The Opening
What if the conversation America needs is finally possible?
A note before you begin: I have written about politics and policy on this publication for several years, always with the same intention — to raise difficult issues in the most non-partisan language I can find, because the moment I reach for name-calling or heavily partisan framing, I feel I’ve stopped doing my job as a writer.
That discipline comes from a specific place: I have an old-school, never-MAGA Republican editor sitting across the dinner table from me in a marriage that has survived and thrived over thirty years and many administrations. He is extraordinarily diplomatic — and I am extraordinarily headstrong. Between the two of us, we tend to find the truth.
He asks me to support my statements, to do the research, to question the framing I absorbed before I even realized I had absorbed it. Often he is right to push me to dig deeper — and occasionally that process reveals that something felt true and urgent to me because of how it was being said inside the spaces I occupy, not because of the underlying facts. That kind of check is not comfortable. It is necessary.
I am not writing from an echo chamber. I am writing from inside the disagreement — which is exactly where I believe this work has to come from.
That is not neutrality. I have clear convictions and this piece reflects them. But I believe the most useful thing a writer can do right now is find the language that reaches people across the divide rather than confirming the views of people who already agree.
This piece references articles I’ve written that go deeper on specific arguments — healthcare, energy, the Epstein files, the broken covenant of the American economy. The links are there for readers who want the full case. The article works without them but I hope you’ll want to dig deeper.
Fair warning: this is a long read. (Sorry, not sorry, Cousin Marty) I wrote it long on purpose — the argument builds in a way that needs the full arc to land. Stick with it. I think it’s worth your time.
What follows is not a both-sides argument. It is an argument about how we find each other again.
We’re All Tired. That’s Actually the Point.
You are exhausted. So is the person you disagree with.
You are angry about the cost of groceries, the gutting of institutions, the feeling that the rules don’t apply equally to everyone. They are angry about being dismissed, talked down to, told their concerns aren’t real. Both of you are being picked clean by the same class of people, and both of you — somewhere underneath the noise — know it.
If you’re reading this, you probably already understand the architecture of what’s happened:
The culture war seeded deliberately by operatives funded by the same ultra-wealthy class that spent fifty years hollowing out the middle class
Union membership collapsed
Billionaires paying lower effective tax rates than their secretaries
Healthcare and housing and education converted from public goods into profit centers
You know that the Epstein files didn’t reveal a scandal — they revealed a class that bought impunity with money and lawyers and silence.
You know all of this. And you are tired of watching people you love being handed a different explanation for the same pain — and believing it. You’ve watched someone one medical bill away from bankruptcy argue against the people trying to fix that. You’ve watched a conversation about insulin costs somehow end up being about Obama. You’ve heard the hollow deflections, the practiced redirects, the blame that always — somehow — lands anywhere but where it belongs.
Obama! Hillary! Email servers!
That helplessness is not a personal failure. It is the intended outcome. The people profiting from the misdirection need you exhausted and isolated, convinced the gap is too wide to cross. They need you to believe the other side is too far gone to reach. It is the only way the con keeps working.
Here is something else they need you to forget: you are not in the minority.
Trump won by a 1.6% margin in the popular vote.
85.9 million eligible Americans didn’t vote at all — more than voted for either candidate.
Among registered voters, 41% sat out entirely. If “Did Not Vote” had been on the ballot, it would have won.
That group includes a significant number of Republicans — not MAGA voters, but old-school conservatives who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump and weren’t ready to vote Democrat either. They sat it out. They are watching what happened next.
Between 1 in 8 and 1 in 6 Trump voters now express some measure of regret — a percentage that, if it holds through the 2026 midterms, would produce a wave election.
The groups that shifted toward Trump in 2024 — Hispanics, independents, young adults — are now among those expressing the sharpest disappointment.
Non-voters skew heavily independent and young. The most common reason they stayed home was not logistics — it was disengagement. They felt their vote wouldn’t make a difference.
That feeling is exactly what the people profiting from low turnout are counting on. In a political landscape increasingly shaped by gerrymandering — districts drawn to absorb large margins and insulate incumbents from accountability — the only answer is numbers large enough to overwhelm the map. Not a slim majority. An undeniable one. And that coalition is not a fantasy. It is sitting at home, waiting to be given a reason to show up.
The noise has been engineered to feel like consensus. It is not consensus. It is volume.
The person across the table from you — the one who voted differently, the one still with a yard sign you find incomprehensible — they are not where they were two years ago, when the rallies were full and the promises were specific: costs would fall, elites would be held accountable, the people rigging the system would finally face consequences. Those promises have not been kept. The Epstein files landed for them too. The gap between what was promised and what is true is closing the distance between you, whether either of you realizes it yet.
A word on what this piece is not asking of you. It is not asking you to pretend both sides are equally responsible for what we are living through — they are not. It is not asking you to soften your values, abandon your positions, or meet bad faith with false equivalence. The goal is not to give ground. It is to find the language that lets more people stand on it.
Universal healthcare is still universal healthcare. Clean energy is still clean energy. The values don’t change. The frame does. And a frame that reaches the farmer in rural Idaho, the small business owner who sat out the last election, the Republican who couldn’t vote for Trump but didn’t know where else to go — that frame doesn’t weaken the argument. It wins it.
This is the inflection point. Not a crisis to endure — an opening to walk through.
Why Right Now Is Different: The Straw
The Epstein files made the villain concrete. Named. Documented. Not shadowy forces or theoretical extractors of wealth — specific people, on specific flight logs, protected by specific lawyers and politicians and institutions that looked the other way. The ideological cover collapses when the faces appear. These are not people who built things. These are people who bought impunity. (The deeper argument — about money, leverage, and a global financial infrastructure operating above accountability — is here.)
But the door it opened was wider than one predator. What came through it was a pattern.
To understand why the UnitedHealthcare reaction landed the way it did, consider this: per-capita healthcare spending in the United States has grown from $353 per year in 1970 to $15,474 in 2024 — a 44-fold increase. Over the same period, median wages have grown approximately 2.6 times.
Healthcare costs have not risen because Americans are getting healthier. They have risen because a system built around profit rather than care has extracted wealth from every family in the country, every year, for decades. The CEO who was shot was not a random target. He ran the largest health insurance company in the United States — a company that posted $22.4 billion in net income in 2023 while denying roughly one in three claims, the highest denial rate of any major insurer and twice the industry average. That context does not justify what happened. It explains why millions of Americans felt something complicated when it did.
When the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot on a midtown Manhattan street in December 2024, the public reaction was not unified condemnation. It was complicated — startlingly, revealingly complicated. There was a current of recognition running alongside the horror. Not celebration. Not endorsement. But something that needed a new word: Mangione-ing.
A man was killed. That is not a data point. That is a human being, and the act that ended his life was wrong in ways that no amount of justified anger can change. And the fury underneath it was not irrational. It ran across every demographic, every voting bloc, every side of the political divide. That reaction is a data point about how far the legitimacy of these institutions has collapsed.
Once that door was open, the pattern became visible everywhere. Congressional stock trades — members of both parties, buying and selling in industries they regulate, timing transactions around legislation they were about to vote on. And then the Supreme Court. The details of Clarence Thomas’s relationship with Harlan Crow — private jets, yacht vacations, real estate transactions involving Thomas’s mother’s home — alongside administration officials trading futures and dark money flowing through structures designed to hide its origin.
What struck people wasn’t just the scale. It was the mechanism for accountability: the Court itself. A self-regulating body with lifetime tenure and no binding ethics code. The people who were supposed to blow the whistle owned the whistle. That was the moment the architecture became undeniable.
This is not a both-sides piece. The systematic dismantling of democratic norms happening right now is not symmetrical, and calling that out honestly is not partisanship — it is accuracy. What this piece argues is not that the two parties are the same. It is that the people being harmed are not limited to one party’s voters, and the coalition capable of demanding something better has to be broader than one party can provide. You do not have to pretend the playing field is level to believe the people on it deserve better than what they are getting.
The anger is real. It is cross-partisan. It is looking for somewhere to go. Your job is not to say I told you so. Your job is to help aim it.
The Shared Ground
These are not liberal or conservative positions. They poll above 60% — many above 70% — when presented without a party label. The same laws should apply to everyone regardless of wealth. Members of Congress should not trade stocks in industries they regulate. The Supreme Court should have an enforceable ethics code. Working people should be able to afford housing, healthcare, and education without going into debt for life.
This is the terrain. This is where the conversation starts. (The full platform of what we should be demanding from candidates — and why it can work now — is coming as the companion piece to this one. The policy foundation is already in The Broken Covenant.)
Same Stakes, Different Language
Every one of these policies has a version of itself that speaks directly to the values of the person you’re trying to reach. The honest version — buried under a label before most people got to evaluate it on its own terms. My husband and I have owned small businesses for thirty years and argued about all of this across the dinner table from genuinely different political starting points. What that produced is not agreement on everything. It is fluency in the reframe.
The translation is the work.
Universal healthcare is the most pro-small-business policy on the table — not because it’s socially responsible, but because the current system taxes every small employer in America, tethers workers to jobs they’ve outgrown, and quietly blocks millions of qualified buyers from homeownership through debt-to-income ratios that healthcare premiums help push past the threshold. That is a market efficiency argument, not a social one. (Full economic reframe here. The broader covenant argument here.)
Energy independence means what it says — or it means nothing. Drill baby drill feeds a global commodity market priced by people you’ll never vote for. A solar array on a barn roof doesn’t. A wind lease on the back forty is the most conservative thing a farmer can do — working all of the land’s resources, owning the price, keeping what it produces.
Picture two people on the same corner. One sign: Save the Planet. The other: Energy Independence. Same policy. Different cars honk. Now picture a third: American Energy: Own Your Power, Owe Nobody. Nobody is sure whether to honk or jeer. Then they do. Both sides. Because it said the thing both of them actually believe, in language neither had to surrender anything to agree with. Now picture a fourth: Energy Independence IS Renewable Energy. Always Has Been. Watch who argues with that. The sign is not the policy. Change the sign. Have a different conversation. (Full argument here.)
An EV paired with a solar array is the most complete individual economic independence available right now — the gas station, the oil company, the foreign government all out of the picture. It was rebranded as a coastal elite status symbol before most people got to evaluate it on those terms. Those are the same vehicle. One got a bumper sticker. The other was never introduced.
Consider this its introduction. If you already drive one — put a sticker on it. American Energy Independence. Drive Free. Owe Nobody. Then pull into a gas station. Watch what happens.
The bridge in every one of these conversations is the same: strip away the label and ask what it actually does. Who does it protect? Whose independence does it expand? The answers are not liberal or conservative. They are just true.
How to Have the Conversation
For a generation, the dominant social norm around political disagreement has been avoidance. Don’t talk about politics at Thanksgiving. Change the subject. Keep the peace. It was well-intentioned. It had a consequence nobody planned for.
When we stopped having political conversations in the spaces where people actually know and trust each other — across the dinner table, over the back fence, in the pew next to someone you’ve sat beside for twenty years, at the water cooler on Monday morning — we didn’t eliminate political conversation. We pushed it onto the worst possible terrain for it.
Social media is not designed for persuasion. It is designed for performance. It rewards the hot take, the dunk, the ratio. It optimizes for outrage and contempt because those generate engagement, and it has trained us — all of us — to communicate in a voice built for an audience rather than a person. We brought that voice home. We brought it to the table. And then we wondered why nobody could talk to each other anymore.
We need to talk about politics. Not despite the fact that it’s uncomfortable — because it affects every single one of us, every day, in ways that are too important to outsource to cable news and comment sections:
The price of eggs is a political decision.
The cost of your insulin is a political decision.
Whether your kid can afford a house is a political decision.
The fiction that politics is somehow separate from real life is the most successful piece of misdirection in the entire playbook — because people who don’t talk about politics don’t build the coalitions that change it or hold it accountable.
What we need to relearn is not whether to have the conversation. It is how.
Argument is not the same as fighting. An argument is a contest of ideas where someone’s mind might actually change — including yours. A fight is a contest of identities where nobody can afford to lose. We have been trained by social media to fight. We need to learn to argue again. To disagree without performing the disagreement for an invisible audience. To say I don’t think that’s true, and here’s why to the actual human being in front of us, and then stay at the table to hear what they say back.
That is the work. Not the march. Not the post. The conversation — across the fence, across the aisle, across the table — with someone who knows your name.
Having this conversation is not the same as excusing what has been done. It is the opposite — it is how we build the coalition large enough to actually stop it. You are not being asked to give up what you believe. You are being asked to say it in a way that more people can hear.
Knowing the argument is not the same as being able to have it. Here is how.
Start with what’s shared. The price of eggs. The cost of a doctor’s visit. The feeling that your kids will have it harder. These are lived experiences the person across from you also has. Start there. Stay there longer than feels necessary.
Don’t explain. Ask. The fastest way to end a conversation is to arrive with a lecture. The fastest way to keep one going is to ask a genuine question and actually listen to the answer. What do you think happened to costs? Do you think the people at the top are playing by the same rules? Did you hear about the Epstein files? Questions open doors. Explanations close them.
Questions open doors. Explanations close them.
Name the con without shaming the person who fell for it. All of us have been manipulated. The culture war worked on different people in different directions. Saying we were all being divided on purpose doesn’t require either person to admit they were stupid — only that they were targeted. That is the only frame in which the conversation can actually happen.
Saying we were all being divided on purpose doesn’t require either person to admit they were stupid — only that they were targeted.
Return to the concrete. When the conversation drifts back into culture war territory — and it will — don’t fight on that terrain. Redirect without dismissing: I hear you on that. Do you think the people making those arguments are the same people whose names are in the Epstein files? You don’t have to win the culture war argument. Make it feel less important than the class war argument. Most people, given a moment of genuine reflection, already know it is.
You don’t have to win the culture war argument. Make it feel less important than the class war argument.
Hold the line on tone without holding a grudge. You can say I don’t think that’s true, and here’s why without contempt. Contempt is the weapon being used against all of us. The system that profits from our division needs us to dehumanize each other — because irredeemable people don’t build coalitions. What you hold instead is a line. Quietly, firmly, without drama: this is not how we talk to each other. Words matter. Relationships matter. And we are not going to lose each other to this.
I say this with the full weight of thirty years of genuine disagreement across my own dinner table: the single most radical thing available to us right now — more radical than any march, more threatening to the people who profit from our division than any individual vote — is to refuse to stop seeing each other as human beings. That is not weakness. That is the most subversive act we have.
Contempt is the weapon being used against all of us. The system that profits from our division needs us to dehumanize each other — because irredeemable people don’t build coalitions.
Don’t demand a full conversion. Plant a seed. The goal is not to produce a fully enlightened person by dessert. It is to introduce one idea that sticks. One question they’ll turn over later. One moment of recognition — we are being played against each other — that they carry away and sit with. That is how minds change. Not in one argument but in accumulated moments of honest contact.
The Opportunity We Cannot Afford to Waste
We are not waiting for the midterms to save us. We are not waiting for a political hero. Political change begins when the people who compete for office understand that there is a unified demand — not a wish, not a talking point, but a demand — that they will be held to. That demand has to come from enough people, across enough of the political spectrum, that no candidate can afford to ignore it.
That means votes. Not a slim majority — an undeniable one. The 85.9 million who sat out 2024 are not gone. They are disengaged. The difference between disengaged and unreachable is a conversation that makes the stakes feel real and personal.
Every person you bring to the table — whether they’ve been voting the wrong way or not voting at all — is a node in the network that changes what candidates believe they can win on. The organizing starts now. The pressure starts now. And the conversation you’re having at your own dinner table is where it begins.
The restoration of a functional American democracy will not arrive as a breaking news alert. It will happen in kitchens, on front porches, in text threads, at community meetings, and at the ballot box — carried there by ordinary people who decided that this inflection point was an opportunity, not just a crisis.
That decision is ours to make.
References & Further Reading
From Smart Ruminations
“What the Epstein Files Reveal About Power, Money and the Class That Bought Impunity.” The deeper argument about money, leverage, and the global financial infrastructure that keeps the powerful protected.
“The Broken Covenant: What and Who.” The full economic and historical argument about who dismantled the conditions that built the middle class — and what a real platform to restore them looks like.
“The Hidden Mortgage Killer: How Healthcare Costs Are Locking Americans Out of Homeownership.” The market efficiency case for universal healthcare — reframed as a housing, small business, and economic freedom argument.
“Farm the Land, Farm the Sky.” The full energy independence argument — including the history of Danish energy cooperatives, rural REAP grants, and why renewable energy is the most conservative thing a farmer can do.
“If You Care About Your Rights, You Should Care About This.” Why the erosion of rights for one group sets the precedent for everyone — a constitutional argument that speaks directly to Second Amendment conservatives.
“Americans Could Lose Access to Birth Control — And It Already Happened Overseas.” How the abortifacient reclassification of standard contraceptives was tested in practice before arriving as policy at home.
Election & Voter Data
Federal Election Commission. 2024 Presidential Election Results. Source for Trump’s 1.6% popular vote margin.
United States Elections Project. 2024 November General Election Turnout. Source for the 85.9 million eligible non-voters and the 41% registered voter abstention rate.
Pew Research Center. “In Tight 2024 Race, Trump Wins on Economy.” Source for demographic shifts among Hispanics, independents, and young adults toward Trump in 2024.
Civiqs / Various pollsters. Trump approval and regret polling, April–May 2026. The 1 in 8 to 1 in 6 Trump voter regret figure is drawn from aggregated polling; individual polls include Civiqs, YouGov, and Navigator Research tracking surveys.
Healthcare Data
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. National Health Expenditure Data. Primary source for per-capita healthcare spending: $353 in 1970, $15,474 in 2024.
UnitedHealth Group. 2023 Annual Report / Form 10-K. Source for $22.4 billion net income figure.
ValuePenguin / LendingTree. “Health Insurance Claim Denial Rates by Company.” Source for UnitedHealthcare’s one-in-three denial rate — highest of any major insurer and twice the industry average — based on CMS Transparency in Coverage data for 2023.
Economic Inequality
ProPublica. “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.” June 2021. Source for the finding that billionaires pay lower effective tax rates than their employees.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. Union Members Summary. Annual report tracking the collapse of union membership from 35% in the 1950s to below 10% today.
Supreme Court / Clarence Thomas
ProPublica. “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire.” April 2023. The original investigative report documenting Thomas’s undisclosed travel, yacht trips, and real estate transactions with Harlan Crow.
ProPublica. Clarence Thomas Investigation — Full Series. Ongoing investigative series covering the full scope of the Thomas/Crow relationship and related financial disclosures.
Cousin Marty took up the challenge and read the entire Rumination. Thanks.