America, much of the traditional Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program for ending addiction also applies to fixing our nation, but since the steps were originally based on a singular type of Christianity, they must be tweaked a bit to acknowledge that fixing today’s national problems requires us to call upon the collective resources of all the nation’s extraordinarily diverse religious and secular ethical traditions. As I argued earlier in the book, religious and secular Americans have a lot more in common than either side believes. So based on that, here’s how we should apply a modified 12-step program to ending America’s addictions to counterproductive habits:
1. Admit that—under the current state of our screwed-up politics—we are currently powerless over greed, gun violence, racism, xenophobia, self-interested government spending and campaign financing, sexism, unworkably low taxes for the rich, and rampant cultural narcissism—and admit that our collective lives have become unmanageable as a result and that this powerlessness is killing our national relationship.
2. Come to believe that a power greater than ourselves—collective action, with citizen-empowered government in the lead—should restore us to sanity. Admit it is troubling that many Americans know every Bachelorette winner but not the name of their two US senators. We must reject the myth of rugged individualism for the fabrication it is, and instead accept that we all need each other’s help sometimes—whether it’s in protecting our drinking water or ensuring that our kids go to high-quality schools.
3. Make the decision to turn over at least part of our will and at least part of our lives to the care of each other as we solve problems together as a nation. Since virtually all religious and ethical traditions say that one of the best ways to honor God or our fellow humans is to repair our own society, this act of letting go would require us to move beyond our own personal needs and desires to aid the greater good. (Recycle that selfie stick—now!) Jesus commanded, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” directing followers to pay any taxes and obey secular authorities that are just. That’s pretty good advice for anyone, whether you’re Christian or not. Following that dictate could, for instance, require turning over a bit more in tax dollars to ensure that your neighbors can visit a doctor or feed their families.
4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves by systematically cataloguing our national flaws. Check. (In case you missed that, please reread the first few hundred pages of this book.) Look in the mirror, America, and see yourself, warts and all.
5. Admit to God, to ourselves, and/or to all other humans the exact nature of our collective wrongs, using actual facts to access and solve our national problems. If you’ve paid good money for this book, feel free to take a photo of any of the charts in it with your cell phones (now that they are not being used for selfies) and text them to anyone who is still fact-resistant.
6. Allow ourselves to embrace the collective will of the nation to act upon a spiritual or ethic imperative (or mere self-interest)—to remove all these defects of national character. In other words, let’s all get to work.
7. Humbly ask the whole nation to work together to actively repair our shortcomings. Let’s push the president and every elected official and business leader to fix this mess.
8. Make a list of all persons and institutions we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all and to fight for a society that welcomes and honors every group we’ve dishonored. That’s a darn long list but we can start with American Indians, move on to African Americans, women, Asian Americans, LGBTQ people, Latinos, Jews, people with disabilities, people falsely convicted of crimes, Donald Trump’s wives, and on and on.
9. Make direct amends to such people and institutions wherever possible, except when doing so would injure them or others. Our apologies won’t mean squat unless we actually start helping all the people we previously shafted. (See # 8.)
10. Continue to take personal and collective inventory, and when we are wrong, promptly admit it. Admit how each of us screwed up. (Come clean, 2000 Florida Ralph Nader voters!)
11. Seek, through a careful examination of objective facts on the ground, to improve our conscious contact with our society we as understand it, actively seeking knowledge of verifiable earthly reality, in order to have the power to carry out the change we need. That’s a lot of mumbo jumbo that I’ll sum up this way: we need to build our collective confidence that we can fix the nation’s biggest, most seemingly intractable problems.
12. Be both ethically and politically awakened as the result of these steps, and try to carry this message to other Americans, and practice these principles in all our affairs.
The rest of this book spells out my own version of a 12-step program for the nation, but to sum it up in one sentence: let’s preach collective responsibility for everyone, then let’s practice what we preach.