Ben Rhodes

Vance's answer.

I was just going to joke.

I don't do a J.D.

Vance speech, but he says—

he made this speech where he said, America is not a nation founded on a creed.

Oh, right, yes.

The Declaration of Independence is not the right way of thinking about what it means to be American.

And he basically gives the blood and soil argument, which is a kind of Christian nationalist argument.

We are defined by...

a certain kind of people that founded this country, white Christians, and were defined kind of by our use of power and American exceptionalism, right?

And counter to that is obviously the story of multiracial democracy and a nation that protects rights and a nation that is enriched by welcoming people from other parts of the world.

And those two stories, I kind of want to trace the argument between them throughout our history.

I begin at the founding.

Benjamin Franklin gave this extraordinary speech at the Constitutional Convention that was about compromises.

and about how the only way we can start this country is if we agree to disagree about important things.

Well, that worked, but it didn't work because the things that we didn't agree about were things like slavery or who gets to be American or, you know, what is the basis of how power works in this country.

And then I kind of follow those threads and there's,

Each chapter is not just about a speech.

It's about the political movement and conditions that could produce that speech.

And we have the kind of strain that most of us identify with, like the abolitionist strain, extraordinary people like Mariah Stewart and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, but also then how they interacted with presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and ultimately our former boss, Barack Obama.