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

And 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 Jon Hill, host of Explain It to Me, and I'm filling in for Shawn. 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 like just going through the same cases and thinking about the Supreme Court and and American values. Um, 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 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.

Um it was a time when I thought America was open to a lot of new ideas and maybe we were you know 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. Um, you know, 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 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