglas, the activist and abolitionist. Douglas was becoming more pragmatic Though he was saying he used to castigate Lincoln. Then he was like, wait a second. I think Lincoln's moving in the right direction. I'm going to kind of meet him there. And so he starts to talk to Lincoln. He starts to work with Lincoln. He gets up and Lincoln gives that second inaugural address. He's about to win the war. He does not talk about that. He doesn't say, like, we've won these great battlefield victories. He does not talk down the South. But he does give an absolutely unapologetic and almost religious case for abolition as the second founding of the United States. And. But the way he's saying it, the way he frames it, is that is going to be good for the south and the North. This is redemption, you know, that we're finding we have this opportunity to start over, having cleansed ourselves of this sin. And there's this kind of insane moment.

[John Lovett]

Well, it blames. Blames the north as well as the South. Right. Like a real. Like we were. I know that we're fighting you right now, and you're gonna lose. Didn't say it, but. But we are all complicit in what has happened over the last however many years.

[Ben Rhodes]

He calls it repeatedly, American slavery. Right. Not Southern slavery, because the north profited off of it, too, you know. Yeah. And there's this great scene where that night he's at. At the White House, and he's greeting a receiving line, and Douglas tries to get in the receiving line to see him and gets booted out. And someone tells Lincoln, and Lincoln says, well, let Douglas in. And Douglass comes in, he stands in this line, and he reaches the front, and he shakes Abraham Lincoln's hand. And Lincoln says, what did you think of the speech? And Douglass says, I'll write you a letter. It's like a thousand people here. And he said, no, no, no, no. I am more interested in what you think of this speech than anybody else. And Douglas just looks at him and says, it was a sacred effort. And I read that, and I was like, all right, whatever you think about this country that happened, a former slave meets with the former slave, meets with the President in the White House, meets with Abraham Lincoln, and has that conversation. Because they both evolved. They both changed. Douglass became more pragmatic. Lincoln became more radical. And Lincoln could only do that because he was able to inhabit. He could look at the world through Douglass's eyes and through a Southerner's eyes, and that was Obama. I mean, we should talk about the race speech. I'll tell you, I originally Ended the book with the Selma speech.

[John Lovett]

Yeah, yeah, let's get in there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Which is triumphalist proration. And after Trump is elected, me and my editor were talking. We're like, well, that's probably not the right note to end on. And so I just, like, I got to end with Trump. And actually, I went back to read the race speech again, and it was more relevant today than it was even in 2008 when he gave it, because he is able to. He's saying, well, he's doing what you're talking about, which is inhabiting through his grandmother and Reverend Wright and through the diagnoses of the white working class and the black working class. He's saying, we all encompass these complexities, and until we can look at the world through each other's eyes, we never gonna move forward. And that's the same thing Lincoln was saying.

[John Lovett]

Yep. It's funny because I was reading that chapter and just reading the whole book, sort of having flashbacks to the night when I first talked to Obama about the race speech and what he wanted to say in that. And he laid out a lot of the thesis of your book, which is these competing arguments that we've been having in this country since the founding, and at the very beginning was slavery and race that we've been having to grapple with. And, you know, you write in the book how, you know, I ended up doing a draft and have the. Have the beginning and the end, and then Obama basically just does track changes and writes like an entire speech in the middle of the speech and sends it back. Because I think he had had that in his mind for a very long time. Like, he was able to, you know, analyze and talk about the Reverend Wright controversy. But if you had lifted the Reverend Wright controversy out, all of the other themes and things that he says in that speech were definitely running through his mind for a very long time, because

[Jon Favreau]

they were themes throughout history.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's exactly right. And I, as you should know, you were the speechwriter on it. And by the way, I don't short shrift. I mean, that beginning and end got him to that middle. Right. Sometimes that's the speechwriter's job to get the principal to where he can have that outpouring of track changes. But I think what I understood better today, both because of what's happened and from writing the book, is, first of all, Reverend Wright was a more interesting character to me today in 2008. He was like a pain in the ass. Like, why is this guy saying this crazy shit that's going to mess up our campaign. But actually having written this book and then having lived the post Obama experience, Reverend Wright emerges out of the black church tradition of the Jeremiad, which is a speech that is intended to call out a nation's sins. So what he was doing is the same thing that Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart and all the people in that tradition did in this book. King did it often, too. And by the way, some of what Rev. Wright said ages pretty well, given some of the things Trump's done. Now, that said, Obama fused the activist and politician in himself. And then when I look at the two key parts of that speech that he wrote, in the middle one is the famous part where he's like, I can no more disown Reverend Wright. Then I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who raised me, you know, who would do anything for me. But I heard her say horrible things. I'm not saying it as elegantly seated. What he's saying there on an individual level is, hey, we all, everybody in our families is like this. Like, you can love somebody and think they're good person and not cancel them because, you know they said something you disagree with, whether it's Reverend Wright or your grandmother who's white. And then he goes into the racial stalemate, as he calls it. And he describes black structural inequality in ways I don't think I'd ever heard.

[John Lovett]

I mean, unsparingly, unflinchingly, unsparingly, you know,

[Ben Rhodes]

redlining, education gap, income gap. But then he talks, like, about the white working class more effectively than J.D. vance or Donald Trump. The line where he says they don't feel particularly privileged by their race is an incredibly powerful line. That these are people whose jobs have been shipped overseas. That these are people who had to bus their kids, which is a hassle across town because of some civil rights requirement, which again, I think is worth doing. But it's their obligation. These are people who are told if they're worried about crime, they're racist. These are his white grandmother. And that ability to say, like, none of this is going to work. American identity, American politics, unless we can have that ability to look at the world through each other's eyes. I mean, that to me, was the magic of that, that the alchemy of that speech,

[Jon Favreau]

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[John Lovett]

People look back now and whenever Obama comes up in the discourse and they're like, well, he's, you know, he was progressive on, you know, the left liked him because he was opposed to the

[Jon Favreau]

war in Iraq, but he was much

[John Lovett]

more moderate on other policies. And but the race speech to me shows the core of what he was always about. And it is the thread that runs through a lot of these politicians and activists in your book, which is like he was very, he was more radical in his diagnosis of the problem, right? In saying, in talking about structural inequality and racism and in history, how history has led us here and the fact that, I mean, he does a speech about his pastor that said controversial things and he opens it by talking about slavery in the Constitution, right? Like it goes pretty deep. But the to the extent that he's perceived as moderate, it's exactly what he did about white resentment, which is like, yeah, there's structural racism and inequality where black people in this country have been subjugated since its founding. And yet that doesn't mean that resentment that white people have is unfounded, wrong, bad, evil. I still want to correct the structural

[Jon Favreau]

inequality and correct the racism.

[John Lovett]

But. But also, if I want to actually fix that, I have to earn the support of the people who have that resentment, as opposed to just telling them they are bad.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, because you don't want to become a mirror image of J.D. vance. Right. Like, we don't like it when J.D. vance shows up and says, you can't have your way of life. You have to live the way I say. Showing up and telling someone your identity's bad, you know, because you come from this heritage or, you know, because sometimes you might have had certain thoughts, you know, like, you have to bring those people along. I mean, you and I have talked about this a lot over the years. What Obama would say to people isn't, come out with your hands up and acknowledge your racism. He would say, this country is so great that we've been able to change over time, and we've been able to right wrongs and extend rights and advance opportunities. And actually, the thing that's holding us back now is. Is the way in which powerful forces. And here's where he's like Trump, There are these elites that divide us against each other. They don't want, you know, working class solidarity among black and white people, because then we might actually fix the economy and have universal health care and things that actually make people's lives better. They're the ones, you know, kind of creating these divisions. But, you know, he tried to channel that towards progress that was inherently incremental. You know, there's no. There's no wand you can wave that can redress every inequality. You have to tackle it problem by problem. But if you're changing, and this is why I think speeches are relevant and matter and need to kind of come back. If you are telling that story and building that coalition and kind of speaking it into action, that's how you keep moving in the right direction. And we kind of get derailed when we lose. I mean, I'm using the story metaphor a lot here. When we kind of lose the plot, you know, and the. Our politics on the. On the left or center left becomes about either how bad they are, or it becomes kind of small ball, like, well, we need these ACA subsidies or we need, you know, more affordable housing. Important things that I agree with. But what's the story? Like, what is it? What do we. Who are we? You know, what is an American? And how can we build a big enough coalition that we can overcome these things that are in our way?

[John Lovett]

And by the way, when he condemns Reverend Wright in that speech, he doesn't condemn the anger that Wright expresses over what he and other black Americans have been through. What he condemns is Wright's inability to see that we have the possibility to change. And, like, that's actually what bothers him most about what Rev.

[Jon Favreau]

Wright said.

[John Lovett]

Not the actual analysis of the situation or the. Or the incendiary language or any of that. It's just the fundamental belief that. Or what he expressed was that, like, somehow America can't change. And I think that is notable. It also made me think, as you were just talking, that I always get annoyed with the. Like, these days, it's, like, very easy for Democratic politicians to pick on the Michelle Obama. When they go low, we go high line because they think it's Michelle Obama saying Republicans can kick the shit out of us and we have to just be nice. And that's not what it ever. That's not what it meant. And what it meant is what you were just saying about, like, we can't. We can't be like J.D. vance and Alexander Stevens and these reactionaries who say that one group is better than the other group. One group is good, one group is bad. It's a contest between good and evil. Because that's not the vision of America

[Jon Favreau]

that the founders had in mind.

[John Lovett]

And it's a harder. This work is harder. Right. To take a country of 330 million people of all different backgrounds and all different biases and warring factions all through the years and. And say, all right, let's somehow, like, hold it all together. Because that's the whole, like, that is a tougher project than the other project, which is to just tear it down and try to subjugate people.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, if you're a reactionary rooted in grievance and nostalgia, you're inherently going to win the go low fight.

[John Lovett]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

Right. Because what we're trying to do is play for something bigger. Douglas and King, the Douglas speech. I love this speech. He gave it during Reconstruction, and it's a speech that's really about multiracial democracy, but it's a speech in defense of Chinese immigrants. If we had a polar coaster episode in 1867, the advice would be, please do not go there. It was wildly unpopular, but essentially these Chinese immigrants were being incredibly mistreated. They were kind of the new slaves, even though they weren't total servitude. And Douglas is saying, if I believe in multiracial democracy, I have to stand up for the rights of these people too. And he gives a beautiful going high speech about that now. You could say, well, Douglas failed. There's a Chinese Exclusion act that was passed shortly after banning Chinese people from coming to this country for decades. Did he fail? Because look around California today. How many Chinese Americans and Asian Americans do you see? Maybe because he went high and he went big, maybe he won in the end. You know, King, same thing. Like King gives a speech and was interesting reliving the story. That speech. He, it's pretty good speech, promissory note. He's got a lot of good rhetoric. He did not have the dream in there. He ad libbed the whole dream sequence.

[John Lovett]

Well, this was like a speechwriter nerding out thing. But I had never heard that King's staff, someone on his staff who was helping with the speech, was like, don't say, don't talk about your dream, whatever you do, because it's too cliche. And then King just gives the speech and does it.

[Ben Rhodes]

So first of all, I'm so glad we're talking about this because it was such a speechwriter thing. They had not really worked on the speech as much as they should have because they were super busy. Everybody thinks you have big speech, you work on it forever. They were huddled in the Willard Hotel the night before the march and they're literally writing the speech. And this guy's like, whatever you do, Martin, just don't tell him about that dream. It's cliche. So they leave it out. He stays up, they finish the draft of the speech, it's done. They distribute it to the press and everything. And King's sitting there on the dais and he's. And you can kind of see him in the footage, he's kind of still fiddling with his speech. And then he gets up there and he gives the speech and it's good. And he gets this moment and he kind of stops. Kind of like Obama did before he sang Amazing Grace. He kind of stops and pauses. And if I had to guess, he's sitting there, he's thinking, I'm never going to speak to a crowd this big again. The whole country's watching on tv. Most white people have never seen a black person deliver a whole speech before. These people watching, some of them are going back to the south and get their ass beat in. I need to give them something more. I need to give them something else. Now, the dream sequence he'd used before, by the way, was not nearly as good. It was okay. It was good, but it was not the evocative language that he ended up using. And he goes so high, right? Like every image that he uses is black and white coming together, black children and white children, and a nation where you're judged not by the color of your skin, the content of your character. He's giving the nation a sense of purpose. Right. And he's, you know, he's doing that because he's trying to affect John F. Kennedy to have a more ambitious civil rights bill. But also intangibly, in the same way that maybe Douglas changed America over time. It's kind of hard to argue with King's dream. You know, he went so big that even today, Donald Trump has to be like, yeah, I have a dream, too, you know, like. Like, and I think we. Let's not lose that. Like, it's not about just going high. It's also about going big. Like a big vision for this country.

[John Lovett]

Well, I was thinking about that, and one thing that connects all these speeches that go big or high or whatever you want to say is this, like, deeply moral language that I, as I was reading the book, realized, like, fuck, we don't have that anymore. Like, we don't hear that anymore. Right. It's not like they are trying to win arguments through logic and reason alone that a lot of these speakers, from King to Douglas to Dolores Huerta to everyone you have in the book, that is not a reactionary. And actually, a lot of the reactionaries, too, they use a moral language that is both. It's embedded in the founding documents, but

[Jon Favreau]

even deeper than that, there's a lot

[John Lovett]

of religious language in a way that I hadn't expected, not in the way that the Christian right uses religion today, because a lot of the people on the progressive side who use this religious language aren't even religious themselves. Mention that Abraham Lincoln wasn't a big fan of organized religion. But again, Frederick Douglass calls his second inaugural sacred, and he reaches for this sort of religious imagery, and it happens all the way through King and all the way through all of these figures in the book. And I wonder what you thought about that. I know you're not, like, a deeply religious person. I'm not a deeply organized religious person, but it was hard to not notice that each of these speeches, especially from a left that has become fairly secular, even some of the most radical activists and abolitionists and progressive presidents throughout history have sort of tried to ground their argument in something. In this higher power.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, and there's like, look, there's some interesting particularities, like, churches and faiths were often party to movements. Right, right. But also, just the language is religious, but it's Also just moral. Dolores Huerta, her speech, she marches from Delano, California, all the way to Sacramento with the farm workers and Cesar Chavez, who is obviously a problematic figure.

[John Lovett]

Good thing you went with Dolores Huerta.

[Ben Rhodes]

I went with Dolores, yeah.

[John Lovett]

You didn't know at the time, but that was a. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Ostensibly she's there to advocate for farm worker union rights. We wanted to have the right to collective bargaining and we want longer breaks and we want healthcare and all these things. But the speech is like, we are here. We embody our needs. For you, it's a very visceral, activist language that felt very contemporary. It was basically all lives matter kind of language. Like our lives matter. Like, we are here. You have to see us, you know, And I think that some of it is. Yes, religion is kind of, in some ways, the simplest way. And I heard, you know, Reverend Warnock on recently, and he talks a bit about this like, religion is obviously. And James Talarico is doing this now. Religion is. Is a quick way to. Into morality. But I also think there are things you can draw from religious traditions. Like Obama used to. Obama would always say, you know, a core of his message at the beginning was, I am my brother's keeper. I am my sister's keeper. That's a religious idea, but it's also a secular idea. Yes, right.

[John Lovett]

Well, that's what's most interesting is the religious language that a lot of these speakers use could be very secular. Like, you don't need to believe in any specific faith.

[Ben Rhodes]

Absolutely has secular meaning. And I think that's the language you used to have this joke. I think I can tell it about kind of Democratic consultant speech. We want to put the middle class at the middle of our priorities. And the horrifying thing about living through the last decade is actually that we want to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out. There's no morality in that. There's no purpose in that. There's no sense that I want to care for my neighbor or that I have a stake in this country and its success, or that I want my life to have a meaning bigger than even what I do every day. I belong to a whole that matters. The Kennedy language about ripples of hope. Right. Or I'm not free unless everybody's free. I think that what's been missing in Democratic politics since Obama, and this isn't just like flacking for Obama, it's. I think we haven't had necessarily great speakers or we've gotten consultants speak or frankly, social media is kind of disincentivized this kind of speaking, but I think people are ready for it now. I think, like, life is pretty fucked in this country right now. Rampant inequality, wars, AIs coming for jobs. Like your kids are on screens and friends with chat bots or something. Like they want someone to come along and say there's something bigger that we need to be about, that we need to care for our neighbors, things, concepts of fairness and dignity. Dignity is a very religious concept, that there's value in human life, which is why what ICE is doing is wrong. I think that kind of language, whoever can harness that and capture that, I think that would be very useful in a 2028 presidential candidacy.

[John Lovett]

And I'm not saying that ideology isn't important here and policy isn't important, but like it is when you say, even when you say Medicare for All or Abolish ice. Even if you believe those things, talking about them in that way is not

[Jon Favreau]

the most powerful way to talk about them.

[John Lovett]

Like slogans about slogans. To signal that you exist on a certain area of the political spectrum is fine for, you know, signaling to certain, in groups and other people paying close attention to politics that that's where you are. Fine. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying it is not sufficient anymore. And it is evidence that we are missing that bigger moral story about who we are and where we need to go that you see throughout American history that you've chronicled in this book. And I just don't. I have not heard anyone tell that story or even attempt to, which is why I'm still like.

[Ben Rhodes]

There was an interesting moment. Do you remember Bernie in, I think, his last campaign, he used to do this thing at rallies he started to do where he'd say, I want you to look at the person next to you.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

And what this campaign is about is I want you to care about that person as much as you care about yourself. And Medicare for All flows from that.

[Jon Favreau]

Absolutely.

[Ben Rhodes]

So what a good politician does is absolutely the policy and ideology matters. So this is not just about giving airy fairy speeches, but if you. You ground it in something, you anchor it in a kind of moral language and a story about America and what American identity means, it should follow naturally. Well, if you care about the person next to you as much as you care about yourself, you want them to have healthcare too, you know.

[John Lovett]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And that's, I think, the piece that's been missing to some extent.

[John Lovett]

So you end the book with Trump's second inaugural. And so I think you said originally it was probably gonna be, What, Pat Buchanan's 1992 speech and then Obama's Selma speech, and then instead you did Obama race and then end with Trump's second inaugural. And we've talked about how in the sweep of history, you start realizing that the transition from Obama to Trump is more natural than it may have seemed at the time, because we've always had these backlashes. And that is true. I will say, after reading your whole book and then getting to Trump, his second inaugural and his presidency feel like even more of a departure, even more un American than even Steven's white supremacy speech. Or you have Mary Lisa's sort of xenophobic populism or even Pat Buchanan, who you talk about like, yeah, and I think it's the. Because it's not just the xenophobia. It's not just like the issues of race that we're dealing with that Trump again. It is the dictatorial quality of Trump's rhetoric. And the actions really stand out, even from all the other reactionaries in the book. And I don't know if that struck you too, but I read it and I was more like, oh, we are fucked.

[Ben Rhodes]

That is absolutely 100% on point. And what I would say, because, look, there's some things that make a lot of sense if you look at history, the kind of populist grievance of the white working class, kind of paranoid America first isolationism, periodic spasms of xenophobia, and anti immigrant sentiment. There's a lot of currents that run into Trump where he is a departure. Alexander Stevens, that was a speech. They had just had a process. Now, obviously Lincoln thought it was illegal, but they voted to secede. They wrote a Constitution. And he's giving a speech defending the legal framework for what they did. You know, I mean, so weirdly, like, the Confederacy, like, tried to have a veneer of process. Trump in that speech says, I think the most chilling line, right, is I was saved by God to make America great again. And everything is. I. Everything is like, you know, like, Reagan would never have said that. You know, And I think the extremity,

[John Lovett]

the departure, no leader in American history has said that. Not even the George Wallaces. None of them.

[Ben Rhodes]

Nope, nope. And he basically says, like, your job is done. You voted for me. Story's over, I won, and I'm taking custody of this country and its story. And you're right, the extremity is not just the. It's not the racism and the xenophobia and the, you know, unleashed capitalism. All of These things. It's the dictatorial. It's the idea that I'm not playing by Franklin's rule book. You know, I don't need to follow the law. I can do whatever I want. That's the departure, and that is a departure. Like, that's the radicalism of Trump is not in the underlying xenophobia or populism. It's in the putting that in service of someone who believes, not in the constitutional framework within which we have this competition of stories. Like, I welcome a world, a Future, in which J.D. vance plays by the rules and gives versions of his Claremont speeches, and we debate him.

[John Lovett]

Yep.

[Ben Rhodes]

Like, that's healthy. That's good.

[John Lovett]

Yep.

[Ben Rhodes]

Like, and I welcome other people disagreeing with me and agreeing with J.D. vance. I don't have all the answers. Shit, I'm not even close. What I do insist on is that we're still dealing within the compromise that Franklin and his buddies outlined, and that in his rhetoric and in his actions, Trump has departed from that. And I think that's why this is an actual emergency. Yes, it's a backlash, just like there was a backlash to reconstruction, just like there was a backlash to civil rights movement. But this is someone saying, even the segregationists, we're process people, states rights and these laws, and we're going to try to get people on the Supreme Court and do this. Like, Trump is just saying, none of this applies to me. And that's the message in his rhetoric.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[John Lovett]

And we can leave it here. Maybe you can react to this, and then I don't bring it up, because I actually do think that we're fucked. But I think that if we are trying to tell a story about where we go from here and continue having this argument in a way where we actually win the argument, like, that's what we have. We have to figure out that what Trump represents and what he's telling people. And I don't say that to be like, to refight the 2024 battle about, like, oh, Kamala should call him a fascist, and we should talk more about democracy and. Because obviously, like, the words have all been wrong, not just from Kamala, but from everyone. Like, we have not been, like, just saying that Trump is a dangerous fascist

[Jon Favreau]

clearly has not worked.

[John Lovett]

But what is it about him and what he's doing and this departure from

[Jon Favreau]

the rest of American history

[John Lovett]

that is still appealing to a big part of the country and what is the argument to that part of the country to say that, like, this is like Lincoln did for to the south, like, this

[Jon Favreau]

is Bad for all of us, it's

[John Lovett]

bad for you, it's bad for us,

[Jon Favreau]

it's bad for the whole project.

[John Lovett]

And we have to find a way out of this together.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think you see Ossoff doing this a bit in the sense where it's not just about corruption. What he's saying is if someone like Trump and his cronies, and actually, I start the section on the speech on Trump with the tableau of all those oligarchs on stage for a reason, if there are a small number of people that are just exempted entirely from the rules, you're going to get screwed. Not only is that fundamentally wrong and un American, it also leads to outcomes where you're fucked. Because they're not going to look at. They're going to loot this country. They're not going to do anything for the common good. They're not going to do anything to care for the neighbor. They're not going to care about the person next to them. And so I think that we have to not have the separation of the democracy message and the economic message because they're connected. Because if some guy says, I was saved by God to save this country and the laws don't apply to me, well, he's probably going to build a ballroom and steal a bunch of money and set up a slush fund for his friends and leverage American foreign policy to make billions in crypto and launch crazy wars. And people are making money off of insider trading while you pay higher gas prices. So I think the people that can tell a story that draws those connections between the radicalism of Trump and the outcomes in people's lives. Lives. I think that's probably. You know, I don't claim to have the exact formulation, but that's the space. And you see Ossoff circling it, you see Warnock circling it, Chris Murphy circling it. AOC is definitely circling it. I think the notably younger Democrats, by the way, are figuring this out.

[John Lovett]

Yeah. Ben, I could talk to you for another couple hours about all this book. I have all these other. All these other questions.

[Ben Rhodes]

We don't have to make it a big exchange. Just curious, like, you read them. What was your favorite speech?

[John Lovett]

Oh, wow. I mean, it sounds. It's like an answer that so many people have given in the past. But I think, like you, I came to appreciate Lincoln's second inaugural. Totally agree in, like, a way that I just never. Like, I remember when people said that I would always be like, yeah, it's a pretty good speech, but I didn't really get why everyone loved it so much. And your chapter on it and the story behind it has brought me around to how both radical and hopeful and with so much humility he delivers that speech at that time.

[Jon Favreau]

So.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, totally agree. And pretty crazy, right, that the most radical speech ever was in 1865. Just goes to show, you know, history moves in different directions.

[John Lovett]

Sure does. Everyone go buy the book. Seriously. I know we say this when we have people on who buy books and Ben's a crooked co host, but this

[Jon Favreau]

book will stay with me for a

[John Lovett]

long time and I will go back to it many times and it was like such a bomb from reading the news because it really, that's why I wrote it. It's just a real like, if you care about the country and you care about politics and you're paying attention to politics, but you want to feel something deeper and more hopeful than you see every day, go read all we say. It's a fantastic book.

[Ben Rhodes]

Thanks, John.

[John Lovett]

All right, Take care, buddy.

[Jon Favreau]

Pods in America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Farah Safari,

[John Lovett]

with Ri Churlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrienne Hill.

[Jon Favreau]

Our team includes Matt de Groat, Ben

[John Lovett]

Hefcote, Jordan Kantor, Charlotte Landis, Kirill Pelaviev, David Toles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Singel.

[Jon Favreau]

Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.