The fight over America’s national story | The Gray Area

We will always be refining and improving, I hope, our idea of what it means to be American. And that's healthy. You know, that's the process of civic maturation. That's the process of debating our ideals. What's problematic, I think, is when you have two stories that are really opposed and incompatible, and those stories are kind of fighting it out again and again. And that, I think, is what you see in American history. And people fight over which of those is the real America. I'm Jonqulyn Hill, host of Explain It To Me, and I'm filling in for Sean. Today, I'll be talking with Kermit Roosevelt III. He's a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the book, The Nation That Never Was, Reconstructing America's Story. The stories we tell ourselves shape the way we live. They tell us who we are. So what's our collective story as a country? I think that's a really important question to ask ourselves. There's this big question mark over who we are as a country, if we even have a single identity, especially as we inch closer to the 250th anniversary of America's founding. In my conversation with Kermit, we talk about the narrative we've told ourselves through the years, alternative ways of thinking of our identity, and whether a national identity is something we even really need in the first place. Kermit Roosevelt, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. You published your book, The Nation That Never Was, back in 2022. I want to go back there. What prompted you to write it? Well, I'd been teaching constitutional law for 20 years at that point, and just going through the same cases and thinking about the Supreme Court and American values, I had started to see some things, and I'd started to notice some sort of conflict between the way that we normally tell the story and the story that was emerging to me through conversations with my students and through my study of the materials. And it started to seem to me that there was something really false in the story that we were telling. And that's interesting to me, you know, from an academic perspective, sort of, what's not true about what we're saying? And then also from a narrative perspective, sort of, why do we tell the story that we do? And is there some alternative? So I started thinking about all these things, and it was a different time. You know, we were going through COVID, it was Black Lives Matter. It was a time when I thought America was open to a lot of new ideas, and maybe we were ready to face some truths that we hadn't faced before and sort of rethink our national identity. So it seemed like a really promising time for the story. Now things took a turn after that. I think we're not in as good a place as we were, but I still think that it is very important to try to understand who we are as a people and where we come from and where our ideals really come from. This year, there are going to be so many celebrations marking America's 250th birthday. But you argue in your book that America has two foundings. What are they? Go ahead and lay that out for us. Well, so we've got the first founding, of course, which is 1776. Everyone knows about this. We've got the Declaration of Independence. And yeah, right, that creates a nation, sort of. It creates 13 independent states. And then they form a confederation with the Articles of Confederation, and then they form a more perfect union with the Constitution that's written in 1787. But America is still, at that point, really a collection of states. One of the ways you can see this is the Constitution. When it talks about the United States, it says they. It uses United States as a plural. It's a collection of states. It's not a single nation. And it's definitely not a single nation dedicated to particular values, because one of the big ideas in the 1787 Constitution is the states are going to make their own choices about a lot of things. So there is sort of a national value of unity, maybe. But there isn't a national value of equality. There isn't a national value of liberty. There isn't a national value of anti-slavery, certainly, because all of the states are slave states in 1776. That America is really not our America. It's not a single nation. It's not anti-slavery. It's not dedicated to the values that we believe in now. All of that comes about through the Civil War and Reconstruction. And it's really important, I think, to understand how dramatic a break Reconstruction is. Because that gets us the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the 14th Amendment creating birthright citizenship, giving people equality rights and some liberty rights that protect them from state governments and not just the national government. And the 15th Amendment, which is our first pro-democracy constitutional provision, prohibiting race discrimination with respect to the right to vote. The southern states have agreed that slavery is over, at least in name. But their vision for going forward is we're still going to be a white supremacist society. We're still going to have a clearly defined racial hierarchy. And the Reconstruction Congress, which is a radical Congress because there are no southern senators or representatives, so this is a Congress representing really just the North. The Reconstruction Congress says, that's not what we're going to do, right? We have a different vision of America. And they are the body that really gives us the vision of America as a nation, single nation where the national government is really supreme, and dedicated to certain values, an anti-slavery nation, a pro-equality nation. And they put that in the 14th Amendment, and they send that out to the states, and the states reject it. So 10 of the former Confederate states reject it, Delaware rejects it, Maryland rejects it. So, you know, the America of the founding really is faced with this question, are we going to take a new path? Are we going to accept black people as full and equal citizens? Because that's what the 14th Amendment does. And the America of the founding really says no. And the Reconstruction Congress then, as I said, wipes out the governments in 10 of those former Confederate states. They put the South under military control. And then they basically make new states. So they tell the people of the states to form new governments, to hold constitutional conventions and write constitutions. And they say the formerly enslaved can participate in these, and the former Confederates can't. So they've created a new political community for these states. They create new legislatures. It's those legislatures that ratify the 14th Amendment, right? It's not the states that succeeded, it's the new states that Congress made. So both in its substance, its values, and in its process, Reconstruction is every bit as much a dramatic break, a revolution, as the founding. And it's this second founding that gives us our real American values and our sense of who we are now. Okay, so we have these two different foundings of America, in America simultaneously. Who are the descendants of these two versions? There's the 1776 version and this Reconstruction version. Right now, who is buying into which version of this story? This is, I think, a really important thing to understand, because Americans, you know, we like to tell one story. We like to think we've got a single narrative, and there's one group of people who are the true Americans, who reflect true American values. And what I'm saying is, if you look back, you see these two different ideologies, basically. And the ideology of the founding is what I call exclusive individualism. So the idea there is, one, we're a political community that excludes some people, right? We're sort of defined by that. And you know, in the Declaration of Independence, you can look at what it says about outsiders. It talks about, you know, Native Americans and calls them merciless savages who are out to kill the colonists. It talks about Hessian mercenaries that King George is transporting across the seas, again, to kill the colonists. And it talks about the people that the Americans are enslaving. And again, it says King George is inciting them to rise up against us and kill us. So basically, everyone who's not one of us is trying to kill us. And then the Supreme Court later in 1857 is, in the Dred Scott decision, going to say there's a racial line around the American political community. And as a matter of law, black people descended from slaves can never be U.S. citizens. So there's a very clear us-them line that's really hard to cross. And then in terms of the individualism, the founding focus is sort of on liberty and individual rights. And there's a real skepticism about the idea that you can ask people to bear burdens for the good of the community, that you can sort of take from people who have a lot and give to people who have little, that you can lift up the disadvantaged in society by putting burdens on other people. So that's the ideology of the founding. Now Reconstruction comes along, and it says a lot of things that are directly in conflict with this. So birthright citizenship, that means the states can't decide who their citizens are. If you're born in the United States, you're one of us, regardless of what the states want. And of course, regardless of what the Supreme Court said in Dred Scott, where they were trying to create this racial boundary, the whole point of birthright citizenship is we will not have a class of perpetual, hereditary outsiders. You can't have this second-class group living amongst us who aren't citizens. And then in terms of individualism, Reconstruction has a focus on equality, and it tries to achieve equality in large part through redistribution. So the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, the 14th Amendment says there shall be no claims based on emancipation, and that seems sort of obviously right to us now, like of course we're not going to allow claims based on emancipation. But this was a massive source of wealth for white Southerners, for slave owners. And what Reconstruction is saying is, in the name of equality, we're going to deprive you of all of that. And we're going to create a more equal society through redistribution, basically. And then Congress goes on and tries to do that more during Reconstruction with the Freedmen's Bureau Act and so on, and they get into a big fight with Andrew Johnson about it. Reconstruction is trying to promote equality basically by asking people to accept burdens to lift up the disadvantaged. I think it's really interesting because, you know, you have sort of these two mindsets when it comes to what America is, when it comes to the story of its founding. But I think a lot of people who maybe believe in that second story are very invested in the 1776 story and don't necessarily see that as a conflict. That's the thing. The way that we tell the story now is we take the values of Reconstruction, so nationhood, the nation is more important than the states, we're a single nation, and equality and anti-slavery. And we say, those are the American values, and we committed to them in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence. But if you do the historical work, it turns out that's really pretty clearly not true. So you can look at the Declaration of Independence and the way that it was understood in 1776, and you'll see people didn't think that the preamble was very important. They didn't think the phrase, all men are created equal, was very important. Wow, that's like the important parts for us now. It is now, yeah. So, you know, we've got a very different understanding of the Declaration of Independence now. We've got, I think you could say, sort of a different document. But the document that we have is not the one that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776. It's not the one that the Continental Congress reviewed, right? Because the draft that Jefferson wrote had a criticism of the international slave trade in there. Congress takes it out, right? They are not writing an anti-slavery document. How does it become an anti-slavery document? It's abolitionists, starting in the late 18th century and then going through up until the Civil War, abolitionists start reinterpreting the Declaration. Because of course, they want to say slavery is contrary to American principles. They can't really say that, right? I mean, what does the Declaration of Independence say about slavery? It says King George is wrong for encouraging slave rebellions. But if you ignore that part, and you go back to the preamble, and you just focus on all men are created equal, you can say, oh look, there's this broad principle that's anti-slavery. And that's what the abolitionists did. And it was persuasive. But even through the Civil War, there's a battle over the meaning and the ownership of the Declaration. And when the southern states secede, they cite the Declaration a lot. Sometimes they quote it in the letters that they send to Congress. They say, we're doing exactly what the patriots of 1776 did. And through the Civil War, for a while, the Confederates celebrate July 4th. And they say, we are the true heirs of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. And I think, as a historical matter, they're pretty much right there. Because they're declaring their independence. They're saying, we consented to the authority of the national government. We signed up for a particular deal. And now we think we're not getting what we signed up for. We think the free states and the national government are going against the terms of the bargain that we struck. And so we're withdrawing our consent, and we're starting over. Which is exactly what the patriots of 1776 said. Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile. When you hear a deal that's too good to be true, you usually wonder, what's the catch? But sometimes the catch is that there is no catch. Like Mint Mobile offering premium wireless for just $15 a month. That's it, no catch, just a good deal, plain and simple. Catches be gone. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right with premium wireless for $15 a month. You can even bring your current phone and your number. It's incredibly easy to get started. You can sign up online and get three months of premium wireless service for just $15 a month. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash gray area. That's mintmobile.com slash gray area. Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com slash gray area. That's it, there's no catch. $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only, speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply, see Mint Mobile for details. You know, so much of this centers around story. Why is having a national story so important in the first place? Well, the point of a national story or the point of a narrative really is to sort of give people a sense of meaning. So you can think about life as a series of unconnected events. And then it's sort of hard to know who you are or what you should do or who your friends are. And the point of history generally and the point of narrative more specifically is it takes those otherwise disconnected events and it puts them together and it gives them meaning and it gives you a sense of like what the themes of your life are and who your heroes should be and who you should look down on, who you should try to be like, who you should try to be different from. And it's especially important for Americans, I think, because our national identity isn't based on race or religion. It's supposed to be based on a set of shared ideals. It's supposed to be based on the Constitution. And in order for that to work as a story that brings Americans together, you want to be able to say something about how these are great ideals and we've fought for them and we've championed them over time. You want to be able to tell American history as sort of a success story. Do we have to have one story though? Like, is it not possible to succeed as a nation and have multiple stories we're telling ourselves about ourselves? Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, it depends on how strong a sense of national identity you want. Yeah, do countries have to have a strong sense of national identity? Well, it depends on what you want your country to do. If you want people to be willing to make sacrifices for the country, to lay their lives on the line. If you want your country to be a big player on the international stage, then I think it does really help to have a citizenry that you can mobilize in the name of national ideals. How important is accuracy to that story? Like, does that story have to be true or is it just any story will do? Well, so it doesn't have to be completely true. And I think it can't be completely true. I think that anytime we do history, we're engaging in a sort of creative, interpretive process. There are always different ways to look at things. So I don't think that there is an objective standard of truth. But I do think that you get problems if your story is just sort of grossly inaccurate because people point it out and they don't believe it. So for example, I was probably guilty of this as a young constitutional law professor, you tell people, Thomas Jefferson, what a great American. He really expressed what it means to be American with that phrase, all men are created equal, and we should try to live up to his example. And then people come back at you and like, yeah, the example of enslaving his own children. Is that what you mean, is a great American? That kind of tension is gonna give you a problem. So I think you can't be that inaccurate. And we are just really inaccurate in what we're saying about the origin of our ideals. But if there is no objective truth when it comes to a story, does that mean we'll just always be arguing about what that story is and who we are? Like, how do you find a solution when that's the case? Well, so yes, we will always be arguing about it. And we will always be refining and improving, I hope, our idea of what it means to be American. And that's healthy. That's the process of civic maturation. That's the process of debating our ideals. What's problematic, I think, is when you have two stories that are really opposed and incompatible, and those stories are kind of fighting it out again and again. And that, I think, is what you see in American history, right? You've got these exclusive individualist values of the founding. You've got these inclusive, egalitarian ideals of reconstruction. And people fight over which of those is the real America. And that's what the Civil War was about. And that's sort of what the backlash to Reconstruction was about. It's about the Civil Rights Movement. It's the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. We just sort of cycle through American history. And if we can see that pattern, I think maybe we can understand better what the choice that's facing us is. You brought up success earlier, and I'd love to get into that a little bit. Why did that OG 1776 story work for so long? I mean, the moment we're in is not the first time the country has been divided. But yet, returning time and time again to 1776 has worked for a really long time. Well, it's worked for a really long time because 1776 is a moment that can unite a lot of people. So, you see this really starting most obviously, I think, with Lincoln, where Lincoln says, the nation is divided. We want to go back to the great days of 1776 when we were united in a common cause. Fighting an external enemy, fighting for independence, that's something that really does bring Americans together. Then Lincoln also tries to say, and back in 1776, we really believed in equality. And now we've sort of fallen away from that. So, 1776 is a moment that lots of Americans can rally around, but maybe not all Americans. Because if you're an American who isn't willing to make a compromise with slavery, then 1776 is not a great moment. Because in 1776, pro-slavery and anti-slavery people come together, and they agree to shelve their differences about slavery in order to fight for independence. Same thing happens with the Constitution in 1787. There are some free states by then. There's a difference of opinion about slavery. And they basically agree to put that to the side, you know, with some pro-slavery elements to the Constitution. But they put that to the side in order to achieve unity. So, 1776, 1787, those are really moments where we do get unity, but we get it by setting aside some really pressing questions about racial justice. How important is success to the American story? You know, like, everyone likes winning, but how important is winning to us as a country? I think that winning is more important than it should be. You know, I think we've got this America can do no wrong, America wins all its wars, America never loses idea, you know, that's kind of unrealistic. And it's one of the things that makes us sort of hypersensitive when that idea of invincibility is punctured. This comes about in part because I think we do tell ourselves a story where America is born with these noble ideals, and then we face challenges along the way. But every time we face a challenge, we overcome it. And I think you shouldn't think of the Civil War as a challenge to the Founder's Constitution that the Founder's Constitution overcame. You should think of the Civil War as a catastrophic failure of the Founder's Constitution, which shows that the whole thing didn't work, right? I mean, what are the goals of the Constitution? A more perfect union, common defense, domestic tranquility. The Civil War is the failure of all of those things, right? It didn't work, right? The union broke apart. And then we made a very different one with different values and a different structure. We got a much stronger national government after the Civil War. I can hear people being like, what do you mean? What do you mean the nation failed and we started over? I don't know. I think it's a spicy take to a degree, no? Well, yeah, but it did. So a lot of people are like, oh, the Founder's Constitution, sure it had these pro-slavery provisions, but it also had within it the seeds of slavery's demise, as you can see, because we got rid of slavery through the Constitution. But we didn't, right? We got rid of slavery because of the Civil War. If the Southern states had not seceded, if you stay with like 13 slave states, when do you have enough free states to get rid of slavery through the Constitution, through an Article 5 amendment? When you have 52 states, right? It never would have happened without the Civil War. The Constitution did not end slavery. The South ended slavery, basically, because they massively overplayed their hand and seceded, and they thought that they could just walk away. But Lincoln wouldn't let them. If they had stayed in the Union and used their political power, it would have been a very long time before anyone was able to end slavery. I think failure is really important on a personal level. It builds character. It makes us who we are. It teaches us that we're a lot tougher than maybe we initially realized we were. Does that sense of failure work for a nation, too? Or is that too much for a country to survive? Well, no, I think that is actually a good concept for a country. And I think about it actually sort of from a parenting perspective. Because if you raise your kids so that they never fail, then there's going to be a moment where you're not there as the parent, and you can't do that for them. And they encounter failure for the first time, and it's devastating to them. And it has terrible consequences for their sense of self. But if you teach them, mistakes are how you learn. And if you prepare the child for the road so that the child can handle the bumps and the stumbles and learn from mistakes and understand that failure can help you learn and make you stronger, then they go on and they can function independently. And I feel that Americans politically, in some ways, we're very immature. We're like a child that has never been allowed to confront the possibility that we were wrong. And so that's why it's so psychologically devastating for us to think something went wrong, something didn't work. But you can instead tell the story of America, and I think it's a much more inspiring story, as a story of people who work within the system, as long as they think that it can deliver the results that they need. And when it becomes clear the system can't do it, then they break the system, and they make something new. And they're like, what we were doing has failed. So that's what the revolutionaries say. We were trying to work it out with King George, but it's not going to work. We just have to admit this isn't working. We have to do something new. I think that's really interesting. I think it's interesting that you bring up parenting, because there's a lot of discussion now about the lack of friction in children's lives. You know, you can Google things, you can use AI. It's very easy to problem solve in a way it wasn't previously. And so there's this idea of, you know, friction maxing, creating sort of tension so that kids can build character and learn those skills. I don't know, is America, should we be in our friction maxing era? Is it the fact that, I don't know, we've kind of been a frictionless country for a while? Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. You know, I think America was just incredibly lucky in a lot of ways. You know, we've got our oceans, so we didn't really have to worry about invasion. We've got incredible natural resources. We had this incredible steady influx of immigrants, giving us talented, hungry, ambitious people. And, you know, we were playing on easy mode for a long time. At least some of us were, right? Others of us were being exploited and oppressed and held down, and some of us were being eradicated. But in terms of our national self-conception, like, a lot of things were really easy for America. And I do think we have to understand that the world is not necessarily just the kind of place where everything goes right for us all the time. You know, you write in the book, the drafters of the Articles set out to create a government that was too weak to become a tyrant. I'm curious when it comes to that particular piece of it, did the Founders succeed or did they fail? Well, so with the Articles of Confederation, they succeeded in creating a government that was too weak to become a tyrant, right? They didn't want another king. And they succeeded. But of course, the Articles themselves were a failure because the nation couldn't hold together, and the states were starting to fight, and the states were ignoring treaty obligations. And so that's why we get the Constitution. And there was a big concern, you know, have we gone too far? Is the national government going to be too strong? And it's very interesting, I think, to look at Federalist 46, which is written by James Madison, trying to reassure people that the states will always be important. The states will always be more important than the national government. And then he goes on to say, and they will defeat it in a war if necessary. So if push comes to shove, the states will fight the national government. The states will win. He's kind of describing the Civil War, actually. But of course, in the real Civil War, the states lost. So I think you could really say, from the Founders' perspective, the bad guys won, right? If you're a Founder, you believe in the states. Congress comes along and eradicates 10 states, says your governments don't exist, puts them under military control. That's exactly what you were afraid of. That's the national government taking things over and becoming a tyrant, like martial law throughout the South, right? They did it. From the perspective of the Founders, I think you could say the Constitution failed in that sense, too, because the tyrant emerged. Now, it turned out that the tyrant was actually on the side of liberty and equality, right? The tyrant was trying to free enslaved people and give people equal rights and create birthright citizenship and all of that. But we did get this really powerful national government, and then it just grew more powerful. And all of that power got consolidated in the executive branch with one person. And we put ourselves in a situation where, if you get the wrong person in charge of the executive branch, if you get a bad president, you're in a lot of trouble because there's not a lot that can stand up to a bad president. Oh, man. And that's so interesting because I think, in a way, people who are on the side of that Reconstruction story kind of get pretty 1776-like when confronted with a president with a lot of power that they really don't agree with. And also, if you're thinking in the 1776 vein, actions like January 6th, they start to make a lot more sense. Yes. Well, if you want to say the people of 1776, they're our heroes, the patriots of 1776, you have to face the fact that they're traitors under British law. Now, we don't care about that because the rebellion succeeded. But these are people who are like, the government is infringing on my rights, I'm going to fight it. And there's a direct line from that to January 6th. So if you are pro-America, if you're pro-the America of the founding, you are pro-revolution. You are pro-this idea that the people can reject the authority of their government. And actually, James Madison wanted to put that in the preamble of the Constitution, that people have an indefeasible right to alter or amend their government, which is, of course, what the Declaration of Independence says. Yeah, I thought it was interesting because in the book, you also put Malcolm X in that same vein. Yeah, so Malcolm X, I think, understood the Declaration of Independence as setting out what your remedies are when your government is oppressing you. And that's what I think the Declaration of Independence is about. And, you know, I think he was right. And I think he had a pretty good argument that his government was oppressing him. Support for the show comes from Shopify. 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Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Vox. That's Shopify.com slash Vox. Shopify.com slash Vox. Absorb it. And listen wherever you get your podcast or watch on YouTube starting May 13th. Ancestors and our relationship with their ancestors are something that I personally spend a lot of time thinking about. You know, I think of the way ancestor veneration shows up culturally. It shows up spiritually. But I think it's also very much a part of our political lives. You know, there's the Lincoln Memorial. The city I live in, Washington, D.C. It's named after George Washington. The Capitol Dome is painted with an image of a picture of him ascending into heaven. I'm not sure the place these images hold in our consciousness will ever really be stripped away. Like, we're very attached to not just the 1776 story, but the men who developed the story. Yeah, we are very attached to the founders. But the important thing to understand about that, I think, is, one, it's actually a relatively recent development. So, you know, before Lincoln, when people talked about America's founders, they were talking about 17th century founders. They were talking about people like William Penn. So this idea of the founders of 1776 as the founding fathers, Lincoln has a lot to do with that. The phrase founding fathers, it's a 20th century thing. And we could still have a lot of that, I think. So it's nice to look back to your ancestors and, like, here are these great inspirational figures from history. Everyone likes to do that. But they don't always have to be the same ones. You know, we could switch. And, you know, we could say we're thinking about Lincoln instead of George Washington. We're thinking about Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, members of the Reconstruction Congress, instead of, you know, James Madison. We're thinking about the people who drafted the 14th Amendment rather than the people who drafted the Constitution. And there is some benefit because if you're like, my heroes are the Union Army in the Civil War, you know, and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and the black troops, the 54th Massachusetts and Abraham Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner. You don't have to perform all of these mental acrobatics to explain why they're your heroes. But yes, they enslaved their own children, like Thomas Jefferson. You know, it's a better set of heroes. It lets us tell the story in a cleaner way. So, like, we want to say, sort of most fundamentally, America is an anti-slavery nation, and we've been that way since our founding. And that is not true if the founding is 1776, but it is true if the founding is 1863 or 1868. Then what do we do with what we have now? The city is named after Washington, who was a slaveholder. There is the Jefferson Memorial, who was also a slaveholder. Like, do you tear them down? Do you name them after someone else? What are we supposed to do? So, the question of how to sort of change the national story is a really interesting one. And obviously, this is something that people feel strongly about. So, for a bunch of reasons, I think it's a bad idea to try to attack it directly and say, you know, rename Washington, D.C., tear down the Jefferson Memorial. You don't want to do that. What you want to do, I think, is get people to understand that the values that we hold dear, that we think define us as Americans, really come to us much more from Reconstruction than from the founding. And then people will start to identify more with the heroes of Reconstruction, who I think are a better bunch of people than the heroes of the founding. And eventually, you know, you'll put up some new monuments, maybe, to Frederick Douglass and Harry Tubman and Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, and people will walk around and they'll see them and they'll be like, you know, I kind of like this better than Jefferson. I feel like I have more in common with this guy. I don't get that weird feeling that I get when I think about Thomas Jefferson. What do you think it will take for people to do that? Like, what will it take for America to say, actually, let's think about Reconstruction way more. Let's invest ourselves in that part of our national story. Well, it'll take a couple of things. People will have to stop identifying with the Confederacy, for one thing. So, you know, that's why we don't talk about Reconstruction so much, I think, because there's a substantial part of white America that, until recently, maybe still, identifies with the Confederacy. So 1776, I was saying, is a unifying moment for white Americans, at least. You can look back and be like, yeah, we were all on the same side there. The reason that we can look back and say we were all on the same side there is that the one-third of Americans who remained loyal were basically driven out of the country afterwards. So there were a lot of loyalists, but we wrote them out of the American story. And we didn't do that with the Confederates. The Confederates are like one-fifth of the white American population. They're a smaller minority than the loyalists, but we preserve them. And we are like, yes, you are true Americans. You were fighting for what you believed was right. We can be proud of you. And there's all of this pride in the Confederacy that prevents people from thinking of Reconstruction as a unifying moment. You write that America's going through an identity crisis. If things remain the same, if what's going on now continues to go on, where are we headed? Who are we? Well, we are a confused and divided people, is who we are, I think. And the way to understand American history, I think, is as cycles between these two different sets of values, between the exclusive individualism of the founding and the inclusive equality of Reconstruction. And I would say founding values have the upper hand basically up until the Civil War. Then you get about eight years of Reconstruction. And it's a time of tremendous change. You get the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, but it's a brief period of time. And then there's the Compromise of 1877. The federal troops stand down. They stop holding back the white supremacist paramilitaries that are basically the remnants of the Confederate armies. And the former Confederates take back power in the South. This is what historians call redemption. So they overthrow the racially integrated Reconstruction governments. And then you've got almost 100 years of, again, this exclusive individualism going up until basically Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement, which is what historians often call the Second Reconstruction. So you've got the Civil Rights Movement, maybe roughly sort of coextensive with the Warren Court, so say like 1953 to 1969. That's 16 years. It lasts longer this time. And there's a lot of changes. There's the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for instance, which brings back the promise of multiracial democracy. But there's a backlash again. And starting about in 1980, maybe, with the election of Ronald Reagan, you see this real turn back towards states' rights. This is a moment in our culture when the founding becomes a lot more celebrated. People get really more interested in the founders. This is when originalism really starts coming out as a jurisprudential idea, the idea being we're going to go back to the founding. Weirdly, the originalists don't talk about going back to 1868 and really understanding the 14th Amendment. They want to go back to 1787. And that's what I would say is the Second Redemption. It's sort of the backlash to the Second Reconstruction of the Civil Rights Movement. And once again, we've entered this long period where the values of exclusive individualism are coming out on top. So what we're living through now, I think, is the Second Redemption. This is what I tell my constitutional law students. And how long is it going to go on? It's going to go on until we get the Third Reconstruction, until we get another Civil Rights Movement. So it sounds like we go Reconstruction, Redemption, Reconstruction, Redemption. It's this pendulum that swings back and forth. Like you said, we had the Voting Rights Act recently. A lot of the teeth have been taken out of it. Do we just swing on this pendulum back and forth forever and ever? Or at some point, do we make a decision and say, this is the direction we're headed in and we pick a path? I would like us to make a decision about that. I would like us to pick the side of Reconstruction. And that's sort of one of the things that I'm calling for people to do. But realistically, I think what happens is we swing back and forth, but the pendulum moves, too. And if you compare the First Reconstruction to the Second Reconstruction, there's a lot of progress. If you compare the First Redemption to the Second Redemption, it's not quite as bad. The First Redemption is military coups, basically. It's the violent overthrow of racially integrated governments throughout the South. There are battles in the streets of New Orleans and other places. The Second Redemption is not as bad. I believe that as a nation, we are making progress. I believe as a nation, we are moving in the right direction. So American history, if you look at it in terms of one-year increments or 10-year increments, it's not so clear what's going on. If you look at it in terms of 50-year increments or 100-year increments, I do think we're making progress. I do think we're getting better. Okay. Would you consider yourself optimistic, then, about our ability and our willingness to write a new story? Where are we going to be 250 years from now, if we're thinking in those long increments of time? I believe that we're going to be better. I consider myself an optimist. I should say I consider myself a patriot. I love America. I believe that we've got great resources. I believe in the American people. I would say part of our problem right now is that our people are better than our government. I think our constitution and our political system are dysfunctional and anti-democratic in a bunch of ways. And that's probably what we need to address. So what we need now, I think, is another sort of progressive era where people try to improve the functioning of government and the functioning of the constitution. And if we make some structural changes to the constitution to make it more democratic, I think we can reduce political polarization. I think we can get elected officials who represent a broader section of the American people. I think we can get a government that actually is going to try to move us forward rather than just fighting with the other side. And I really do believe we can do that. All right. Kermit Roosevelt, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for watching. Each week we'll be in your audio and video feeds with great interviews and a philosophy-minded look at tech, culture, politics, and much more. Episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. As always, we want to know what you thought of the episode. So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com. And if you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, then consider becoming a member of the Vox community on Patreon at patreon.com slash vox.