Notes on the Stories We Tell

These are disorienting times.

Authoritarianism is eclipsing democracy. Chaos is displacing order. Technology is changing how we interact and even think. It is harder to understand the story we are living through, as individuals or a collective. And we need stories to make sense of our own lives and the world around us.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. I do know this: You are right to feel how you are feeling. A period of history has ended, and a new one has begun. The disruptions – to politics, society, and individual people – are real and growing and seem impossible for most traditional media to digest. There will be no soft landing from the Trump Administration. Meanwhile, the transformations wrought by climate change, AI, and inequality continue unabated as power is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands.

For eight years, I looked at power from the inside-out as a speechwriter and deputy national security advisor in the Obama White House. Ever since, I have been looking at power from the outside-in, trying to make sense of a world unravelling through writing, my podcast, and travel. I have tried, with varied success, to not self-censor or cling to old assumptions.

I am starting these Notes to think out loud about these times in a more personal and informal way. Because I have always turned, first and foremost, to writing to find out what I think. Because everywhere I go, I meet people who feel less alone when they can connect with people wrestling with the same fears and questions – especially in an information landscape littered with slop.

I will post here regularly about:

- Events as they happen and how the longer stories they’re part of;

- Places I travel and people I meet;

- Books that make sense of these times, whether they are about them or not;

- Power – and how it works in the world;

- My own writing, including what I’m struggling to understand

My first book, The World As It Is, was a memoir of the Obama White House. My second book, After the Fall, was about the rise of authoritarianism around the world – how and why the old history of nationalist strongmen had returned. I had to cast aside some of my own assumptions, including a very American belief in the inevitability of progress. And I was struck by how stories from our once-buried past were shaping the world we live in now – often, without us giving it much thought.

So, for my third book, I tried to understand the arc of the argument we’ve been having in the United States for 250 years. It’s an argument about what it means to be American, and who gets to decide. The result is All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, a History in 15 Speeches.

The book begins with Benjamin Franklin, who warned at the constitutional convention that the new government, “can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” The book ends with the second inauguration of Donald Trump.

This age of Trump is a story not just about him, but about us. Like other autocrats, his emergence depended on his ability to frighten and embolden a crowd. Yet it also depended upon the breakdown of our capacity to talk to one another. It is no coincidence that Trump came to dominate our politics just as our attention spans and experience of a shared reality was shattered by the Internet and social media.

Now, we have an administration that propagates a story built upon lies. We can watch a man get killed by federal agents in Minneapolis and then hear him besmirched as a terrorist or assassin despite what we saw with our own eyes. It makes you feel powerless, which it is intended to do.

It reminds me of a young woman I met in Hong Kong. It was 2019, at the height of the protest movement there. The encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party was manifest in crackdowns, new curriculum, and disappearances. But most disorienting, to her, was their capacity to dictate reality. It was, as she told me: “like pointing at a deer and saying it’s a horse.”

That’s happening now, here in America. Of course, people can see it with their own eyes. But that’s always been the case. When Germans were told that national greatness came through racialized hate and territorial conquest. When Soviets were told that collectivization and centralized control would bring riches and not famine.

What’s different here and now is that we still have the capacity to use our own voice, to tell our own story. But what is a story that can both weather – and move beyond – the assault on democracy and reality itself that we are living through? That kind of storytelling has often been missing from the opposition to Trump and his like-minded strongmen around the globe.

The title of my next book comes from Martin Luther King’s speech the night before he died: “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper.” At a time when that gap feels cavernous, I want to use this space to try and understand where we are, how we got here, and where this story is going.