Sitting alone at our kitchen table, now my makeshift office, on the second day after the end of the Obama administration, I am trying to adjust… to the feeling of having no huge stack of paper awaiting my review, no government-issued cell phone alerting me to the next crisis. Exhausted, proud, and done, following eight years of long hours and intense pressure, I am relieved to be through with government—at least for now. It has been a tremendous experience and an unmatched privilege to serve. At this point, however, I want nothing more than to sleep, vacation, and spend time with my family and friends.
Unburdened and untethered, liberated and lonely, I am befuddled by the recognition that there is nothing I have to do right then and there. Email offers a familiar distraction, even if it will not contain any issues of urgency or national security import, much less a matter of life and death. Opening my mailbox, I find a series of kind messages from former colleagues and friends thanking me for my service and wishing me well in the “afterlife” and more notes of condolence for my mother’s passing three weeks earlier.
In my crowded inbox, one email immediately jumps out, because it is entitled “Love You.” It’s from Jake, then a freshman at Stanford University, and his message is characteristically direct:
Hey Mommy,
I have been thinking about you this week, and about how proud I am of you. You are truly a massive source of inspiration for me in life, and I look up to you in everything that I do. I will always be proud to identify myself as your son. You have done amazing work for our country, and I will forever be grateful for that.
… Look forward to talking to you tomorrow. I am going birding but will try to call you in the afternoon.
Love,
Jake
Jake’s email leaves me briefly buffeted by emotion. No one has sacrificed more than my family, especially my two children and my husband, to enable me to serve another eight years in government. It is gratifying to be reminded that Jake neither resents the tradeoffs my service entailed nor the lost time.
His pride moves me enormously, especially since Jake has long since declared his political independence from our family and adopted a classic conservative philosophy. At Stanford, he would grow more active and vocal, eventually becoming the high-profile president of Stanford College Republicans and, as my son, a darling of right-wing media. Given our strong differences—including over key issues that define the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy—I am touched all the more that my son emphasized his admiration for me and my service, appreciating that I had done my best for our country.
Jake’s message is a timely reminder of how much we share and how bound we remain. Jake and I agree that we cannot allow our differences to overshadow what we have in common—an abiding bond of family and country—even in the most testing times.
Initially, my return to private life was refreshing—a time to focus on my health, relax and catch up on sleep, and start to think about what I wanted to come next. Struggling against sensory overload, I tried my best not to despair over early indications of how disruptive and dishonest Trump’s presidency would prove to be.
Then, barely ten weeks after Trump took office, a new assault began, which I could not tune out.
Step one of their play was run the night of Sunday, April 2, 2017. Ian alerted me by texting a link to Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist who had accused Hillary Clinton of running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Northwest Washington. Cernovich had tweeted: “I just published ‘Susan Rice Requested Unmasking of Incoming Trump Administration Officials.’ ”
Within minutes, I was trending on Twitter. Shortly thereafter, I again became a constant story on Fox. The right-wing media machine, and many Republican members of Congress, including of course Senator Lindsey Graham, accused me of “improperly” or “illegally” “unmasking” Trump campaign and transition officials “for political purposes.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized: “All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in anti-terror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.”
I’d seen it coming but hadn’t anticipated the full force of the hit. After leaving government at the end of the Obama administration and free from the public spotlight, I was briefly under the illusion that I would no longer be a favorite target of the right wing, a recyclable bogeyman. Certainly, I never expected to be personally and publicly targeted by this (or any) president of the United States.
Thankfully, I had already heard rumors that the White House and then-chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Devin Nunes, were gunning for me. Friends confided that, to reduce the pressure President Trump was feeling from the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the White House wanted to change the subject. Trump’s March 4, 2017, tweet storm of lies accusing President Obama of having put a “tapp” on Trump Tower had been thoroughly discredited. The Trump team needed somehow to justify those false tweets and divert attention from Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation, just after it became clear he made false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his campaign contacts with Russians.
Their fabricated allegation was that I had asked the Intelligence Community to reveal to me the names of Trump associates who were caught in intelligence collection on foreign targets, and that my motives for doing so were political (though no one has ever explained what that meant). Worse, they claimed that once the names were provided to me, they were widely disseminated within the U.S. government, and thus, directly or indirectly, I was responsible for the leaking of those names to the press.
The truth is far different. So-called “unmasking” and leaking are two very different things. “Unmasking,” or requesting the identity of a U.S. person or entity who is not named in a particular intelligence report, is something that I and other senior officials did when necessary to understand the report’s importance. As national security advisor, my job—like that of other cabinet-level national security officials—was to protect the American people and the security of our country. To help me do that, every morning the Intelligence Community gave me a carefully selected compilation of some twenty to thirty intelligence reports chosen to provide the best current information on what was going on around the world. I read them faithfully. On occasion, I received a report in which a “U.S. person” was referenced but no name was provided (as is customary to protect privacy). If, in order to assess the significance of the report, I needed to know who that “U.S. person” was, I would ask through my IC briefer whether the agency that produced the report could reveal the identity to me.
To give a hypothetical: if I received a report about a conversation involving an unnamed American proposing to sell an adversary high-tech bomb-making equipment, clearly, as national security advisor, I would want to know who that American person was and whether he had the capacity to follow through. Was this some pretender on the internet flacking something he didn’t have, or was this a serious person with the will and the means to provide dangerous technology to an adversary? In such a case, the identity of the U.S. person is essential to assessing the importance of an intelligence report revealing a potential threat.
There is a long-standing process by which such requests for the identity of U.S. persons are made to the Intelligence Community, and there are guidelines for the access and use of such information consistent with the law. Assuming the IC provides the identity of a “masked” U.S. person, it would come to me personally and directly from my briefer. The identity is not broadly disseminated throughout the national security community or the government. It is completely false to suggest that asking for the identity of an American person is the same as leaking it. Leaking classified information is a serious crime. I have not and would not leak classified information.
As another example, if I saw information indicating Russia or any adversary were interfering in our electoral process, it would be my responsibility to understand its significance and initiate an appropriate policy process at the direction of the president. For me not to try to understand that information would be dereliction of duty. The much hyped and bogus “unmasking” charge was a case of being assailed for doing my job responsibly.
But the truth be damned.
President Trump told The New York Times, without a shred of evidence, that he thought I had committed a “crime.” To further hype the distraction, Trump said: “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story. I think it’s a massive, massive story.”
Calling me a criminal from the Oval Office was so baseless that few in the mainstream media gave it credence. Trump sounded manic in defaming me, but he succeeded briefly in changing the subject from the Russia investigation, while firing up his base. The “unmasking” faux-scandal didn’t last that long, and it was such a bogus hit that it soon lost much steam even on the right. But more helpful than the power of the truth in refocusing public attention was President Trump himself, who continued generating an endless stream of juicier, fresher, and more deceitful distractions.
Trump’s attacks on me have proved tame in comparison to those he has since leveled against many other loyal, principled public servants in both the Obama administration and his own. Tame as they are, I wear them as a badge of honor.
My main comfort was that my mom was not here to see this happen again. Moreover, Maris, fourteen at the time, was old enough to understand the attacks in ways she could not five years earlier during Benghazi. Well-informed and a critical thinker, my daughter recognized that I was being vilified by the right wing to distract from concerns that the Trump team may have colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. This time, she was able to support me and urge me to stay strong.
Similarly, Jake, who brooks no assault on his mother, was sympathetic and supportive throughout. By virtue of my experience, Jake has seen firsthand how dishonest and defamatory the right-wing media can be, even as he remains an all too avid consumer.
Perplexing as such cognitive dissonance is to us, Ian and I love Jake as deeply and surely as any parents can love their child. We are thankful that he is a smart, self-disciplined, and responsible kid, who has given us few headaches apart from politics. We talk and text frequently when he is away, and he continues to seek his parents’ advice and crave our approval.
Drawn academically to economics, political science, and history, Jake professes no interest in running for political office, favoring the private sector and finance. Ever quirky, his greatest passion remains birdwatching. Jake knows the sight and sound of most every bird in North America and continues to study the roughly ten thousand species worldwide. By his twenty-first birthday, Jake had recorded more than one thousand species of birds on six continents.
As close as Jake and I are, we know exactly how to push each other’s buttons. Like every good Dickson and Rice, he is not shy about advocating, even aggressively, for what he believes. Our arguments can be calm and rational—when we try hard to reason deliberately and exercise maximum restraint.
More often, a phone call or casual conversation in the car or around the dinner table can escalate into an explosive, sometimes profane argument. Occasionally, after a heated debate, Jake will muse aloud, “Maybe we should just stop talking about politics.” Truthfully, I’m sometimes sorely tempted to do so. But my response is, “Jake, if you and I can’t manage to discuss this stuff, I don’t know who can. Painful as it can be, we have to keep talking.”
In reality, Jake and I differ more on policy means than ultimate ends; and, on some issues, we find our way to acknowledging that we don’t actually disagree that much, if at all. Indeed, we agree on: the importance of strong national defense and principled American global leadership; supporting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law; protecting the liberty and equality of every individual; free, fair trade and robust economic growth that enables many to thrive; the severity of the Russian threat; the value of our alliances; and a passion for Africa. Yet, we strongly differ on other foreign policy matters, such as Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and Middle East policy.
We argue energetically over domestic policy. Jake typically takes a libertarian, constitutional conservative view of most social and economic issues, and I favor pragmatic progressive solutions. He is pro-life, while I am pro-choice. He favors shrinking the state, and I believe the state has an important role to play. He opposes the Affordable Care Act, while I am deeply committed to ensuring that quality health care is accessible to all. Jake is not exercised about climate change; to me, it is an urgent, existential threat.
Even when most frustrated, I’m proud that Jake cares deeply about public issues and is an effective leader. It takes guts to get in the arena, especially at a place like Stanford where his views have earned him many dedicated detractors. Still, I confess it can be deeply painful to love someone so powerfully with whom I disagree so profoundly. As much as Ian and I have struggled to understand Jake’s ideological evolution, chastising ourselves—what did we do or not do?—to this day, we’re not sure when or why his views shifted so far to the right. The facts belie Jake’s claim that he has always been a conservative. Yet his posture seems more than a phase of youthful rebellion, given its intensity and duration—although a swing from one end of the spectrum to the other has been a pattern in Jake’s intellectual development. He moved from supporting the far-left Dennis Kucinich early in the 2008 campaign to center-left Obama, and then to conservative Rick Perry in 2012 and Tea Party ideologue Ted Cruz in 2016. Political views aside, Jake still personally likes and respects President Obama, who has always been extremely kind to him.
As far to the right as Jake has moved, Maris—as warm and easygoing as ever—is almost an equal distance to the left. Brilliant and beautiful, an excellent high school student fascinated by science, math, and literature, a three-sport Varsity athlete, and saxophone player, she is deeply committed to celebrating diversity and demanding inclusion of all people without exception. Ian and I agree with Maris on social issues, even as she leans more left on economic policy than we do. Frugal to a fault, Maris rails against “entitlement” and is critical of excessive wealth.
Rarely having met a progressive cause that she didn’t wish to champion, Maris rallies (often with us) for: civil rights; Black Lives Matter; March for Our Lives; gay pride; the Women’s March; Earth Day. Unfailingly lighthearted, tough-minded, and strong, Maris has wanted since age nine to serve her country in what she believes to be the most demanding possible way—in the armed forces. A better version of Mom and me, Maris is proof (at least in our family) that Darwin was onto something.
Jake and Maris truly love each other, but given their extreme differences, as older children they have struggled to get along. Ian and I tried to mediate and defuse their battles—a thankless task. Imploring them to recognize what’s at stake, Ian once bluntly told the kids, “Just stop it. You guys need to listen and consider the other’s point of view. Pause ten seconds before responding to what the other said. Remember,” he stressed, “you two only have each other. Long after we’re gone, you will have to get along, or be alone.” It worked. In recent years, our children have mostly honored a mutual commitment to be more kind and try to understand each other’s perspective.
In that spirit, unbeknownst to us, Maris invited Jake to come to speak at Maret, her school and his alma mater. She wanted her brother to share with the overwhelmingly liberal student body the foundation of his conservative views and then answer questions. Proud and at the same time nervous that the two might publicly combust, or that Jake would say something to offend Maris and other students, I anxiously awaited news of how the event unfolded.
Maris happily reported, “Jake answered questions openly and respectfully. He offered a good explanation of his core values as a conservative, opening many eyes.” Fellow students told her that his views were internally consistent and made sense to them.
While I privately wished Jake might have been less persuasive, I was thankful that both kids viewed the event as a success. In our household, we have tried to instill deep respect for free speech and the necessity to try to understand and debate (hopefully civilly) those with whom we differ. Jake usefully affords us firsthand insight into the perspectives of many fellow Americans, which we would otherwise lack. Without him and our inescapably contrasting views, I doubt I would fully appreciate the urgency and importance of bridging our increasingly deep domestic political divide.
In the process of reflecting on the Washington in which I was raised and the world in which I am raising my kids, I am affirmed in my faith that, as a family and as a body politic, our divisions need not be fatal. We have the ability to heal.
Personally, I still worry there could come a day when Jake and I determine that our disagreements have become so profound, that we are irreconcilable. Not only do I pray that never happens, but I am committed to doing everything in my power to prevent and repair any rupture. Love and respect, however tough, are the most powerful salves to heal wounds, and we can’t be afraid to use them—whether with family or, as I was reminded, with our compatriots.
The distressing news of Senator John McCain’s terminal illness in 2017 prompted me to reflect on what Americans owe each other as fellow citizens, reminding me that to heal, we must be willing to forgive. Confronting that imperative, I struggled to reconcile my complicated feelings toward McCain. Though he had continuously assailed me and disdained many of the policies I helped craft, I could never bring myself to dislike him in return. He was often wrong on national security issues, in my view, and in particular too quick to favor using military force. Yet McCain consistently championed strong and principled U.S. global leadership, our alliances and universal values, while seeing clearly the threat we face from Russia and other totalitarian regimes.
Above all, I admired John McCain’s guts, his fearlessness, and his readiness to stand up for what he believed. From his brave service in Vietnam and the torture he sustained as a POW to his firm rebuke of a supporter on the campaign trail who said she “can’t trust Obama… he’s an Arab,” from his gracious concession speech in 2008 to his principled vote to save the Affordable Care Act and his sustained critique of President Trump, Senator McCain was a patriot and a decent man. McCain also had a remarkable capacity to forgive—whether his Vietnamese captors or his political opponents whom he invited to speak at his funeral. His loss dealt a blow to our democracy and our global leadership.
When he died, I was saddened but also deeply torn. I had long regretted my comments about McCain on the 2008 campaign trail, which were fairly construed as disrespectful. My aim had been to draw a contrast on policy but not to engage in an ad hominem attack. Much as I wanted to pay my respects and honor his service, knowing how he felt about me, I didn’t want to seem a hypocrite or the classic Washington poser who cares mainly about being seen. Wrestling with the question of whether to attend his funeral, I had decided to stay home and watch it on television.
Then I received an email that made me laugh so hard I cried. It was from Ambassador Deborah Jones, whom I had not heard from since I left government. A career foreign service officer who had succeeded Christopher Stevens as U.S. envoy to Libya, she wrote to me days after McCain’s passing but before his memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral:
Dear Susan,
Just wanted to share this private anecdote with you because it was so typical of John McCain, God rest his soul, and involved you.
As you know only too well, McCain was obsessed with Libya, even more so following Chris Stevens’ death in Benghazi. He loved the romantic notion of dealing with “the war” (revolutionaries) and he also had a great fondness for Chris and believed the Obama Administration had covered up the “real [AQ] story” on Benghazi. He’d come to Tripoli for a whirlwind visit—naturally flying milair—and we’d ensured he’d gotten to see some of “the war” and to visit his favorite shawarma stand (security be damned) and were heading back to the airport. He asked me what Libyans currently thought of America (this was late 2013 I recall) and before I realized what I was triggering in him, the words were leaving my mouth to recount that Libyans had told me: “When she raised her right hand at the UN to support the Libyan people against Qaddafi, Susan Rice became our Statue of Liberty!” He erupted, nearly leaping across the seat at me, yelling “well that was before she lied, LIED about Benghazi!” I replied “Senator, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that point,” which only served to infuriate him further. “Madame Ambassador,” he began—which as you know is what happens when Senators are irritated; they resort to formal title—and continued facetiously “I’m sure you know Libya much better than I do [here I interjected, “oh Senator, I’m sure I do not”] but you can’t tell me that large groups of young men go around carrying RPG’s and the sort of weapons those groups who attacked our facilities in Benghazi were carrying!” Just then a bunch of heavily armed militia members drove by. “Senator, they do,” I replied. We rode in silence the rest of the way. (I should mention that his accompanying staff, unaccustomed to hearing anyone push back on the great man were smiling ear to ear in the rear seat of our armored SUV.)
I’ve never forgotten this. I actually found it rather amusing.
Hope all is well with you and yours,
Best,
Deborah Jones
Once I collected myself, I forwarded the email to a few family members and to my good friend since Oxford, Lance Bultena, for their amusement. A South Dakota Republican, Lance had worked for McCain in the Senate and tried to advise me in the wake of Benghazi on how best to defuse McCain’s ire. Lance loved Ambassador Jones’s message and opined on how McCain would have approached my funeral, “Were he you, he would have attended the funeral to get the attention and make the type of generous comment with a slight ‘but’—without using the word ‘but’—to trigger the press awareness of what was being said.” Hearing my explanation as to why I would not attend, Lance deftly persuaded me that going was the right thing to do, subtly suggesting that it would be a gesture of forgiveness and healing. Lance secured me a ticket as his guest at the invitation-only ceremony, after alerting the organizers whom he intended to bring. Hearing no objection, which I took as a reciprocal measure, I sat discreetly in the back row of the long Cathedral Nave. It felt appropriate to be present and personally give the “great man,” as Ambassador Jones called him, his due.
At a time when the president and many political leaders govern deliberately in a manner designed to exacerbate our divisions, the challenge of overcoming them is greater than ever. Tragically, we have entered an unprecedented era in which the president of the United States tells bald-faced lies on a near daily basis, while attacking unpleasant truths as “fake news,” the free press as “the enemy of the people,” and loyal career public servants and critical government institutions as “the Deep State.” His demonization of our fellow Americans—from Muslims to Latinos, refugees, immigrants, women, transgender persons, African Americans, and other minorities, while excusing or even praising anti-Semitic, racist white supremacists—has become so commonplace as to be nearly numbing. At the same time, President Trump lauds adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, embraces autocrats from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, dismisses scores of nations as “shithole countries,” and degrades our treaty allies who share our values.
Up is down, and down is up.
What this all reveals about the character, motives, and loyalties of the American president cannot be dismissed. Nor can the inaction of the president’s party in Congress in the face of direct, daily assaults on the integrity of our core values and national institutions. Together, they are systematically rending the fabric of our national democracy purely for partisan political gain.
The key questions that remain are whether our democratic institutions can withstand this sustained assault, and whether the American people will hold leaders accountable at the ballot box for placing party over country. I believe the answer to both questions is yes, but only if Americans fully understand what’s at stake.
Today, our domestic political divisions constitute the greatest threat to our national security. Healing them is critical to the survival of our democracy and the preservation of America’s global leadership.
America’s polarization along socioeconomic, geographic, racial, religious, and political lines appears only to be deepening. We are too often suspicious of “the other”—those who don’t look, worship, or think like us—and assume that our interests are more likely opposed than common. In an era when the benefits of wealth, economic growth, and our global leadership are so unevenly distributed, Americans often perceive that they are competing with each other for their share of a static or shrinking pie. Rather than expecting to grow the national pie and thus, potentially, our respective shares, too many Americans are locked in a zero-sum mentality, in which what is good for me and mine cannot be good for others; or, when I win, someone else must lose. As our country changes demographically—growing more racially and ethnically diverse, on course to becoming “majority minority” in the 2040s—this fear, this presumption of us vs. them, is becoming more pervasive and pernicious.
Not only do these divisions, exacerbated by self-interested leaders, weaken our national cohesion, they threaten our national security by keeping us from tackling urgent problems and by creating openings for our adversaries to exploit. Extreme political polarization prevents leaders in Washington even from taking actions that members of both parties agree are necessary—from repairing and replacing aging infrastructure, like bridges and airports, and expanding broadband access, to ensuring that government does not shut down over minor budgetary disputes, enacting comprehensive immigration reform, and passing paid family leave.
Washington is broken, and our democracy is increasingly dysfunctional.
Even more dangerously, our vulnerabilities are not lost on our adversaries, who seek to weaken America from within and strengthen their global position at our expense. Russia, above all, has intervened to manipulate and discredit our electoral process, most blatantly in 2016, but its nefarious actions are not tied solely to our political cycle. They continue and are constant. When a Ferguson, Charlottesville, Parkland, or massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh occurs, Russian propaganda engines from RT television to thousands of coordinated social media bots light up to magnify suspicion and anger among Americans on both sides of contentious issues. Our divisions afford our adversaries easy openings through which to pit Americans against one another—to distrust, discredit, and ultimately, detest each other.
If Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, or any adversary can corrode our confidence in our national institutions—the media, Congress, the Intelligence Community, law enforcement, the presidency—as well as our faith in each other’s motives and loyalties as Americans, then they need never fire a bullet to defeat us and our democratic way of life. We will have done the equivalent of putting a bull’s-eye on our own back, handing our enemy a loaded rifle, and standing still waiting to be shot.
Terrorists, too, now get more bang for each blast. After 9/11, Americans largely came together, united in their resolve to defeat the Al Qaeda terrorists that struck us and to recover from our losses. Yet, not even a dozen years later, by Benghazi, politicians had learned to demagogue terrorist attacks for political gain and have done so repeatedly since—from Paris to San Bernardino to Niger. Terrorists now know that a successful attack is more likely to further divide Americans than to unite us, which makes us a more attractive target. Not only do terrorists reap the propaganda gains of killing and maiming, they also benefit from the lasting consequences of a more fragmented and fractious America.
At the same time, our adversaries are working to erode that which at our core makes us American—our faith in democracy. Democracy can only endure if citizens believe that their vote counts, their voice can be heard, and their will is respected. In magnifying our divisions, our opponents seek to cause as many Americans as possible to doubt the legitimacy and utility of our democratic institutions, to lose faith, disengage, and to denigrate the process and each other. Even if our adversaries fall short of provoking domestic conflict, they will surely still succeed in devaluing the democratic model globally and boosting the attractiveness of authoritarianism.
The risks to our survival as a strong, influential, and cohesive nation cannot be underestimated. It’s mind-boggling and alarming to hear some right-wing commentators predict, almost with relish, a coming “civil war.” Yet America has been divided before—far more deeply than today. Recall the actual Civil War and Reconstruction, the pull of the isolationist movement of the 1930s, McCarthyism, the civil rights era riots and destruction in our major cities, Vietnam. We emerged from each of these periods whole and, arguably, if not immediately, stronger.
What is different today is that our adversaries have demonstrated both the will and capacity to weaponize our divisions for use against us, and they are aided and abetted, whether deliberately or not, by nativist leaders who seek political benefit in pitting groups of Americans against each other—on the basis of race, class, religion, or national origin.
In tandem, our political system has evolved in ways that make it easier and far more beneficial to pursue zero-sum partisan outcomes. From the nearly unlimited role of money in politics (particularly from “dark” and unaccountable sources) and our relentlessly gerrymandered congressional districts, to a primary system that rewards extremes on both sides, we face real structural impediments to compromise and cooperation across party lines.
Concentrated ownership of local news stations, the influence of cable television, which offers a network for every political disposition while demonizing opposing views, the decline of traditional newspapers and local coverage, and a social media revolution that enables individuals to choose what information they consume all make things far worse. No child today knows the simplicity I enjoyed of receiving my nightly news courtesy of a venerable man anchoring one of the three original networks.
Civil discourse has suffered further from Americans’ growing penchant to filter out information we prefer not to hear—whether through the issuance of “trigger warnings” in classrooms, efforts to constrain conservatives or pro-Israel groups on college campuses, or the right’s reactionary dismissal of progressive views as “un-American” or “socialist” or “identity politics.”
We can now select what “facts” we want to believe and discount those we do not. This danger will only worsen as technology enables the perfection of “deep fakes,” like manipulated videos that make it authentically appear a politician has done or said something he has not, or improved algorithms that further skew the information we are fed. If citizens cannot agree on the realities we are facing, how can we rationally debate challenges, much less devise common solutions?
Americans are more and more segregated along ideological lines—not just racial and socioeconomic. Liberals and conservatives tend to live in different zip codes and don’t encounter each other on a routine basis. Washington has changed too, as members of Congress rarely move their families to town, and instead sleep two or three nights a week on cots or in group houses on Capitol Hill. Democrats and Republicans in Congress do not know each other as they once did. The ties of school, friendship, and shared personal struggle that bound families across party lines, like mine with the Brock family—Republicans from Tennessee who embraced me almost as their own child—barely exist.
We live apart, in our own bubbles, and resist any disturbance to the comfort of our self-imposed cocoons. It’s hard to trust someone you have never met, to respect someone you know little about, to hear someone who doesn’t even see you.
The good news is: our domestic divisions are a problem of Americans’ own making, and thus we can fix it. From the personal to the national level, every one of us can contribute. Within our families, at work, and in our communities, we can listen, learn, and try to understand what animates those with whom we disagree. Yet we also need to reach well beyond the confines of the familiar and challenge ourselves to know those we don’t, those we think we won’t like, even those we fear.
When our differences feel too vast to bridge, we need to step back, cool off, and try again. That may sound facile, but the alternative is too dire not to try.
Each of us, not just our leaders, has agency and responsibility. Each of us can contribute to catalyzing our national healing. We have the tools, if only we have the will.
For instance, one year of mandatory national service would compel Americans to get to know each other and work together. Universal civics education—with a curriculum focused on the Constitution, our electoral and legislative process, our democratic institutions, the rule of law, and how to distinguish fact from fiction—would make for more competent and engaged citizens. Truth in advertising on social media, a revival of apolitical local news, and the genuine, not selective, application of norms of free speech and free assembly, would better inform our citizens. Limiting the role of money in politics, implementing nonpartisan redistricting and measures like rank-choice voting of candidates from all parties as in Maine, while making it far easier for all citizens to vote, are steps that would strengthen our democracy and constrain the role of extreme partisans and special interests.
America’s potential to continue to grow and thrive, to innovate and contribute is almost limitless, if and when we pull together—as a people, a nation, a body politic. We are at a crossroads where Americans will either heal, remake, and renew ourselves as a nation; or we will tear ourselves apart, ensuring our national rot and international decline, due to fear, division, and our inability to care for and learn from each other. We are testing the strength of our national cohesion and our democratic institutions; and the jury is out.
Will we demand leaders who put country over party? Leaders who put our shared national mission first?
That mission remains to champion the worth, dignity, and well-being of every American—regardless of what they look like, when they came here, how they worship, or who they love. It is to expand opportunity and revive the American Dream rather than restrict access to it. Ultimately, it is to lift up the coming generations, so that like my parents and me—the descendants of immigrant laborers and slaves—they too can rise and thrive and claim this country fully as their own.
The choice is ours.
I believe, as always, that we must choose each other. Individually and collectively, we can and must bend the arc of the moral universe—toward both justice and unity. We do not live in a zero-sum America. Your failure can never be my success. Our national creeds, of equality and “Out of Many, One”—E Pluribus Unum—must still guide us.
For better, for worse, we are in this together. And we cannot afford to part.
That’s why I remain fundamentally optimistic about America. We have overcome far greater challenges as a people, a nation, and a global leader.
No one has ever won by betting against America’s long-term capacity for growth, change, and renewal.
It would be foolish to start now.