Ben Rhodes

And so I think what people need to get their minds around, though, is J.D.

Vance, how extreme this is.

If you told Ronald Reagan that the Republican Party would be led by some smarmy guy like J.D.

Vance shitting on immigrants-

Ronald Reagan, one of his beautiful speeches, and I have a Reagan chapter in the book, very bulwarkian chapter.

I noticed that.

His last speech was about if we had to build walls around this country, we'd all have doors in them so the people could come through.

Literally, it's a beautiful speech.

People should read it.

And so this is radical, what J.D.

Vance is doing.

And look, that's not to say we should have opened borders.

It's to say that we are an identity.

that is not defined by J.D.

Vance.

We all get to choose what being American is.

And we can't tell people that they can't access that because, you know, their fucking ancestors didn't fight in the Civil War.

What I find so offensive, because one of the things I took away from this project and reading all these words and reviewing all these political movements, you know, part of what you learn is that all this is more complicated than you think in the sense that, you know, just take one example, like the populist Bernie Sanders economics wedded to Donald Trump xenophobia.

You know, it's kind of interesting threads that come together and then go apart in American history.

But what I take away from it all is that, like, what's so interesting and wonderful in some ways about America is...