Ben Rhodes and Alex Wagner: All We Say
Ben Rhodes and Alex Wagner trace American political identity through fifteen pivotal speeches — on the rhetoric, power, and struggle to define a nation.
Why we picked this
Rhodes spent years drafting speeches inside the Obama White House — his read on what political language does and doesn't do to a country carries weight that most political commentary lacks.
Ben Rhodes’s All We Say: The Battle for American Identity — A History in 15 Speeches argues that the contest over American identity has always been fought in language — in the specific words speakers chose, the audiences they addressed, and the futures they tried to call into being. As Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor and chief speechwriter, Rhodes sat inside that process for eight years.
Alex Wagner — journalist, podcaster, and one of the sharper interlocutors currently working in political media — brings a complementary angle: someone who has covered the consequences of that language from outside the room. Together they’ll move through the arc of American political rhetoric and what it reveals about where the country has been and what it’s still arguing about.
A conversation about history as it’s made in the moment of address — worth attending for anyone who thinks carefully about how democracies narrate themselves.