How can Democrats persuade more voters to like them? (with Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former senior advisor)

21:19Ben Rhodes: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 it was also because he spent a year just traveling around iowa which is an all white state pretty much just meeting with people in their living rooms and knocking on their doors and and enjoying being with them and and and kind of modeling that hey actually like we have a shared identity in this country whether we're black or white our concerns are pretty similar um and right now i think we've been in a period where it has suited trump to have people only see the things that they hate in one another you know polarization benefits Trump.

22:03Ben Rhodes:And obviously social media makes polarization easier. Here's a challenge though. I read that speech. So that speech is one of the speeches you have in your book. And it is when you read it again, and particularly the line about his grandmother who loved him, but would say to him things about how she was frightened of black men and walked on the other side of the street and things like that, that he says in the speech made me cringe. That's right. But that's all part of us. When I read that, reread it in your book, I thought, you know, I'm not sure there are many democratic politicians now who get away with saying these kinds of things, black or white, actually, because we've become, you say it's a speech against cancel culture.

22:50Well, kind of the cancel culture is one. There's a lot about Obama reading those speeches where you think, And, you know, there's an intake of breath. You think, goodness, is he really saying that? I can't imagine a Democrat saying that now, being allowed to.

23:03Ben Rhodes:Well, I'd say two things. I mean, the first thing, it's interesting because he said that. This is a woman that he loved as much as anybody in the world who had these fears. When he later says, hey, white working class people, like his grandmother, don't like to hear their concerns about crime be dismissed as racism. He's entered that doorway through a personal place, right? Like I was raised by a white working class woman. I think today, again, I think people are so afraid of making a mistake or, you know, you have to be willing, actually, I think in this day and age, you know, Obama used to have to say something to us, too.

23:39Ben Rhodes:You have to show that there are things you're willing to lose over in order to win. I think that you probably have to go through some pretty brutal controversies and show that you're willing to kind of stand by something that you said that may be uncomfortable. because if you're not, I think Kamala Harris, you know, fell into this very careful politician and maybe didn't make a huge mistake, but because she was afraid of making a mistake, she also didn't really say anything that connected that much with people either. So I think you have to be willing to put yourself out there, be personal, be authentic, because I think people today, they don't just want to know, you know, what you want to do.

24:20Ben Rhodes:They want to know, like, why do you want to do it? Like what in your background compels you to want to run for this office? Democrats like to skip ahead to the 10 point plan or, you know, this agenda or that agenda. Actually, I think Americans are more interested in, okay, why do you want to do these things? Why should I trust that you'll do these things, that you understand what I'm going through? 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 that the message we keep getting from American voters is they don't want a typical politician.

24:56And that's the thing that comes out from your book. I'm proud to be on the back cover of it because it's it's not a political book. It's not the Ben Rhodes view of the world. It's it's a view of America from a set of speeches and your take on those speeches. And I want 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 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 you had the Ronald Reagan speech.

25:26The one you chose was a particular one.

25:28Ben Rhodes: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.

26:02Ben Rhodes: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 an 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.

26:36Ben Rhodes: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. You know, from his perspective, I probably wouldn't share his perspective entirely on this.

27:07Ben Rhodes:But then when he gets to the Soviet Union, the contrast he's drawing is not one between capitalism and communism. It's that we are people that believe in God and they're people who believe in the rule of man. And the reason they're an evil empire is because they don't believe in anything higher than the rule of the state. During my first press conference as president, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.

27:44I think I should point out I was only quoting Lenin, their guiding spirit, who said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas, that's their name for religion, or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war, and everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.

28:17Ben Rhodes:And actually, he works in, in a quite clever way, kind of secular bureaucrats in America, too. You know, there's, I don't think Reagan would have liked Doge, but it kind of foreshadows in some way this kind of Republican, you know, commonwealth's fear of the administrative state. And so what you're seeing is a kind of coherent effort by Reagan to use words to build this coalition that puts a tent over Christian evangelicals, small government conservatives who don't trust the state, and national security hawks who don't like the Soviet Union. That's the coalition that dominated American politics for most of my life.

28:53Ben Rhodes:Yeah. Yeah. Talking about Reagan raises something that I've seen raise, I'm not quite sure the extent to which I think this may or may not be true. But it's a fascinating idea that one of the reasons why American politics and in a sense society has broken down to the extent that it has in recent years is that post-Cold War, there wasn't anything outside America to fight against. Do you run along with this thesis? Do you think it's true? 100%. Yeah. And I felt this very strongly in doing the Reagan speech because Reagan constructs this coalition that is very focused on the outward enemy of the Soviet Union, right?

29:31Ben Rhodes:And that can, again, unite the small government people who hate communism, the Christian evangelicals who want a God-based political system, and then these hawks who hate the Soviet Union. And well, once the external enemy is gone, all this kind of energy that has been built up kind of turns inward. Suddenly the enemy is kind of within. If you remember the Clinton years, like there's a kind of relentless and vicious political combat about like pretty small things. And I think part of it was like the redirection of that energy. One of the characters in my book, even though I didn't do a full speech by him, is Pat Buchanan.

30:08Yeah.

30:08Ben Rhodes:And so Pat Buchanan comes along in 1992, right after the end of the Cold War. and we should we should explain why he comes along where 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 hw bush in 1992 for the presidential nomination and his basic argument is 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.

30:45So today we call for a new patriotism, where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first. For a new nationalism, where in 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...

31:21Ben Rhodes: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 is gone.

31:58Ben Rhodes:The thing that kind of held together these disparate groups is gone. And Buchanan 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.

32:24And our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations and not dumped onto some landfill called multiculturalism.

32:36Ben Rhodes: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, they're 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. FDR, I think, is the origin of the American superpower. We kind of had an agreed upon story. And I think after the Cold War, we have not agreed on what the story, America needs a story, right? I mean, you guys have, Britain is anchored in a much deeper identity.

33:21Ben Rhodes:You know, there's all this history. Well, America, because we're, we're not a fixed identity, right? We were 13 states, now we're 50. And we were one particular kind of people at the beginning. Well, now look at America today. It looks nothing like it did at the beginning. We have no official religion. The story is kind of what holds the identity together. And I think in the Cold War, we had a very clear common story. And part of the reason we're so disoriented is that since the end of the Cold War, I don't think we've had one. It would be remiss of me not to ask you a bit about bang up to date things.

33:56Yeah. Given your role in the Obama administration, you dealt a lot with Iran. Yeah. Is there the remotest chance, do you think, that at the end of this, that there is a better agreement done by Trump with Iran than the one that Obama eventually did?

34:16Ben Rhodes:I don't think so. First of all, just because whatever agreement is reached, I don't think was worth the cost of this war already in terms of life. Billions of dollars, tens and tens of billions of dollars, shortages around the world, including here. But then second, the agreement that they're negotiating right now, it lacks – it's not just a substance – because the substance of the agreement, if they get to one, which is a question because in their memorandum of understanding, the nuclear issues are punted forward. So Iran is going to get billions and billions of dollars up front just to open the Strait of Hormuz, which is a new development.

34:57Ben Rhodes:Even if they get to nuclear restrictions, they're not eliminating that program. They've acknowledged that. 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 are 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 in on the deal to the International Atomic Agency doing all these intrusive inspections.

35:35Ben Rhodes:This is like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Pakistan with the Qataris and a few other countries like making up Texas. They go. I don't trust the durability of anything that comes out of this. You know, the Iranians have seen America pull out of a deal. I don't think that they believe that they're signing up to anything that is, you know, we had a UN Security Council set of resolutions behind this deal. You know, 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.

36:10Ben Rhodes:That frankly, they want to 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?

36:39Ben Rhodes: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.

37:20Ben Rhodes: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. And they shut down in the Strait of moves with speedboats, mines, and Shehzad drones. Shehzad drones mattered more than aircraft carriers to the outcome of the war, full stop. Something that you can make for tens of thousands of dollars in kind of a garage, right? And so the idea that we can project power because we have these massive systems, well, we just, I think, lost a war to people firing Shehzad drones and some ballistic missiles and recognizing that they could weaponize the global economy through the straight.

38:02Ben Rhodes:I think the second thing that Trump is massively underappreciated, obviously, is that America's power in the world. I mean, you're always, when you're a hegemon, you're always a bit like the Wizard of Oz. You're behind the curtain and making people feel like you're much more powerful than you are. The actual power came from the alignment with a whole set of countries and institutions that we built. Because actually, if you look at the record of our wars, we tend not to win them, right? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, which I was there for, freely acknowledged. Let's put that one on the list. Back to Vietnam.

38:35Ben Rhodes:Our actual strength has been that we had this block of countries that was largely aligned with us in Europe and Asia and often in other parts of the world, that we had these institutions that we set up that we could channel our power through. Well, Trump is not only disrupted, he's dismantling all of that. Threatening to invade Greenland undermined his ability to project power on Iran, because who's going to want to go along with you to open up the Strait of Hormuz when you're like threatening to invade a European sovereign territory. And so, I mean, I don't think we can rebuild that. I think we have to build something new.

39:08Ben Rhodes:But I think the lesson is just tariffing people and bombing people. Maybe you'll get some very short term benefit. But the long term cost is that this entire system that allowed America to be the Wizard of Oz. And frankly, it's going to put at risk even things like the dollar as a reserve currency. Yeah. So given that, how optimistic are you? I mean, in a sense, it's a trite question, but it's a question that is raised by the book because it's a book of an incredible achievement, really, isn't it? And it's a story, as you say, America needs a story, and it is a story and it's a story that people admire and respect around the world.

39:53Has the story ended?

39:55Ben Rhodes:No. And that's what gives me hope. I mean, I'm pretty dark about the present. That's one of the reasons I went in the past. And I think we're in for a pretty bumpy ride the next two and a half years with Trump. I think we're not at the end of his efforts to assert himself at home and abroad. But, you know, when you go back into the past, I mean, Churchill's famous quote about America doing the right thing after it's done everything else. I'm paraphrasing. It's kind of true in our history. You know, if you look at the arc of American history, we go through some very disruptive times. And in part because of our ability to kind of tell a different story, like we have to refresh what this whole project is about.

40:34Ben Rhodes:We tend to come out of those darker times in a better and more interesting place. I mean, I think it's relevant to Brits too. You've been kind of casting about for a national identity since Brexit, right? And you can get trapped in the present. Like, this is crazy. We're never going to get out of this. Like, what happened? When you kind of go back and look at the past, you see, okay, well, here's how people work through this. And here's how people were dealing in this context, in this book, like with slavery and with the Gilded Age and rampant inequality and corruption and with segregation and all these ills.

41:12Ben Rhodes:And they're never permanent. And so I think we have to sometimes get out of the present, learn from the better aspects of our past, and then kind of look beyond. One of the things that can be very empowering, I've been trying to tell Americans this in traveling around the last month, allow yourself to imagine beyond this. We're so trapped in Trump's reality that we have a hard time thinking beyond tomorrow, never mind the next election. Like, where would you actually like to go? A lot of effort is being made to make you think that this can never change. The inequality is here to stay, that you'll never regulate artificial intelligence.

41:49Ben Rhodes:Well, no, it's a democracy and Americans have done harder things than that. But I think we have to, again, look beyond like kind of to the horizon here. Trump wants us just looking at it like he's literally looking into his reflecting pool. You know, we just we need to look past that. Glenn Rose, that's a brilliant moment of which to end. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thanks.

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