Updates, letters, and notes from the movement.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how change actually happens. We tend to imagine it’s some enormous moment. A million people marching on Washington.A presidential election.Some famous person standing behind a podium. But I’m beginning to think we’ve got it backward. Change starts with one person talking to another person. That’s it. That’s the revolution. […]
So today I found out I have cancer. Again. Third time. At this point, I don’t know whether to call my oncologist or ask for a frequent-customer card. “Welcome back, John! One more diagnosis and your next MRI is free!” But something interesting happened when I heard the news. A switch flipped. Survival mode. Not […]
And I don’t think it’s as simple as America moving left or America moving right. Look at Minnesota. Peggy Flanagan just won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate. She beat Angie Craig, who had considerably more financial resources and represented the more traditional Democratic establishment. And what did Flanagan run on? Universal healthcare. […]
So if America is unraveling, what do we do? I don’t think we’re going to fix this with another political argument. We’ve tried that. We’ve been arguing for years. Everybody’s talking. Nobody’s listening. And somewhere along the way, politics became entertainment. We have teams. We have uniforms. We have celebrities. We have villains. We have […]
Twenty-five years ago, Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone. His warning was pretty simple: America was losing the places where Americans actually met each other. Churches. Clubs. Neighborhood groups. Volunteer organizations. Bowling leagues. Places where you didn’t ask somebody who they voted for before you sat down next to them. And now Putnam says it’s worse. […]
America doesn’t need another political tribe. We’ve got enough of them already. Left. Right. MAGA. Progressive. Socialist. Libertarian. Independent. Centrist. Tuned-out and completely fed up. The last thing we need is another group standing in its own corner yelling at everybody else. The Truth Party shouldn’t become the tenth tribe. It should become the meeting […]