Ben Rhodes

There has to be a reconstruction of how the US government works.

There has to be an enormous reform agenda.

And this is another thing I found in my book.

After the Gilded Age is when you got the direct election of senators, you got women's suffrage, a similar level of ambition

in just transforming how politics is financed, how politicians are held accountable in this country, how you can assure Americans that the government is actually going to work for them and not just to set a special interest.

And then globally, I think a real effort to say this is over,

You know, we're dismantling this forever war apparatus.

We're not just drawing down some troops.

We're taking the whole thing apart.

We're an anti-war party now.

We're not going to do the dumb war thing anymore.

And we're going to reengage the world as a country that wants to deal with issues that people care about, like how do you put guardrails about artificial intelligence?

How do you deal with the threat of climate change?

So I think all of that adds up to the Democrats needing to not come in and try to make things feel normal, but to come in and act as FDR did with the sense that there is an emergency that is of a scale that everything is going to have to be different going forward.

Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

And look, to connect these conversations, because I think it's really important how you framed it, Trump has kind of dismantled the idea that we have a shared national identity or even a shared reality in this country.

Now, underpinning that is a deeply reactionary story that has always been part of the American story.

Right.

It's a kind of white Christian nationalism that rejects or subordinates other identities and basically says that there's a group of people in this country.

And with Trump, it's a very small group of people who are allowed to do whatever they want.