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Chapter 1: Why are Democrats struggling to connect with voters?
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What's the future of the American left? What happens when Donald Trump departs the stage? There's a lot of discussion about it and we frequently talk about it on the podcast, but I'm going to talk about it now with someone who really has thought it through and knows his stuff on this, partly because he was a member of the Obama administration.
He knows how Democrats can win and can govern, but also he thinks a lot about the future of the party and the way it's got to appeal to Americans. So, welcome to AmeriCast. I have four words for you.
Turn the volume up.
I'm delighted to say I'm now in a room with Ben Rhodes. And it really makes a difference, doesn't it? Because I talked to you a dozen times down the line. You talk a lot to the British press, don't you? And you've done it for years. We should start off by saying then it's a real pleasure to have you face to face.
In the flesh, not upstairs in my closet so that my kids don't walk in.
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Chapter 2: How can Democrats improve their digital messaging?
No, I don't think it's fixed. And it's a great question. And I think there's several components to it. I mean, first of all, you know, if you look at the podcasts that are successful on the right, most of them didn't start out as political podcasts, right? Like Joe Rogan was a comedian and an ultimate fighting championship commentator who got political, right?
You know, politics was downstream of culture, to use a phrase. And the other point is that, you know, we were political in what we set up, but the whole idea was to talk about politics like normal people do, you know, to not create a barrier to entry by using a lot of jargon or acronyms, to use humor. I think one of the problems in the Trump decade is
People present on the left as angry and kind of grim. And my experience of politics, you know, including with the Obama campaign, is if you have some humor to it, number one, that can help cut a strongman down to size. But it's also inviting. You know, you want to be a part of something that is fun and a bit joyful. And then I think the other problem that Democratic politicians have is
that is connected to this point about the origin of politics being downstream from culture, is that when they do go on podcasts, they have these debates like, well, now we must go on podcasts. And they go on and they sound like politicians. You know, so they go on the podcast with Joe Rogan or whoever it is, and they're using the same talking points that they would use in an interview with CNN.
And the whole point is that the way media is evolving is people want to see you authentically. Like, what are you interested in? Like, you know, actually, whatever your views of his politics are, Zohra Mamdani understands this, that if he's going on a sports podcast, he's going to show up to talk about sports. And then he'll get to politics.
You know, like you need to kind of meet people where they are in these kind of new meetings.
And you might occasionally screw up. Again, you saw that with Mandane.
Which is fine.
Before he was elected there in New York, he went on a podcast. I can't remember the exact circumstances, but I remember people saying, oh, he shouldn't have gone on there because he said something. I think it was possibly about Israel. He's gone too far. He said this, he said that. Actually, that's not the modern way, is it? That's not the modern politics.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Ben Rhodes share about American identity?
That's the kind of positive side of it. But he's also got quite a background, all sorts of misogynist stuff online. So it's a risk. It was always going to be a risk.
Well, I'm not saying that's the ideal, but I think that, again, people want someone who doesn't present like other politicians. They want the Democratic Party to show that it gets, that people believe it became out of touch, it became too complacent, it became too committed to kind of defending established ways of doing things at a time when people don't like that.
It certainly became resistant to generational change. So when I look to 2028, I think...
First of all, I feel adamantly that it needs to be a younger person, that it needs to be someone who can communicate in the kind of spaces that we're talking about, and that it needs to be someone who doesn't in any way suggest that they wanna kind of go back to some way of doing things before Trump, but is rather telling a story about How we can do things differently.
You see, you know, and again, I'm not picking any one person, but to take one example, John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia.
Yeah, who we've also talked a bit about in America.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there's more and more talk about him running for president because, you know, he's telling a different story. He's connecting dots for people. He's, you know, Democrats have had all these, you know, debates about democracy. do we talk about democracy or do we talk about kitchen table issues? Well, Ossoff blows apart that dichotomy. He's like, this is the same thing.
If you have an oligarchy and a corrupt system that only serves a few people, well, that's the reason why you can't afford your healthcare. He tells one story about what's happening in the country that explains both why things aren't getting better on things like cost of living, but also makes you believe that we can make them better if we make certain changes to how government itself works.
It's not showing up with a 10-point policy plan. And if you look at, you know, an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I think we'd have an uphill battle to be president.
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Chapter 4: How does history inform our current political landscape?
Obama didn't show up and say, you're a racist, and you must come out with your hands up and acknowledge it, and acknowledge white supremacy, and then maybe we can make progress. He would say... This country is so great that we've been able to make progress before. And here's the whole history of progress throughout America. And join us in this next chapter. And he was a patriotic appeal.
And look, I've been very critical of America. You followed my commentary, particularly on foreign policy. But if you want to bring people along... You have to open a door for them to come in.
It's such an important point, that, isn't it? Obama gave the impression, I don't know how real it was, but he gave the impression that he really liked ordinary Americans. So even when he gave that speech, that it was greatly lambasted, wasn't it, where he talked about people in small towns hankering after their guns and people seized on that and said, oh, he doesn't like the small guns.
Actually, he was able to get past that, wasn't he? Because it did seem as if he liked his fellow Americans. And the risk, and we talk about it quite a lot on the pod now, the risk among some modern Democrats is that they don't really seem to like people who live in West Virginia or South Dakota or somewhere else.
Yeah, I mean, Obama, it was actually really interesting for this book. I went back and wrote about the race speech he gave in 2008. This is when there were clips of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. They went viral online.
No, no, no. Not God bless America. God damn America. That's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn. The United States government has failed the vast majority of our citizens of African descent.
You know, attacking America, saying it's a racist country. And he did a couple of things in there that were really interesting to relive now. The first is he defended Reverend Wright by essentially saying, look, he's a complicated guy. He's done some wonderful things and he said some terrible things.
As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthens my faith. officiated my wedding and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.
And he talked about his white grandmother who raised him. Same thing. This woman who loved me, but she said things that make me cringe.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can Democrats learn from the Obama administration?
None of us is perfect. We all have people in our family we disagree with about things. We don't have to just see the worst in people. We can see what we love in people and we can see what makes us share an identity in this country. But then he talked about black structural inequality in the United States.
But then he talked about the white working class and he said, these are people who aren't particularly privileged by their race.
Most working and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they've been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor.
They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game in which your dreams come at my expense.
And he was able, again, to your point about what the left getting into these traps, to say, like, actually, instead of kind of condemning these people, I want to, they're us too. I want to put myself in their shoes and see how things look from their perspective.
And I may not even agree with all their views, but we're never going to build a multiracial coalition if we don't take their concerns seriously.
So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear an African American is getting an advantage and landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudice, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. but they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.
And I think because he had a genuine, he did have a genuine affection. I mean, he, you know, you covered that campaign. The reason he could give a speech like that wasn't just because of his family.
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Chapter 6: How do humor and authenticity affect political engagement?
And if you're not willing to kind of maybe even step in it or offend people from time to time, go through the controversy, then they just will see you as a typical politician. And the message we keep getting from American voters is they don't want a typical politician.
And that's the thing that comes out from your book. I'm proud to be on the back cover of it because it's not a political book. It's not the Ben Rhodes view of the world. It's a view of America from a set of speeches and your take on those speeches. And I wanted to ask you why you selected the ones you did because I knew the Obama speech very well.
And there's a Trump one there as well, which you remember because it's more recent. But actually, most of the others I'd never really come across at all. It wasn't, in a sense, the obvious ones. I think of the Ronald Reagan speech. The one you chose was a particular one.
Yeah, well, because it's not an anthology. It's not meant to be the greatest speeches. It's meant to tell the story of not just American history, but essentially the arguments Americans have been having about what this country is and what it means to be American from the founding. Benjamin Franklin is the first one. But I wanted different perspectives.
You know, we're going to have abolitionist voices. We're going to have famous people like Abraham Lincoln and people you've never heard of, like the suffragette Anna Dickinson. and showing the course of this argument about what the country is. So the Reagan speech I chose is the one in which he coined the phrase evil empire to talk about the Soviet Union. And I suppose that's the point.
It's a wider speech. So this is what I found so fascinating about Justin is it's not his greatest. You know, I love the D-Day one about the boys of Ponderhook, for instance, or the Challenger disaster. But what's so fascinating to me about that is that it's famous for him calling the Soviet Union evil empire.
to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding. and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
But most of the speech is not about foreign policy at all. It's a speech to Christian Evangelicals, the National Association of Christian Evangelicals. And he talks a lot about the centrality of Christian faith to American identity.
And he kind of goes through what would be seen as kind of a pretty right-wing social agenda, like banning abortion and prayer in school, but in a much folksier, genial way than we would hear today. But he's talking about how America is a nation founded in Christian faith, and that's one of the things that makes us exceptional as Americans.
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Chapter 7: What challenges do Democrats face in the 2028 election?
And so Pat Buchanan comes along in 1992, right after the end of the Cold War.
We should explain why he comes a long way. So he's in the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the great sort of country club place. And suddenly Pat Buchanan is saying what to them?
Pat Buchanan, who's been a political operative and a political commentator, comes along and he challenges George H.W. Bush in 1992 for the presidential nomination. And his basic argument is this. You know, we beat the Soviet Union, but this globalization that we've created, in part, you know, our Cold War strategy, has essentially hurt the white working class.
So today we call for a new patriotism, where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first. For a new nationalism, wherein every negotiation, be it arms control or trade, the American side seeks advantage and victory for the United States.
And the people of this country need to recapture our capital city of Washington from lobbyists and registered agents of foreign powers who are hired to look out for everybody and everything except the national interest of the United States. It is time.
So here's Pat Buchanan's platform. America first. Literally, that was a slogan for his campaign. Isolationism, like we shouldn't bear all these burdens abroad. We should cancel these free trade agreements that are emptying out, hollowing out working class communities in this country. We should build a wall on the southern border to keep immigrants out.
We need to fight culture wars in this country to kind of restore Christianity as like the foundation of American society. This is all Trump, like, you know, almost 20 years before Trump. And he's only able to do that because the Soviet enemy's gone. The thing that kind of held together these disparate groups is gone. And Buchanan's saying, no, this should be the core of the Republican Party.
When we say we will put America first, we mean also that our Judeo-Christian values are going to be preserved. And our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations and not dumped onto some landfill called multiculturalism.
And actually, you know, again, it was interesting to relive. I have speeches by FDR and I go through the Kennedy years in this, you know, FDR to John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. Yes, there are swings, but they're telling the same story at core. Like Reagan's is more conservative and more Christian. Kennedy's is more progressive and open to social change and about the future.
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Chapter 8: How might the future of American politics evolve?
They're not bringing in ballistic missiles and support for proxy groups, which they wanted. That's off the table now. So essentially, they're trying to get to a point where there's some restrictions on the nuclear program and some inspections, and they ship the stockpile out. Those were all the things that were in our deal.
But what they're lacking is the kind of force of international support and law. Our deal was with the permanent five members of the Security Council, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany and the EU went on the deal too. The International Atomic Agency doing all these intrusive inspections.
This is like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Pakistan with the Qataris and a few other countries like making up texts as they go. I don't trust... the durability of anything that comes out of this. The Iranians have seen America pull out of a deal. I don't think that they believe that they're signing up to anything. We had a UN Security Council set of resolutions behind this deal.
Americans don't like multilaterals until they need it. You need it to kind of codify and build support for these things. But I think, Justin, the most likely outcome too is that they never get to a nuclear deal. That frankly, they won't end the war. The Iranians need money. So they're going to get a bunch of money from the sanctions relief that's on the front end.
They're allowed to sell oil on the front end without making any nuclear concessions. The Iranians also know that they can probably toll the Strait of Hormuz in some way, you know, some insurance rate that they're going to charge certain countries. So they're getting money. And America just wants that straight open. They feel burned. I think Trump realizes this is a mistake.
If I'm Iran, like, why am I making a bunch of nuclear concessions in 60 days? You know, I hope they do. But even if they do, I think that's kind of status quo ante for two years.
Does it tell a wider story, though, as well, just finally, about... I was going to say about American power, but actually maybe about the power of any large country and previously militarily significant country. You think of Russia and Ukraine. You think of China when it looks at Taiwan now.
The kind of technicalities of warfare have changed so much that exerting power for any future American president is going to be a really difficult thing to do.
I think that that's a really important point. And there are two components of that I think are worth pulling out. Like one is just on the military aspect alone. Like we had aircraft carrier strike groups in the region. We had all of this military hardware, the most brought to bear to the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq.
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