2022 Irving Kristol Award Presentation

Introduction: Robert Doar, President, AEI

Keynote Address: Arthur C. Brooks 

Robert Doar: So, one thing I want to get out the way right away is that sometimes when we do these events, we have dialogues and questions and answers. But, you know, when you have a racehorse, you’ve got to let ’em run. And so, Arthur will be giving a speech. I want to make sure you’re clear on that.

I also want to thank Jason. When it comes to leading an organization such as AEI, Jason Bertsch has been the best partner anybody could have. For more than two decades, he’s done so much for all of us.

Now, we gather tonight to honor our great friend and mentor, Arthur Brooks. And before introducing Arthur, I’d like to say a few words about what brings us all together and about the work we do every day. And I’d like to say a word in praise of the United States.

Lots of people today are quick to tell you what’s wrong with our country, and that’s important. But we don’t often enough remind ourselves of how much is right about it, how much we agree, and how important those agreements are. You realize this when you look at America from the outside.

I have just returned from a trip with AEI scholars to Warsaw, where we were on the edge of the war in Ukraine. There we came face-to-face with two facts. First, the people of Ukraine are making a historic and courageous stand for freedom. And they, like all of Europe, from Poland to Germany to the United Kingdom, are looking to America for leadership.

And second, we saw firsthand that Americans, including political leaders from both parties, but also citizens and soldiers, are providing that leadership and playing an essential role in the battle for a free and independent Ukraine. Now, those facts should come as no surprise to all of us. As Ronald Reagan would say, “Fighting for freedom is what we do, because after all, we are Americans.”

Here at home, we have just completed a free and fair election. We at AEI congratulate the victors and console the defeated. But most of all, we offer our help as we together turn to the essential tasks of self-government, which include protecting the rule of law on our borders, in our elections, and in our cities; managing our resources in a way that protects future generations from bankruptcy; promoting work, innovation, and creativity, by making our markets as free and open as possible and by showing that the way out of poverty is through earnings, not government benefits.

We must also strengthen those essential institutions of family, church, and community that have always been the key to our success as a people. And finally, we need to celebrate our founding documents and the protections that they provide, which make our contentious, boisterous, sometimes unpleasant, and frustrating democracy work as a republic. In all of this, AEI will be there, providing research, analysis, and ideas, which will show the way forward.

Despite all our imperfections and despite all our struggles, the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world, and we do not say that enough. But to help us do that, you might say we need happy warriors, and that brings me to tonight’s honoree.

Almost 20 years ago, Arthur came to AEI from Syracuse University, and from the day he arrived, he changed our institution with his energy, his charm, his humor, and most of all, his love, which came from his faith in God. He taught us lessons about charitable giving, the moral core of free markets, and why human flourishing and happiness are far more important than partisan politics.

Arthur’s decade of leadership saw AEI protect its unique strengths while also expanding our work, our impact, and our reputation. He left us with a beautiful headquarters, with a new vision for outreach in communications, with a legacy of new scholars, staff, and supporters who he recruited and attracted. And all the while, Arthur was a steadfast guardian of our nonpartisan, intellectual quality and rigor.

Too often people in Washington assume you have to choose between having integrity or having influence, but AEI has always proven that is a false choice. We have proven it from AEI’s earliest days, and with Arthur at the helm, we proved it anew.

Now, after all of that, I’ve even left out an interesting fact that ever since Arthur left, a strange thing has been happening. Some guy from India named Dalai keeps calling the office and asking for Arthur. 

I got a little chuckle. Not much, but I tried.

Seriously, all of us have been graced by Arthur’s influence. That’s why all of us at AEI are very proud to honor him tonight with the Irving Kristol Award. Congratulations, Arthur, and thank you for all you have done for America. There you go. We’re celebrating you.

Arthur C. Brooks: Thank you, Robert, and thanks to all of you. What an honor it is for me to be here back at the institution that I love so very much, the institution that I had an opportunity to be part of for more than a decade, including 10 and a half years as president. And which is, I must say, seeing its very best days under Robert Doar and Chairman Dan D’Aniello. What a privilege also to give a lecture in the name of Irving Kristol, the creative giant and intellectual godfather to an entire generation of thinkers.

I left AEI as president about three and a half years ago, and people often ask me when they see me in DC that I haven’t seen in a long time what I’ve been up to. I can tell that they’re kind of wondering if the rumors are true, that there’s life outside Washington. I tell them I’ve been teaching at Harvard University. And they say, “What have you been teaching?” They know that I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School, a policy school. Makes sense. Also at the Harvard Business School. “What are you teaching? Accounting, finance, marketing, supply chain management?”

I say, “No, I’m teaching happiness.” And they think I’m lying, as if I told them I had run off to join the circus or something. Because it seems so disconnected from the core business of the American Enterprise Institute. It isn’t disconnected from the core business of the American Enterprise Institute, not at all.

In my first year as president of AEI, the year 2009, the Kristol Lecture was delivered by my great friend, Charles Murray. And that speech was entitled “The Happiness of the People.” As he pointed out in that beautiful speech, which I recommend that you go back and read or watch, happiness is a core part of the American dream.

As the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reminds us, the pursuit of happiness is one of our unalienable rights guaranteed and given to us by our creator, alongside life and liberty. Everybody knows that. The story behind it is a little less well-known.

Thomas Jefferson, who penned the document, was asked sometime later after the revolution and the establishment of the new country why he used that turn of phrase. Many people believe his answer was that he was simply taking dictation from the American mind. I asked the filmmaker Ken Burns, and he said, “It’s more likely that Thomas Jefferson was taking dictation from Benjamin Franklin’s mind.” 

But be that as it may, it was radical, and it was peculiarly American. At the time, happiness would be considered presumptuous for really anybody to pursue, let alone the nobodies populating a startup nation. But that’s really who our ancestors were, ambitious riff-raff, pursuing their happiness with startup lives.

Some years ago, I invented that little turn of phrase, characterizing our ancestors as ambitious riff-raff. I thought it was clever. I said it at an AEI board meeting, and one of the AEI trustees put up his hand and said, “I want you to know that I resent the way that you depict my ancestors. They were not ambitious.”

Still today, the pursuit of happiness is what leaders must promote and what they must protect. Their job certainly is not to make us happy. No government should do that. No politicians should be trusted who promises that they’ll make us happy, but they should protect our ability to pursue our happiness freely. Look, if they make that easier, they’re strengthening our country. If they make that harder, they’re hurting our country. It’s almost that simple.

Well, unfortunately—this is not news—the pursuit of happiness is getting harder in our great country. According to the General Social Survey, the most authoritative source of social data collected by the University of Chicago, since the year 2000, the percentage of Americans saying that they’re not too happy about their lives has risen from 10 percent of the population to 24 percent.

At the same time, the percentage of the population saying that they’re very happy about their lives has fallen from 36 percent to 19 percent. This can be aggregated up to a sense of pessimism. You see that there’s a record number of Americans who will tell you that our country’s headed in the wrong direction. Since 2000, national confidence in all of our institutions, from business and government, has fallen by more than a third.

But you don’t need these data. I’m a social scientist; you can trust me on the data. But you don’t need the data. You feel it, don’t you? It’s in the air. People tell me every day they have a pervasive feeling that, I don’t know, we’re losing something as a country, something beautiful, something unique, something valuable. No matter how you feel about politics, no matter how you feel about the election last week, that’s just short-term stuff. Very few can shake this feeling of loss.

Well, that loss is what I’m going to talk about here tonight. I want to answer two big questions, if I can. Why has the pursuit of happiness become so difficult in this country? What exactly are we losing? But more importantly, what can we do to get it back and maybe even to re-inflect our happiness and our purpose and our greatness to see our best days?

Like most of you, but not all of you, I don’t remember very much about the 1960s. Now, usually, when people say that, they’re about to tell you about their drug experiences. You know, unfortunately, that’s not what I’m going to tell you.

I don’t remember Woodstock, for example, because I was 5 years old. But I do remember in 1969, one thing about that famous music festival. I remember seeing a news report on television about Woodstock.

I was watching the news with my father on a grainy black-and-white television in Seattle, and a reporter was interviewing a hippie. And he asked him something like, “What’s the philosophy of this whole thing?” And the hippie famously said, “If it feels good, do it.” And my dad said, “That’s the end of America.”

Well, the hippie mantra of Woodstock is more or less how most people understand happiness still today. It’s about feelings. 

My happiness class at the Harvard Business School is very oversubscribed. It’s about happiness, after all. Who wouldn’t want that? The 180 slots fill in about nine minutes, or they did this year. And there are hundreds—about 400 on the waiting list. There’s also an illegal Zoom link they think I don’t know about.

On the first day of class, I ask my students a very simple question. I say, “Look, you worked hard to get into this elective. It’s about happiness. Obviously, you must know what happiness is.” And I cold call ’em. This is what we do at Harvard, where you pick people out of the crowd and you cold call ’em, and I say, “What is it? What’s happiness?”

And one after the other, they say something like this. “It’s the feeling I get when I’m with the people that I love.” “It’s the feeling I get when I’m doing what I enjoy.” And I say, “Wrong.” That’s like saying your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of a turkey. No, happiness is not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness.

According to most good social scientists, happiness can be understood as kind of a combination of three phenomena: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Enjoyment is pleasure, plus effort and human elevation. Satisfaction is the joy of an achievement or a goal met or the reward for a job well done. And then there’s meaning.

You know, you can make do without enjoyment for a pretty long period of time, and a lot of people go without very much satisfaction. But without meaning, you’re lost. That is the point made in the famous work of the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, that he made in his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Without a sense of meaning, a sense of the why of our basic existence, our lives just can’t be endured.

Psychologists relate meaning to good mental health. And lately, neuroscientists have helped us to understand why. They’ve uncovered evidence that experience of sense of life’s meaning maps onto all different parts of the human brain, such as the periaqueductal gray, a brain stem region. It’s implicated in all sorts of parts of our lives that we can’t live without, fear conditioning, pain modulation, altruistic behavior. Without meaning, life is unbearable. So, how do you find it?

Social scientists like Charles Murray helpfully refer to what he calls, what we in the community of social science researchers call, the institutions of meaning. There’s four: faith, family, friends, and work. That’s your happiness portfolio, your happiness 401(k) plan. Decades of social psychology research show that these institutions are central to understanding who we are as people and why our lives matter. That is absolutely true for me.

My sense of personal meaning comes from my Catholic faith; my family; my beloved friends, many of whom are in this room here tonight; and my work dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together.

Now, in my work, I’ve developed kind of a handy diagnostic tool to find out if somebody has a healthy sense of meaning in their life. I ask them two questions, the questions of meaning. Number one, “Why do you exist?” And number two, “For what would you be willing to die?” Do you have answers to these questions? When somebody that you love finds the answers to these questions, it’s like a miracle.

I remember this very clearly in the case of one of my children, my middle son, Carlos. Carlos, like most adolescents in high school, struggled with his life’s sense of meaning. As a result, he was not happy. Well, after high school, he found his meaning when he joined the military. Today, at age 22, he is Corporal Carlos Brooks, Scout Sniper, Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

Ask him the two meaning-of-life questions, and he has answers. Why are you alive? “Because God created me.” For what would you be willing to die? “For my faith, for my family and friends, and for the United States of America.” But I have to ask; I need a clarification. “Carlos, what is America?” “It’s the American people and the people with the spirit of American freedom in their hearts. It’s us.”

Now, this happiness crisis in America, I think it’s actually a crisis of personal and shared sense of meaning. We lack meaning. I believe this is because the institutions of meaning—faith, family, friends, and work—have been in full-scale decline for the past 20 years. Consider the evidence. Religious affiliation, religious practice, steadily falling. Among people under 30 today, more than a third are neither spiritual nor religious, and it’s rising by a percentage point every single year.

Marriage rates have fallen by 38 percent since the year 2000, childbearing down by 18 percent since 1990. The percentage of people with fewer than three close friends has doubled since 1990. Our connection to other people through work has cratered, only made worse because of our response to the coronavirus epidemic.

Now, you’ll notice something. Faith, family, friends, and work, you’ll notice something about them. These institutions of meaning, they all have one big thing in common. They are outward-facing expressions of love, and these expressions of love bind us together as people. Let me put it another way. The secret to meaning that brings happiness is to love and to be loved by others.

Now, that can be an awkward topic. Not everybody’s comfortable talking about love. Some people find it positively painful. I was in Minnesota speaking a couple of weeks ago, and they’re not known for discussing their feelings openly. They told me about a man who loved his wife so much that he almost told her.

But we have to talk about love today. When we lose the institutions that reinforce our love for each other, there’s a vacuum of meaning in our lives. Happiness abhors a vacuum. So, we seek alternative sources of meaning, and that leaves us vulnerable, vulnerable to moral predators.

I’m talking about people who offer us fear and hatred instead of love, people who exploit our lack of love to divide us for political, financial, and personal gain. These are people in politics and in media and in academia, or just simple internet trolls who would set us against each other. These are people who tell us that we’re victims of fellow Americans, even friends and family who don’t share our demographics or political views.

Leaders have filled the space people once reserved for faith and family and friendship and work that serves others and given us instead the zombie religion of grievance and the counterfeit family of shared victimhood. They urge us to think in terms of us versus them and to see us as victims of them, be they immigrants or wealthy people or Democrats or Republicans or people of another race or religion.

The leaders who sell grievance do not have our interests at heart. On the contrary, psychologists at the University of British Columbia have found that people who trade in what they call “virtuous victimhood,” they tend to display dark triad personality characteristics. That means, for those of you not following the social psychological research on the dark triad, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. These are people we should pity or fear but not follow. These are not the people we want setting policy or educating our children, but they are. They are in positions of authority, and it’s touching all of our lives.

My own sweet daughter was encouraged by her upper-class, suburban high school in Boston to explore the roots of her oppression. She requested a meeting with the school administrator in which she told him, “I will not be a child soldier conscripted into your culture war.” Yeah, I will admit that I fell prey to the deadly sin of pride that day. But my daughter was simply acting in self-defense, my friends.

The great psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his coauthor Greg Lukianoff, they have found that an identity of victimhood, like bad religion or bad family, causes anxiety. It provokes depression. And these things have skyrocketed in recent years, especially among young people. It’s also ripping our country apart.

Today, 72 percent of Democrats say that Republicans—and by that I mean Republican citizens, not politicians—that these Republican citizens, their neighbors, are more dishonest and immoral than other Americans. Sixty-four percent of Republicans say the same thing about Democrats. Sixty-one percent of Americans are concerned that we could face another civil war.

How long can this go on? The words of historian Will Durant, they kind of ring in my ears these days. He wrote about why Rome fell. Here’s what he said very simply: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.” OK.

People search for meaning. We need meaning. But nations search for meaning too because, as my son Carlos reminded me, nations are just collections of people. So, let’s ask: What has become the de facto meaning of America today as people have been fed grievance and victimization by leaders?

If I were to visit this country for the very first time in 2022, knowing nothing about our history, I would have to say that there’s one national purpose that we appear to agree on, and that’s power.

Just listen to what political leaders from the cultural left to the populist right are telling their followers. “Why are you suffering? Because people like you lack power. People with power are oppressing you. What do you need to succeed? Not virtue, not aspiration, not faith, hope, or love. No, just more power over others.”

And here’s how the power ideology answers the two questions of meaning for our nation. Why does America exist? Because of power. Depending on your political persuasion, either we exist to exploit others or to defend our narrow interests and exclude those who didn’t happen to be born within our borders.

For what are we willing to risk our prosperity and security? Nothing. Either because America’s evil or because nothing is more important than our security and prosperity. There’s nothing really new or especially novel about any of this. It’s a cultural recipe right out of Thomas Hobbes, with a little bit of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche thrown in, depending on your politics.

But don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that there’s something inherently wrong with power. But power for its own sake, ho-hum. That kind of national purpose is just like every other grievance-fueled country on the United Nations roster. No wonder Americans feel like we’re losing something. With that kind of purpose, we are.

Now, it’s easy to be discouraged, to see polarization, to see suffering and the resulting degradation of our sense of national purpose and conclude that we might never be able to bring America together again as people. Some even see a future in which our union is at risk. But my goal tonight is not to stop at telling you our troubles. You know these troubles. It’s to propose real solutions.

So, let me propose three that all of us, as leaders in our families, in our communities, in our country, can start to undertake today. Solution number one: Share your secrets of meaning. When I spoke earlier about the importance of faith and family and friendship and work, I bet a lot of you thought to yourself, “Hey, good news. I practice all of those things.” Congratulations. It’s not enough.

It’s not enough to practice these things privately in your own life. You need to celebrate faith, family, friends, and work openly and recommend them to other people without embarrassment. We need to preach what we practice. We have the responsibility to help Americans, especially those at the margins of society, to learn our secrets to success. If you keep your mouth shut about your secrets to happiness because you’re worried about looking judgmental, that’s simple discrimination.

Solution number two: Find a way to go out of your way to reject identity politics, even when it comes from people who are powerful, and tell our shared story as Americans instead. If you go back in time as a nation, if we want to find our way back in the future, we have to reject the poison of grievance and victimization and work to reestablish a really healthy sense of meaning by telling this shared story that we have as Americans.

Now, don’t dismiss this as horribly idealistic. On the contrary, some of our greatest and most successful presidents, from George Washington to Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, they did exactly that in times of crisis and trouble. They told a shared story that we have as Americans to unite us against a common threat, rather than balkanizing our people one against the other.

This was also, by the way, the secret to the most successful president of my lifetime, the man who was given this very award and gave this speech in 1988, President Ronald Reagan. That’s success. His name is an applause line. Here are his words when he was accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. He was drawing Americans together into a shared story.

“I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries. The spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth, who came here in search of freedom.” And then he added, by the way, just for fun, “Let’s make America great again.”

Now, in 2022, Reagan’s elegy to immigrants—it sounds kind of strange coming from a conservative, doesn’t it? But as Reagan knew, the best way to maintain a shared story and build a great country is to welcome people here who want to be part of that and are going to work for it. So, as an American conservative myself, let me take a minor detour. 

I want to second that old-fashioned view. I want to say something to the immigrants here tonight, including my wife, Esther; including a lot of you in this audience; and including many of you who are serving our meal here tonight. Thank you for believing in the American dream for yourselves and for your children and reminding us that America is still great.

So, what exactly should that American story be that we share? I don’t think we have to look very hard to find it. We need to give voice to the story that I think ordinary Americans still have written on their hearts. 

As a social scientist, one of my hobbies is actually collecting fake quotes that people use all the time. They’re kind of a sociological Rorschach test. They always say more about the misquoters than anything else. They reveal everything about the people who keep perpetuating the misquotes.

Anytime my late father, he wanted to emphasize something, he would attribute it to Socrates. You know, “As Socrates once said, ‘Quit your whining and eat your vegetables.’” That tells you more about my dad than it did about Socrates obviously. 

One of the quotes most commonly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville is this one: “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

He had those words attributed to him since the middle of the 19th century, probably when he was still alive. But he never said that, and as far as I can tell, he never wrote that either. The reason that’s a powerful thing, that we persist in using that misquote—I see it all the time—is because that’s what we want to believe about the United States. De Tocqueville didn’t say it; we said it.

In our hearts, we believe our purpose is not one of power; it’s virtue. To be good, we must be great. To be great, we must be good. To be powerful, we must be virtuous. So, with this beloved misquote in mind, let me take a stab at the answers to the two meaning questions that I think fit our true American story.

Why do we exist as a nation? To lift up the world, both indirectly through the example of our unapologetic enjoyment of prosperity and freedom and directly through our generosity to others and courage in times of trouble.

For what are we willing to risk our prosperity and security? For our way of life. By which I mean our system of free enterprise, which has made our country the envy of the world and pulled billions of my sisters and brothers out of poverty since I was a child. Also, democracy and strength and faith and family. It’s our willingness to fight for the things that benefit us, but also that benefit the world by providing a model that others can and have followed.

This story is a nation. Well, it might seem kind of distant at present, but it resonates like a song that we used to know. It strikes a chord because, leaving aside the outrage industrial complex, which I hope we could leave aside forever, it reminds us that we can be part of something bigger than ourselves that brings freedom and opportunity and goodness. This is what makes us proud to be Americans again.

Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know that it’s a lot more complicated than a patriotic bumper sticker. I get it. Reasonable people can and do disagree about how to pursue these aims. As a matter of fact, we have to disagree. One of the ways that we keep our freedoms is by arguing about how to keep our freedoms.

Now, I promised you three solutions, and I only gave you two. Number one was to share your secrets to success. Number two is to reject the identity politics and tell a national story, which is the story of goodness before greatness. Here’s the third practical solution, and it’s the most urgent of all today.

In 1796, in his farewell address to the nation, George Washington said this, “Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.” In other words, no matter who you are, no matter how you got here, love your country.

So, what’s my country? Is it the soil? Is it the ethnic ancestry? Is it the money? No, as Carlos told me, it’s the people. You and I are in America, and so are the people who are not here tonight, including the people who don’t agree with me or look like me or think like me or vote like me. As impossible it is to imagine, there are millions of people out there who don’t love the American Enterprise Institute. Them too. 

To be great, we must be good. To be good, we must start by being good to each other, even when we disagree. No, especially when we disagree. Anything less is un-American.

Now, let me emphasize the importance just a little bit more of not agreeing with each other. This is a country based on competition: competition in politics, which we call democracy; competition in economics, which is capitalism; and the competition of ideas, which is most important of all and the concept on which the American Enterprise Institute was founded in 1938. So fundamental to a free society: We have to disagree.

But I will not treat those with whom I disagree with contempt, because that is to say I have contempt for the United States, and I won’t do it. It’s wrong. It’s also a lie. It’s to deny what’s written on my heart and probably yours as well. 

Let me ask you a question. How many of you truly love someone with whom you disagree politically? I’m going to round it off to 100 percent. The rest of you are on your phones.

When my fellow conservatives trash people on the left, they’re trashing my family and many of my friends. These are people that I love. I come from a long line of liberal Democrats, despite my dad’s dim view of hippies. I’m the only bona fide conservative in my immediate family.

Many years ago, in my 20s, when my parents were starting to become nervous about my political views and they started to suspect that I had a deep and abiding affection for free market capitalism, my mother took me aside. She confronted me. She said, “I want you to tell me the truth. Have you been voting for Republicans?”

We all love people who disagree with us but who share our American story. It’s time to start acting that way. Easier said than done, I’m aware. We’re in something of a stalemate ideologically in this country, aren’t we? “How can I be nice when they’re so terrible?” I’ve heard it again and again and again.

Someone has to make the first move. Why not Republicans? The party I voted for for many, many years. I would suggest to anybody of any political party that the way to win the hearts of Americans is not to double down on contempt and pugilism, but rather to become the party of normal people, with normal people as leaders who want greater unity and greater happiness.

That’s the right thing to do, and my grandmother would’ve been proud of it. But it’s a practical thing to do, my friends. Look, I have data, but you don’t need the data to tell you that 93 percent of Americans say they hate how divided we’ve become as a country. But ask them, and they’ll say they don’t feel they have leaders who do as well. So they sigh and pull the lever for the lesser of two evils. How sad, how pathetic, in a country like ours.

There’s an opportunity for whomever wants to grab it, to go from a 51–49 political ping-pong match to governing with a big majority. Here are four steps to embrace that opportunity starting today. This is advice I give to all of my friends in politics and in leadership at every level. 

Step one: Renounce all rhetoric of contempt and hatred for all fellow Americans. Number two: Leave behind the leaders who got us into this swamp of grievance and victimization, starting now. Number three: Make a commitment to reject all political violence without fear and without favor. And number four: Search for stable, mainstream policy solutions that a majority of Americans can live with, while disregarding the approval of radicals and activists.

None of this, none of this means renouncing basic values or even center-right policy positions, the policies of free enterprise and American strength that the vast majority of American support. It’s simply to widen the net based on the decency we crave as human beings and proud Americans.

Now, I know, I’m probably going to read tomorrow that this was a pretty naive speech, maybe from some of my friends on the right. And I’m not going to lie; it’s going to hurt my feelings a little bit, although not that much.

The hardest part of what I’m suggesting is that it requires standing up to one’s own side. It means calling very powerful people to account. Nobody wants to do this. It’s scary. We are literally evolved not to stand up to our friends. Half a million years ago, that would mean getting kicked out of your tribe, wandering the frozen tundra, and dying alone. But look around: There’s no tundra, just Twitter.

Standing up to the powerful, look, it isn’t physical courage; it’s moral courage. We often hear the leaders of the grievance coalition, we hear from them that it’s morally courageous to stand up, to stand up militantly to your enemies. What nonsense that is.

As my father taught me, true moral courage is standing up to your friends on behalf of the people with whom you disagree. That’s the patriotic thing to do. Are we strong enough? Are we strong enough to do that?

Look, goodness isn’t for weak people. Goodness isn’t soft, and isn’t easy. It’s difficult. It’s as hard as granite. It requires hard leaders who are as strong as Washington and Lincoln and the great Ronald Reagan.

Here’s my last word. I know we feel like we’re losing something in America. And that’s uncomfortable, and that’s sad. And we don’t like it. But you know what? It’s a sign that there’s an opportunity at hand.

When I was a kid growing up in Seattle, I was crazy about fishing. Nobody in my family fished. My father was a professor; my mother was an artist. No fishing. We rarely went outdoors. I just took it up on my own, fishing in lakes in the Pacific Northwest and in Puget Sound. And it got into my head when I was 11 years old: I was going to learn how to fish in the ocean. I heard it was hard.

So, I went to visit my aunt on the rugged Oregon coast in a place called Lincoln City. And I had my little fishing pole, and I had a little bit of bait. And I stood on the rocks, and I started casting out into the wild surf. And I was catching nothing, nothing. Hours went by. 

After a while, a wizened old fisherman from the town comes up, and he says, “Hey kid, I’ve been watching you.” Today he’d be arrested, but anyway.

He says, “Are you catching anything?” And I said, “No.” He says, “Are you getting any bites?” I said, “Nothing.” He says, “Because you’re doing it wrong.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You can’t catch fish right now. You got to wait for the falling tide.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Oh, that’s when the tide is going out really fast, really rushing out between the rocks.”

And I said, “Well, it doesn’t make sense because, when the falling tide is occurring, all the fish are going out to sea.” And he said, “No, that’s wrong.” He said, “During a falling tide, that’s when the plankton and baitfish are stirred up, and the game fish are going crazy. They’ll bite anything. It’s going to be in half an hour.” “OK.” So, we waited. And after 30 minutes, he’s looking at his watch, and he says, “Let’s fish.”

He had his fishing pole too. We threw our lines in the water, and we’re pulling ’em out one after another, 20 fish each. It was unbelievable. At the end of 45 minutes, exhausted, we’re sitting on the rocks. We were friends by this time, and he’s starting to get all philosophical on me, the old guy was. He lights up a cigarette, and he says, “Kid, during a falling tide, you can only make one mistake.” And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Not having your line in the water.”

We’re in a falling tide in America. It can look and feel like we’re losing our happiness, that we’re losing our purpose, but that just means there’s an opportunity to build something new, to build something great together. We can do it, but we gotta get our lines in the water now. Look, I love this country. I know you love this country, too, so let’s fish. 

God bless you. God bless America.