During a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell about “How Reconstruction Still Defines America,” published today, former President Obama said Vice President Vance’s “hypocrisy” on nativism exemplifies why he doesn’t see Reconstruction as a complete failure. “When you have the current vice president making a speech that is basically a blood-and-soil version of ‘we the people,’ that it matters who your parents were and how long they’ve been here, despite being married to a daughter of an immigrant himself,” Obama said. “That’s progress.” “Hypocrisy is progress,” Obama said. “It means that you feel guilty enough to either lie to yourself or others. And that is better than not even thinking about the idea that maybe you’re doing something wrong.”

BARACK OBAMA: It’s impossible to spend a lot of time thinking about Reconstruction without reflecting on the present day, right? Because these issues are-well, they’re still there. If somebody is asking why it is relevant to talk about Reconstruction, I have to describe for them the degree to which we’re having the same arguments. The issues of: How are we going to help the freed people who’ve been enslaved? What are we going to give them to allow them to have a go at life? What does real freedom mean? You trace that debate of 40 acres and a mule and public education, and you can trace it all the way through to debates about welfare and debates about, now, DEI. Do we, as a society, have an obligation to address past injustices that have been institutionalized or left a legacy of poverty? So we’re having that argument. When you look at issues of state versus federal power, and how do we protect the rights of all citizens-both against states that may be abusing the people who live there, but also against the federal government that, at any point, might decide it wants to bully people around-those issues are still there. Obviously, more directly, we’re having debates now about voting, voting rights. And you’ve got a Supreme Court that has systematically weakened the possibilities of enforcing voting rights in our democracy. And we have a politics now that-at least one of our major parties has been captured by politics that is not that subtle about suggesting that we the people means a certain kind of people. When you have the vice president-the current vice president-making a speech that is basically a blood-and-soil version of we the people, that it matters who your parents were and how long they’ve been here, despite him being married to a daughter of an immigrant himself, that echoes, then, ideas about who can be a citizen, who belongs, who gets to make decisions. So all these issues are still being debated, sometimes not as bluntly and explicitly as they have in the past, but they’re still there. And what I would say, though, is, in the same way that we were talking earlier about the Constitution, and you get that equal protection language in the Constitution, and it may not be observed, and we may be shocked and appalled by the gap between those words and the reality, and it may be frustrating that we have to file lawsuits to vindicate those words-but they still count. In that same way, I would argue that the progress that we’ve seen over your lifetime and mine in creating a multiracial democracy-that stuff sticks, and that’s progress. And so I don’t get cynical and look back. I don’t subscribe to the idea that, because this has always been a theme in America, because we will often be disappointed by how American society responds to racial discrimination and injustice, because at any moment that kind of caste thinking can flare up and be dangerous and violent and cruel, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have evidence of that better version of America. We have evidence of it. We’ve seen it. MALCOLM GLADWELL: The example you gave is actually a lovely illustration of this. A hundred years ago, a vice president could not stand up and make a nativist argument if he was married to the daughter of an Indian immigrant. But today he can. So we’ve moved from malice to hypocrisy. That’s progress. BARACK OBAMA: It is progress. That is progress. Listen, hypocrisy is progress. It is, because it means that you feel guilty enough to either lie to yourself or others. And that is better than not even thinking about the idea that maybe you’re doing something wrong. My mother, she used to always say, I think guilt’s a highly underrated emotion. And if I tell you to do something-you mentioned earlier the role of parenting-if I tell you to do something and you know it’s wrong, and you hide it and then you kind of try to do it anyway, well, at least I know I’ve planted the seed. You set the standard. And that’s part of the reason why I don’t deem Reconstruction this complete failure. And somebody like Eric Foner, a great historian who resuscitated and reevaluated this story that Reconstruction had been an utter failure-one of the important points he makes is all these seeds are planted, and not all of them grow. Some of them are dormant for a very long time, for decades. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Mm-hmm. BARACK OBAMA: But both you and I and our kids have benefited from the fruits of trees that were planted during Reconstruction.

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