Want to understand our democracy better? Start here.
Plus, the introduction from my new book We Hold These "Truths."
Folks, the countdown is on—less than one month until my new book, We Hold These "Truths", hits the shelves, and I couldn't be more excited to share it with you. Today, you're getting an exclusive sneak peek.
Over the past several years, I've had countless conversations with people—left, right, and center—who are frustrated with our political system. We've got some real problems in our politics, but they aren't the problems you might be thinking of right now.
Our democracy is riddled with convenient falsehoods, spun by those who profit from the chaos. Many of us feel stuck in a never-ending cycle of political dysfunction. It ain't on accident and we need to put a stop to it.
That's why I teamed up with experts from across the political spectrum to debunk these untruths. Together, we dive into presidential power, realities of the Constitution, the media, campaign finance, lobbyists, and so much more, with firsthand accounts from some of the sharpest minds in the game, including
, , Alyssa Farrah Griffin, former members of Congress, and many others.Think of this book as your civic-duty secret weapon. Read it cover-to-cover for a comprehensive crash course in American politics, or keep it handy as your go-to reference when political headlines leave you scratching your head.
Get ready to rethink what you thought you knew about our democracy—starting with the introduction below!
Preorder We Hold These "Truths" today at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local indie — with a special shoutout to contributor Rep. Steve Israel's bookstore Theodore's!
Introduction
I recently got back from Uzbekistan. I bet you didn’t see that coming.
While tough for most to locate on a map, Uzbekistan has thousands of years of cultural and religious heritage to brag about. Many of its cities sit directly along the famous Silk Road, and at various points, it was viewed as the economic and intellectual powerhouse of the Muslim world. It also has a long and tortured history of being overtaken by dictators, including Genghis Khan in the early 13th century and the Soviets in the early 20th century. Though the Uzbeks declared independence in 1991, the country has struggled to maintain a transparent, stable democracy ever since.
I was asked to help.
I traveled there as part of a small, bipartisan American delegation sponsored by the House of Representatives. Our mission was to meet with senior Uzbek leaders—presidential advisors, members of parliament, Supreme Court justices—and offer expertise and advice to aid their government’s transition from a former Soviet satellite to a steady, representative democracy.
Beyond the translators, security personnel, and administrative staff, our team was made up of a warm, chatty former Republican congressman from Illinois; a semi-paranoid national security expert with years of CIA and State Department service; and me, a former Capitol Hill staffer turned think tanker turned professor who spends his waking hours trying to make American politics work just a little bit better.
Throughout the week on the ground, a team of security officials, interpreters, and local officials shepherded us from one military-patrolled, decorative government hall to the next. As soon as one meeting ended, we’d be cattle called right back into our secure vehicle and whisked directly to the next reception line. In the few minutes in the van between meetings, we’d receive a quick rundown of who we were about to meet next. And always, always, we’d hear yet another reminder to assume that every electronic device around us was bugged and that any journalist in the room was more likely to have Jason Bourne skills than any real media training.
Some Uzbek government officials clearly wanted us there; others very much did not. Some conversations were fruitful; others felt like a contest over who could chew up the most time without actually saying anything. From our earliest conversations, it became clear that there was a generational divide between the Uzbek leaders. The younger leaders yearned for democracy to take root and flourish. The older ones, however, wanted our plane to depart back West as quickly as humanly possible so they didn’t have to spend another minute hearing from the Americanskis. They were simply from a different era. They preferred to turn back the clock to the pro-Russia alliances they grew up with and curtly shut down anyone who dared suggest alternative ways of thinking. In fact, our handlers told us Americans in no uncertain terms to not explicitly mention Russia—which at the time had recently invaded Ukraine—because it would immediately shut down the dialogue. A few meetings got so tense because of this internal division I was afraid someone on our side of the table would purposefully break their glass water bottle over their own head just so they’d have an excuse to extricate themselves from the awkwardness.
The most memorable interaction, though—one that has messed up my REM cycle ever since—didn’t come from an Uzbek senator, the solicitor general, or the deputy ambassador. No, it came from a small, soft-spoken, kind-eyed Uzbek driver who had a firmer grip on the English language than I did. Let’s call him Pavel because I’m not allowed to relay his real name. Pavel’s task was to silently drive us around those parts of Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, that the government authorized us to see. At one point, I shimmied close to the front seat to pepper him with questions out of earshot of our handlers.
As he drove, I did my best to ask Pavel open-ended questions about what life was really like for the Uzbek people. His answers started off short and rehearsed. His eyes spent more time on the rearview mirror than the scooter-invaded streets in front of him. It was clear he had been coached on what to say and, more importantly, what not to say.
I asked what he thought about the government’s attempts to transition from Soviet-style communism to a more open, pro-Western, pro-blue-jeans-and-Quarter-Pounders-with-cheese government.
He smiled. I couldn’t tell if he was collecting his thoughts or thinking, “Shut the hell up, Americanski, before we both get in trouble.” I asked again.
“You see that apartment building? And that one? And that one?” His nail-bitten finger pointed at the endless line of utilitarian, perfectly rectangular buildings painted in a wide variety of colors that were all beige. The fancy ones had railings cemented to the outside walls for decor, but there were barely any fancy ones. Their purpose was clear: House as many people as possible as efficiently as possible. No frills. Just boxes. It was the Soviet way.
I assumed he was deflecting, looking for literally anything to change the conversation before he said something he shouldn’t.
“Those are called Stalinkis,” he said. As in Stalin, the ruthless former Soviet dictator. “Those buildings are the best example I can give for how likely we are to truly become a strong democracy or make any really meaningful changes in Uzbekistan. Ninety percent of people in the capital live in Stalinkis. Every generation, mine included, grew up in them, and we all promised we’d be the last ones. Everyone hates them. Every leader promises to get rid of them. And yet there they stand.”
Then he landed the plane for me.
“The same is true for our government. Every generation says they will bring about change. Democracy. But we can’t ever make any progress because we’re still having the same fights our parents did, our grandparents, even. We can’t move on, even from Stalinkis even though everyone hates them.
How can we have any real change when all we do is argue about the same things over and over and over?”
Before I could respond, we pulled up to yet another set of frozen iron gates and a cadre of assault-rifle-laden security guards. I sat through the next meeting barely paying attention. I smiled and nodded, pretending to listen intently to the simultaneous translation in my ear.
All I could think about was how Pavel, who wasn’t even supposed to talk to me in the first place, finally cracked a riddle that had been plaguing me for months (years, if I’m being honest). I finally had the answer I’d been looking everywhere for. I just never thought to look in Uzbekistan.
Let me back up. I’m a political scientist. I have a PhD in American government and a couple of master’s degrees, and through my years as a staffer on Capitol Hill, in think tanks around DC, and in my current role as a graduate professor at George Washington University, I have carved out a solid reputation for understanding American politics. I literally wrote the textbook on how Congress really works (or more often than not, how it doesn’t work).
More specifically, I study, research, and write about political reforms, or the changes we can make to our system of government to ensure it’s the freest, fairest, and stablest version of itself it can be. That’s why I was invited to Uzbekistan, Iraq about a year before that, and Guatemala more recently. It was my charge to explain the good, the bad, and the ugly of the US political system to hopeful, nascent democracies. I was there to offer their leaders any warnings, insights, and lessons gleaned from America’s nearly 250 years of experimenting with democracy.
Back in the United States, I work regularly with members of Congress (from both sides of the aisle), journalists, lobbyists, nonprofits, and advocacy associations. Anyone with a question on how politics really plays out often comes to me. I’m their guy because they know they’re going to get an honest, understandable assessment of what is often a dishonest, undecipherable business.
Let’s just say it’s an interesting, if not flammable, time to be a political scientist, particularly one whose job it is to recommend cures to the ailing body politic. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is more than willing to voice their disdain for politics—and usually one party or politician—before our hands even break from our first handshake.
Often, I admit, I answer the “What do you do for a living?” question with a simple “professor,” hoping against hope they don’t ask the inevitable follow-up, “What subject?” Once they learn I’m in politics, they want me to confirm everything they’ve ever thought on the subject or else face their passive-aggressive version of “Wow, I don’t know how you do it.”
The across-the-board frustration with politics, ironically, is one of the very few things upon which most people, from granola-crunching liberal to pistol-packing conservative, agree. Hating nearly everything about politics is a rare bipartisan issue.
Ask 1,000 US citizens—Black, white, farmer, city dweller, rich, poor, voter, and abstainer—if they’re satisfied with our current state of government, and only a depressingly tiny minority will respond with a thumbs-up. Americans across the political spectrum lambaste the sleaziness, inaction, and tit-for-tat practices of politics.
I don’t blame them.
And yet my whole goal, inside and outside the classroom, is to get more people to understand politics rather than run away from it. To get involved rather than angry on the sidelines. To lean in rather than lean out. That’s how we make it work.
But if you’ve been paying even passive attention, you know full well we’re nowhere near this personal utopia of mine. Our democratic breakdowns are tearing our social and political fabrics like the hamstring of a 45-year-old has-been sprinting to first base in his beer league softball game. The dysfunction leads to disgust and detachment—which only exacerbates the dysfunction, which perpetuates the detachment. We are caught in a countrywide doom loop that’s only accelerating.
My job is to help us break this trend. I’ve had some successes, but not nearly enough. More recently, I’ve felt like I’m just bashing my head against the wall, and the only dent I’m making is in my own skull.
In one sense, this struggle to get anyone to change their mind and behavior is understandable. No one likes to be told what they’re doing or thinking is wrong—me included. This reluctance is especially true in politics. In fact, researchers have repeatedly shown that those who care the most about politics, who follow it the closest, are actually the least willing to hear new ideas or alter their stances.
And here’s where we return to my kind, fingernail-munching, Uzbek friend Pavel, who inadvertently cracked my personal riddle with his Stalinkis metaphor.
“How can we have any real change when all we do is argue about the same things over and over and over?”
In my middle-of-the-night ruminations since our car ride, I have added to Pavel’s question a critical, needling question of my own: And, even worse, what if we’re arguing about the wrong things to begin with?
Right now, in our country, we can’t achieve genuine political change because we’re having the wrong conversations. We’re fighting about the wrong things. Just like our parents did, and our grandparents before them. We can’t move on.
Our apartment buildings—the things we can’t ever seem to get past—are the many pervasive, often well-intentioned myths in American politics. These are not myths about which politicians secretly want to take away your granny’s Medicare or why one party wants to spend billions subsidizing organic kale. The dark assumptions we make about those whose views differ from ours are also harmful, but those are more the symptom than the disease. The myths I’m talking about, the ones that trap us in the past like Soviet apartment blocks, are about the nature of our political system itself.
Think of the widely accepted notions that bipartisanship is dead or that the Founders got everything exactly right when setting up our government in 1787. These kinds of ideas are so popular that they have come to be accepted as fact. But they are not. And our commitment to them is causing us—and our democracy—harm.
These common misunderstandings involve all facets of our democracy—our institutions, our leaders, the media, Congress, the president, and yes, even ourselves. They fuel our anger, cloud our judgment, and quash our ability to see and pursue the possible (and notice how I didn’t say the perfect).
The most damaging consequence of these myths’ pervasiveness is that they’ve convinced far too many of us that there are simple fixes to our politics—and that the people with the power to implement these obvious solutions are just ignoring them for their own power-hungry reasons. We chalk up our problems to ineptitude and immorality, and we check out. It’s easy that way. But it’s wrong. And it’s dangerous.
Here’s the reality. Everyone who says they’re disgusted with American politics—politicians especially—points to a silver-bullet antidote to make the pain go away. Right now, as a country, we’re like a fast-food addict who thinks he’s one fad diet away from looking like the Rock. We tell ourselves and one another that just one new election law, one campaign finance reform, or one good court decision would solve the sickness.
But what no one will say out loud is this: It ain’t true.
We have reduced our varied and impossibly intertwined political problems down to a few convenient scapegoats, like gerrymandered districts, money in politics, or feckless, self-serving politicians. These are (huge!) problems, but they are far from the entire story. And the oversimplified solutions we seek for them ignore two fundamental truths in politics: Nothing—no issue, politician, or solution—exists in isolation, and nothing comes without trade-offs.
Nothing.
The very present danger is that fixating on supposedly simple cures prevents us from seeing the real picture. Which, in turn, only perpetuates the cycle.
What’s worse, our monomaniacal focus on our pet political problems allows us—invites us, even—to be hoodwinked by the horde of talking heads, politicians, pillow tycoons, or outright snake-oil salesmen tossing out simple fixes like Mardi Gras beads on Bourbon Street. After all, convincing voters that someone else is to blame for all the bad in the world is one of the most tried-and-true ways to win elections. “Give me the power,” political candidates say, “and I’ll fix everything so fast it will make your head spin.” We fall for it every time.
As a result, we’ve convinced ourselves that we could easily cure all our ills, if only our damned leaders would grow some vertebrae. My students talk like this. My half-interested friends talk like this. Hell, even our elected leaders talk like this. And I’d bet the $1.12 in my Venmo account that you’ve said or thought something similar.
This quicksand is killing us. We’ve all seen the signs. Spinning in our same old political debates actually makes it harder to do the many things we must do to have a functioning, representative government. Our hunger for simple solutions simply crushes any chance of implementing reforms that will achieve positive, lasting results.
The tough-to-swallow truth about our politics is that there are no quick fixes to our big problems. And we have big problems. Many. But there is no savior candidate with the cure-all political platform coming to rescue us—and expecting one is actually perpetuating our dysfunction.
The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can have the necessary and honest conversations on what to do about it. And the sooner we, the people, can return from our cliff edge of futility and engage in solutions. Because there are things we can do, lots of them. And because our country needs us.
That’s where this book comes in. To have any shot at detoxifying our politics and reversing our dangerous political trends—and we are careening toward democratic breakdown faster than a Kardashian finds a camera—we must change the conversations themselves. We must stop pouring our attention, our energy, our dollars, and yes, even our anger into the mythical fixes that have distracted us for decades. We’re only growing increasingly cynical and disillusioned, and the cycle is proving more and more difficult to break. It’s long past time to take our vision back.
To begin the climb out of this rut we find ourselves in, we first need to collectively concentrate on what is actually wrong with our politics. As anyone who has ever spent a minute in therapy can attest, getting out of a doom loop requires starting at the uncomfortable beginning, challenging the assumptions that we have too long left unquestioned. That is, well before any ideological debates about specific policies or politicians that inescapably lead to shouting matches—before we even approach what to do about immigration, education, military spending, taxes, abortion, climate change, or any other of the thousand huge policy challenges we face—we have to burst the myths about how politics work and fall short and how we, the people, are contributing to the problems we hate.
That’s the fundamental purpose of this book: to finally get past the myths that keep us stuck in our Stalinkis. We do this to free ourselves to act on what actually matters. It won’t be easy by any means, but as the great philosopher Tom Hanks taught us in A League of Their Own, “The hard is what makes it great.”
What you’ll find in this book is a myth-busting tour of our favorite untrue truisms. The chapter titles should look familiar; they are the beliefs you hear over and over again from friends, social media memes, and maybe inside your own head. Each chapter breaks down one such myth and equips you with the knowledge to finally lay it to rest.
To help, I enlisted some of the brightest, most respected, most effective people in politics. The chapter authors include academic experts widely viewed as the best in their fields and political practitioners—those who have literally done the jobs, including former members of Congress and one of the most influential lobbyists in DC. This dream team mix of academic and professional perspectives gives you the best of both kinds of wisdom, from the scientific to the practical: book smarts and street smarts within a single book.
You’ll also find that I took pains—mostly logistical, but sadly a few physical—to recruit contributors from across the ideological spectrum, ranging from former President Trump’s White House director of strategic communications to progressive Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s former chief of staff. Let this bipartisan mix of contributors be your signal that this book is not just liberal or conservative propaganda and that the myths debunked here aren’t, on their face, political in nature. One party may believe some of the myths more strongly than the other at this particular moment. But they are, at their core, false distractions that harm us all.
Are we here to change your mind about specific policies or convince you that all elected leaders are saints? No. (Spoiler alert: They aren’t.) In fact, in talking about this book idea to friends, colleagues, and even potential publishers, one of the first questions I was asked was why in the hell I thought we could get people to change their minds about politics. It’s a fair question. And the genuine answer is I’m not positive I can. I just know we must.
Our goal is to help you extricate yourself from a problem that you didn’t know you were a part of. You’ll learn how to exit the echo chamber and advance the solutions you might be unwittingly making it harder for us to achieve.
Your first essential tool for this mission will be myth-spotting—the ability to call a myth a myth (or perhaps an even choicer phrase) when you see it bandied about, which will be often. Each chapter spells out the telltale signs of its particular myth. Thus equipped, you can steadily shift from myth-spotting to myth-busting to effective action, to start building something better and stronger than Stalinki democracy.
This book will also equip you to deploy a critical stealth maneuver that I’ll sum up in one word: pause. Instead of reacting to anything political—a politician, a policy, a campaign—instantaneously, with emotion leading the charge, you’ll be better positioned to take a beat. To consider. To listen before adding volume to the same old argument. Simply by taking a momentary pause—literally just a second or more—libraries full of research show that a different part of our brain kicks in: away from the defensive and reactionary and toward the purposeful and rational, even empathetic. That single moment empowers us to act for a far more lasting impact. For the sake of both our sanity and our shared future, the pause is vital.
At the very least, it’s our hope that after reading, no politician will ever again catch you under the same “I alone can fix it” spell, because you’ll be equipped to see politics for what it has always been: a messy, imperfect, critical pursuit of a better future. And that will make you a more effective, more thoughtful, and certainly less dupable participant in our collective effort at self-government.
After reading We Hold These “Truths,” we believe that what once was maddening and hopeless will feel clear and, yes, even fixable. You’ll know the real solutions we need and the role you play in bringing them about. That’s a win for this book, a win for you, and most importantly, a win for our democracy at a time when we need all the wins we can get.
Let’s get to work.