New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Car fight, then a ‘Search for Common Ground’
Yale Law grads’ road trips bring hopeful book on ‘Union’
Jordan Blashek is a Marine veteran on the political right; Christopher Haugh is a Berkeley, Calif., writer who worked as an intern in the Obama White House and is on the left. We met the co-authors together in a Webex interview from East and West coasts Wednesday. And unlike a cable news flame-throwing session, no one lost their temper or called names.
Which is pretty much the point of their new book, “Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and A Search for Common Ground” (Little, Brown & Co., due out out Tuesday, July 21).
In a country reeling from partisan bickering, protests over racial injustice, pandemic stress and a polarizing president, the book explores the national divide through the authors’ unlikely friendship and a series of road trips across the country.
You can trace the book to 2015 when the two were at Yale Law School, where they had no plan to become practicing lawyers.
“It’s kind of a Yale tradition; that you go there with other interests and, whether it’s writing or politics or policy, it’s open to that expansive view of what you could do as a lawyer,” said Blashek. “So we spent a lot of time exploring New Haven. We probably spent way too much time at the Owl Shop, listening to the Grateful Dead cover band on Tuesdays.”
Blashek, working also on investments for a philanthropic firm, said New Haven is “fascinating because it’s got this amazing, long history. It also has a lot of current tensions.” And it led the two men to decide they needed a better understanding of the country between the coasts. Haugh said they would debate for hours at the smoke shop, where he enjoyed the whiskey.
The two met because one of Blashek’s cousins worked at the State
Department, where Haugh had been working, and suggested he look up Blashek as Haugh headed for Yale Law.
The two California natives met and bonded over an appreciation for literature, writing and adventure, and second-year grad student Blashek ushered first-year Haugh into his circle of friends.
As told in chapter five of the book, the following spring saw Blashek headed back to California and Haugh with time to kill before starting another job in D.C. So a road trip came up — during the presidential campaign of 2016.
“At the time, the heat in politics really started to rise, and it started to seem like there was nothing else to talk about, especially in a cross-party friendship like ours,” said Haugh. Traveling from New Haven to Gettysburg, they also discussed the Civil War and today’s fractured country (reverberating today).
Haugh told Blashek that there was no way Trump could win. “I think I told Jordan that it was a mathematical impossibility, which of course I regret saying,” Haugh laughed.
The first road trip was just for fun, but “there’s something magical on the road,” said Blashek. “You get to go through the national parks, you get to meet people in towns and cities that you’ve never been to, and you find that Americans are interesting and unique and diverse.”
Their own conversations were great because there was “less noise than we’re used to,” Blashek said. “In New Haven, we were always surrounded by friends; it always got very heated . ... On the road, we could talk about deeper things, and explore values that underpin why we felt this way or that way about a political issue.”
Six months after the election, they took to the road again, including a Trump rally in Phoenix, some time with a group of Black Lives
Matter protesters and a group of military veterans. The two had a fight about immigration in Nevada, said Blashek, and spent time with the woman who helped raise him, a babysitter who was an undocumented immigrant. They realized there was a story in the “connective tissue” among Americans.
Regrettably, the immigration argument was “an all-out brawl ... and we really hurt each other. We said some things that kind of attacked each other personally,” said Blashek, “and left some scars.” In the book, they tie that fight to a story about two friends from the Civil War who end up on opposing sides. “We were just trying to show that friendship is really powerful; it helps transcend even the deepest divides ideologically. And yet, those friendships can also be brittle.”
In their re-created road discussions in the book, they debate issues from climate change and the environment to layoffs and the future of business, the opioid crisis and criminal justice, law enforcement, battleground states and the Southern border. But there’s even more information from the regular people they met on the trips, they said. And the authors’ conclusion is hopeful.
“We have deep problems as a country,” said Blashek, “but we can solve them together because there are a few thing we do share in common . ... There’s this great new poll that just came out . ... I think it was 80 percent said they agreed that they want a great leader who can unify the country. So if nothing else, we’re unified in that we want to be brought back together . ... I think we share this common bewilderment on what’s happening, whether it’s social media or it’s very aggressive activist groups on both sides pulling us apart or it’s a political class that we think no longer represents us.”
Blashek said the stumbling block, repeatedly, is in “powerful emotions on both sides that get triggered over and over and over again. And either we don’t care that we trigger the other
You can trace the book to 2015 when the two were at Yale Law School, where they had no plan to become practicing lawyers.
side or we don’t understand it is happening.”
Part of the solution for the two staying friends was navigating around those triggers, to avoid the emotional reactions.
“You know, on the right, I think there is this language of patriotism that triggers strong emotions,” said Blashek. “There’s a reason why Republican candidates always use ‘Proud To Be an American’ as their music when they enter. And it’s why Republicans get triggered when they hear ‘This is a racist country; this is a terrible country.’ ... And on the left, I think there’s a similar language around empathy. And harm and unfairness, especially to disadvantaged groups ... when they hear language that seems to minimize or overlook some of that pain, they react very strongly. And the two sides keep butting heads on this.”
Haugh, who was a Yale Journalism Scholar, agreed it is tough to avoid the triggers to emotions when viewing Twitter or Facebook.
“That’s one of the reasons the road was so eye-opening for us. When you get out there and you start meeting people and ... go talk to people and get away from the distortion of very effective politics and political journalism to a certain extent ... you start to see people doing the work of hope. We like to say that hope is ... an activity; it’s not a belief system. Optimism is the belief that things will get better, no matter what. Hope is actually rolling up your sleeves and doing something to make it better.”
Haugh said they saw evidence of that work everywhere, including Tulsa, Okla., with its tragic history of racial hatred.
“We’re far more complex thinkers than we give ourselves credit for,” he
said. “Oftentimes when you talk to a Republican, you hear bits and pieces of your own philosophy as a liberal, say . ... Or we get on the road and we meet Pete the truck driver who wears a Make America Great Again shirt for four of the five days we’re with him. And the first thing he says to us about politics when we’re with him, as he shifts into third gear in his dieselengine (truck), is we need to talk more about climate change and how important it is.”
Over-simplicity and politics get in the way, said Haugh. With COVID, all agree we want to beat this thing and get back to work as quick as possible. “But if you look at our politics, you wouldn’t know that.”
As for populists and extremists having more success in public opinion than moderates in recent years, Blashek said people are seeking out their own information (on the Web, for instance) and “because we can’t have conversations that can reveal the little bit of truth you have and the little bit of truth I have, and triangulate off of each other . ... Instead we’re left in these weird echo chambers that reinforce our views ... creating this fragmentation. I think it’s very dangerous, but it comes from this feeling that ‘I’m being manipulated and I don’t know why.’” A conservative, he faults globalism and the governing class for that, partly, leading to a recent desire for aggressive risk-takers.
The pandemic is laying bare our national problems “and we’re not reacting in the best possible way,” said Haugh. “But that doesn’t mean in the coming months and years, we can’t use this as an opportunity. I’m very much hopeful about what comes next.”
“The beauty of America,” added Blashek, “is that we can reinvent ourselves every generation, and we have. ... But those moments in our history are always very hard . ... There are big challenges we face but there are also incredible people on the ground in cities and communities across the country... They’re the one who are going to figure it out.”