On the Monday, June 1, 2026 episode of The Excerpt podcast, author Ben Rhodes—former national security advisor and speechwriter to President Barack Obama—frames America’s identity debate as a long-running fight over who gets to define “American,” from Benjamin
For the third decade of the podcast’s life, the questions Ben Rhodes brings into the studio sound almost impossible to retire: What does it mean to be an American? And who gets to decide?
On the Monday. June 1. 2026 episode of The Excerpt. Rhodes—author of “All We Say: The Battle for American Identity” and a former national security advisor and speechwriter to President Barack Obama—returns to those questions as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. The prologue. he says. is built around the same core tension that has run through the country’s major arguments for centuries: whether America is a closed. exclusionary national story or a more inclusive. creed-based multiracial democracy.
Rhodes doesn’t treat the debate as a historical relic. He treats it as an argument still being fought in real time—through speeches, through the stories people tell about the founding, and through the technologies that now slice those stories into viral pieces.
In choosing what ends up in the book. Rhodes says he wasn’t chasing the “15 greatest or most well-known speeches.” Instead. he picked 15 speeches and speakers to show “different parts of this struggle over American identity that you identified. ” spanning a wide spectrum of views rather than two neat camps.
He describes one recurring thread as “inherited exceptionalism,” tied to a traditional nationalism rooted in Western traditions and supremacy—an America imagined as essentially a “white Christian nation,” where others exist but are subordinated to the predominant identity.
The counter-thread is a more progressive America trying to live up to the creed in the Declaration of Independence about equality—championing abolition. suffrage. and civil rights. Rhodes says the speakers he chose reflect different windows into those competing visions and the ways they intermingle rather than simply divide.
Dolores Huerta is one example he points to: in her speech, Rhodes highlights Huerta speaking up not just for farm workers but for Latinos in the country, saying, “We are here to embody our needs for you. Look at us. We are American.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Rhodes points to Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who in his 1861 speech frames white supremacy as the cornerstone of the nation the Confederacy was trying to build.
Rhodes’ timeline begins with Benjamin Franklin’s closing argument at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. and he calls Franklin the speech that “unlocked the whole book.” Franklin. the oldest member of the convention by far. was in his 80s and was reportedly the most famous American in the world at that time. He was speaking to an assembly of mainly younger men in their 30s and 40s.
Rhodes says Franklin “notably” did not speak about the Constitution itself in that address; the speech was about compromise. Franklin’s argument. as Rhodes quotes it. was that “Out of such an assembly of men. a perfect product for any one of us cannot be expected.” The delegates. Franklin argued. had to accept “the things that we don’t like” while recognizing the Constitution as “the best that we can do.”.
Rhodes connects that compromise to the Union’s survival and to everything that followed, while also underscoring the scale of what was compromised at the time: slavery, the nature of citizenship, and how immigration would work.
He also ties Franklin’s later actions to the idea of building a system and fighting inside it. Rhodes says one of Franklin’s first public acts after signing the Constitution was to petition Congress to abolish slavery, a move Rhodes describes as demonstrating “this is how it should work.”
The debate over American identity, Rhodes says, keeps coming back to the same fault line created by those early bargains—arguments that, he believes, can already be seen in the 1700s, even if they show up in new forms.
When Rhodes turns to American exceptionalism, he says there are competing interpretations that help explain why the argument keeps returning.
One interpretation is a view that America is exceptional from the start: “a chosen people in a promised land. ” with something inherently right about the country—summed up in John Winthrop’s “city on a hill.” Rhodes says this view also shows up in originalism. where “the idea that what was in the Constitution is kind of almost in stone tablets” leads people to divine the founding fathers’ intentions and treat them as binding today. Rhodes links this style of rhetoric to Ronald Reagan. and to Donald Trump. saying Trump argues that whatever is happening now is right because “if we’re doing it. it’s right.”.
Rhodes’ “more interesting” version of exceptionalism, though, is different. He describes it as the idea that America becomes exceptional through the struggle to live up to what it claims to be.
He points to Lincoln’s second inaugural. where. Rhodes says. Lincoln wrestles with the meaning of the Civil War and concludes the meaning cannot simply be preserving the Union. Rhodes quotes Lincoln’s line about the “250 years of unrequited toil” and the idea that paying for slavery’s “sins” must be answered through sacrifice—arguing that emancipation’s moral logic is part of becoming the multiracial democracy America is supposed to be.
Rhodes then brings in Frederick Douglass, framing the relationship between the two as especially revealing: Rhodes says Lincoln was becoming more radical while Douglass was becoming more pragmatic.
In Rhodes’ account. Douglass’s speech defending Chinese immigration—delivered at the height of Reconstruction and described as “wildly unpopular” at the time—turns on the idea of equality as universal rather than confined to Black and white categories. Rhodes says Douglass made the case that if Black equality is the goal. then Chinese people also must be defended because equality is universal: “It’s not just Black and white. it’s everybody.”.
Rhodes says this theme runs forward through the tradition of King and Huerta and even into Barack Obama: exceptionalism that is “not given” but “has to be earned.”
That theme sharpens in the section where Rhodes discusses Alexander Stephens’ 1861 speech—one Rhodes says he traveled to personally to understand. He says he “actually traveled to Alexander Stephens’ home in Crawfordville, Georgia,” saying he wanted to “feel the place where this man came from.”
Rhodes rejects the assumption that people in that era knew slavery was wrong and simply pretended otherwise. He says, in Stephens’ world, slavery was embedded in the economy, or people believed it would be phased out later, or they had “justifications” that Rhodes characterizes as not prideful.
Rhodes describes the moment as dramatic: the Confederacy had come into being, the Civil War had not begun yet, and Stephens was helping write the Confederate Constitution while touring Georgia to build support. Rhodes says Stephens gave listeners something to believe in for a difficult time ahead.
According to Rhodes, Stephens defended the Confederate Constitution and insisted the cornerstone was white supremacy, quoting the belief that “The Negro’s place is slavery, is subordination to the white race.”
Rhodes says Stephens went further by casting it as a “progressive discovery. ” comparing white supremacy to scientific truths like the circulation of blood and how planets orbit the sun. Rhodes says Stephens told the audience that within the Confederacy. no matter who someone was. if they were white they would have “equal rights” and be “above Black people.” Stephens also predicted that other nations would “come to replicate what we’ve done.”.
Rhodes frames the speech as horrifying but instructive in a specific way: that words can make people talk themselves into believing in the “absolutely profoundly wrong causes.”
He then connects the postwar effort to repurpose Civil War history to the way Stephens’ messaging outlived itself. Rhodes says that after the war. the Civil War was often repackaged as “state’s rights” and the “economic model of the South. ” which then became “kind of the textbook version of the Civil War for a very long time.”.
For Rhodes, speeches matter because they don’t disappear once delivered. He says speeches are “in the present tense,” and that “You can rewrite history after the fact, but you can’t change the words that Alexander Stephens said.”
He closes that section by saying white supremacy in America is sometimes less “boldly and brazenly” than Stephens’ version. but it still runs as a thread at times. In the 21st century. Rhodes says. there is a “reemergence of a more overt white nationalism. ” with far-right politics being asserted more openly and Stephens-style figures being treated as heroes.
Rhodes also points to enforcement policy. He says “ICE putting people in camps” is happening now. “overwhelmingly Black and brown. ” and he acknowledges that this doesn’t mean every supporter of those policies agrees with Stephens directly. Still. he argues there is “a kind of DNA in this country” that has not been fully dealt with—because some of the reasons behind segregation for a hundred years and behind ICE today remain embedded.
Through the conversation, Rhodes repeatedly returns to the way communication itself changes the fight over identity. He describes a shift in rhetoric over 250 years, focusing on the medium that carries the words.
When he discussed Franklin’s era, Rhodes said only people standing in the room could hear speeches, but newspapers reprinted them; the result was that speeches were carefully worded arguments, “almost essays that were read aloud.”
In the 19th century, Rhodes said, speeches became performance too, helped by speaker circuits where people traveled the country and delivered the same speech hundreds of times—like the reform-minded tours associated with figures he includes in the book.
Radio brought a different style, Rhodes says, and he points to Franklin Roosevelt as an example of plain-spoken explanation. Then television elevated charismatic figures and made spectacle central, with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, as examples.
Now, Rhodes says, the internet has changed everything again. He argues that most people don’t consume entire speeches; they consume clips designed—“literally by algorithms”—to trigger anger at the other side or reinforce existing beliefs. Rhodes says Donald Trump has been especially effective in this environment because he can deliver a rally speech for an hour. but only a small fraction of audiences watch the full performance as videos and clips are cut and spread across the internet.
Rhodes says Democrats have failed to understand that dynamic. He says they have either tried to mimic Trump or they “skip the speech and cut right to the social media video.” What’s been lost, Rhodes says, is the capacity to listen to and work through a complete argument.
He also predicts a turnaround: he says speeches are at a low point in their role in American politics. but that the venue “will make a comeback.” He links that to the disorientation people feel when they don’t have a place to work out “who we are and where we’re going. ” and he argues social media posts and op-eds cannot replicate the full story people can tell in front of a group.
Near the end, Rhodes shifts from warning to possibility. He agrees that technology can be used to expand exposure to different ideas. while refusing to adopt a stance against new tools. He draws a parallel to earlier disruptions. including television—when people once feared it would end the ability to talk to one another and then. he says. people learned how to use it.
Rhodes’ prescription is practical and tied directly to his central metaphor. He compares the core story to “the trunk of the tree. ” while social media posts. interviews. and viral clips flow from it. He says people have grown too focused on how to generate likes rather than on knowing what they’re saying.
What he wants. he says. is a return to basics: “What do I uniquely have to say?” and “Why did I want to say it?” Rhodes argues that this is where authenticity comes from. and he says each chapter in his book was built around the life of the person and the movement that drew them—because. in his view. speeches don’t come out of nowhere.
When Dana Taylor closes the conversation, Rhodes thanks the host and the program ends with the book already on shelves. The final note is simple but heavy: in a country still approaching its 250th anniversary. the oldest questions remain—about identity. about authority. and about who gets to speak in a way that lasts.
Ben Rhodes All We Say American identity The Excerpt Dana Taylor Benjamin Franklin Alexander Stephens Frederick Douglass Martin Luther King Jr Dolores Huerta ICE speeches technology American exceptionalism 250th anniversary