Since Kanter was spending part of the offseason in Los Angeles, we agreed to have dinner at the Rose Café in Venice. Kanter was amiable and talkative. I had other friends who had fallen out with Erdogan, including a prominent writer who had been similarly forced into exile. We talked about basketball and Turkey and Kanter’s activism. The only two unusual things about the evening were the fact that Kanter ate an astonishing amount of salad and raw vegetables (part of his diet at the time) and that he had another older man with him who barely said a word, watching us intently.

A few days later, Kanter appeared in studio for an episode of Pod Save the World (well-titled “Dunking on Erdogan”). We talked about how Turkey had taken away his passport, rendering him effectively stateless. This was due in part to his outspoken support for the U.S.-based cleric Fetullah Gulen.

A brief aside for those not familiar with Gulen. He was a one-time Islamist ally of Erdogan’s who built a network of followers deeply embedded in the Turkish legal and educational establishment, in addition to having networks across the world. In the late 90s, Gulen moved to rural Pennsylvania where he continued to serve as an inspirational leader of his movement. He began to fall out with Erdogan around 2013. Then, in 2016, a failed attempt at a coup in Turkey was attributed to the Gulen movement, leading to a vast crackdown that led to hundreds of thousands of detentions in Turkey.

I knew these events well from my time in the Obama White House. Indeed, our final meetings with Erdogan in 2016 were marked by insistent demands that we extradite Gulen to face justice in Turkey. Much to Erdogan’s frustration, Obama refused the request because the U.S. government had no evidence that Gulen had personally ordered the coup. I remember one meeting where Erdogan showed up personally carrying large brown folders of legal documents which, he insisted, proved Gulen’s culpability. But Gulen remained in Pennsylvania, even as his followers were rounded up in Turkey or – in Kanter’s case – barred from the country.

Kanter and I talked about his experience. Back in Turkey, his family’s house had been raided and they’d been compelled to issue statements disowning him over his support for Gulen. Kanter’s games were not shown on television back home despite Turkey’s love of NBA basketball. Erdogan even put out a notice for Interpol to have Kanter arrested. It was, in some ways, a familiar story of an activist being punished for his views in a world drifting, increasingly, towards authoritarianism.

Kanter did not talk much about Gulen or cast himself as an activist. “I just want to play basketball,” he told me. “And I want to represent my country, my flag, my family, the people I love, people I care about.” He was also avowedly nonpartisan. “Republicans are showing a lot of support,” he said. “Democrats are showing a lot of support.” He had recently met members of Congress from both parties, as well as the Clintons. If he had a cause, he insisted, it was free speech and human rights.

Once again, that same quiet man was accompanying him. I knew that the somewhat mysterious Gulen movement was known for having a network of so-called mentors (or minders) who guided members, particularly more prominent ones. As I escorted Enes and this man to the elevator, let’s just say that the arrangement seemed strange to me. In any case, it spoke to the strange place this relatively young man in his 20s found himself.

In the years that followed, I watched as this story took more turns. While Kanter claimed to be non-partisan, he started showing up more on Fox News: in a 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson, he said people criticizing America should “just keep their mouth shut and stop criticizing the greatest nation in the world” – a direct contrast to his advocacy for free speech in Turkey and around the globe. Whatever moral authority I had seen in Kanter’s stance on Turkey was morphing into something different.

Around this time, having changed his name to “Enes Freedom,” he picked a fight with the Chinese government online and by writing slogans like “Free Tibet” and “Free China” on his shoes. When he was waived by the Celtics in 2022, he blamed the NBA for blacklisting him. While I don’t claim to know what motivated individual NBA executives, by his 11^th and final season Kanter was averaging under 4 points per game. He may have been a political lightning rod, but he was also a fading role player.

After his playing career, he joined the right-wing media’s pile-on of the NBA and players like LeBron James as woke hypocrites, becoming a kind of B-List MAGA influencer in the process. In multiple Fox News appearances, he excoriated the Biden Administration for being “in China’s pocket” and NBA players for embracing so-called “woke” politics in the United States while not speaking out about China – a criticism that willfully ignored the life experiences of other players who had reasons to be focused on racial justice at home. He went on to attend the Republican National Convention in 2024 and the Turning Point USA Inaugural Ball in 2025, venues that hardly bespoke taking a stand against authoritarianism.

Watching all this, I remember feeling that it was kind of sad. A decent NBA role player takes a risky stand against the autocratic leader of his home country, albeit on behalf of a mysterious spiritual leader (Kanter’s ties were hardly superficial, he has said he loves Gulen more than his own family). His initial activism seemed sincerely focused on doing whatever he could to draw attention to human rights in Turkey – indeed, in some ways I was just another DM mark in his public relations campaign, which I knew at the time but didn’t mind given Erdogan’s autocratic streak.

By 2022, though, the easiest place to get attention was with a MAGA right that loved to excoriate the NBA and China. Perhaps whoever was in his ear told him that the pathway to greater political influence was clearer on the ascendant American right, where an ex-NBA player could have a short-cut to Fox News and could stay relevant in online culture wars.

Fast forward to 2026, when it is hard to feel sorry for Enes Kanter Freedom. A few weeks ago, he popped up in my feed because of a stupid video declaring his intention to enter the WNBA draft (nevermind that he is not permitted to do so). It was a clearly mean-spirited effort to insert himself in the culture war debate about trans people playing women’s sports despite the fact that there are precisely zero trans athletes in the WNBA. The whole thing felt demeaning to an already-targeted trans community and to the actual women who play in the ascendant WNBA.

All of this took an even stupider turn last night when he showed up courtside at a WNBA game wearing a t-shirt that read: “WOMAN noun. adult human female.” During a timeout, he exchanged words with the (outstanding) Chicago Sky forward Tash Cloud, took a few steps onto the court, and was ejected – smiling a shit-eating grin – from the arena. Like clockwork, he tweeted “I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN!” As of this writing, the post has 230,000 likes and he’s already appeared on Fox News, so I guess he got what he wanted.

Indeed, given his seeming lust for attention, I debated even writing this piece. But I think his story is illustrative of our times and the corrosive marriage between manufactured culture wars and the attention economy. A person like Enes Kanter Freedom would have been impossible ten years ago. And ultimately, like a lot of people who go down his route, whatever 15 seconds of fame he is gaining in the immediacy of our online world comes with a cost.

Consider what he has lost. He turned his back on an NBA that allowed him to become rich and famous. He burned whatever bridges he built with anyone who is not a MAGA Republican. He squeezed all the juice out of his broadsides against the NBA and China, so he grabbed on to the juicy discourse around WNBA athletes and trans people. His efforts to stay current feel more like an ossified effort to freeze time in 2020, when leftist discourse was briefly ascendant online.

In doing all this, Enes Kanter Freedom made himself into a hypocrite: a proponent for free-speech telling Americans to shut up, an opponent of authoritarianism signing up for America’s authoritarian movement, a self-described advocate for women trying to score a few culture war points at the expense of the most successful women’s sports league in history. The man I met back in 2019 had a claim on moral authority; the man who makes himself the center of attention at the expense of a marginalized community and female athletes has squandered it.

The lesson is not simply about these three men because (let’s face it) many of us were a part of that era. It’s about why, and how, the energy unleashed by Trump’s first election failed to stop his return to office and to cohere into any kind of durable political movement.

Resistance 1.0

Let’s put ourselves back in that moment after Trump took office. It seemed like an aberration from the natural order of things. And there were plenty of things to grab on to by way of explanation. That Trump had lost the popular vote. That the Russians had interfered in the election to help Trump. That James Comey had inexplicably reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server on the eve of the election. That Clinton, for all her strengths as a public figure, wasn’t a good presidential candidate (and was the perfect establishment foil for Trump’s outsider energy).

All those things were true. But strange things happen in every presidential election. By clinging to the aberration narrative, Democrats (and never-Trump independents and Republicans) could simultaneously occupy a moral high ground without confronting the breadth of the rebuke and challenge posed by Trump’s ascent: the marshalling of populist outrage, the creeping disgust with American imperialism and inequality, the resiliency of racism and xenophobia, the fracturing of discourse in our social media age and the capacity of right-wing media to shape culture war discourse, just to name a few.

When Trump’s inauguration was marked by the enormous Women’s March and fabulist White House claims about crowd size, a certain zeitgeist was set: the people were resisting Trump and his operation was so dishonest and inept that it would ultimately implode. Maybe the Russia investigation would bring him down. Maybe congressional Republicans would find some breaking point. Whatever happened, surely the voters would rebuke this turn to incompetent authoritarianism. Meanwhile, all of us in the so-called Resistance could feel good about ourselves: we were on the right side of history.

There are many books to be written about what happened next (with many colorful characters). But for this moment, I’d highlight just a few archetypes of the Resistance embodied by Conway, Vindman, and Goldman.

Hyper-Online Resistance: Conway was at the vanguard of a certain kind of online personality: belligerently anti-Trump, humorous, and omnipresent on Twitter (remember when it was Twitter?). The fact that he was a Republican married to one of Trump’s chief strategists, Kellyanne Conway, only made the storyline more delicious. He was acting how many Democrats assumed official Republicans should respond to Trump’s behavior. When he co-founded the Lincoln Project with other Republican strategists, it seemed like the GOP’s pugilism could be enlisted for the virtuous end of cutting Trump down to size.

Except almost all this energy existed online or in cable news segments. There was no wave of Republicans away from Trump in the physical world. The attention generated could juice follower counts, sell books, and raise money, but it was inherently preaching to the hyper-political converted. Still, Democrats continued to celebrate Never Trumpers through 2024 – Liz Cheney was even enlisted as a leading surrogate for Kamala Harris – ignoring the fact that there was little evidence of a non-elite Never Trump coalition (and much evidence that people of all political persuasions weren’t nostalgic for the pre-Trump Republican Party).

To be honest, I have no idea what happened to the Lincoln Project, though I have vague memories of in-fighting and grifting. Conway’s campaign for Congress in New York City felt more like an attempt at recapturing the attention and relevance of the first Trump term than a real campaign. He finished with 6 percent of the vote.

The Virtuous Civil Servant: I have real admiration for what Alex Vindman did in coming forward as a whistleblower. He was right that Trump’s attempted shakedown of Volodymyr Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden was an abuse of presidential power for personal gain. He was willing to sacrifice his career as a military officer and national security official to do so. That decision set in motion Trump’s first impeachment (more on that in a moment).

Yet the fervent Democratic and Resistance media embrace of Vindman took turns that proved unfortunate. First, the constant refrain about a virtuous federal bureaucracy willing to stand up to the president played into Trump’s narrative of a Deep State hellbent on sabotaging him. Every letter signed by former officials condemning Trump (I signed a bunch of them – more on me later) reinforced that perception while making the Democrats seem like the party of the Establishment. The nexus to Russia fed a perception that the Resistance was obsessed with Putin and focused above all on preserving U.S. global hegemony, which most Americans have long tired of underwriting. As much as I love Larry David, Vindman’s (funny) appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm fed the perception of a marriage between Resistance politics and Hollywood celebrity, a playground for a small number of people compared to the wider electorate.

Vidman’s brother Eugene made it to Congress in 2024. But after Trump’s election, the mood shifted while the federal bureaucracy was DOGE’d and the National Security Council (where the Vindmans served) was largely dismantled. Alex Vindman raised a ton of money in his run for Senate in Florida. But why, exactly, was he running? Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon’s message was grittier, more in tune with the anger and hurt people are feeling at the community level with both Trump and a Democratic Party that failed them. She beat him by double digits.

Watergate 2.0: Dan Goldman rocketed to attention as the articulate and unflappable lead counsel for the first Trump impeachment (with Vindman as the star witness). His performance in those televised hearings spoke to a deep, psychic expectation of justice for Trump’s crimes. Americans with memories of Watergate had been taught that a president’s crimes, once exposed, carry consequences. And Americans of all ages have seen countless movies that end in a courtroom, with someone like Dan Goldman making the case against the bad guys.

Only this time, in the vagaries of American politics in the Trump era, the bad guy got off anyway. Yes, that was because of a recalcitrant Republican Senate (no surprise there). But a phone call to the Ukrainian president was also a harder story for Americans to understand than breaking into the DNC headquarters and lying about it; an impeachment on that basis likely reinforced a notion, among some voters, that the Resistance was so focused on taking down Trump that it ignored what was going on in their own lives and communities. Undoubtedly, the second Trump impeachment after January 6^th was more warranted and should have made a second Trump presidency impossible (like many things, we have Mitch McConnell to thank for that).

Dan Goldman was elected to Congress after his star turn in those impeachment hearings. But this year, he learned that Resistance cache is not enough to maintain one’s standing in a progressive district. His continued support for Israel despite the genocide in Gaza was a decisive factor in his loss, by over 20 points, to the Zohran Mamdani-backed Brad Lander in a House primary.

Lessons Learned

I am not writing this to pick on these guys. Let me briefly examine my own glass house. I (somehow) still have over half a million followers on X that are largely from Resistance era-posting. I have spoken often about the competence and patriotism of the federal bureaucracy (indeed, the debacle in Iran has a lot to do with the absence of a functioning NSC). I supported both Trump impeachments on the merits. But to get out of this era that has entrapped all of us, we must learn from things that went wrong.

So what lessons can we draw from these Resistance cautionary tales?

Online energy is not a shortcut to electoral success. Politics is about persuasion, organizing, policy, and storytelling that speaks to what matters in peoples’ lives. Yes, attack Trump’s venality and corruption, but connect it to the outcomes people hate: higher prices, dumb wars, runaway inequality. In the Resistance, politics – too often – became a pageant online and on television (venues that suited Trump). At its worst (remember Michael Avenatti?), it became a performative means for profit. Of course, that was not true for the majority of people involved. But there were enough.

Stop defending norms and institutions that have lost legitimacy. Again, Vindman did the right thing as a whistle blower. But the energy that met his action could tip into sanctimony. The rush of Democrats and Never Trumpers to embrace every civil servant and defend ever norm wasn’t hard to interpret as a ringing defense of an Establishment status quo that Americans are sick of – be it an expensive and imperialist foreign policy, an out-of-touch political-media class, or a neoliberal model that (ironically) Trump and his cronies embrace far more enthusiastically than Democrats.

There is no single anti-Trump “right side of history.” This one is a little more complicated, but it’s important. In the Trump era, just being against Trump can be enough for someone to become exalted: to write a bestseller, gain a huge profile, or even get elected to Congress. But there is more to history than one man. Sure, Liz Cheney helped lead the January 6^th Committee; she also vigorously supported every dumb war that this country has fought (and some we didn’t) – somehow, Democrats lost the plot in thinking her presence with Kamala Harris would be a vote-getter. Sure, Dan Goldman was right to prosecute Trump; he was also on the wrong side of history in supporting aid to a government that had killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza.

Trump is not an aberration. This is perhaps the most important, and damaging, flaw of the Resistance because it was the operating theory of the Democratic Party. Wait Trump out. Nominate a familiar, older politician in Joe Biden. Reach out to Republicans you believe that you can work with. Appoint competent technocrats and virtuous civil servants. Assume that history’s verdict on Trump and Trumpism is inevitable: through impeachments, the January 6^th Committee, multiple prosecutions.

As painful as it has been to learn, none of that was enough because Trump wasn’t an aberration. At minimum, he’s symbiotic with what has happened to the Republican Party and American conservatism in the polarized age of social media and right-wing media. More alarmingly, he reflects deeply embedded aspects of the American psyche (xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and racialized backlash; a cult of success and celebrity and an odd affinity for con men), a ferocious backlash to globalization and the elites who trumpeted it, and a uniquely stubborn brand of nationalist strongman politics that is ascendent around the globe.

Indeed, the fact that the Resistance is no longer a winning brand in the Democratic Party is a hopeful sign that people have learned these lessons. It will take a far deeper reckoning to uproot Trumpism than the shorter path that appeared available in 2017. They may not be household names, but in their own ways, the three people that defeated these Resistance heroes – Micah Lasher, Brad Lander, and Angie Nixon – reflect a party that is searching for more fundamental solutions to the problems facing the Democratic Party and the country. That’s good.

That’s a lot, I know. For the last few weeks, on the back end of a book tour and amidst the normal slowing down of summer, I’ve felt – more than usual – the sense that this new age of anxiety is trying to tell us something. So, as I’m in between subjects to write about, I thought I’d share a few observations about some of the bigger things happening around us.

First, it is unusually hot. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been in places – from London to Des Moines – under severe heat advisories, the temperature soaring over 100 degrees. No one thinks this heat is normal, and yet each year it gets hotter.

Of course, this is what we’ve been told would happen over the course of the 21^st century. Yet at the precise time that what was foreseen has happened, the belief that human beings should do something about climate change has receded. Meanwhile, it keeps getting hotter.

Second, war is being normalized. It is no longer shocking, or even surprising, to read about the latest escalation in Eastern Europe or the Middle East – two thirds of the map that made up the two World Wars. No one can say how these wars will end; instead, they become a kind of background noise, with diminishing focus on the people trapped within them.

Of course, most people do not want these or other wars to go on. Yet they do, acquiring a self-sustaining logic of their own. Consider the war against Iran, which now exists for a purpose – reopening the Strait of Hormuz – that did not exist at its outset (and which, conveniently for this essay, is about getting access to fossil fuels).

Third, the technologies remaking life are accelerating. No day passes without some new hyperbolic proclamation about the onset of Artificial Intelligence, while hundreds of billions of dollars are allocated for its deployment. No one – not even the best AI model – can explain what destination this is leading to; what’s clear is that no government is doing much at all to steer it.

Of course, we have recent experience of how new technologies can transform society. Social media has done more to change how humans interact with information, and each other, than anything before it. Yet we still don’t really understand its impact. My own memory of life before it is hazy even though it wasn’t that long ago.

There is much else happening in the world. But something about this nexus of climate, war, and technology feels much bigger than, say, Donald Trump hiding in a catering cart. Because it feels like the future that we are all hurtling towards, and yet that kind of future does not feel sustainable.

I am not suggesting we succumb to doomerism. What I do think we need to do is understand better what is happening, why it is happening, and what are potential remedies. And no, I am not going to do that in one post, nor would I ever claim to have all the answers. Indeed, part of what got us here is people who think they have all the answers.

Let me offer a couple of thoughts that have been ricocheting around my head in between algorithmically delivered images and information.

First, power is running amok like an uncaged predator. Yes, there have always been powerful and power-hungry people in the world. But there has been a steady dismantling of the guardrails around power, particularly in the United States. And now, there seems to be no end to the pursuit of domination.

We have recently seen the world’s first trillionaire (who also dismantled the world’s largest development agency). We have grown accustomed to an oligarch class that speaks openly about replacing human beings or ignoring the onset of climate change. We have a president who makes ignoring or weaponizing the law a feature of his administration. We have reclaimed the language or empire while launching two regime change wars within a few weeks of one another.

Ok, you might say, but it’s always been like this. But not when you consider how power, at this scale, is interacting with the transformation of the climate, the dangers of mass violence, or the subservience that human beings are coming to feel relative to technology.

Now, to put the onus on us: we all, in some way, plug into and sustain these systems. We fill up our tank and don’t want higher prices. We vote for the people who start the wars and pay the taxes for them. We share our data and download the newest models. We are, each in our own way, part of these systems which have acquired their self-sustaining logic.

So, clearly, there is no way off this trajectory without fundamentally altering our relationship to power. Unusual, particularly for Americans, it must be seen as something to be constrained instead of pursued.

Second, it feels increasingly clear that the course we are on is not one that most people want. Some of this is for obvious reasons. For instance: everything costs more while a handful of people vacuum up the wealth.

More fundamentally, though, people seem to be groping for a way to be – well – people amidst all this change. I’ve written recently about how much people seem to want to be together in public spaces (sometimes watching a Homeric epic nonetheless); to celebrate a common identity or watch the World Cup; to spend less time on screens or hating one another because it serves some political agenda. The horrors of Gaza changed public attitudes, if not policies. And yes, people would rather not live in extreme heat.

This impulse – to be human – is fundamentally connected to our problem with power. Because we will not find a way to preserve our humanity without figuring out a way to constrain those in power: who want to keep profiting off fossil fuels or starting profitable wars or insisting that new technologies could never be regulated.

This is power that insists you have no agency. But there is nothing inevitable about that, precisely because you are a part of the systems that sustain this power.

When I started writing this, I decided to title it the Age of Anxiety before remembering that was a poem by Auden.

We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die

These were not, upon first re-reading, reassuring words. But if you consider them closely, there is a useful lesson that carries something approximating hope.

We must first let some illusions die. About the way things have been. About the inevitability of a certain kind of progress, particularly the American brand. No, we cannot reverse change and return to some idealized past. But if we let that go, perhaps we can take control of change so that it serves us rather than ruining us.

The people who want you to think nothing can change are, most often, the people who are changing things – more often, for the worse. Look around (in the physical world, not the online one) and you will find people who want better outcomes, for themselves and for other people. The question is how to make the future look more like that than the one being foisted upon us.

There is something freeing about letting illusions die, even the ones that were comforting. Because then the self-perpetuation of systems is no longer a foregone conclusion. Then, and only then, can we figure out not just where we’re going but where we want to go.

FIFA, and its cartoonishly narcissistic president Gianni Infantino, are corrupt enoughas it is: Infantino’s awarding of the “FIFA Peace Prize” to Trump while he was ordering extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean demonstrated Infantino’s bottomless capacity for sycophancy to anyone more powerful than him. But consider whether any of the other remaining teams could have a leader put their thumb on the scale to get a red card suspended like Trump just did. International sports should be a refuge from politics, but once again that has proven too much to ask.

On the field and with the fans, this World Cup has delivered. From Messi to Mbappe, the world’s greatest players have shone. Upstarts like Cape Verde made us fall in love with underdogs anew. Traveling masses of fans have charmed host cities and been charmed in return. I am writing this on vacation with a lingering hangover from watching Erling Haaland blast Norway into the quarterfinals in a raucous Oslo bar (improbably, I heard renditions of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” sung in Norwegian) – one of millions of experiences that people around the world have had shifting collectively and communally from anxiety to misery to delirium watching grown men brilliantly play a game familiar to children everywhere.

The U.S. team has been one of the success stories. Watching them steamroll their way into the round of 16 has been a change from past tournaments when even victories were nail-biting affairs. This has been a long time coming: the product of years of investment in youth soccer, a growing fan base for the global game in America, the success of multiple U.S. women’s teams, and the delightful convergence of the men’s national team’s ascent with the United States sharing hosting duties. Success can also be attributed to the brilliant play of Folarin Balogun, whose decision to play for the U.S. injected a dose of dynamism to our offense.

I am not here to defend the decision to penalize Balogun with a red card in the previous round: calls that don’t go your way are a part of sports (I am still upset by the suspension of several Knicks in a playoff series with the Miami Heat nearly 30 years ago). Nor would I ever blame Balogun for the reprieve he has been granted from this penalty: like any other player, I am sure he wants to be on the field. Indeed, it would be unfair to penalize the American players for the conduct of their president or the policies of their government, just as it was unfair to force Iran’s players to commute to their games from Mexico or to bar a referee from Somalia from doing his job (yes, I know, politics has always been present at this World Cup).

But Trump’s decision to protest Balogun’s suspension to his peace prize pal Infantino has further injected geopolitics and a stench of corruption into a competition that should play out between the lines. Make no mistake: everyone loses in this scenario, including the U.S. team and Balogun. If we win, the rest of the world will understandably affix an asterisk to the achievement, another case of the Americans imposing their will on the rest of the world’s business. Meanwhile, Balogun will be associated with the unprecedented intervention of a president who is widely loathed around the globe by people who don’t have to sanewash his actions or caveat their disgust behind euphemisms like “critics say Trump….”

No, I am not concerned that Trump got a “win” – because no other U.S. president would sink to inserting themselves into disciplinary decisions made during sporting events. Nor do I believe that he was stirred to action by some innate love of soccer. In his own comments about the matter, Trump credentialed himself by saying, “I understand sports really well. Really well. That wasn’t a foul.” He then revealed the depth of his knowledge of the sport in question by revealing that he didn’t know that a red card carried a suspension with it.

It wasn’t love of the game that motivated Trump: he did it because he could, which is why he does a lot of things. Scanning the reports, I’ve noticed the U.S. government is going to great lengths to ascribe FIFA’s shocking decision to “suspend” the suspension that goes along with a red card to other interventions. This includes Commerce Secretary (and Epstein-island visitor) Howard Lutnick, some hedge fund manager named Scott Goodwin, a team of lawyers, and Andrew Giuliani – son of Rudy – who has the improbable if not fantastical job of being “the executive director of the White House Task Force for the World Cup.” Yes, I am sure that Andrew Giuliani’s powers of persuasion carried the day, and not Trump’s phone call to Infantino.

In its statement protesting the decision, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) said, “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.” Now that politics has entered the chat, let me extend that sentiment. Within the U.S., Donald Trump plays by a different set of rules – whether he is enriching himself and his family through the powers of his office or ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. Around the world, the U.S. plays by a different set of rules – whether it is blowing up those boats in the Caribbean, tariffing and sanctioning countries, or illegally bombing Iran and threatening to wipe out an entire civilization.

Indeed, the failure of powerful actors to play by the rules – and the absence of any guardians to enforce the rules – is why the world is in the chaotic mess that it is in today. That is why we turn to competitions like the World Cup which is supposed to be a respite from the harsher realities of our times: a competition where a victor emerges within an agreed upon amount of time, with agreed upon rules, and even a shared tendency to complain about the refs. Now, the World Cup feels like, well, the world that we are living in today, where corrupt and powerful people get to make opaque deals over the heads of the people, and the U.S. clumsily tries to dominate anything in its way.

I do not intend to dwell on this. I am writing this quickly, before the U.S.-Belgium game, because I’d prefer to move on from this sordid affair and get on with watching the games, supporting the players, and indulging in the antics of the fans. I’m sure that more magic awaits and that passions will continue to be stirred. But that alchemy will owe nothing to Trump or – despite his best efforts to make himself the face of the game – Infantino.

The magic of the World Cup is not about the powerful people who go to such lengths to control the game or make themselves the story: it is about the people playing it and the billions of fans supporting them.

It will take me some time to unpack it all. I travel a lot, albeit usually – admittedly – to coasts and other countries. The last time I saw America like this was in 2018 when my first book came out, still programmed to be the Obama defender, still stunned and incredulous at the transition to a new regime. Those audiences came out to bathe in nostalgia or tap into a Resistance energy that seems quaint in retrospect (Orange man bad). My second book was birthed amidst a COVID surge (remember Omicron?). I talked to people on Zoom, each event identical to the preceding one, eyes fixed to the green dot at the top of a computer screen, the questions curated from an unseen Chat. The catastrophic event that already happened to us, which we don’t care to think too much about.

This time felt different. At my events, people did not want to talk much about the present – they preferred the past (thankfully, I wrote a history book). A time where it’s more plausible to find hope, where you can feel proud of American identity: we are still a country that produced Franklin and Lincoln, Anna Dickinson (google her), Douglass, and King. But there’s no sugarcoating it: things don’t feel good out there. People are struggling to get by and make sense of what’s happening. But that only produced a more fervent energy everywhere I went – theaters and libraries, bookstores and churches. People want to be together in public spaces. People are hungry for community and solidarity. The same things – I suppose – that I’ve been looking for too.

Hard Times

Do you ever look around in airports? The stratification of society announces itself on the security lines. General Screening. Pre-Check. Touchless. CLEAR. The securitization of post-9/11 travel transformed into a means of sorting travelers and squeezing revenue from those who seek shorter lines. Your photo taken, eyes read, to be dumped into an ocean of data alongside your likes and dislikes, searches and secrets. Privacy and convenience a thing of the past. Someone is getting a government contract. Somewhere a data center is being built to store it all. The Markets inflate alongside the prices you pay. While I was traveling, Elon Musk became a trillionaire. More than once, I stopped to buy a sandwich, then stumbled away when I saw it cost twenty-five dollars. Air travel is more expensive, too, on account of the dumb war that raised the cost of jet fuel, a war that no one can understand except for its most fervent advocates online.

Sitting at the gates, I occasionally looked around to find most people staring blankly at their phones. Often, an eerie silence hung in the air. People did not look happier for this distraction. Still, I’d follow suit, plunging into one algorithm or another. This, I have come to realize, is my most potent addiction – more powerful than the lure of a drink or the Nicotine lozenges I carry around. One bright spot was the creeping enthusiasm I could feel for the World Cup over the last few weeks, as the airport bars showed games played by countries that many Americans would have trouble finding on a map. Perhaps people do want to share something in common with different people; or at least understand the joyful enthusiasm they are consuming online.

While taxi drivers once offered the knowing local commentary of the professional, Uber drivers offer a glimpse at people living in between situations. The elegant man whose restaurant went under along with downtown St. Louis. The guy who thought he’d finally scored when he inherited a house, only to realize that his other job didn’t come close to paying the mortgage. The Texas woman who moved to D.C. to work in commercial real estate but shared a story of meeting a gun in her face with a can of mace. She ended up taking the teenage miscreant home where the cops had to protect him from the wrath of his mother. People who don’t feel particularly advantaged by GDP growth or stock market records, tax cuts or infrastructure bills.

Politics, where I’ve made a living, was a strange presence, too. Somehow, it produced this economy, purchased by the wealthy who control it. In Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, people leaned in on the book signing line to tell me remarkably similar stories about the state legislature. Black people drawn out of representation. Women and LGBT people downgraded as citizens. Immigrants dehumanized and put in camps. Books banned. Public radio gutted. Social services and public transport hollowed out while the wealthy got a tax break. All of it made worse because the kind of people who choose to move to these states from New York or California were self-selecting into the new system, further entrenching the far right in power.

It reminded me, eerily, of traveling to talk with dissidents in authoritarian countries. America, it turns out, is not quite as exceptional as we were taught. On the highways and thoroughfares that took me back to the inevitably lonely hotel room, the most visible signs of America 250 were patriotic billboard ads for a local personal injury attorney.

Community

Yet everywhere I went, there was an energy, a defiance, a joy in public spaces. At a church in Coral Gables, I was met by a sign that read “A sanctuary for banned books.” At St. Mark’s in the Bowery, where Alan Ginsburg once read poetry and Patti Smith performed, the clergy had just protested conditions at the brutal Delaney Hall ICE detention center across the river. In the multi-racial, multi-generational audiences in these sanctuaries, I was reminded of what I experienced researching my book: that Christians, and other people of faith, have been foot soldiers in justice movements reaching all the way back to the founding.

In St. Louis and Cleveland, several hundred people packed into public libraries. I’d like to think it was about me. But as the events unfolded, there was something different in the occasional bursts of laughter, applause, and conversation in these rooms. It was the feeling of people wanting to be together with other people, and it was noticeably different than the many other times when I’ve travelled and spoken in years past. On the signing lines in these red states, person after person thanked me for coming there, but what I really sensed was gratitude for having a reason to be together. As one man who I’d never met messaged me after driving from Detroit to St. Louis: “Sat next to a very kind woman who took a shift off from her hospice job to come out and feel some hope from like-minded folks gathering together in a hard time.”

Yes, that’s what it felt like for me too. And in the America of 2026, the independent bookstores where I spoke felt like safe havens for both people and ideas. No, it’s not going too far to compare these spaces to those where people have regrouped amidst societal darkness in other countries amidst dangerous times. I’m mindful that there are less of them today than there were a decade ago. But still, people must congregate somewhere, and they seemed to be doing it in greater numbers and with greater vigor than in the past – to speak their hopes and fears out loud and interact with new ideas. I met young people running for office and organizers with stories of small victories; teachers trying to pass on a sense of a actual history to their students, and even the occasional celebrity looking for somewhere to blend in with a like-minded crowd.

And it occurred to me that any regeneration of America must once-more prioritize public spaces. Our past leaps forward tended to coincide with investments in libraries and parks, in fairgrounds and theaters and plazas – something well understood by the likes of FDR. These are not luxuries: they are essential to a democracy where citizenship is a shared enterprise. It’s no coincidence that they’ve been gutted for decades, dating back to Reagan’s ascent and the precursors to DOGE and the mass transfer of wealth from the working to the wealthy.

Our politicians and media spend so much time speaking to each other: talking into an algorithm, crafting talking points that no one would use in their own community, let alone their own dinner table. Meanwhile, we are living through times when we have never been so disconnected from one another. We stare at screens. We’re polarized by algorithms. We ask AI for recommendations of what to do. We train ourselves to hate or dehumanize other people. We seal ourselves off from the outside world: in cars or with AirPods. It doesn’t even occur to us that we might find what we’re looking for in our own neighbors. People are so hungry for connection, yet we don’t look around our communities to find where we might discover it. People want more variance and variety in their lives, but they don’t see what a gift our diversity is – we can access the whole world here, in America.

Indeed, my multiple times in New York coincided with the Knicks playoff run (you knew that was coming). And while I love my team, there was something else going on there. Masses of people just wanted to be happy together in public spaces, no matter their race, ethnicity, or socio-economic background. Something similar is happening with the World Cup. Pay attention to that impulse, because it may be what gets us out of this darkness. People wanting to be joyful. People wanting to feel passionate. People wanting to be together with other people.

Connections

For someone who spends a lot of time writing alone in rooms, or podcasting in a studio, or doing TV hits on my computer, it is a balm to meet the actual human beings on the other end of it all. I’ll have more to say about some of the questions I got, as they’ve given me much to think about.

What I was struck by the most from the many hundreds of small interactions I had along the way: how decent, dignified, and curious for connection most people are amidst these difficult times. Because of my background, there was no single profession I heard more on the signing lines than “former USAID worker” – literally dozens. And yet so many of these people are now working in their communities – as public health workers, in civic administrations, or teaching. I hope these people feel seen. I hope they know that each of them continues to do more for this world than Elon Musk: no amount of money or rocket to nowhere is of greater value than the difference you can make in other peoples’ lives.

I will remember the Palestinians who felt like they had to speak softly to me when they reached the front of the line – and the Lebanese woman who spoke loudly and with pride about her ancestral home. I will remember the students who said they are developing an interest in the wider world. I will remember the veterans who told me that they’re searching for some other way to serve. I will remember doctors who told me of cuts to their medical research, nurses working extra shifts, and public broadcasters who told me about doing more with less. I will remember parents who brought their kids, and kids who brought their parents. I could go on.

Here’s where I want to end with: this month still undigested, this 250^th anniversary still to come. When you talk a lot in public places you get a sense of what lands with people. In the past, it was anything – really – that recalled what this country can be. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass shaking hands in the White House after Lincoln’s second inaugural, the president imploring the former slave that he was more interested in his opinion of the speech than any other Americans; the former slave telling the president that it was a sacred effort. That happened in America, in the same White House where we now have a UFC fight.

In the present, it was Minneapolis – neighbors standing up for their neighbors: empowered, emboldened, made fearless by a sense of common humanity. Finding hope in other people.

There are a lot of people who want you to believe that this country is lost. That you have no agency. Oligarchs who want you to believe that nothing can change because they don’t want you to take away their wealth and power. Right-wing politicians who want you to hate one another - to blame vulnerable people or to look at anything other than what’s in front of your own eyes. Some people on the left who want you to look at this country and only see it sins. Your cynical or apathetic friend who wants you to stop caring about things beyond your immediate gaze. And on and on and on.

Don’t listen to them. Things are pretty fucked up in America right now – there’s no sugarcoating it. But it’s still a country filled with decent, dignified, and curious people – and it’s still a place where we have agency, if we choose to use it. We just need something to believe in. Above all, we need each other.

The Knicks coming back from 29 points down has not been my experience of fandom, even if Knicks fans have learned that there is something different about this particular team and its players. But I want to share something about what this means beyond the celebrities and viral videos and even the games. For me, and so many others, this Knicks run is also a story about identity, community, and connection to something bigger than yourself. It’s a story about New York City, and as with all things New York, that means it’s a story about everything.

Identity

The first thing I remember writing was a short story about my sneakers in the fourth grade. They were named Gerald and Mark after the Knicks starting back court: Gerald Wilkins and Mark Jackson. My teacher was impressed by this imaginative leap but there was nothing unusual about it to me: giving my sneakers the names and personalities of my favorite players was a way to spend more time with them in between games – even as the team finished with a losing record.

I came of age with the 90s Knicks – a gritty, grind-it-out, and always good team that never made it to the top. These were tough guys who weren’t blessed with the talent of their rivals, most prominently Michael Jordan. They won with defense, rebounding, relentless effort, and a bruising physicality that seemed to mirror the city before Manhattan’s makeover under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Even our one star, Patrick Ewing, seemed like he had to fight a little harder to get points: sweat-drenched, he’d put his shoulder down and lumber straight into the defense, carrying the weight of millions of people on his back before flinging a shot in the direction of the basket. My favorite Knicks were the ones who came out of nowhere: undrafted John Starks and third-rounder Anthony Mason, journeymen who found a way to become All Star role players in New York.

I was lucky enough to have a dad who bought into a share of season tickets. In my teenage years, when talking to adults became confounding, there were always games at the Garden to share, the unspoken language of trying to will the Knicks to victory with chants of De-Fense. From those seats, we saw Starks dunk over Jordan to seal a playoff win; we also saw Charles Smith helplessly miss five layups to lose a pivotal Game 5 against the Bulls. Losing only seemed to intensify my connection to the team. When we finally reached the Finals in 1994 (with Jordan taking a break to play baseball), I watched Starks shoot 2-18 in Game 7 (0-11 from 3). The rational thing to do would have been to lament this irrational shooting which likely cost us a championship; instead, I was proud of his effort. I remember wandering barefoot onto Manhattan streets after the game, the phrase “keep shooting, John” mysteriously in my head.

And so it went. We lost Pat Riley to Miami and brawled our way through successive playoff matchups with the Heat – with coach Jeff Van Gundy, dressed like a disheveled and coke-addled trader, clinging to Alonzo Mourning’s leg. We traded playoff wins and losses with Reggie Miller, finally reaching another Finals by beating the Pacers in 1999 after Ewing tore his Achilles – assuring we would lose to a Spurs team graced by two big men, David Robinson and Tim Duncan. We descended into decades of tragicomical mediocrity under a Bond-villain owner and a procession of declining coaches, aging stars, freak injuries, and off-court soap operas. Somehow, this only heightened the loyalty of fans who could become irrationally excited about the flickering promise of one ill-considered draft pick after another.

To identify as a Knicks fan through all those years was a strange and stubborn thing to do, like Starks shooting eighteen times in Game 7. But isn’t the belief in something unseen the very essence of faith?

Community

The Knicks are a singular religion in New York.

Baseball loyalties have always been divided – between Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, and then Yankees and Mets. Football is similarly split between Giants and Jets, both of whom play in New Jersey. Hockey has its die-hard Rangers fans but, with apologies to some of my friends, the sport has always been niche. New York is a basketball town, littered with outdoor courts that require no fee or equipment to play other than courage, where everyone feels a stake in the Knicks – as the Nets discovered after they moved from Jersey to Brooklyn.

It helps that the Knicks play in Madison Square Garden, the literal heart of the city, right on top of Penn Station. This is a place you also go to see other things: I saw the Big Apple Circus there as a kid and attended my first rock concert as a teenager (Dire Straits) after which I got buzzed for the first time (in the upstairs dining area of Sbarro). But despite all the other events, and that bond-villain who owns MSG, the building has always belonged to the Knicks. As everyone is seeing once more, there’s no sound, no energy, no feeling like MSG during a basketball game.

For all the focus on the resale prices at these Finals, my memory of MSG was of a place where people from all over the city came after work to be together. And if you couldn’t make it or afford the price, there was always a television or radio somewhere where you could catch the game or strike up a conversation about what the team was doing right or – more often – wrong.

This, more than anything else, is what fuses my love of the team and place. New York, perhaps more than any city on Earth, encompasses sprawling diversity: of race, religion, and ethnicity; of income and circumstance; of natives and newcomers; of highs and lows, heartbreak and hope. The Knicks are a thing that everyone can share – the great leveler. I’ve had conversations about the Knicks with homeless people and billionaires, doormen who’ve been on the job for decades and little kids who probably name their sneakers after players born decades after me. The team connects New Yorkers to one another and to the city’s past and future.

Like so much in America, the 21^st century has been a time of painful transformations in New York. In many ways, the century – and so many wars that have marred it – began with 9/11. The Bloomberg years saw the construction of high-end public spaces and the rise of Billionaire’s Row south of Central Park, colorless monuments to wealth and ego and oligarchy – be in American, Russian or Chinese. Financial capitalism supplanted some of the city’s working and striving-class ethos. A New Yorker, Donald Trump, was rejected by his hometown and seems intent on taking it out on the rest of the world (including Knicks fans, who knew intuitively that he would wreck their karmic winning streak in Game 3). The city is harder to afford than ever before as evidenced by the price of getting into the Garden.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Knicks have struggled throughout most of this century, as if the team was mirroring the convulsions happening outside of MSG. That is until a second-round draft pick named Jalen Brunson came to town and then reunited with a group of friends to form the team’s core. And for all the snapshots of celebrity-row, the genuine images of this playoff run are of people of every kind celebrating in bars and parks and subways and streets. It’s a cathartic coming together, an assertion of community that has far-too-often been lost in America, as if the city is exorcising not just the demons of sports but of a world gone wrong.

My personal favorite was the video of a group of Knicks revelers chanting U-P-S! at a delivery truck on the Upper West Side after Game 4’s comeback win. It’s the kind of delirious gesture that was immediately familiar to me, something that made innate sense. Because the Knicks won. Because O.G. won it with that tip-in. Because it’s fun to chant with strangers. Because we’re all probably a little drunk. Because we want to forget whatever pain there is until morning. Because we’ve seen a million of those trucks blocking traffic while double-parked at rush-hour. Because of course we assume, we know, that driver is a Knicks fan too. And we love him for it.

Exile

I moved away from New York not long after 9/11. I reoriented my entire existence: for better and worse, away from a life of outer-borough writing and into an unlikely career tied up with American national security. If I’m honest, my motivation wasn’t so much patriotism. I had witnessed my city, the place I love more than any other, the place that made me who I was, attacked. When I packed up my Astoria apartment, I assumed that I’d be back in a few years. But life usually has more in store for you than you can imagine as a 24-year-old.

Of course, I go back constantly. From D.C., weekends on the Accella or the Turnpike, barreling back into the city. From L.A., weeks over the summer and holidays where I can feel like myself again walking the endless streets. My parents still live in the apartment where I was born, the one where my room was plastered with Knicks posters – Gerald Wilkins and Mark Jackson dressed as fighter pilots (“The Bomb Squad”) or John Starks improbably rising over Michael Jordan (“The Dunk”). Some people relax when they step into nature; I always exhale a little differently when I enter the din of Penn Station or emerge from the Lincoln Tunnel.

But most of the time, when I’m away, nothing connects me to the city like sports. The one non-negotiable aspect of my daughter’s lives is that they are Knicks and Mets fans, even if they mainly humor my obsessions. One of the few blessings of technology is that I can watch every Knicks game with the same announcers who were there on local cable television when I left, Mike Breen and Clyde Frazier. Those broadcasts are like rituals transporting me back to the city, back to that energy, back to childhood. Every game is accompanied by a group text that keeps me in touch with my high school friends as if we were still sixteen.

As luck would have it, four of us were able to watch the second half of Game 1 together in my friend’s Manhattan apartment. I showed up just after halftime from my book event at the 92^nd Street Y. Stressed out from missing part of the game and the Spurs third quarter lead, I poured a vodka on the rocks. Then Brunson started scoring and the Knicks clawed their way into the lead. Surely the vodka played a part (this superstition will be familiar to any fan). I refilled and sipped nervously. When Brunson hit an insane dagger fade-away with 38 seconds to go, the cheering from every corner of the city – from bars and watch parties and other apartments – washed in through the 8^th floor window like we were all together. Because we were.

The Parking Lot

Game 4 also conflicted with a book event, this time at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madeira. I noticed one guy in the audience wearing a Knicks jersey, number 20 (Alan Houston, I nodded with respect). As I spoke about American history and identity, I stole occasional glimpses at the score. Spurs up 10. Spurs up 20. Spurs up 29. I didn’t rush through the book-signing line like I intended. I had faith in the Knicks, but clearly not quite enough.

By the time I walked out into the parking lot I noticed that the Knicks had it under 20. I jumped on the group text. “Ben the vodka.” Pulling the game up on Hulu, I dutifully walked into a Total Wine which was (by the grace of a higher power?) next door. I grabbed a few mini-Belvederes, made my way back into the parking lot, and called an Uber. When the Knicks cut it to 15, I cancelled the Uber. The parking lot was working. I paced my way over to a curb and sat down.

If the anonymous suburban sprawl of that parking lot accentuated my distance from New York, the image of the Garden and the sound of Mike Breen’s voice was like the tether that holds an astronaut from drifting off into space. Shot by shot, stop by stop, the Knicks were clawing their way back. It wasn’t the prettiest comeback, which seemed fitting. Without ice, a sip of vodka was more something to be endured than enjoyed. When Josh Hart blew a layup that would have sent the arena into delirium, I immediately forgave him.

When I was 8 years-old, I attended Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, the game when the Mets came back from two runs down with two outs and the bases empty to beat the Red Sox. Walking to the subway, I still remember my father warning me not to get used to this kind of thing because sports rarely offers up those endings. He was right. 1986 is the last year that a team I rooted for one the championship.

As O.G. Anunoby prepared to inbound the ball with the Knicks down by 1, it all felt like too much. “I believe” one friend texted on the group thread. “I believe” I wrote back. I paced the parking lot as Brunson hoisted a three pointer and barely saw what happened on my small screen when O.G. flew from nowhere to tap it in, the kind of thing that only seemed to happen for other teams from other places. I closed my eyes and could feel, from all that distance, the city explode: so many years of mediocrity, so much endured, so many individual journeys converging into a moment that bound us all together. The kind of thing that only sports can offer; the kind of noise that only New York can make, the kind I could hear and feel over 2000 miles away.

There are still identities that can connect you to a larger whole. There are still places that we can call home, wherever we are. There are still reasons for hope, no matter how far you fall behind. I believe.

As I was working on All We Say (out May 26!), I thought about how I taught myself to write speeches, how that vocation connected me to American history, and how we can learn from the past today.

How to write for someone else

That first speechwriting job was for Lee Hamilton. After thirty-four years representing southern Indiana in Congress, he had ascended to the status of Washington Wise Man – running a think tank, writing opinion pieces, and explaining the post-9/11 reality to audiences across the country. To prepare, I read all of Hamilton’s speeches and writings online. He was an amiable man with the practiced social air of a long-time politician: interactions tended to be gracious but economical. His guidance to me often came in handwritten notes and blank, white sheets of paper. His rhetoric did not soar, but there was a consistent voice: plainspoken, pragmatic, direct. A moderate, midwestern ex-Congressman explaining foreign affairs in a language that ordinary people could understand. Short sentences. Few adjectives. No adverbs or acronyms. I, a New Yorker, would be writing in this midwestern voice for a man from a place I’d never been.

As the years went by, I mixed in small bursts of ambition. A quote from the American canon – Benjamin Franklin or Franklin Roosevelt – to give the material some lift. A story from a firefighter or whistleblower taken from testimony received by the 9/11 Commission, which Hamilton co-chaired – to give the material some texture and humanity. None of these could be categorized as great speeches. They were meant to inform, enlighten, and provoke thought – not to inspire.

That changed when I was hired as a speechwriter for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2007. Suddenly, in place of an elderly, white, ex-congressman from a rural constituency, I would be writing in the voice of a charismatic, young, Black presidential candidate from Chicago. I was hired because of my capacity to communicate foreign policy in a language that people could understand. But I would have to write about all the topics that come up in a presidential campaign, for a politician who owed his political ascent to soaring speeches, playing for the highest stakes possible back when the wrong turn of phrase could send a campaign into a spiral (a quaint notion in our Trumpian era).

Obama provided guidance on what he wanted to say. But time was a precious commodity for a presidential candidate, so you were lucky to get thirty minutes of direction on the phone before sitting down to write a major speech; for more routine speeches, you’d get none. So, I studied all of Obama’s speeches. I read – and reread – his two autobiographies which became a rich source material to understand the voice, worldview, and lived experience of my boss (sometimes I’d lift phrases or whole paragraphs from those books). I spent many hours in an archive of his interviews, picking out extemporaneously spoken lines to use in speeches. But this was still incomplete.

Using History

To capture Obama’s voice, our small speechwriting team led by Jon Favreau had to reach beyond the words that Obama had spoken and written. To understand his cadence, we had to reach back into the rhetoric of the Black church which infused his capacity to uplift an audience – to the convention speeches of Jesse Jackson, the sermons of Martin Luther King, all the way back to the abolitionist jeremiads of Frederick Douglass. To find a template for a young, inspiring, Democratic candidate for president, we reached into the rich wells of the Kennedy years – to the aspirational language of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign, and the more radical truth-telling of Bobby Kennedy before he was killed in 1968.

I never felt less alone as a writer. Each time I sat down to write a speech, it was like I was joined by ghosts. Words which had been spoken before I was born had cut clear grooves underneath the surface of American life, and those words flowed like currents into Obama’s speeches. People who understood this gravitated to the campaign. For instance, Dick Goodwin, the writer for some of Bobby Kennedy’s greatest speeches, took our speechwriting team to lunch in Chicago alongside his irrepressible wife, the historian Doris Kearns. Goodwin smiled knowingly and wearily at us, as if seeing both the youthful euphoria of the moment we inhabited and the inevitable heartbreak that follows any progressive ascent in American politics.

In that 2008 campaign, Obama melded together different currents – Black and white, the voice of an activist and the ambition of a politician – into a distinct political identity. No matter who wrote them, they were his words, not ours: they would not have worked coming from a different politician and would have sounded ridiculous being read aloud by someone like me. He channeled the language of the civil rights movement into the mainstream of American politics, while casting himself simultaneously as an underdog outsider and a figure at ease with the pursuit of power. When he spoke soaringly ambitious words – It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality – they were authentic. They sounded like Barack Obama.

When we entered the White House in 2009, I continued to draw on past American speeches. If Obama was going to deliver a speech in another country, I read all the speeches I could find delivered by presidents and prominent Americans in that country. If he was going to console the nation, I read speeches delivered in the aftermath of tragedies from history – Reagan after the Challenger disaster, Bobby Kennedy after the King assassination. If he was going to send troops to war, I read the words that had sent Americans off to fight in the battles of the past. If he was going to speak about that most complicated of subjects – race and what it means to be American – I surveyed the words that Americans had spoken at previous moments of contested identity: at our founding, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, or through the upheaval of the 1960s. I came to see each Obama speech as telling one big story, like chapters in a book.

In addition to mining the past for ideas to tell that story, it was comforting to be reminded that the present is never quite as exceptional as it feels. Through all those words spoken to persuade different audiences throughout American history, I found common arguments and counterarguments, and different political and social movements which appeared and reappeared in different peoples’ voices. I came to appreciate how some speeches served as a mirror which revealed what kind of country the United States was at a given moment, while also changing it – carving out new grooves under the surface of American life which could propel currents which reached all the way to the present day.

So, yes: to be credible, a speech must sound like it can only be delivered by the person speaking – drawing on their experiences, influences, and ambitions. But I came to feel I was discovering a different alchemy in some American speeches. The speaker is not just in conversation with an audience – he or she is also in conversation with the vast American past, the words spoken before, the movements that produced those words, and the oppositional forces which confront them. Obama could not have succeeded as a politician without oratory that drew upon his own unusual biography, the civil rights movement and the abolitionism that preceded it, and the New Deal populism and Kennedy mystique which shaped the Democratic Party in the 20^th century. The words were a product of both the man and a set of movements.

Visiting Lincoln

During my eight years working on speeches in the White House, there were nights when bouts of writers’ block compelled me to walk the short distance to the Lincoln Memorial to gaze up at the words of the second inaugural address etched into marble. This was not an exercise in distraction or procrastination. In those words, there seemed to be an invisible current of meaning which could be tapped, an articulation of what it meant to be American which spoke with the authority of an ancient tablet carrying a living truth.

The West Wing became an eerie place at night. The bustle receded into a handful of tours that staff could give; then to custodial staff running oversized vacuums; then to the uniformed man who took away burn bags filled with classified documents that had to be discarded in fire, even as the value of their information would inevitably burn out. Time passes. Today’s secrets become tomorrow’s history. Presidents come and go – something the current president is fighting against with his fixation on ballrooms and arches.

Lincoln used to brood into the night in the residence, writing meditations to himself. Like anyone else who works in the White House, he was a temporary employee, fated to disappear into the vastness of the American experience. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God,” he once jotted down in those rooms. “Both may be, and one must be, wrong. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.”

With that kind of searching feeling, I would make my way to the Lincoln Memorial. It only took a few minutes, but the walk was a passage through America’s complicated history. You start down 17^th street and pass the stately headquarters of the Organization of American States, an institution which represents the tension between America’s stated intention to foster cooperation among nations and its imperial habit of trying to control them. Once onto the national mall, you walk through the Constitutional Gardens, a bucolic homage to the document which bound us into a Republic of laws but left unresolved the status of slavery which tore the Republic apart. You sink down a pathway next to a black wall with the names of every American who died in Vietnam, the smallness of the letters in stark contrast to the enormity of the mistake for which they died. Then, you reach an illuminated, neoclassical temple.

Like so many Washington monuments, the Lincoln memorial is a self-assured effort to associate the country with the Greeks and Romans – the origins of the modern idea of the West, and the peculiar blend of democracy and empire, citizenship and supremacy, that it represents. On the steps of that temple, Martin Luther King declared that he had come to “cash a check” on the promissory note that all men are created equal and guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “It is obvious today,” King pronounced, “that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” That hard reality contrasted with his dream of a future in which, “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” One hundred years after Lincoln, King also spoke the words of a prophet, demanding that the gap between America’s stated purpose and its lived reality be closed, that the promissory note be honored. King, like Lincoln, would be felled by a white supremacist’s bullet.

At the top of the steps, Lincoln sits on a throne that is offset by the humility in his downcast eyes. As President, Lincoln tried to align his choices with his evolving understanding of God’s will. He preferred to save the Union without resorting to violence, but that effort failed. He hoped to bring the war to a swift conclusion, but those hopes were also dashed. He delayed freeing the slaves before embracing emancipation as a wartime necessity. By the dusk of the war, though, he forged a more conclusive path: he became the Commander-in-Chief of a military waging a righteous and total war of physical and moral conquest against not just secession but slavery itself. A war of emancipation not just for the slaves but for the nation which had enslaved them. Lincoln understood that the meaning of the war had become inexorably tied to the meaning of America itself; far beyond saving the Union, it was a war about what kind of country we were, and what kind of country we could become.

Like so many national memorials, the Lincoln Memorial tries to express a contested history through a symbol of grandeur. Father Abraham, who died for our sins before ascending to his throne. An imperial democracy, risen from the ashes. But words, more easily than statues, contain multitudinous truths. And on the two walls facing one another adjacent to Lincoln’s statue are his own efforts to make sense of, and resolve, America’s contested history. On one wall, the Gettysburg address relates in remarkable brevity the best version of America’s founding purpose: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. On the other, the more enigmatic oration of the second inaugural address. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other,” Lincoln said, echoing the meditation he had written when the war was in doubt. But the South, he noted cuttingly, prayed to that God while fighting to defend human slavery. Still, he was quick to indicate that justice was in the hands of a higher power than his own: “let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

Then, Lincoln spoke words which resolved the question that had churned in his mind. Why had God brought all this suffering upon Americans? He looked out at an audience that included widows and wounded veterans; white supremacists and abolitionists; uniformed troops and freed slaves. He started with poetic words they all wanted to hear. “Fondly do we hope – fervently do we pray – that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” But then, like a prophet emerging from a desert of testing, he spoke the words that they needed to know. This is the most radical sentence ever uttered by an American President: Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

I liked how late at night I could sometimes be the only person standing there, looking up at this startling invocation of God’s judgment against the people who Lincoln led. So much of the American story has been about the gap between who we say we are and who we actually are; for a precious moment, Lincoln’s speech closed that gap. By taking responsibility for the worst part of American identity, he showed Americans a pathway to “bind up the nation’s wounds;” to become who we say we are.

Looking Back to Move Forward

It’s dark out there in America today. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t telling you the full truth, the hard truth. And you don’t need me to tell you that either – you can feel it all around you.

As a former Obama speechwriter, I am often asked to offer people some hope at a time when there is little. Yet one reason that I think people feel a sense of hopelessness is that we have become stuck in an interminable present. We are prisoners of phones, the Internet, the endless feedback loop that reinforces the toxicity of our discourse.

This is precisely the time to look somewhere other than the present for hope. To the past, when people faced circumstances more dire than our own, and somehow spoke their way out of them. There is wisdom to be found alongside courage. There are blueprints to how we can treat one another better and build a more just and equal society. There is a reckoning with what’s wrong about us that can allow us to try - at least - to make things right. There are people like Lincoln and Kennedy who can still speak to us today, counter-programming the slop that we get from too many of our leaders. There are men and women who can once again make you feel pride, and not shame, in that peculiar identity: American.

There are those currents that run underneath American life, waiting to be tapped.

Writing a book is like being in a relationship. You are going to live with this thing for a long time (four years, in this case). You are going to engage with it every day. You are going to bring all your own experiences, eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses to it. It’s going to be in your mind when you go for a run, wake up in the middle of the night, or stare at your computer. It’s going to be a subject of conversation, a source of anxiety, and a repository for your beliefs while changing you in the process. And then you let it go, leaving it to readers and reviewers who will respond to it in their own way.

Before that happens, let me tell you about my relationship with this book.

Turning to History

What became All We Say began as I was writing my last book about the rise of authoritarianism. While researching, reporting, and writing about the playbook that brought Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump to power, I kept bumping into history.

These autocrats shared certain political strategies. They were also similarly invested in rewriting history, remaking the stories of their respective countries into prequels that justified their power. Orban tapped into a blood and soil Hungarian nationalism wounded by the country’s dismemberment after World War I. Putin framed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a catastrophic event which he summarized in a chilling lesson: “We were weak, and the weak are beaten.” Xi dialed up the role of the Chinese Communist Party in defending the nation against adversaries intent on dismembering it – be they Hong Kong democrats, Uighur Muslims, or a colonialist West and Japan. Trump promised a return to an idealized past before the Civil Rights movement and New Deal: Make America Great Again.

In short, history was not a settled narrative – it was a living thing that could be marshalled to shape the future. Think of it this way: we tend to experience politics as a contest taking place in the present, but each nation’s identity is shaped by currents that reach back into our shared past. A strongman taps into those currents to make their ascendancy the inevitable outcome of the story: they will avenge, correct, guard against, or return to history. Alternatively, progressives tap into different currents. Barack Obama cast himself in a continuum that reached back through America’s social justice movements – the next step in a story of progress, of forging a “more perfect union.”

Obama and Trump, I realized, represented two entirely different ways of interpreting American history and applying it to the present. A story of progressive nationalism versus a story of entrenched or reactionary nationalism. I wanted to understand that argument - the argument we have been having in the 21^st century – by following those currents all the way back to our founding.

I wanted to understand the present by exploring the past.

Choosing Speeches

I am not an historian, but I am a speechwriter. For ten years, through the Obama campaign and White House, I tried to help my boss redirect American history with words. Speeches, I knew, offered a unique – and often entertaining – way to understand our history.

A speech is history in the present tense. In a democracy, it is the purest form of persuasion: you stand in front of a group of people and try to convince them to believe something and to do something about it. Speeches have started wars and elected presidents; sparked movements and the backlashes to those movements. Try to imagine American identity without Lincoln’s second inaugural address or King’s “I Have a Dream” speech? Or try to imagine the presidencies of Kennedy, Reagan or Obama without them? You can’t, because they wouldn’t have happened without the power of spoken words.

So, I decided to write a book that would relive American history through a certain number of speeches. Not an anthology. My intention was to curate a list of speeches that told the story of America and the debates that we’ve had over our identity. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? For each speech, I knew there would be a rich backstory. About the life of the speaker that shaped their words. About what was happening in the country at the time the speech was given. About the social or political movements that fed into – and out of – the speech, forming those currents that lead up to the present day.

But first I had to choose the speeches. It took me a full year. With the help of a research assistant (hi Hannah Dobie) I read over a hundred speeches. The goal was not to find the greatest speeches – it was to encompass the debates we’ve been having as a nation that was not founded upon a fixed territorial, ethnic, or religious identity. I wanted to include people of different races and genders; liberals and conservatives; white supremacists and reformers; activists and politicians. I wanted famous speeches and ones forgotten by history.

The speech that unlocked it all was Benjamin Franklin’s closing argument on behalf of the Constitution. It’s wise, funny, and singular. It makes no mention of the content of the Constitution itself but rather defends the virtue of compromise. Indeed, Franklin acknowledges the document’s imperfections. “When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom,” Franklin argued, “you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?”

The compromise embedded in the Constitution made the United States possible. It also set in motion all the conflict and competition to come because those men compromised about big things: slavery and representation; the nature of citizenship and naturalization. From there, fifteen speeches fell into place like pieces of a puzzle forming a picture of America. It wasn’t easy: for instance, I was struck by how, until fairly recently, the words spoken by women were often absent from recorded discourse. Like America itself, the picture formed by these speeches was far from perfect, but it was sprawling and contradictory: beautiful and ugly, inspiring and infuriating, immensely rich and yet still unfinished.

Bird by Bird

One of my favorite books about writing is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. The title is taken from advice that her writer father offered when she was struggling with a report about birds. “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” She includes similar advice from E.L. Doctorow who I studied under at New York University while getting an MFA in Fiction Writing. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I have written all three of my books this way. Each chapter is a single bird or the part of the road illuminated by headlights. Chapter by chapter is how I go. For a work of history, that meant more reading than writing. For each speech, I read whatever biographies I could for the speaker, supplemented by books about movements or periods of history. For some, I travelled – to the Seneca nation, for instance, or to the house of Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy. My notes became outlines which became chapters. For months at a time, I lived with these people from history – reading, thinking, and writing about them. Bird by bird.

No chapter ended how I thought it would at the beginning. Franklin the man turned out to be more interesting than the myth, gradually shaking off his own prejudices until the final act of his public life was petitioning Congress to abolish slavery – demonstrating that he did not see the Constitution as anywhere near the final draft of history. Red Jacket, the Seneca chief, delivered a speech turning away a white missionary that was chillingly contemporary in its simple but devastating rebuke of the hypocrisy of white supremacy. Maria Stewart, a penniless Black woman in 1830s Boston, demanded not just abolition but the empowerment of Black people and women as intertwined, and spent the rest of her life quietly practicing what she had preached. Alexander Stephens unabashedly cast slavery as a progressive discovery of the Enlightenment, calling it the cornerstone of the Confederacy before repackaging it as states’ rights after the war. Lincoln’s second inaugural came alive for me as a painfully personal reckoning with Civil War, slavery, and our greatest president’s own story of trauma, religiosity, and evolution to abolitionism which led to his assassination. And that’s just the first third.

As the book progressed, I discovered connective tissue across different eras. How 19^th century populism blended resentment of elites with a white working-class resentment of immigrants and civil rights (sound familiar?). How the interaction between the activist King and politician Kennedy mirrored the ways that the activist Frederick Douglass interacted with Lincoln. How a speech like Douglass’s “Composite Nation” address defending Chinese immigration as central to multi-racial democracy could appear to be defeated in its time but foreshadowed the demographics that comprise America today. History is never settled.

I also found how much the medium often shaped the message. Franklin’s era prized carefully worded arguments that could be reprinted in newspapers. Douglass’s saw speakers emerge as celebrities, traveling from town to town delivering messages of reform over and over again. With radio, the plain-spoken explanation of FDR was ascendant; with television, the charisma of King, Kennedy and Dolores Huerta jumped off the screen. And now, with the Internet and social media shrinking speeches into viral clips designed to enrage or reinforce pre-existing views, we get Donald Trump – and lose the capacity to talk to one another, or listen to an entire argument, in the process.

Along the way, my own views about America changed. I was finally and fully disabused of any notions of the inevitability of progress or the inherent goodness of the American experiment. But I was also moved, again and again, by the audacity of those Americans who have insisted that we become better and, quite literally, spoke their beliefs into movements that changed things by insisting that America be held accountable to the story we tell ourselves: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

The title honors that activist part of our history. “All we say to America,” King said the night before he was killed, “is be true to what you said on paper!” Now, as much as ever, those words resonate precisely because of the gap between the reality and the aspiration, and because of the absence of storytelling that closes that gap.

Returning to the Present

Inevitably, the present ended up intruding on my journey into the past. While I was writing the book, Donald Trump was re-elected.

Initially, my book was going to end with Obama’s 2015 speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. It’s Obama’s favorite speech that he gave – a celebration of the triumph of America’s activist past: the marchers (led by John Lewis) confronting the forces of repression who attacked them. America’s two stories clashing on a bridge named for a Confederate veteran, with the civil rights movement winning through non-violent direct action.

Trump’s election scrambled my plan. Would a triumphant speech delivered in 2015 make a fitting end to a book released amidst the resurgence of white nationalism and the capture of our national story by a strongman who railed against DEI and promised to undo many of the gains of the civil rights movement? Painfully, I swapped out the Selma speech for Obama’s 2008 speech on race in which he spoke honestly and viscerally about our “racial stalemate” – the persistence of structural inequality for Blacks, the legitimate grievances of a white working class that doesn’t feel “particularly privileged by their race,” and the necessity of multi-racial solidarity to achieve multi-racial democracy that can solve the nation’s intractable problems.

Then, I ended the book with Donald Trump’s second inaugural address (while taking out Pat Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican convention, a precursor to Trump and MAGA). It makes for a jarring conclusion to a single volume history of the United States. But that is where we are. We cannot change the story without looking squarely and honestly at how we got here and what it means. Trump, like any demagogue, is both a conductor of our national discourse and a mirror held up to the nation. By situating him in the continuum of our history, we can see the deep roots of the MAGA movement in our past, while also recognizing just how extreme our present moment is in its danger.

Of course, Trump is not the end of the story. He is no more permanent than anyone else in my book despite his best efforts to make you think that history somehow ended with his election. That, too, is a lesson from writing this book – and a hopeful one. The wheel of history turns. One story appears ascendant until it doesn’t. Reactionary forces claw back power until a movement emerges to move us forward.

More than when I started this book, I believe that speeches will be essential to making that change. I was mindful that I was writing All We Say at a time when the art of political speaking has receded. But there is simply no other way to tell a story that answers those questions – What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? – without speeches. You can’t do it in a social media post or an op-ed. You have to stand in front of other Americans and say what you believe: to start a movement, to win an election, to make people believe in a future that is different from the present while tapping into those activist currents from our past.

I have now written a memoir of my time in the White House, a searching account of the rise of global authoritarianism, and now a book about speeches and American history. To me, they form a trilogy tapping into my various past identities: White House staffer, foreign policy advisor, speechwriter.

I now feel like I am ready to let go of that past.

I am no longer the young man who set out on an idealistic journey on the Obama campaign in 2007, or the weathered and pugnacious partisan who stepped out of the White House in 2017. America has exceeded my expectations and broken my heart; it has revealed itself as a story that, like the past itself, is full of contradictions and competing truths. Yet whatever I do going forward, I will still carry with me two beliefs. Words matter. And America is worth fighting for, because it is ultimately about whether a better story can prevail – in this country, and in the wider world that this country’s citizenry embodies.

The final furniture to move was my desk and chair. Something about seeing the room stripped to these bare essentials hit me. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote for the literary journal and school newspaper in high school, majored in English in college, and got a Master’s degree in fiction writing (much to the delight of my Republican critics). Most of my adult life, I have supported myself – at least in part – by sitting at a desk and writing words on a computer. In the room I was absenting, I finished a book, wrote articles, stared at the walls (and sometimes, lying on the floor, up at the ceiling), and wrestled with the world outside – all the violence, upheaval, technology, and distortion of truth that has come to mark our times.

It can be a lonely existence, writing. But it can also connect you to the vast expanse of human experience; all the longing, heartbreak, inquiry, inspiration, mythology, and storytelling that has been captured in language since the scribes of the ancient world started keeping accounts thousands of years ago. It got me thinking: why do people write? And what does the future hold for writers?

Why Write?

Joan Didion once wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” That has been the case for me. Sure, when I sit down to write, I usually have a sense of where I’m going – an idea, an argument, even an outline. But anything worthwhile that I’ve written has ended up somewhere I didn’t expect – the sentences lead me in the direction of an idea or image that I didn’t have at the outset, a new way of understanding or seeing a piece of the world. In the best of circumstances, that process is akin to revelation, a sense of ephemeral discovery that you can’t quite explain to yourself after it happens.

Since leaving the White House in January of 2017, I’ve written three books as well as essays, reviews and opinion pieces. The work I’m proudest of has struggled to find out not just what I’m thinking but what I’m feeling; to reckon with my own morally ambiguous experience with power and the ways that power itself has become so corrupting in our time. I’m sure plenty of those words are forgettable. But the ones that mattered, at least to me, pulled something out of me that I didn’t know was there: an insight or feeling that looked (imperfectly and incompletely, I’m sure) at power from the outside-in – something that so many of the far greater writers I admire have done far better than me. Orwell. Baldwin. Arendt. Didion. Vonnegut. Le Carre. DeLillo. Zweig. Just to name a few.

Which leads me to reading. I also write because I like to read. In many ways, that’s my origin story as a writer. For as long as I can remember, I liked stories – in particular, stories contained in the object of a book. To this day, nothing makes me want to write more than reading something that is provocative, revelatory, or just finely rendered. Indeed, I often think of a line that one of my favorite professors told me about Don DeLillo’s novel, The Names (one of my favorites). “I reread it every year,” he said, “just for the sentences.”

The sentences. A sentence contains multitudes, changing in meaning depending on how old you are – or what you are experiencing – at the time that you read it. To write is to enter a conversation with the other writers of sentences (living and dead) and the wider world of readers (that’s you). To write is to use this tool that human beings invented – language – so that we can make sense of the feelings inside of us and the things happening around us.

So, yes, writing can help you find out what you’re thinking. More than that, though, writing can help you connect to all the other words that have been written down, the ceaseless effort to find meaning in being human.

The power of books

Which leads me to books. I love being surrounded by the physical presence of books. I can look at a bookshelf and remember how I felt when I first read something. What was happening in my life at that time? Who did I love? What did I fear? How did that book make me feel? What does that author represent to me? What kind of person do I think I am, or do I want to be, as represented by the books I choose to keep on shelves around me.

Sure, I’m often alone in a room. But I’m not. I have all these people with me in the form of their books, the things they wrote to find out what they thought, how they felt, and who they were. When I’m stuck, the language of great writers can usually get me unstuck.

I write this at a time when people are reading fewer books. As an author, I’ve noticed that the portion of books that I sell is increasingly weighted in the direction of audiobooks and e-books. As a consumer, I find myself following this trend, listening to more books as I walk, run and drive. And as a “content creator,” books are a small share of my own output compared to writing for the New York Times, recording Pod Save the World, appearing on MS Now, and posting on social media platforms. But scrolling is not reading as sure as posting is not literature.

Three weeks from now, my next book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity will go on sale (pre-order now!). Like other authors, the thought fills me with trepidation. In part because you worry about whether people will buy the book and whether people will like it (which determines, to some extent, whether you can write another one). And you know, especially these days, that some people will say mean things about what you write (sometimes without even reading it). It’s a very vulnerable experience, no matter how thick you pretend your skin to be, and I’ve done a lot of pretending over the years. It’s rough out there, particularly for people writing and talking about things like politics and foreign policy.

More than that, it’s a strange experience to spend years writing something alone in a room and then to go out and talk about it. Because nothing you say in an interview could possibly be as carefully considered and constructed as the words you wrote in the actual book. Yet you know that far more people will hear you talk about your book than read it.

Which leads me back to physical books, the company I often keep. I am one of those people who is spiritual without feeling a deep affinity for a particular religion, though I believe in God, admire aspects of many faiths, and was raised from a lineage of two (Christianity and Judaism). God, I believe, is in the mystery around us; books draw us nearer to that mystery.

When I hold a book, open it and read the words inside, I feel something akin to ritual. Here is a tradition that began with the carving of symbols onto stones; of writing down oral epics and copying manuscripts in monasteries; of binding paper together and the replication afforded by the printing press; of human beings trying to tell other human beings something that they believed to be important about life within this universe and preserving it for posterity. Here is a physical object that is – unlike a social media post, an audio recording, or words stored in a data center or “cloud” – both tangible and lasting. In that way, a book offers connection to both the past and the future.

Writing at the dawn of Artificial Intelligence

Which brings me to the last part of this reflection: the onset of artificial intelligence (AI). Like every writer I know, I have been fascinated, terrified, and confused by the introduction of large language models (LLMs) like Chat GPT and Claude.

The room I recently moved out of is where I first explored these LLMs at length. I found myself simultaneously riveted and disoriented conversing with a limitless expanse of data packaged and programmed into something that resembles consciousness, a kind of being with opinions that seem purposely shaded in the direction of my own. How strange it was to think that this LLM had been trained on so much more data – including millions of books – than I could ever read or review. How harrowing it was to realize that it was a product of the very unbridled capitalism that has concentrated so much power in the hands of so few people – most of whom have become full stakeholders in the destruction of our democratic polity, and some of whom seem to think of themselves as godlike in their appetites and aspirations. How frightening it has been to confront a version of automation that seems poised – maybe designed – to replace my vocation.

It is hard not to foresee a very-near future in which these LLMs are churning out news reports, analysis, screenplays, and books on myriad subjects, Indeed, this is already happening. It is increasingly difficult to know for certain whether writers are the authors of their own work or whether they’ve become collaborators with technology trained on the work of other writers. Will what we call writers become experts in writing prompts more than writing stories? After all, staring at the wall (or ceiling) can seem counter-productive compared to sharing your outline or idea with an LLM that contains so much knowledge and is programmed to be eager to please – whether it be you or a wider audience.

At times, I have experimented by asking an LLM to react to an idea, respond to something I’ve written, or provide research to buttress an argument. But something always stops me when it inevitably asks if I’d like help drafting something.

What, then, is the purpose of writing? How can I write to find out what I’m thinking if AI is doing the thinking for me? How can I write to interrogate what I’m feeling if the thing that is doing the writing is incapable of feeling as I do? How can I find that connection to human experience in books if humans have been removed from the act of their creation?

Behind every piece of writing is the unseen experience of a human being. Orwell’s failing health and revulsion at totalitarianism while writing 1984. Tolkien’s experience of World War I which must have haunted his creation of The Lord of the Rings. Arendt’s history not just of political and philosophical inquiry but also of injustice, anti-Semitism, exile, and incredulity that feels tightly woven into The Origins of Totalitarianism. Baldwin’s visceral revolution against the dehumanization of racism in his essays. Vonnegut’s absurd survival of the firebombing of Dresden which allowed him to write such a humane and darkly funny anti-war novel as Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes. Creations that do so much more than recreate language in response to being trained on vast sets of data. The alchemy that can only happen when a human being sits in a chair and tries to write something, to tell other human beings something about what they think or how they feel.

When writers retreat into a room, they bring with them their broken hearts, capacity for love, unpredictable moods, memories of travel, and shifting beliefs, doubts, and certitudes. They also bring their mundane hunger, worries about money, fatigue, euphoria, and at times a dose of alcohol, caffeine or drugs. Perhaps they are struck by the way the light shines through a window, the sound of birds outside, or the voices drifting in from the street. Above all, there is a stillness and quietude that cuts against our current mania for screens and competition for attention, the veneration of so-called entrepreneurs profiting off the collapse of what we might call civilization.

The next room

I have no idea what the future holds for writers. Nor do I want to become a luddite, a man moving further into middle age lamenting invention and innovation, afraid of the future. AI will certainly play some role in the creation of language that informs, entertains, and holds the attention of human beings.

However, I take even greater comfort in the connectivity I have with books. Somehow, through thousands of years, amidst the rise and fall of empires, the beginning and end of wars, and the emergence of seemingly transformative technologies, there have been writers. It’s what unites the man in ancient Egypt who chiseled lessons onto stone with anyone who tries to write a story today.

I have moved into a new room to write. The books are stacked and ready to be shelved. The light, I notice, is different: brighter, with different shadows cast. The air is a bit cooler, closer to the ocean. Sea birds make different sounds than the crows. And while I am outside that room, new things will happen to me and to the world.

I’ll sit in a chair at a desk and think and consider the power of a blank page. I’ll read new books and reread old ones or simply run my hand along their spines when the world – online or offline – becomes oppressive. I’ll try to summon words and shape them into sentences. I’ll try to feel that connection to the deep, unseen currents of words that are all around us until something like faith leads me to arrange them into sentences. I will fail, and then I will try again.

Buller’s book was published in 1943, before the destruction of the Third Reich. Beginning in 1935, this British educator went on multiple trips to Germany, at first with the blessing of a Nazi regime that still aimed to win over Britain. She spoke to teachers and clergymen, businesspeople and soldiers, committed Nazis and intimidated opponents, recording and summarizing conversations in the years after Adolf Hitler rose to power.

Buller lets the voices of these Germans speak at length, uttering unvarnished warnings from the edge of history. In their words, we hear a blend of excitement, fear, resignation, and foreboding about what was happening. Even before the Nazis plunged Europe into the most catastrophic war in human history, almost all of them knew that their country had taken a dark path that would become increasingly destructive. Yet in this contemporaneous account, they seem largely utterly incapable or unwilling to stop it.

That, to me, is the ultimate tragedy of the book: to hear people who knew how much around them was going wrong but still acquiesced to it. America has not been captured by such a disciplined, unitary, and totalitarian ideology as Nazi fascism. Fascism, in our country, has taken a more disjointed and undisciplined form. But America is sending immigrants to internment camps; America does have a MAGA movement held together by fealty to an exalted leader; America has waged multiple illegal wars and massacred civilians.

What lessons can we learn from these German voices of the past?

The Seduction of Revolutionary Populism

Like many contemporary observers, Buller was preoccupied with the question of how one of the most educated and advanced societies in the Western world succumbed to fascism. Of course, there were proximate causes. The crushing defeat of World War I followed by the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. The rampant inflation and political chaos of the Weimar Republic. The economic anxieties of a middle class losing their status and a working class struggling to make ends meet.

Underneath this, though, was something more ephemeral. One professor described to Buller the mindset of his students. “The young generation could no longer look into the future with anything like happiness or confidence,” he said, describing the years leading up to the Nazi ascent. “They knew well what it was to fear for their very means of existence. This was a threat to the bourgeois desire for security.”

This sense of futility discredited an older generation that should have warned younger Germans about the danger of fascism. No one trusted the old institutions or the people who ran them, which created a hunger for something different. “The young recognized a certain spiritual bankruptcy in the general outlook,” the professor said. “In place of these old political ideas came an experience quite new in our history, namely the experience of the people as a community.”

Of course, this community was a self-serving and artificial creation of a Nazi political movement that saw the people as a means to obtain and wield power, cogs in a machine. But what the Nazis did tap into was the natural human desire to belong to something bigger than yourself. “We talk today a lot about security,” one barrister said to Buller. “Collective security in the international field, social security at home, but we talk very little about a much more important security: namely, the inner feeling, and acceptance of a place in the social fabric of the nation.”

By 1933, the old political, economic, and even religious order in Germany failed to offer people that sense of meaning and belonging to something bigger. Hitler, in his own perverse way, did. “This was again a way to retore meaning to the masses,” the barrister said. “To save them from senseless loneliness, to restore to them greatness by giving them the feeling that the humblest among them shared the greatness of the whole.” Once the Nazis forged that compact with their masses, they could accomplish things – including horrific persecution – that would have otherwise been impossible.

Buller rightly casts this dynamic in spiritual terms. Witnessing the mass demonstrations put on at Nuremberg, she saw how the analysis of her interlocutors became manifest before her eyes. “They were like drowning men and women who saw in Hitler a chance of salvation,” she writes, “due I think to the fact that somehow he conveyed to them that he understood their suffering and hardship and that he would save them from themselves because he had made them feel they were not alone.”

Compromise and Capitulation

Many Germans did not succumb to this hypnosis. Their voices are perhaps the most haunting, because they knew at the time the immorality and danger of what Hitler was doing. And yet because they felt powerless to stop it, they were.

One teacher told Buller how the Nazis imposed a racialized curriculum that was “rot” – including the denigration of the Jews. The teacher takes Buller inside his own thinking. What is he to do? He could choose the path of exile. He could resign and retreat to his garden. He could stay in his job and refuse to teach the Nazi curriculum, which would land him in prison. Or he could stay, begrudgingly teach the Nazi curriculum, and try to impart wisdom in his students along the margins.

He chose the ladder option, betting on some future payoff. He rationalized his decision by imagining some alternative future: “As they grow older,” he said of his students, “the Nazi fever dies down, and it again becomes possible to offer some opposition, they may be prepared.” Perhaps sensing the unlikelihood of his own motivation, he offered a further rationalization. “If we leave,” he said of himself and three other teachers who shared his plan, “four Nazis will come in and there will be no honest teaching in the whole school.”

It is a very human thing to engage in this self-deception. Because ultimately, it allows the person to avoid the hardship of exile, poverty, or imprisonment – to avoid paying a real cost – while believing that they are doing the right thing.

And yet this rationalization required ignoring the ultimate master – the movement, and Fuhrer – that Germans were serving. This is particularly evident in the comments of a civil servant, a technocrat who chose to stay in his position. “We must be patient and put our knowledge at the disposal of those who are in control, however unpleasant they are,” he told Buller. “It is essential that anyone who knows anything about food production or land reclamation should serve his country and not just retire because it is so difficult.”

Of course, these Germans were near the bottom of a pyramid of capitulation. First, the industrialists made their own deals with the Nazis to preserve – or advance – their wealth and status. Then, many of the nation’s political, military, legal, academic, and media elites followed suit. So, the ordinary teachers, civil servants, and priests who Buller interviewed were following within powerful currents of self-interested rationalization.

However, their moral cowardice and ultimately self-destructive decision was exposed by those Germans who made different decisions. “I think we have to stand outside this movement altogether,” one German educator told Buller. “If you once begin to compromise, then things become impossible.” A civil servant foresaw where capitulation would lead. “We are trying to compromise with evil so that we may have an easier time now,” he said, “but…we shall pay bitterly for our apathy and our compromise.”

The dynamic of capitulation also led some to foresee that once-reluctant collaborators would become committed Nazis. Because it’s harder to admit your own error – to change your mind and behavior – then it is to stay the course. One barrister described two categories of Nazis: those who were true believers, and the others who betrayed their own beliefs to collaborate. “The latter type is,” he said, “very likely to become a cruel oppressor of anyone who makes him conscious of his self-betrayal.”

It’s Too Late

Buller’s book unfolds across several years of traveling to Germany. As time marches on, a sense of futility grows, as Germans continue to rationalize their own complacency because they believe it’s too late to do anything about the horrors unfolding around them. One priest sums up this dynamic: “our real guilt lies in our slowness and in letting these gangsters get the whole country in their grip sufficiently to paralyze all collective opposition.”

This “slowness” is omnipresent in Buller’s book. There is an overwhelming sense of passivity, as if the things that happened were a force of nature and not the result of human decisions – from casting votes for the Nazis, to the collaboration of elites, to the tolerance of the persecution of Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, and other enemies of the regime. One German military officer described this spreading cancer amongst his fellow citizens. “To many of them,” he said, “the fact that they were losing all personal liberty; the freedom of the press, all chance of meeting in conferences to discuss things, never really came home until the mischief was done.”

Of course, the mischief should have been evident all along. In the people disappeared. In the property confiscated. In the newspapers shut down. In the books burned. In the violence of storm troopers marching through the streets. And yet many Germans convinced themselves that these forces would either not envelop them, or that they would somehow lead to some alternative future. “When men find that the circumstances they have to face are hard,” the German officer says, “they will move away from real life where there is so much disappointment and frustration and live in a kind of fantasy where everything comes right.”

Failure of Empathy

None of what Buller describes would have been possible without a collapse in empathy, the capacity of Germans to see themselves in the shoes of the people that Hitler was persecuting. The obvious truth is that the belonging Germans won with Hitler’s ascent was claimed at the expense of others, the Us versus Them politics that defines fascism. The dehumanization of Jews and other vulnerable groups was, after all, a feature – not a bug – of Naziism. For many Germans, the consequences of this dehumanization could be tolerated so long as the suffering occurred out of sight: a Jewish shop shuttered, a Social Democrat who disappeared, rumors of camps in some other part of the country.

One of the more shocking passages in the book comes when a professor recounts a conversation with an S.S. officer who is afraid that he will be sent to become a guard at a concentration camp. “They are terrible places and I could not do it,” the S.S. officer says. “I know the Jews are the enemies of Germany because the Fuhrer says so, but it is horrible in those camps and there are not only Jews but pastors, Social Democrats, and Catholics. One of my friends went on guard there and in three days he committed suicide.”

Missing from this recognition is any sense that the concentration camp is horrifying because the entire system is horrific. It is the S.S. officer’s personal circumstance which are his greatest concern – not what is happening to the people at the camp. After all, Hitler had always been clear about his desire to violently persecute Jews and all manner of people who opposed him. “Our great mistake,” said one German woman to Buller, “lay in our failure to see right at the beginning when the Party decided to persecute the Jews, that once persecution became part of its gospel, no one could say where it would stop.”

Foreboding of War

Buller recounts conversations before the German invasions that commenced World War II. Yet still, the war casts a long shadow over the book. And the war, like the increasing radicalism and horror of the regime, is described as some inevitable force divorced from human agency. “How is it possible that when all Europe cries out for peace, we are still hurled toward war and destruction?” asked one civil servant. “How can it come when so many among the people in every land dread it – and want to stop it?”

The answer, of course, is that Germans made the war inevitable when they chose the path of Naziism. This truth was obvious to one unemployed student who spoke with Buller. “The really tragic thing about this movement is that I believe it must end in war,” he said. “There is a kind of momentum or, if you like, hysteria in this movement and in the devotion of many of its individual members that will drive them to some kind of ultimate sacrifice.”

Historians and commentators have spent eighty years examining the run-up to World War II. Could Hitler have been stopped when he reoccupied the Rhineland? Why did Chamberlain appease Hitler at Munich? These are important questions. But the inevitability of war itself was seeded in the choices Germans made to elevate, or capitulate to, the Nazis in the first place.

This was evident to one Catholic priest in one of Buller’s earlier conversations. “They will fall,” he said of the Nazis, “and millions with them, and pray God that those who survive will have learned never again to allow the minds and spirits of men to be fettered.”

What would you do?

Hitler is both absent and omnipresent in Darkness Over Germany. Very few people voice personal admiration for him, and yet he has come to dominate their lives.

“You once said you thought Hitler’s power was partly due to the fact that in some ways he does reflect much that is in the German mind, both good and bad,” one interlocutor said to Buller. “I never thought about that before but I agree that it is largely true, though it is perhaps superfluous to point out that he seems to base his actions on the bad side rather than the good.”

It is, indeed, superfluous. Every country encompasses both good and bad because every country is made up of individual human beings stitched into a collective. And human beings, like nations, are capable of extraordinary good and extraordinary evil. It is perhaps the mistake of every nation to believe that it is only the best version of itself, and that the bad things we do are somehow justified. America is by no means an exception to this rule: we have a boundless capacity to exalt, excuse, or rationalize our own actions even when they reflect the worst - not the best - in us. Just look at our 21st century wars.

Hitler, unlike so many of the people in Buller’s book, did not hesitate. “He saw no obstacle,” Buller writes, “nor indeed did he visualize any consequences – thus unconcerned by circumstances or consequences, he always moved ahead of friend or foe.” No two people are the same. Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. Yet Trump does possess an innate capacity to move forward without concern for circumstance or consequence. He cannot be shamed and, thus far, he has rarely been stopped. That makes it easy for the rest of us to simply observe what is happening around us as if we have no agency. And yet we do have agency. For three consecutive presidential elections, Americans have failed to decisively rebuke Trump and what he stands for; twice, we’ve elevated him to the most powerful office in the world.

Trump simply could not do the destructive things that he has done without the collaboration, consent, or capitulation of countless people. The people who chose to find belonging within his movement. The swing voters that delivered him to the Oval Office. The ICE and Border Patrol agents who willingly separate children from their families. The right wing media that constantly celebrates his every move and parrots his attacks on others, often the most vulnerable among us. The tech oligarchs who bankroll Trump’s politics to preserve and enhance their own power. The law firms, universities, and media companies who rationalize their own moral compromises in service of profit or mere survival. The military officers who followed orders to commit murder in the Caribbean or launch an illegal war on Iran. Perhaps above all, the members of Congress - representatives of the people - who have abdicated their own Constitutional responsibilities to avoid a primary challenge or uncomfortable phone call. People who no doubt rationalize their actions as a veil for self-interest.

What’s missing is empathy – for the Americans, and others around the world – harmed by what is happening. Far too often, we fail to choose to see them, to see the truth. Instead, politics is covered as spectacle, the absurd is sane-washed, truth is cast as subjective, or we look to some ill-defined future when this will all be over.

Perhaps it is not too late. America is far more diverse and diffuse and democratic than the fascist regimes of the past. Trump’s power is temporal, limited by his age, incompetence, and the gift of Constitutional term limits handed down to us. But still, there is a sense that we won’t avoid worse outcomes – more war, economic calamity, civil unrest, or technological dystopia – without some kind of civic action, the choices each of us will make.

“What do you think is honest?” the German teacher asked Buller, after recounting his own choice. “What would you do yourself?”

The journey from 2001’s “Operation Enduring Freedom” to 2026’s “Operation Epic Fury” showcases our post-9/11 unraveling: what started as a grandiose project to remake the world has become a forever war devoid of any values proposition, America moving from country to country like a zombie superpower. How did we get from “Enduring Freedom” to “Epic Fury”? And what does it say about us?

Forever War 1.0: Enduring Freedom and the Seeds of Overreach

In the days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush made a series of narrative choices that set in motion all the overreach and unintended consequences to come. Speaking to a joint session of Congress, he accurately told Americans that they had been attacked by al Qaeda. But then he raised the stakes far beyond reality.

Al Qaeda’s goal, he said, “is remaking the world – and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.” To that end, he compared al Qaeda to the 20^th century threats posed by Nazi fascism and Soviet Communism. “Why do they hate us?” Bush asked. “They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

This was nonsense. Of course, al Qaeda was loathsome and dangerous. But al Qaeda hated American policy, specifically its support for autocratic Arab governments and Israel – not our freedoms. Al Qaeda did not have any intention of imposing its beliefs on Americans because, unlike Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, it lacked the capacity to do so. This was a network of perhaps a few thousand people, not an empire. It’s governing and territorial ambitions were focused closer to home: in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Still, the framing of the Global War on Terror as an existential struggle for freedom served the Bush Administration’s ambitions. An existential struggle required the full mobilization and reconstruction of the U.S. government to fight a Forever War – from the creation of a Department of Homeland Security at home, to an enlarged intelligence community, to the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq abroad. A war tethered to Americans’ self-conception (or self-aggrandizement) as being at the vanguard of freedom infused the violence to come with a dubious moralism that has often characterized American foreign policy: we were going to destroy parts of the world to remake them in our image.

Notably, “Operation Enduring Freedom” was not the Bush Administration’s first choice. “Operation Infinite Justice” was considered and then dismissed as offensive to Muslims who (like most religious people) see God, not the American military, as the source of infinite justice. No matter. “Operation Enduring Freedom” was better suited to Bush’s framing of the war by the time bombs started falling on Afghanistan. In 2003, the name was repurposed for the catastrophic invasion of Iraq which was branded “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Soon enough, of course, the narrative of freedom spreading hastily around the globe clashed with the reality of resilient insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. It turns out people don’t like being occupied. Those thousands of al Qaeda fighters became tens of thousands of insurgents stretching from the Sahel through Iraq and Yemen to Pakistan. Still, Bush doubled down in his second inaugural address, setting the “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world” - an ambition that appealed to Washington and security elites, while sounding absurd to most Americans and people around the world.

This is how you get a forever war: unachievable objectives framed as an existential struggle tethered to the nation’s core sense of identity. “Enduring Freedom” became enduring war abroad coupled with eroding freedoms at home.

Forever War 2.0: Inherent Resolve and Scaled Back Ambition

During the Obama years, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” came to an end and “Operation Enduring Freedom” morphed into a grim endeavor fought mainly by Special Forces and drones against a terrorist threat that had metastasized. The vast majority of U.S. troops were drawn down from Iraq and Afghanistan, but Obama’s ambitions to go further in dismantling the infrastructure of the Forever War were stymied by a blend of political, budgetary and bureaucratic inertia (the U.S. national security apparatus does not like giving up new capabilities) and the emergence of ISIS.

Ironically, the rise of ISIS in Syria was due in large part to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as battle-hardened insurgents became some of the most effective forces fighting against the regime of Bashar al-Asad (one al Qaeda veteran of the Iraq insurgency, Ahmed al-Sharra, would end up as Syria’s president). So, in 2014 when we began the counter-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. was going to war with the consequences of its own policies.

The counter-ISIS war was named “Operation Inherent Resolve.” It reflected an evolution : Obama’s recalibration of Bush’s soaring ambitions. Gone was the language of freedom. U.S. military force was now locked in a grim battle with the same insurgents it helped to create, determined to keep them in check. While necessary, “Inherent resolve” felt, to me, like an inherent resignation that the United States was trapped in a war of its own creation.

Forever War 3.0: Iron Swords and a Schizophrenic Superpower

Throughout the first Trump and Biden Administrations, increasingly isolationist politics fought a tug of war against the inertia of the Forever War and the instincts of two very different American Presidents.

Trump’s stated opposition to starting wars served as something of a check on more aggressive policies during his first four years in power. Yet there were plenty of warning signs about the direction he would take in his second term. He increased the pace of drone strikes and loosened rules of engagement intended to prevent civilian casualties. He pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal despite Iranian compliance and assassinated Iran’s most senior military commander. He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, cut off the Palestinians, and recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.

But perhaps the most jarring addition to the language of Forever War in the first Trump term was his dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) on Afghanistan in 2017 – a 22,000 pound monstrosity that was the largest conventional weapon ever used in warfare. The MOAB was named to troll Saddam Hussein’s reference to the “Mother of All Battles” and served as something of a metaphor for the War on Terror. The MOAB set off an enormous explosion, killed a few dozen people, collapsed some caves, and made no strategic difference. Still, Trump boasted that it made “a tremendous difference” - as if the size of our bombs could tame an unwieldy world.

Biden made good on his promise to pull out of Afghanistan entirely, but the grim and tragic end drained the moment of any satisfaction or relief. Meanwhile, the Forever War ground on from Somalia to Syria. The U.S. surged military assistance to Ukraine under “Operation Atlantic Resolve” – an inherently regional and defensive objective which indicated the shrinking U.S.-led order fortifying its own frontiers.

The Biden Administration’s most notable military endeavor was its unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. After October 7th, 2023, the Israelis named their war “Operation Iron Swords,” a medieval echo befitting a campaign defined by brutality. Forget freedom and democracy: the U.S. was now supporting the serial violation of the most fundamental laws of war, choosing swords over plowshares.

Forever War 4.0: The Epic Fury of a Rogue Superpower

Shortly after launching his illegal and unnecessary war of choice against Iran, Trump boasted at a rally about the name of his new war. “Operation Epic Fury!” he growled to the crowd, as if he was revealing the title of a new video game. “Isn’t that a great name?” he asked, as if the morality and progress of the war was incidental compared to its branding.

Despite the escalating violence, death, destruction, and global economic calamity, Trump announced that the war was already won. “In the first hour, it was over,” he declared, alluding to the assassination of the 86 year-old Supreme Leader - an act with little precedent in modern war. Then he told a barely coherent story in which a group of sycophantic Generals and aides had called him “sir” repeatedly while asking him to name the operation. “Epic Fury,” he said again, remembering wistfully how the phrase had captured his attention. “I like that name.”

Epic Fury. It is an apt name. It fits perfectly with the pointless violence and vengeance embedded in this war. Iran had also been empowered by the Iraq War, which removed its regional rival and installed a Shia-led government. Once more, the U.S. was fighting the ghosts of its own policies, dating all the way back to the U.S.-backed coup that installed the Shah in 1953. Only this time, the President couldn’t even be bothered to explain what we were fighting for.

Epic Fury. A wounded and aggrieved superpower lashing out at its enemies – Venezuela, Iran, maybe Cuba next – in one more imperial spasm . A strategy of sewing chaotic destruction across the Middle East alongside Israel. The occasional calls for Iranians to “rise up” seem more about smashing the Islamic Republic than establishing anything new, while condemning the Iranian people to danger from both U.S. and Israeli air strikes and regime crackdowns.

From 9/11 to the second Trump term: from Freedom to Fury. This is what happens when a superpower overextends and exhausts itself in pursuit of illusory power over events beyond its control. The Forever War grinds on in its newest form, tethered to the impulses of a strongman who feels the lure of conquest. The White House churns out memes that trivialize the millions of lives smashed by its war. The President lies relentlessly about the war, while starting his days watching a video compilation of U.S. bombs being dropped on Iran.

It turns out that the existential danger to America was not al Qaeda, it was the war we launched against it. We will not recover our democracy without ending the Forever War and detoxifying our country of the fury that is consuming it.

Why don’t you explain it to her?

When my first daughter was born, I was working in the White House. A few days later, I had to return to work. For well over a year, I had negotiated in secret with the Cuban government. On December 17^th, 2014, we were going to surprise the world by announcing an effort to normalize relations. Prisoners were going to be released. Travel and commerce and embassies would be opened up, within the boundaries set some long time ago by Congress. Something old was ending, something new beginning. Or so I thought.

I felt bad about leaving our apartment so soon, but there wasn’t anyone else who could coordinate the announcement. It was so secret that only a few people knew. Still, I felt the tug of guilt. Why don’t you explain it to her, my wife suggested?

I held my swaddled daughter, impossibly light, eyes still not really seeing. For a moment I felt ridiculous, like a traveler trying to communicate with people who speak a different language. Even in the most private of spaces, we can feel self-conscious. “Our country has been fighting with this other country for a long time,” I said. “Now we’ve decided to stop fighting and to try working together so that we can help make life better for the people in the other country.”

My daughter, half-awake and half-asleep, showed no sign of registering any of this. Still, it made sense: it was simple. Not everything that I did in my job could have passed that test. Far from it. But that only made me feel better about doing this thing.

Why did they kill them?

More than eleven years later, I was in the car with my two daughters – now 11 and 9 – when the Bruce Springsteen song “Streets of Minneapolis” played on shuffle. The girls had, I knew, talked about ICE in school.

King Trump’s private army from the DHS, guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law or so their story goes

“He’s not subtle, Dad,” my oldest daughter said. I laughed the way a parent does when your child says something that surprises you in its maturity. Still, as the song played, I listened to their backseat silence.

“That’s where they killed that man, right?” she asked, after Springsteen sang about Alex Pretti. “The one who was helping the woman.”

“Two people. They killed a woman too.”

“Oh right, the woman in a car.”

I was beginning to get nervous. Yes, they knew that these things happened – in that information loop of classroom lessons, chatter with friends, the overheard conversations of adults. ICE and the military had been deployed here, to Los Angeles, before Minneapolis. They knew that too.

“Why did they kill them?” my youngest daughter asked.

She knew less about these things, of course. But the question was clarifying in its simplicity. “They were trying to protect their neighbors,” I said.

The statement was true, I felt, but also ran counter to everything they’d been taught. Why would the government kill people who were trying to protect their neighbors? I explained that the government was trying to deport a lot of immigrants, something else they’d heard. I offered the hope that all these people in Minneapolis had stood up for one another and defended the immigrants. I fumbled through an explanation of how something had gone terribly wrong in those two cases – Alex Pretti and Renee Good; that those were extraordinary circumstances, which is why people were writing songs about it.

Don’t worry, I was trying to say. You will be safe. Right defeats wrong. As I got out of the car to walk them into school, I wondered if I had misled them with false comfort. Would it be better to simply listen to Taylor Swift sing about her break-ups? To keep the world at a safe distance and assume that these were always things that happened to other people, somewhere far away? Los Angeles is nestled between ocean and mountains. It’s sunny every day. The place is so spread out that even the bad things that happen generally go unseen. Prosperity and security can reassure you that you somehow earned it.

Why don’t they share the land?

My job is hard to explain. I am constantly writing and talking about horrible things. On television. On a podcast. Online. My kids want to watch Taylor Swift videos on YouTube, not hear dad talking about war. Good for them.

Still, news of war finds them. During the war in Gaza, my oldest daughter started to ask me questions. I tried my best to answer in simple terms. One time, my oldest daughter told me that she knew how the war should end. “The Israelis and Palestinians should share the land and they can each have their own country.” She spoke like she made a discovery all her own.

“Did someone tell you that?” I asked.

“No,” she replied, with a hint of incredulity.

“That’s right,” I said. “Good for you.”

“Then why don’t they do that?” she asked.

I gripped the steering wheel. It’s complicated. Or is it?

Should we tell our children lies?

We were still awake when the United States started bombing Iran. I had to go upstairs to “do TV” as my daughters call it. To sit in a chair and stair into a green light on a computer screen and talk about another war.

How would you explain this war to a child? The President can’t even offer an explanation that makes sense to adults. Should we tell our children the same lies that we’ve been told about nuclear weapons that don’t exist, or ballistic missiles that we stockpile in far greater numbers? Would you be comfortable telling your children that the way to make another country’s government better is to assassinate its leaders?

Too late in life, I came to know many people who were children in wars when they were the age of my daughters. People who did not have the luxury of learning about these things in the backseat of a car in America’s superpower cocoon. Bombs and shells going off. Pantries going empty. Superpowers somehow involved. Friends dying. Refugees fleeing – coming to places like America, where they are now being hunted down to be deported.

I have not tried to offer any explanation for this war except that it is wrong. The one question my oldest daughter has asked is why we are allowed to do what we are doing to Iran but they aren’t allowed to do it to us.

What will happen to them today?

I had never heard of Minab, Iran until my tax dollars paid for missiles that slammed into a school, roughly the size of my daughters’, killing well over a hundred children alongside their teachers.

I do know what it’s like to be a parent. I do know what it’s like to wake your children up in the morning, to get them dressed, to pack their lunch, to take one last look at them as they disappear into a classroom with their friends. I do know that feeling of turning to walk away and feeling a slight pang of concern. What will happen to them today?

Maybe you worry that things won’t go exactly the way they want. A friend might be mean. A teacher might not call on them. A test might not go well. A knee could get scraped at PE. I don’t worry about a Tomahawk missile being fired by a foreign government, on the orders of a corrupt leader, paid for by a population that has grown passive about the wars it launches from the air. I don’t worry about returning to find the school a smoldering ruin, children’s bodies blown to pieces.

How would you explain that to your children?

Donald Trump’s first explanations were not unlike his administration’s response to the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In Minneapolis, they were called domestic terrorists – it was their fault they got killed. In Minab, Trump absurdly blamed the Iranians for bombing their own school. Anything to avoid taking responsibility, which is exactly what we tell our children not to do.

Can you explain this to a child?

People in Cuba are currently starving because of the “maximum pressure” sanctions that our government is imposing on the people of that country. I have not, yet, had to explain that at home; to update the conversation I had with a child who was less than a week old. How would you tell your children why it’s justified to starve children in Cuba with a blockade?

The bombs continue to fall on Iran, on Lebanon, on too many countries to keep track of in what we call the Middle East. There is a massive machinery in the United States designed to keep you from asking too many questions; to make you feel somehow naïve if you don’t understand the necessity of these wars that seem to come in ever-more rapid succession.

If my children were mixed together with kids from Beirut or Minab, if they could somehow speak the same language, I doubt they would have any problem getting along. They are all children, with that same spark of the divine within them. They look up at the same sky, marvel at the same moon, feel the same sense of comfort when embraced. They want to play.

It is not naïve to ask what, exactly, gives us the right to put such a higher value on the lives of our children than children on the other side of the world. Or to consider whether it is healthy to raise our children within a society that seems to have so thoroughly devalued human life that the President routinely posts social media content that treats dropping bombs like playing a video game – content that treats adults like children, the kind of children that you don’t want your kids to be around.

Can you explain this to a child? If the answer is no, then perhaps we should reconsider whether the thing is worth doing in the first place.

Americans watching are rightly struggling to determine how this makes us safer or makes any sense. Who is benefiting from this war? One answer is Bibi Netanyahu, who seems fine with a strategy of regional hegemony through chaos. Another answer: Vladimir Putin.

A Boon for Russian Oil and Gas

Iran has unsurprisingly embraced a strategy of spreading the chaos to its neighbors, particularly in the Gulf. This includes targeting energy infrastructure and effectively shutting down the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow maritime passage that accounts for 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas shipments. While this hurts Iran’s capacity to export, that’s a price the regime will be willing to pay because it also strangles other major producers like Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. Iran wants to make the war painful – to its neighbors, to America, and to the global economy.

Iran’s strategy is also potentially a huge boon to Russia – it drives up energy prices that the Russian war machine depends upon, and could cause oil and gas consumers who rely on the Gulf to turn to Moscow instead. Acknowledging this reality, the Trump administration is already giving India a waiver from U.S. sanctions to purchase Russian oil – a sign of the incoherence of Trump’s policies. A sustained disruption in Gulf exports could particularly harm Europe, which has sought to wean itself off Russian energy.

In short, because of Trump and Netanyahu’s war, Russia could make more money and find new customers. America’s friends in the Gulf are suffering and will likely hedge against being overly reliant on a U.S. that has shown itself to be reckless and untrustworthy. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the U.S. pays for Israeli air defense systems while the Gulf will have a hefty tab to pay to replenish their own, all thanks to a war that the U.S. and Israel started. Even a moderate Gulf reorientation would be notable shift in geopolitics and potential investments – with the United States the loser.

Ukraine Fades Further into the Background

A few years ago, the world’s attention was on Ukraine. The U.S. and European allies were arming the Ukrainians, buttressing Volodymyr Zelensky, and isolating Putin. Fast forward to today. Trump has withdrawn much of America’s support for Ukraine, castigated Zelensky, split the NATO alliance with Greenland threats, made preemptive concessions to Moscow in peace talks, and launched multiple wars in other parts of the world. As U.S. munitions run low – including missile defense systems that Ukraine has relied upon to defend against Russia’s bombardment – Western capacity to defend the Ukrainians is further diminished. Indeed, the absurdity of this whole situation was highlighted by the fact that the U.S. has now asked for Ukrainian support in shooting down Iranian drones across the Middle East.

Consider how far we’ve come. Because of Donald Trump, the United States has gone from helping fortify Ukrainian defenses to pleading with Ukraine to help it stop Iranian reprisal attacks brough on by a dumb and unnecessary war.

Russia Can Make a Quagmire Worse for the U.S.

In the run-up to war, Russia did little to stop its erstwhile ally Iran from being attacked. This was taken by many as yet another sign that Russia is not a reliable partner – already, it had done little to save Bashar al-Asad in Syria other than giving him a luxurious landing in Moscow. But U.S. hawks who have been singularly fixated on fighting a war with Iran seem to have forgotten the Taliban maxim: “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

This could apply in Iran. Already, there are reports that Russia is providing intelligence to support Iranian targeting of U.S. troops and facilities. This should come as no surprise. Sure, Russia did not stop the U.S. attack but now it intends to make Trump’s war as painful as possible. This has been the pattern in all the proxy wars that Moscow and Washington have fought over the decades. Why would anyone expect this one to be different?

If the war grinds on– either through sustained U.S. attacks, civil conflict, or a widening regional war, Russia could be the beneficiary. From the continued diminution of U.S. munitions, decreased attention on Ukraine, Gulf states hedging, a potential refugee crisis that could bolster far right parties in Europe, and increased divisions inside America. All of this is yet another reason why Trump should try to find an exit strategy as soon as possible.

The Rules Based Order is Dead

Since his ascent to the Russian presidency, Putin has been intent on smashing a rules-based international order that he saw as advantaging the United States. Much of that work was done before the attack on Iran. But if the old rules-based order was dying already, it is now buried in rubble. First, the United States sanctioned the same International Criminal Court (ICC) that indicted Putin for war crimes because it also indicted Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza. So much for international law and justice. Now, Trump – in just two months – has abducted the President of Venezuela and joined Israel in decapitating the Iranian regime with no domestic or international legal basis.

A few years ago, I talked to Alexey Navalny – the opposition leader who was subsequently killed in a Russian gulag – for my book After the Fall. Putin, he told me, didn’t need to convince Russians that he wasn’t corrupt and self-interested. Instead, he just needed to convince them that everyone was. “The West is bad,” he summarized Putin’s argument, “it’s actually the same, the system is the same, everyone is the same.”

Those words echo in my mind today. Of course, the Iranian regime is odious but that doesn’t make the war any more legal, nor does it bring back the girls killed in what appears to have been a U.S. strike on a school in Iran – images that surely played around the world. How can we maintain any moral, legal, or political high ground? Putin’s war seems less extreme than it should in a world where the U.S. is launching regime change wars of choice without even pretending to think through the consequences.

Why is this happening? Because elites like Trump are insulated from the consequences. “Corruption is the essence of such a regime: lies and corruption,” Navalny said about Putin. “They just want to have their palaces and their very luxurious lifestyles.” It’s true, of course. But is that unique to Russia? Trump launched this war from his luxurious estate at Mar-a-Lago. Back at the White House, he took a break from updating Americans on the war to boast about his fancy drapes and the ballroom he is building, paid for by American oligarchs.

Donald Trump keeps doing things that help Vladimir Putin. I know many people ask if he’s somehow compromised, but that’s almost beside the point by now. What’s clear is that he wants the same thing. They just want to have their palaces and their very luxurious lifestyles.

The rest of us pay the bill.

None of Trump’s Pretexts Hold

Trump and his associates continue to give shifting explanations for going to war. None of them hold up to scrutiny. No, Iran was not – as Trump suggested – anywhere near developing a nuclear weapon or an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of hitting the United States. Pete Hegseth sought to refine that case by saying the U.S. had to destroy Iran’s missiles and drones because they constituted “a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions.” Putting aside the disturbing spectacle of a Fox News weekend host with a bottomless need to prove his masculinity, that makes no sense. Iran has had a ballistic missile program for decades. It posed no greater threat last week than it did two years or five years ago – if anything, it was weaker because of last summer’s bombing and willing to negotiate away much of its nuclear program. So, why now? Marco Rubio offered a different answer. He suggested that Israel was determined to strike Iran and the U.S. had to join since we would have been drawn in to defend our bases in the region anyway. While that sounds quite plausible, that’s still not a reason. Trump could have just told Netanyahu “no.” He didn’t.

In the end, Donald Trump set this in motion, even if he was urged to do so by Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump made the decision to pull out of the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018, assassinate the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) in 2020, bomb Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025, and to change the Iranian regime in 2026. He did so without authorization from Congress or any basis in international law given that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. Only he knows why he did it. Maybe because Israel pressured him. Maybe because his ego called him to be the one who ended the Islamic Republic. Maybe because he (wrongly) drew the lesson from abducting Venezuela’s President that regime change can be clean and easy. Or maybe because he is drawn to the exercise of power itself for its own sake. The answer is probably a combination of all those things.

Iran’s Strategy of Chaos

Iran’s response has spread chaos across the region. They have fired ballistic missiles and drones at U.S. military facilities. They have similarly attacked Israel, as has their ally Hezbollah. They have lashed out at the Gulf States, attacking energy infrastructure, U.S. diplomatic posts, data centers (a new target in warfare and not for the last time), as well as civilian targets – notably, luxury hotels and other high-rises. They have threatened shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, which is a transit point for a significant chunk of the world’s energy. While their attacks have been largely thwarted by air defenses, they have managed to hit some targets and have killed at least six U.S. troops as well as dozens of other people across the region. Moreover, they are achieving a psychological objective, at least for the time being – putting everyone on edge, slowing the energy trade, terrorizing stranded travelers, and puncturing the stability that facilitates prosperity in the Gulf. The logic being, if we burn you burn.

It’s unclear whether the remaining Iranian leadership is exercising command and control over these efforts. The Supreme Leader and other senior political and military figures who have been killed likely delegated decision-making for reprisal attacks far down the chain of command. It feels like that directive was to fire away. While missile defense systems have been effective, the U.S. and its partners are reportedly running low on munitions and interceptors, which also happened during last year’s installment of the Iran Forever War. If the Iranians keep firing away, they may start hitting more things as time goes on – a reminder that the war won’t necessarily end when Trump wants it to end.

The determining factor is likely going to be the direction of politics inside Iran, not the timing chosen by the U.S. and Israel. Will the regime be able to install new leaders? Will those leaders continue to control Iran? If so, will they seek accommodation with the United States? Will there be a popular uprising or civil war? Those are the questions that will determine how this war ends.

Israel and America’s Strategy (Intentional or Not) of Chaos

There is still no clearly articulated objective for the military operation. Trump has called on the Iranian people to rise up and suggested that his goal is bringing freedom to Iran (which would require a full regime change). Yet he has also spoken of a “Venezuela” model which presumes that the regime would stay in place under new management. He also said that the operation was projected to last “four to five weeks” but could go far longer than that. He told a different reporter he could end the war in a couple of days.

The reality is that the U.S. cannot engineer Iranian politics from the air. The Iranian regime has millions of people under arms, including the IRGC which controls much of the economy and Basij militia who have in the past suppressed peaceful protests. The regime has shown that it will use brutality to cling to power. Even if it implodes under the pressure of U.S. and Israeli bombing, it is quite possible that what follows is a civil conflict in a country with heavily armed factions rather than a smooth transition to democracy.

The most disturbing recent report suggests that the CIA is arming Kurdish forces inside of Iran. Turning Iran into a sectarian war risks plunging the nation into the kind of conflicts that we have seen in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Both Kurdish and Baloch minorities have separatist ambitions that can spread across borders (into Iraq and Pakistan, respectively). I have tremendous sympathy for what these minority groups have suffered under the Islamic Republic. But I also worry about this conflict becoming sectarian and regional in ways that could lead Iran to fracture rather than hold together under some new leadership.

So, even if (and when) the U.S. stops bombing Iran, that does not mean the war is over. This is not a news cycle exercise. Violence could continue in Iran. The Iranian regime could continue to lash out in waves of attacks. Periods of calm could be interrupted by spasms of conflict. This kind of chaotic scenario may suit Israel’s strategic interest in weakening a regional adversary to cement a sense of regional hegemony – think of Iran as a giant Lebanon in this scenario. But that kind of outcome is not in the interest of the United States. The best-case scenario is some kind of return to stability in the region with a less repressive government in Tehran. The pathway to that outcome remains unclear.

The Cost to, and Calculus of, the Gulf States

Five members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain – have faced the most attacks. This could cause significant changes in the years to come. Most of these states were furious that the U.S. and Israel unleashed this chaos by attacking Iran. Now, they are furious at Iran for indiscriminate attacks on their territory. The GCC relies upon the United States to defend their security and buttress stability. Now, the U.S. has done the opposite. Even if the violence dissipates, the carefully cultivated sense of the Gulf as a hub for business travel, tourism, and international sports has taken a huge blow as people watch images of a Dubai luxury hotel burning, people running from missiles, or desperate travelers stranded at the airport. What kind of security guarantor endangers your security and your prosperity model?

In the near term, GCC states will have to decide whether to do more to facilitate the war, perhaps by allowing the U.S. to strike Iran from bases in their territory or even getting involved themselves. But in the medium and long-term, the wealthy and well-connected GCC states may rethink their security arrangements. They are distrustful of Israeli hegemony and military action across the region (since October 7^th, Israel has bombed Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Qatar and Iran). They are worried about refugee flows out of Iran and unrest among their own populations. So, they may explore ways to hedge against dependence on the United States. Perhaps by obtaining a nuclear weapon. Perhaps by drawing closer together. Perhaps by turning more to China. One thing seems certain: a status quo that was generally working for the GCC has been rocked.

Democrats Should be More Vocal, Categorical, and Unified in Opposition

Many Democrats have been strong and principled in opposing the war, but there has been an undercurrent of ambivalence among others. A small number have supported the bombing. Some hang their opposition on process concerns (the administration didn’t make the case, etc). Others seem nervous about opposing a war that just might turn out well. None of those rationales hold when weighed against the competing arguments.

- The war is illegal, unnecessary, reckless, and opposed by a large majority of the American people.

- The war has claimed the lives of U.S. troops, stranded Americans in the region (without any aid from the State Department), and raises the risks of continued reprisal attacks or acts of terrorism: in short, the war is making Americans less safe.

- Trump announced the war from Mar-a-Lago, has offered wildly inconsistent and incoherent explanations for what he’s doing, and spoken glibly about U.S. casualties: these are not the people you want running any war.

- The operation is likely to cost tens of billions of dollars, money that could pay for health care subsidies: we’re spending money on another war of choice in the Middle East instead of what people care about at home.

- Trump has already bombed seven countries and changed two regimes: if he is not met with strong and sustained opposition, he will take us to war elsewhere. In Cuba, Greenland, Panama, or some other place. Or he may grow more comfortable deploying U.S. troops at home to combat fanciful threats of terrorism or voter fraud.

- Globally, the war could embolden Russia and China to follow suit, encourage would-be proliferators to obtain nuclear weapons to avoid Iran’s fate, and will surely reinforce the belief of an increasing number of the world’s people and governments that the United States is a source of aggression and instability – not democratic values and order.

Even in the best-case scenario – a chastened Iranian government that is somewhat less repressive – it is still right to be against this war. Americans don’t want more wars of choice. The world will be more dangerous because this one is being fought.

War is Wrong

Above all, absent some imminent threat, war itself is wrong: morally, ethically, and legally.

Imagine, for a moment, being a parent who sent your child to that girls’ school that got bombed in Iran. Can you? For decades now, America has become frighteningly comfortable dropping bombs on people – almost exclusively people who are brown – all because we were attacked on a single September day in 2001. War kills people, shatters families, and inflicts life-long trauma. And since 9/11, none of America’s wars have gone as planned. The Forever Wars have led to chaos and repression, to massive refugee populations and metastasizing extremism. The Forever Wars have ended whatever reputation America had as a reliable steward of global order or defender of democratic values. The Forever Wars have diminished us, rendering us meaner, more divided, and subjected to an authoritarian leader who has turned to military aggression.

Democrats should be the anti-war party. That is what most Americans believe. That is the right thing to be. When faced with an existential challenge to American democracy and global order like Donald Trump, it is not enough to make cogent arguments about strategy, politics, and priorities (though we should). We must also not be afraid to make moral arguments. Otherwise, we risk losing ourselves.

The U.S. military has deployed the largest American force to the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. Yet we have no idea what it’s there to do. The build-up began when Donald Trump said “help is on its way” to Iranian protesters – but he did nothing when thousands of them were killed. Now, he says he wants a nuclear deal with the government that massacred those protestors (which undermines his claims to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a few months ago). What kind of deal would be sufficient to avoid a war? Trump isn’t saying, and the size of the force suggests that the goal may become regime change. Or maybe not. Who knows?

What’s striking about this potential war is that Trump isn’t even going through the motions of cooking up a pretext. There’s no campaign to scare Americans about weapons of mass destruction, as was the case in Iraq. There’s not even anything like the (wildly overstated) pretext of drugs coming to America from Venezuela. Iran has been an adversary of the United States for decades, but they pose no greater threat today than they have in the past – if anything, they’ve been weakened. So, we seem to be on the cusp of war for no reason other than the fact that Donald Trump wants us to be there.

If you were hoping for answers in the State of the Union, none were forthcoming. When Trump finally got to Iran well into his second hour of barely coherent boasting and ranting, he spoke darkly about the regime spreading “terrorism and death and hate” and being “the kings of the roadside bomb” during the Iraq War (something that happened over a decade ago). There was one new detail in Trump’s litany – “they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States.” That felt like a possible pretext, never mind that Iran’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program is neither new or close to being able to reach us. Trump then claimed Iran has never said “those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’”

Huh? Those words aren’t secret. That commitment was in the preamble to the Iran Deal negotiated by Barack Obama, which Trump tore up. The Iranian Foreign Minister has repeatedly said that Iran will commit to never having a nuclear weapon. Not that lying has ever bothered Trump.

It’s certainly possible that Trump will accept some new nuclear deal as a victory – that would be the best outcome, and I sincerely hope that’s what happens. But it’s worth unpacking what this whole situation reveals about America’s experience of both war and authoritarianism – two things that, throughout history, tend to go hand in hand.

This war would be illegal and unpopular.

Congress has not authorized the use of military force against Iran. Nor is there any international legal basis for deciding to bomb a country that does not pose any imminent threat. But that has not stopped Trump in his previous bombing campaigns against Iran and Nigeria or his abduction of the Venezuelan president.

Polls show that around 20 percent of Americans support war with Iran. Indeed, it’s hard to find many voices in support of war beyond dead-enders who have advocated for American-led regime change in Iran for years: hawkish Americans like Lyndsey Graham, the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu who has wanted this war as long as I can remember, and the son of Iran’s former U.S.-backed autocratic Shah, Reza Pahlavi. This is precisely the dynamic that Trump claimed he would end: a relatively small number of elites and foreigners driving policy in costly directions while ignoring the problems Americans face.

What kind of democracy do we have if the president can repeatedly take us to war while ignoring the Constitution, not consulting the peoples’ representatives, and disregarding public opinion? What kind of world will we live in if big countries can constantly bomb and invade smaller ones? After World War II, international laws were written to prevent precisely that outcome. Yet here we are again.

Many Democrats have rightly insisted that Congress take a vote to constrain Trump’s ability to use force against Iran. Yet Democratic leaders have been more muted about the policy itself. After a meeting with Marco Rubio before the State of the Union, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave a terse statement. “Look,” he said, “this is serious, and the administration has to make its case to the American people.”

Sure, that’s the least the Administration should do. Yet it is fundamentally an argument about process. Now is the time for Democrats to take a position against the policy itself, as well as the power grab it represents.

The consequences of war could be catastrophic.

Trump may be betting that another limited strike on Iran can allow him to weaken the Iranian government and look tough without precipitating disaster. That worked in the 12-day war and maybe it will work again. But maybe it won’t. If we’ve learned anything from our history of 21^st century wars, it’s that their consequences can be far worse than Washington envisions.

To begin with, Iran could decide to strike back this time beyond the largely symbolic counter attacks they’ve launched when previously bombed. Iranian ballistic missiles could target Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East, oil infrastructure in the Gulf, or the commerce that flows through nearby waters. Iranian proxies could strike inside of countries like Iraq and Lebanon. Iranian hackers could launch cyber-attacks. All of this could draw the U.S. deeper into a war that Americans don’t want to fight.

What if the Iranian government collapses? While the regime is odious and oppressive, there is no guarantee that some neat transition to democracy, or triumphant return of the Shah’s son, will come next. It’s far more likely that a power vacuum leads to civil conflict inside Iran, where the most heavily armed factions tend to be the most hardline. The Supreme Leader is 87; the regime is weakening. The Iranian people should be the ones to change it over time, not the U.S. military (see: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya).

If you talk to people in the Middle East, they worry about Iran fracturing, many millions of refugees fleeing to neighboring countries, and instability spreading across the region - potentially threatening other governments. That is why an unusual collection of nations – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Egypt – have been urging restraint. The people who live closest to Iran are the most concerned about a war there, even countries who have no love for the Iranian government.

A dangerous blend of authoritarianism and war.

Consider the frog boiling in water. For years now, Americans have been steadily acclimated to the idea that bombing other countries is normal and that authoritarian politics is tolerable. In Trump’s military build-up, we see those two trends converging. It feels almost normal that one man can just decide to start a war for reasons known only to him. It should not be normal.

I acknowledge having a personal stake in this. I worked for years on the negotiations that led to the Iran Deal under Obama. After that deal was signed, it was submitted to Congress and there was a bruising, months-long debate about whether Congress would kill the deal. There were endless briefings, speeches, opinion pieces, and media scrutiny. The deal survived, only to be killed off by Trump a couple of years later.

What does it say about the United States that there was far more debate about a diplomatic agreement with Iran than there has been about a potential war with Iran?

It is, to put it mildly, unhealthy for a country to be this accustomed to fighting wars. Iran has over 90 million people. We have barely heard a word about how many of those men, women and children could be killed in another round of U.S. bombing or the chaos that could ensue. Nor about how much we have asked of our own military for 25 years, or how this will all be paid for. Nor have we given much thought - in our politics - about what this normalization of violence has done to us. It should come as no surprise that a government that can use violence so casually abroad would also deploy the military in American cities or send masked ICE agents to hunt down Black and brown immigrants. Dehumanization abroad begets dehumanization at home.

Authoritarianism and war make a toxic brew. If Democrats are serious about opposing the former, they must show much more fight in opposing the ladder. Stop being afraid that you’re going to be called weak by some armchair warrior pundit. Start speaking to the disgust with this state of affairs across the political spectrum.

More fundamentally, Americans must evaluate our relationship to power itself. This country has become far too comfortable using violence and sanctions to impose its will, or simply create chaos, abroad. Superpowers can feel like they have an infinite margin for error.

Now that power has been concentrated in the hands of one man: Donald Trump. In the days and weeks ahead, he must continue to feel resistance to using it . In the years to come, though, we must restore the constraints that prevent the abuse of power, no matter who is in office. And we should stop approaching war as a political drama or test of strength.

Endless wars are incompatible with democracy. Ultimately, we must choose one or the other.

I’ve long had a morbid fascination with this question of how people responded to Nazi Germany at the time. Part of this is because I have German Jewish ancestors, including some who were killed in the Holocaust. But over the last decade, as we’ve lived through the rise of authoritarian politics, the question has taken on a different kind of urgency.

Of course, events in the United States are not as extreme as 1930s Germany: this is not yet a totalitarian state with all the grotesque excesses of those times. But from the masked men in the streets, to the targeting of certain groups, to the denial of objective reality itself, there are enough echoes from history to compel us to learn from it.

I recently read Boyd’s book in the evocative location of Munich and drew several lessons from how so many travelers got it wrong. First, I was struck by the sheer scale of travel to the Third Reich. For instance: in 1937, on the cusp of war, a half million Americans visited. There was similarly a regular flow of British travelers. And while some did see the Nazis for what they were, others whitewashed what they saw – or even celebrated it. Why?

Confirming Priors

Many people went to Germany with preconceived notions about what they’d find there. If you were on the political left, you were more likely to see evil; if you were on the right, you were more likely to excuse, explain away, or admire the Nazis. “They went to Germany (as indeed they did to Soviet Russia) intent on confirming rather than confronting their expectations,” Body writes.

The Nazis understood this and eagerly indulged these expectations. “Foreigners were lectured incessantly,” Boyd writes, “on how only Germany stood between Europe and the Red hordes poised to sweep across the continent and destroy civilization.”

Indeed, those from the political right who were inclined to see Hitler as a bulwark against Communism or a legitimate vessel for German nationalism could easily tip over into believing things that were untrue – no matter what Hitler said. Wyndham Lewis, the British writer, incomprehensibly returned from one visit to report, “It is essential to understand that Adolf Hitler is not a saber-rattler” even though he was. Lewis even wrote a book with a chapter entitled: “Adolf Hitler: Man of Peace.”

This is a reminder, particularly in these polarized times, to beware of always believing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Real Grievances Don’t Justify Fascism

Many travelers allowed their sympathy for the German people to extend to the Nazis. During the Weimar period following World War I, visitors encountered a country that was economically devastated and politically weakened. “Germans from all walks of life told them repeatedly how betrayed they felt,” Boyd recounts, “by the Kaiser, their politicians and generals and especially by President Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles.”

One could feel sympathy for this sense of anguish set against the extreme insecurity on display. Berlin, at the dawn of the Nazi era, “seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles treaty and other potent ingredients.” Having encountered that brew, some travelers chose to rationalize Germans’ attachment to a strongman like Hitler, who promised to restore the nation’s dignity and sense of purpose.

Those travelers who felt an affinity for Germans made the mistake of rationalizing their support for the Nazis. Just because people have legitimate grievances against a failed establishment does not mean they are justified in turning to fascism.

Excitement for the Extraordinary

There is something seductive about living through historic times. Boyd’s accounts often portray visitors who were seduced by the pageantry of authoritarianism, that sense of witnessing history. Owen Tweedy, for instance, was captivated by the solidarity and spectacle of Naziism, describing it as “buoyant, exciting, and alive.”

Of course, if you were a Jew, a leftist, or simply an ordinary German who expressed misgivings about the new regime, you could be murdered, disappeared, or sent to one of the concentration camps which were common knowledge at the time. But some travelers still got swept up in the iconography of Nazi authoritarianism. “The incessant marching and beating of drums,” Boyd recounts of the Nuremberg rallies, “the sweeping searchlights, flaming torches, and thousands upon thousands of gigantic red and black swastikas flapping in the breeze, were all skillfully deployed to pay homage to the one supreme chieftain, the demi-god pre-ordained to lead his tribe out of darkness.”

The proper reaction to this cultish spectacle was revulsion and concern about where those displays – coupled with anti-Semitic, messianic, and militaristic rhetoric – could lead. But even highly educated people chose to see something else. Arthur Remy, a professor at Columbia, came back from one trip to Germany declaring: “I believe on the whole the celebration was dignified and impressive….the presence of black or brown uniforms can certainly not be construed as of sinister significance.”

A strongman capitalizes on the very human instinct to want to be a part of something big, new, and transformative. In the 1930s, far too many people felt that tug of history and fell for the spectacle, without regard for who it was hurting and where it could lead.

Propaganda Matters

Propaganda reinforced this willful ignorance, redirecting ones’ vision to an alternative reality that did not really exist. For instance, the 1936 Summer Olympic Games represented a propaganda coup. The Games were an impressive feat of stagecraft, showcasing Nazi expertise in organization and imagery without pointing to what ends those skills could be put.

While presiding over the Games as the singular leader, Hitler could also be unusually accessible – a fact often lost to history. “He gave his autograph as willingly as Babe Ruth,” one visitor recalled. Indeed, Nazi propaganda often showcased these two contrasting sides of Hitler’s identity – the demigod worshipped by the Nazi throngs at Nuremberg, and the paternal figure greeting young people or meeting foreign visitors who were regularly given audiences with the strongman.

Hitler could also be disarming in private in ways that filtered out to the public, as when he told former Prime Minister David Lloyd George that he was responsible for Britain’s victory in World War I. After this meeting, Lloyd George reported to the British back home that Hitler, “is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart.”

Another reminder: just because someone can present themselves in a certain light doesn’t mean you can ignore their darkness.

Refusal to Confront Uncomfortable Truths

Several of the travelers profiled by Boyd visited German concentration camps. They were always given Potemkin shows, sometimes with the camp’s guards posing as prisoners to hide the brutality and starvation taking place. Time and again, people credulously accepted this false version of reality – perhaps because they didn’t want to believe the horrifying reports about what was really happening.

Indeed, Boyd shows us enough people who could see exactly what was going on at the time because, well, it wasn’t hard to find the truth. For instance, the Black American leader W.E.B DuBois left Germany reporting, “the campaign against the Jews surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen, and I have seen much.”

The boycotts of Jewish businesses, murderous anti-Semitic rhetoric, and brutality against Jewish people was a feature – not a bug – of Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. Yet for some Americans, confronting this reality raised uncomfortable questions about their own country. “Amy derogatory comment regarding the persecution of Jews,” Boyd writes, “invited comparison with the United States’ treatment of its black population – an avenue few ordinary Americans were anxious to explore.

Often, those visitors who tried to sound the alarm about the Nazis were dismissed as hyperbolic or overly negative. For instance, many extraordinary journalists tried to report the truth. “Their reports were repeatedly edited or cut,” Boyd recounts, “or they were accused of exaggeration.”

This aversion to seeing uncomfortable truths, or fealty to an objectivity that insists upon two sides to every story, can blind people to imminent danger. Even when it is staring you in the face.

Individuals Have Agency

Ultimately, people decide how to respond to fascism. In Boyd’s book, we see individuals making their own choice – to ignore, support, or confront what was happening in Germany.

Compassion can be the most powerful choice. One British couple encountered a Jewish woman with a disabled daughter. The woman begged the couple to take her daughter out of the country. “Having seen enough on their holiday to realize that the outlook for a crippled Jewish girl in Nazy German was anything but rosy,” Boyd recounts, “she agreed on the spot.”

Because of that decision, one person – at least – was saved. It’s a reminder that even when we cannot arrest the momentum of political events, we can help our fellow human beings and in doing so preserve our own humanity. Keep that in mind the next time ICE comes to your neighborhood.

There is much more to be said about the choices that Germans themselves made – for an incredible book about this, see Amy Buller’s Darkness Over Germany. In that book, Buller records – contemporaneously – just how many elites, institutions, and individuals capitulated to the Nazis and how they rationalized that choice.

But it is also instructive to see Nazi Germany – indeed, to see fascism itself – through the eyes of these British and American travelers. “Perhaps the most chilling fact to emerge from these travelers’ tales,” Boyd concludes, “is that so many perfectly decent people could return home from Hitler’s Germany singing its praises.”

Those people were often educated, influential, or perceived as upstanding citizens. Many went on to change their tune. By then, though, it was too late.

How should we interpret, today, what is going on right in front of our eyes? By seeing it clearly, calling it out, and opposing it. Before it is too late.

I was a privileged white kid in New York City, watching on television back when political conventions weren’t the carefully programmed branding exercises that they’ve become. Jackson had won New York in the primary, stretching his multi-racial campaign farther than most anyone expected. He lost the nomination battle to Michael Dukakis, but the words he spoke that night worked their way into me, as they did for so many others. I didn’t know enough to understand everything I was watching, but I knew enough to know that this was important.

Now that he’s gone, a lot will be written and said about Jesse, as he was called in my house like so many others. I want to talk about this one speech and what it meant. Because we live in a country where speeches matter. They tell us something about where we’ve been, where we’re at, and – at their best – where we’re going. That’s what Jesse did in 1988.

He was, I imagine, disappointed. He’d won contest after contest, but he came up short. He’d captured just under 30 percent of the vote, enough to come in a healthy second. Not bad for someone who never held political office, a Black man from the segregated south. But as he barnstormed the country and broke barriers, the party had closed ranks around Dukakis who passed him over for the Vice Presidency. He had already electrified one convention in 1984 by calling for a “rainbow coalition” – a multiracial working-class politics to arrest the plutocratic momentum of Ronald Reagan’s America. What would he do for an encore?

He framed his message around seeking common ground. Never afraid of grandiose imagery, he began with Jerusalem, “the intersection where many trails met” to help give birth to three great faiths. And then he talked about New York, my hometown. “What makes New York so special?” he asked. “It’s the invitation of the Statue of Liberty. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses who yearn to be free.’ Not restricted to English only.”

It was not the last time in that speech that Jesse’s words anticipated the battles that continue to rage in American society, all the way to Stephen Miller and ICE and Bad Bunny today. He had his finger on the pulse of the nation’s soul that night – where it had been, where it was going.

Jesse spoke of the need to unite the Democratic Party’s left and right wing on behalf of the people it was meant to serve, lest the Republicans win again. He personalized that union in his support for Dukakis – a good man, but a lesser figure in the arc of American history. “His foreparents came to America on immigrant ships; my foreparents came to America on slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we’re in the same boat tonight.” We still are today.

He demanded same-day voter registration and sanctions on apartheid South Africa, foretelling that racist regime’s eventual collapse.

He lambasted Reaganomics. “They believe that the poor had too much money and the rich had too little money so they engaged in reverse Robin Hood – took from the poor and gave to the rich, paid for by the middle class.” He had been called an extremist, a “class warrior,” but if we had heeded his call we could have avoided so many of the divisions that have riven our nation.

Not content with a policy frame, he made the multiracial working class real, painting word pictures for the people watching. “They wipe the bodies of those who are sick with fever and pain. They empty their bedpans. They clean out their commodes. No job is beneath them, and yet when they get sick they cannot lie in the bed they made up every day.” That would make even a kid sit up and pay attention. “America,” he pronounced, “that is not right.” It’s still not right.

Long before people worried over losing the so-called Global South, he warned us. “We’re losing ground in Latin America, Middle East, South Africa because we’re not focusing on the real world. That’s the real world.” To appeal to that world, the world most people lived in, he demanded fidelity to human rights, self-determination, economic development, and consistency in how America pursued its principles around the world. Another warning too often unheeded, as we watch the world turn away from an America that doesn’t see them the way Jesse did.

He waded, unafraid, into what we would come to call the culture wars four years later – when Bill Clinton had his “Sister Souljah” moment at Jackson’s expense, and Pat Buchanan declared the culture war at the RNC. But was he really that radical? In his speech, Jesse called for equal pay for women before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, support for those suffering from AIDS before the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Emergency Act, and dignity for the disabled before the Americans With Disabilities Act. He wasn’t extreme, he was early.

“Politics,” he said, “can be a moral arena where people come together to find common ground.”

It was a very good speech, not yet great.

Usually, in the paint-by-numbers approach, politicians lead with their biography, then get to the policy. But not Jesse Jackson in 1988. He saved this personal touch for the end. And he began his ending, unusually, in the third person.

“Why does Jesse run?” he asked. He was talking about the doubters of 1988, but he could have been talking to all those who will write about his uncommon ambition today, as if that ambition was some sort of flaw. “Because they see me running for the White House. They don’t see the house I’m running from.”

And just where was he running from? Born in Greenville, South Carolina, he told us, “my mama was not supposed to make it, and I was not supposed to make it.” He pronounced “Mama” in a way that you didn’t hear most politicians talk, certainly not those politicians who ran for president before 1988. There was pride and pain in the pronunciation. Something deep, something true. She had been, he told us, a teenage mother, just like her own mother.

Jesse Jackson, he told us, was his third name. “I’m adopted,” he said. “When I had no name, my grandmother gave me her name.” These were not things I was accustomed to hearing, but they rang true to millions of people watching, my fellow Americans. “I understand when nobody knows your name,” he said. “I understand when you have no name.”

At this point, he wasn’t really talking to me anymore, but he was educating me. “I understand,” he repeated several times. He spoke of being born at home because his mother had no insurance. He talked about the toilet outside and the slop jar by the bed. “I’m a working person’s person,” he said. “That’s why I understand you whether you’re black or white.” This wasn’t the anthropological discussion of working-class politics – the online debates about white economic anxiety or wokeism or a third way. This was truth.

Then he spoke directly to people “watching this broadcast tonight in the projects” – people who had probably never been spoken to before from such a prominent podium. “Call you outcast,” he said, surfing the applause, “low down, you can’t make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass; when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination” (and here, he tapped his own chest with pride) “your name goes in nomination.”

The crowd in the hall was feeling it. Some people knew exactly what he was talking about; many others just sensed, intuitively, that they were hearing the truth. I don’t remember exactly what I thought, of course. I just remember feeling something different. This is politics? I certainly didn’t know I’d become a speechwriter for the first Black president of the United States, something that would not have happened without Jesse Jackson’s trailblazing campaigns.

That’s when he got to that line. “I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me.” But he wasn’t just talking about himself. “And it wasn’t born in you, and you can make it. Wherever you are tonight, you can make it.” He kept going from there. He was going to use this time to drive his point home, to give those fellow downtrodden strivers their moment, coming back to that phrase “you can make it” – a bumper sticker of the American Dream stripped of its gauziness and exclusivity. That thing we’ve lost sight of as a country, with a President who builds ballrooms to himself and oligarchs who see their exploding wealth as earned and not taken from the rest of us.

Then he reached the end, speaking words that seemed to will a different future. “America will get better and better.” He had to know, in that moment, that he’d said something meaningful, personal, and politically powerful. And he extended the moment by chanting his catchphrase “Keep hope alive” over the applause.

Now, Jesse Jackson is no longer alive. Over the years, he’s gradually faded from view. America got better, then it got worse. That’s how things go, I suppose, but it’s never the end of the story.

I don’t claim to have always favored him as a politician. People will point out his flaws, his own ups and down, as they should. No one is perfect. Jesse Jackson certainly was not, nor is America itself.

But that’s the thing about words, about speeches. In them, we can be the best of ourselves, and ask for – no, demand – the best of America. If we want to find a way out of our mess, we would do well to look back to Jesse Jackson’s words. They offer a moral vision, a politics of belonging for those who are excluded, a purpose that is bigger than winning itself.

That America is still there, despite those who aim to erase it. And it can get better.