Tom Nichols

But as human beings, right, we are fraught and fallen.

And we can tell a story about that.

You know, Robert Bell in 1975 wrote a wonderful book entitled The Broken Covenant.

And he said, if only we could just simply admit that we're not the saviors of the world, that we're not innocent.

If we can embrace a tragic story about our journey to now, then maybe we can be better as human beings moving forward.

I'm saying all of this not to reduce everything to race, but to see how it all fits.

in our current malaise.

And damn it, it is a malaise.

It is a deep, deep malaise, it seems to me.

That was a lot boiled up, boiling up and out.

You know, Nicole, I come out of a different tradition.

You know, the first line of my new book is, I do not love America and never have, especially now.

You know, I find it suspect to love something so morally dubious and abstract.

I love people close to the ground.

And it's a provocation, obviously.

How can you expect me to love the place?

From whence your expectation of gratitude from me, given the tradition out of which I come?

You know, my teacher, Albert Raboteau, was raised without his father because a shop owner on the coast of Mississippi shot him in the head because he dared to confront him over this treatment of his wife.

That's not in the 19th century.

That's the guy who taught me, right?