Ben Rhodes

I basically wanted to understand the intensity and existential feeling of the argument we're having in this country right now politically by going all the way back to the beginning.

And through 15 speeches, I tell the story of essentially the argument we've been having about American identity.

And the shorthand is it starts with Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention, basically giving a speech in which he doesn't even mention the Constitution.

He just defends the virtue of compromise.

And on the one hand, that was what allowed us to form a union.

On the other hand, we compromised about some pretty big things.

Like who is an American and who gets to decide that, right?

And basically by looking at this mix of

People you know like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, I Have a Dream or people you don't know like an abolitionist or the vice president of the Confederacy or a Kansas populist.

I wanted to kind of trace how this argument has taken different forms all the way until today.

And I definitely learned a lot and had a lot of fun on the journey of writing this.

So this is really important because part of what's happened is Americans used to give speeches that were reprinted in newspapers, and they really favored argument.

And then there was a speaker circuit.

That's what people like Frederick Douglass were on, where they traveled the country and gave these speeches days on end.

Then there was radio, and that favored the kind of clear explanation of an FDR.

Then there was television, and you had the kind of charisma and spectacle of a King or a Kennedy.

Part of what's happened to us is because the internet has created infinite attention, competition for attention, because social media has kind of polarized us in these algorithmically designed tribes, we can't make or listen to an argument.

All the information we receive is in bite-sized pieces that are meant to make us angry or fearful or energized.

When's the last time you listened to an entire speech delivered by a politician?

And the fact that that sounds quaint I think shows that we kind of might need that again.