The Path to Healing a Nation

Lessons from Terry Szuplat's latest book

It can sometimes feel like we're trapped in an age of pessimism. Faith in institutions—from the media to Congress to the military—is at all-time lows. Fear of climate change is endemic. Swaths of young people feel like they're drowning, and many attribute their depression and anxiety to forces that they believe are outside of their control: "late-stage" capitalism and systemic racism for some, and a decline of morals and the erosion of free speech for others. In A Time to Build, political scientist Yuval Levin argues that the "bright and forward-looking era" of the early 2000s has given way to a "twilight age," marked by what sociologist Robert Nisbet calls "a widely expressed sense of degradation of values and of corruption of culture."

Into this cultural moment comes Say It Well by Obama's longest-running speechwriter Terry Szuplat. And, like his former boss, Szuplat is preaching a message of hope.

The essence of Szuplat's message might be summed up in that Big Sean song: "One Man Can Change the World." He quotes Obama: "...one voice can change a room. And if it can change a room, it can change a city! And if it can change a city, it can change a state! And if it can change a state, it can change a nation! And if it can change a nation, it can change the world!" If our current national discourse too often feels nihilistic and convinced of its own powerlessness, Szuplat is selling the opposite message.

Telling us to hope is one thing—and from a writer of Szuplat's heft, that alone might do something to alleviate our cultural malaise. But far more powerfully than just telling us to hope, in Say It Well Szuplat shows us how. Above all, his version of hope is grounded in the idea that we can each rediscover who we really are.

One of Szuplat's favorite phrases is "Say what only you can say." He means that all of us have a unique perspective and voice. We aren't mindless drones or copycats of more successful people—the next Barack Obama or Elon Musk. Our identity is deeper than that. He urges his readers to give a speech "that only you can give." Instead of trying to copy someone else, we should tap into our own deepest essence. Instead of believing that we have nothing to say, or that whatever we have to say has been said before, we should mine our story for the insights inside of us that can add another note to the grand orchestra of the human experience. We may never be Barack Obama—but the truth is that Barack Obama can never be us, either.

In Szuplat's insistence that we all have something unique and powerful to say, he reminds me strongly of the most hopeful theologian I've ever heard: Jamie Winship. Winship took the stage at a summer camp to tell an auditorium full of middle schoolers that they each possessed limitless potential. He told them the story of David, a middle school boy who defeated a giant and went on to write psalms that have resonated with us over thousands of years. He told them the story of his own son, who went to Baghdad as a teenager and became an internationally famous skateboarder. He told his audience that they could "change foreign policy," "stop conflict in other countries," and “end human trafficking.”

Winship's message is that each of us has a true identity: an identity that God breathed into us when we were in our mother's womb. When we tap into that true identity, we can change the world. When we try to be someone else, we're doomed to fail. There's no evidence that Szuplat has ever heard of Winship, but the message of true identity seems at times to sing through Say It Well. Szuplat quotes Donovan Livingston: "At the core, none of us were meant to be common. We were born to be comets." Like Winship, Szuplat seems to believe that if we can dig deep and figure out who we are, then there is no limit to what we can accomplish.

Szuplat admits that speaking up can be daunting—the more so when we're baring our soul to our audience rather than just reading from a corporate PowerPoint. So how do we find the necessary courage? For Szuplat, a key ingredient is belonging. He argues that we should "Love our story—because the feeling of safety, love, and belonging that we all need starts in our own hearts." In this, he's on solid psychological ground: humans need a sense of belonging before we can strike out on our own. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that children need a "secure base" in which they feel safe and comfortable in order to venture out. That "secure base" gives them the confidence to take risks, because they know that they have somewhere safe to retreat to if things go wrong. What's true of children is true of adults as well. When we feel we have a strong attachment to something secure, we are more capable of being bold.

Zooming out from the micro to the macro, Szuplat even offers hope for our current political discourse. He acknowledges that right now, that discourse is broken. "Too many speakers," he bemoans, "seem more eager to drown out those with different views than to practice the persuasion that brings more people to their cause." But, he says, it doesn't have to be this way.

Szuplat praises the work of Braver Angels, a national nonprofit focused on turning down the political temperature and healing our partisan divides. He reminds us that Americans across the board share broadly similar values. Most of us assume that our political opponents are less moral than we are, but Szuplat would be quick to cast doubt on that assumption. He cites a survey on the values of Republicans and Democrats to remind us that "Roughly 90 percent of the people in the survey, Republicans and Democrats alike, said that personal responsibility, fair enforcement of the law, compassion, and respect across differences were important to them." He quotes one member from a Braver Angels gathering, who told him, "We have sincere differences, but I think we’re motivated by deeply shared principles." Again and again, he offers hope for our political discourse. 

This is an especially important message given the upcoming presidential election. So many of us are terrified of our political opponents: over 70 percent of partisans across the political spectrum agree that members of the other party represent a "clear and present danger" to our great nation. That terror can transmute into anger, and we can end up bullying and intimidating our fellows across the aisle; either as an outlet for our overwhelming fear, or because we tell ourselves that scorched earth politics are justified as a way to keep Those Awful People™ from winning another election. But this is not Szuplat's message. Szuplat's creed is that we should remain grounded in our common humanity; that the people across the aisle are living, breathing human beings who love their children and want to leave our great country better than they found it. Both in the runup to the election and once we have the results, we should let the reality of our common humanity guide our actions towards reconciliation rather than division. 

Our neighbors on the other side are not the demons we so often see them as. And if we can internalize that lesson, then maybe we can change from a culture dominated by fear and anger back to a culture of open-mindedness and bipartisan problem-solving.

Ultimately, Say It Well is about hope: about finding it, about speaking it, about spreading it. If we can do that, I think we can end our current age of pessimism and bring about a new dawn in America.

This is the inaugural essay of our 2024 Election series. Submit your article to submissions@fairforall.org.