What Makes Me Hopeful. Even now.

A few scattered thoughts in a crazy world

Today is publication day for It’s Only Drowning! I was going to post something directly from the book, but I’ve got a great excerpt coming in The Contrarian later today, so you’ll be able to read it this afternoon.

So instead of talking more about my book, I want to talk about how writing it changed the way I think about the world.

In particular, I want to tell you how it made me more hopeful at a time when hope is hard to come by.

After I wrote Thanks, Obama, everyone I met told me about the first time they’d met (or come closest to meeting), President Obama. After I wrote Democracy in One Book or Less, everyone I met told me their idea for government reform.

Because It’s Only Drowning is about my friendship with my Joe Rogan superfan brother-in-law, I’m hearing about everyone’s friend or family member who they can no longer speak to because of politics. (In fact, Chris Matthews and I just discussed this subject on a Substack Live - for him, it’s his brother.) The book has been in the world for less than 24 hours, and I’ve already heard dozens of these stories.

And here’s the thing: no one - and I mean literally no one - says, “And good riddance” at the end of their story. Everyone who’s had a family relationship or friendship divided by politics and the culture wars wishes they knew a way back.

Even now, in a time of chaos and cruelty, we want something better. We may not know how to get to a better place, but we refuse to ever be satisfied with this one.

What’s true when it comes to our friends and family is true for our American family as well. We’re a divided country. We know we’re a divided country. Yet the vast majority of us don’t say, “Well, that was a nice experiment in democracy.” We say, “There must be a better way than this.”

I’m not naive. Trump, Elon, and Stephen Miller aren’t trying to heal anything. They seek domination. Conservative media, meanwhile, profits by demonizing people who disagree with President Trump. There’s a handful of social-media types on the left who similarly benefit from deepening our divides.

But most of us know we’re not being helped by the nonstop culture wars and us vs. them demonization. We’re aware that disagreement is painful - but we’re not willing to give up our freedom to make disagreement go away.

That’s where Trump and Stephen Miller have already gambled and lost. There’s plenty of debate about whether America is an exceptional nation, and I’ll leave most of that for another time. But I’ll say this. In Hungary and El Salvador and Turkey and Russia, strongmen are (or were, at the beginning) extremely popular. People chose order and predictably over freedom and messiness.

Not in America. We’re fighting a lot of battles, and we won’t win them all. But the more authoritarian Trump gets, the less popular he gets. That makes me proud of - and hopeful for - our country.

And I think that, entirely unintendedly, my experience surfing with my brother-in-law Matt, which is at the heart of my new book, has helped me understand why. Americans don’t like being pushed around. We’re willing to take risks and make sacrifices in our to control our own fate. Sometimes that leads many of us to do dumb things, like rejecting vaccines. But it also leads many of us - not all, but most - to look at the Trump/Miller project to turn government into the world’s biggest bully and say, “No thanks.”

I expected to get pushback on this book from MAGA, and I have a little bit. But when I talk about the possibility of winning over some of the voters we’ve lost, I’ve also gotten some pushback from the left. They’ve said, essentially, “It’s not our fault so many people voted for a dangerous idiot, and if they did, there’s no helping them.”

I think that’s not just wrong. It’s sad. Believing that persuasion is impossible is another way of giving up. Knowing that people change, and can come around even when it seems unlikely, is what hope looks like right now.

Here’s one more thing I’m hopeful about:

For a long time, I thought we had to choose between staying true to our values and having genuine discussions with people who put themselves, in ways large or small, on the wrong side of history. I now know that’s not the case. We can respect every person without having to respect every opinion. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the strategic thing to do.

Also, life is so much better when you live that way!

I don’t know what will happen in our country or our world. None of us do. But there is a better a way forward, and I know that because I’ve lived it. We can reject the endless division, fight for the values we share, and embrace the world with courage, joy, and curiosity.

One unlikely friendship at a time.

P.S. I’ve waited so long to say this: if your copy of It’s Only Drowning arrived today, and you read it and you like it, leave a comment! I’m so excited that I get to share it with everybody - but I’m particularly excited that I get to share it with you, the readers of the newsletter, who have been so supportive of my work.