by Susan Rice
Up is down, and down is up.
What this all reveals about the character, motives, and loyalties of the American president cannot be dismissed. Nor can the inaction of the president’s party in Congress in the face of direct, daily assaults on the integrity of our core values and national institutions. Together, they are systematically rending the fabric of our national democracy purely for partisan political gain.
The key questions that remain are whether our democratic institutions can withstand this sustained assault, and whether the American people will hold leaders accountable at the ballot box for placing party over country. I believe the answer to both questions is yes, but only if Americans fully understand what’s at stake.
Today, our domestic political divisions constitute the greatest threat to our national security. Healing them is critical to the survival of our democracy and the preservation of America’s global leadership.
America’s polarization along socioeconomic, geographic, racial, religious, and political lines appears only to be deepening. We are too often suspicious of “the other”—those who don’t look, worship, or think like us—and assume that our interests are more likely opposed than common. In an era when the benefits of wealth, economic growth, and our global leadership are so unevenly distributed, Americans often perceive that they are competing with each other for their share of a static or shrinking pie. Rather than expecting to grow the national pie and thus, potentially, our respective shares, too many Americans are locked in a zero-sum mentality, in which what is good for me and mine cannot be good for others; or, when I win, someone else must lose. As our country changes demographically—growing more racially and ethnically diverse, on course to becoming “majority minority” in the 2040s—this fear, this presumption of us vs. them, is becoming more pervasive and pernicious.
Not only do these divisions, exacerbated by self-interested leaders, weaken our national cohesion, they threaten our national security by keeping us from tackling urgent problems and by creating openings for our adversaries to exploit. Extreme political polarization prevents leaders in Washington even from taking actions that members of both parties agree are necessary—from repairing and replacing aging infrastructure, like bridges and airports, and expanding broadband access, to ensuring that government does not shut down over minor budgetary disputes, enacting comprehensive immigration reform, and passing paid family leave.
Washington is broken, and our democracy is increasingly dysfunctional.
Even more dangerously, our vulnerabilities are not lost on our adversaries, who seek to weaken America from within and strengthen their global position at our expense. Russia, above all, has intervened to manipulate and discredit our electoral process, most blatantly in 2016, but its nefarious actions are not tied solely to our political cycle. They continue and are constant. When a Ferguson, Charlottesville, Parkland, or massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh occurs, Russian propaganda engines from RT television to thousands of coordinated social media bots light up to magnify suspicion and anger among Americans on both sides of contentious issues. Our divisions afford our adversaries easy openings through which to pit Americans against one another—to distrust, discredit, and ultimately, detest each other.
If Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, or any adversary can corrode our confidence in our national institutions—the media, Congress, the Intelligence Community, law enforcement, the presidency—as well as our faith in each other’s motives and loyalties as Americans, then they need never fire a bullet to defeat us and our democratic way of life. We will have done the equivalent of putting a bull’s-eye on our own back, handing our enemy a loaded rifle, and standing still waiting to be shot.
Terrorists, too, now get more bang for each blast. After 9/11, Americans largely came together, united in their resolve to defeat the Al Qaeda terrorists that struck us and to recover from our losses. Yet, not even a dozen years later, by Benghazi, politicians had learned to demagogue terrorist attacks for political gain and have done so repeatedly since—from Paris to San Bernardino to Niger. Terrorists now know that a successful attack is more likely to further divide Americans than to unite us, which makes us a more attractive target. Not only do terrorists reap the propaganda gains of killing and maiming, they also benefit from the lasting consequences of a more fragmented and fractious America.
At the same time, our adversaries are working to erode that which at our core makes us American—our faith in democracy. Democracy can only endure if citizens believe that their vote counts, their voice can be heard, and their will is respected. In magnifying our divisions, our opponents seek to cause as many Americans as possible to doubt the legitimacy and utility of our democratic institutions, to lose faith, disengage, and to denigrate the process and each other. Even if our adversaries fall short of provoking domestic conflict, they will surely still succeed in devaluing the democratic model globally and boosting the attractiveness of authoritarianism.
The risks to our survival as a strong, influential, and cohesive nation cannot be underestimated. It’s mind-boggling and alarming to hear some right-wing commentators predict, almost with relish, a coming “civil war.” Yet America has been divided before—far more deeply than today. Recall the actual Civil War and Reconstruction, the pull of the isolationist movement of the 1930s, McCarthyism, the civil rights era riots and destruction in our major cities, Vietnam. We emerged from each of these periods whole and, arguably, if not immediately, stronger.
What is different today is that our adversaries have demonstrated both the will and capacity to weaponize our divisions for use against us, and they are aided and abetted, whether deliberately or not, by nativist leaders who seek political benefit in pitting groups of Americans against each other—on the basis of race, class, religion, or national origin.
In tandem, our political system has evolved in ways that make it easier and far more beneficial to pursue zero-sum partisan outcomes. From the nearly unlimited role of money in politics (particularly from “dark” and unaccountable sources) and our relentlessly gerrymandered congressional districts, to a primary system that rewards extremes on both sides, we face real structural impediments to compromise and cooperation across party lines.
Concentrated ownership of local news stations, the influence of cable television, which offers a network for every political disposition while demonizing opposing views, the decline of traditional newspapers and local coverage, and a social media revolution that enables individuals to choose what information they consume all make things far worse. No child today knows the simplicity I enjoyed of receiving my nightly news courtesy of a venerable man anchoring one of the three original networks.
Civil discourse has suffered further from Americans’ growing penchant to filter out information we prefer not to hear—whether through the issuance of “trigger warnings” in classrooms, efforts to constrain conservatives or pro-Israel groups on college campuses, or the right’s reactionary dismissal of progressive views as “un-American” or “socialist” or “identity politics.”
We can now select what “facts” we want to believe and discount those we do not. This danger will only worsen as technology enables the perfection of “deep fakes,” like manipulated videos that make it authentically appear a politician has done or said something he has not, or improved algorithms that further skew the information we are fed. If citizens cannot agree on the realities we are facing, how can we rationally debate challenges, much less devise common solutions?
Americans are more and more segregated along ideological lines—not just racial and socioeconomic. Liberals and conservatives tend to live in different zip codes and don’t encounter each other on a routine basis. Washington has changed too, as members of Congress rarely move their families to town, and instead sleep two or three nights a week on cots or in group houses on Capitol Hill. Democrats and Republicans in Congress do not know each other as they once did. The ties of school, friendship, and shared personal struggle t
hat bound families across party lines, like mine with the Brock family—Republicans from Tennessee who embraced me almost as their own child—barely exist.
We live apart, in our own bubbles, and resist any disturbance to the comfort of our self-imposed cocoons. It’s hard to trust someone you have never met, to respect someone you know little about, to hear someone who doesn’t even see you.
The good news is: our domestic divisions are a problem of Americans’ own making, and thus we can fix it. From the personal to the national level, every one of us can contribute. Within our families, at work, and in our communities, we can listen, learn, and try to understand what animates those with whom we disagree. Yet we also need to reach well beyond the confines of the familiar and challenge ourselves to know those we don’t, those we think we won’t like, even those we fear.
When our differences feel too vast to bridge, we need to step back, cool off, and try again. That may sound facile, but the alternative is too dire not to try.
Each of us, not just our leaders, has agency and responsibility. Each of us can contribute to catalyzing our national healing. We have the tools, if only we have the will.
For instance, one year of mandatory national service would compel Americans to get to know each other and work together. Universal civics education—with a curriculum focused on the Constitution, our electoral and legislative process, our democratic institutions, the rule of law, and how to distinguish fact from fiction—would make for more competent and engaged citizens. Truth in advertising on social media, a revival of apolitical local news, and the genuine, not selective, application of norms of free speech and free assembly, would better inform our citizens. Limiting the role of money in politics, implementing nonpartisan redistricting and measures like rank-choice voting of candidates from all parties as in Maine, while making it far easier for all citizens to vote, are steps that would strengthen our democracy and constrain the role of extreme partisans and special interests.
America’s potential to continue to grow and thrive, to innovate and contribute is almost limitless, if and when we pull together—as a people, a nation, a body politic. We are at a crossroads where Americans will either heal, remake, and renew ourselves as a nation; or we will tear ourselves apart, ensuring our national rot and international decline, due to fear, division, and our inability to care for and learn from each other. We are testing the strength of our national cohesion and our democratic institutions; and the jury is out.
Will we demand leaders who put country over party? Leaders who put our shared national mission first?
That mission remains to champion the worth, dignity, and well-being of every American—regardless of what they look like, when they came here, how they worship, or who they love. It is to expand opportunity and revive the American Dream rather than restrict access to it. Ultimately, it is to lift up the coming generations, so that like my parents and me—the descendants of immigrant laborers and slaves—they too can rise and thrive and claim this country fully as their own.
The choice is ours.
I believe, as always, that we must choose each other. Individually and collectively, we can and must bend the arc of the moral universe—toward both justice and unity. We do not live in a zero-sum America. Your failure can never be my success. Our national creeds, of equality and “Out of Many, One”—E Pluribus Unum—must still guide us.
For better, for worse, we are in this together. And we cannot afford to part.
That’s why I remain fundamentally optimistic about America. We have overcome far greater challenges as a people, a nation, and a global leader.
No one has ever won by betting against America’s long-term capacity for growth, change, and renewal.
It would be foolish to start now.
Acknowledgments
From childhood, I have used a cylindrical wooden wine barrel my dad brought home from Europe as a bedside table. It has a removable top, and into it I threw every important piece of paper I ever wanted to keep—letters, event programs, the occasional report card, notes to myself. I never bothered to unearth what it contained. I just kept chucking stuff in. That barrel, which I still keep in my bedroom today, amounts to an archeological dig of my life before email. In the process of excavation, I found a handwritten note to me from my paternal grandmother, who died when I was four; virtually all of Ian’s letters to me; and loads of correspondence from secondary school, Stanford, and Oxford.
After my mother passed away in 2017, we discovered dusty, mite-infested trunks in her attic filled with family history, newspaper clippings, and photographs. It was a treasure trove. Years earlier, my brother, Johnny, did the painful work of cleaning out my father’s house in Camas, Washington, after he died in 2011. Unable emotionally or practically to sift through all of Dad’s papers, he stashed them in his basement. Prompted by my pleas to assist with the book, Johnny dug them out, and I have benefited enormously from what we have found—from the ugly, such as depositions from my parents’ divorce proceedings, to the mundane, like tax records, to the amazing, including photographic portraits of my father’s relatives, official Air Force pictures of Dad’s service in World War II at Tuskegee, and personal photos from his days in India and Berkeley.
I have truly enjoyed writing Tough Love. A large part of the personal purpose behind this endeavor was to explore my family history, to revisit unflinchingly the painful aspects of my childhood that I had sped through in order to cope in the moment, and to ask myself the hard questions of where and why I have succeeded and failed and what I have learned in the process.
I needed to unbury my own life—literally and figuratively. No one else could do that for me. Thus, when some suggested at the outset that I partner with a ghostwriter or coauthor to help me produce this book, I resisted.
That said, as at every stage and in every aspect of my life, I could never have completed this project nor had this story to tell without the extraordinary help and support of so many others.
My agents at Creative Artists Agency, Mollie Glick, David Larabell, Christine Lancman, Kate Childs, Craig Gering, and Michelle Kydd Lee, believed in the importance of my story, offered valuable feedback, and supported me every step of the way.
I am grateful to Simon & Schuster for enabling me to tell this story, especially my dedicated, diehard editor Dawn Davis, who made this journey fun as well as a humbling learning experience. Chelcee Johns, Mark LaFlaur, Christina Zarafonitis, Min Choi, Amanda Lang, Cary Goldstein, and Jonathan Karp have also been great partners.
I am extraordinarily indebted to Alexander Cox, my special advisor and research coordinator, who joined me at the start, contributing extraordinary research, painstaking editing, unvarnished and consistently thoughtful feedback, logistical and administrative support, and invaluable encouragement. In addition, Elizabeth Pan supported my transition from government to private life and helped me get this project launched.
Mim Eichler Rivas taught me more than anyone in this process—about structure, storytelling, language, and the world of commercial publishing. Mim originally offered to help me to “rearrange the furniture” but did so much more, pushing me to grow as a writer, to dig deeper, to revise relentlessly, and not to get overly frustrated in the process. I cannot thank her enough.
I am blessed with extraordinary friends from all corners of my life, many of whom read and commented thoughtfully and extensively on drafts of the book. While the flaws are all mine, without their wise and candid input, their “tough love,” this would be a lesser endeavor by far. My deepest thanks to Salman Ahmed, Brooke Anderson, Erica Barks-Ruggles, Alex Butcher-Nesbitt, Richard Clarke, Suzy George, Avril Haines, Zev Karlin-Neumann, Vernon Lobo, Courtney O’Malley, Erin Pelton, Ben Rhodes, Priya Singh, Gayle Smith, Bonnie St. John, and Dan Wilhelm.
I am forever grateful to Kathy Ruemmler, Nick McQuaid, and the Latham and Watkins team for their extraordinary and generous support in this and too many other endeavors.
Anne Withers and Mike Smith at
the National Security Council expeditiously read and reread the manuscript, shepherding it expertly through the interagency clearance process and generously offering valuable insights along the way.
I am thankful to Jim Goldgeier, Christine Chin, and Sylvia Burwell for embracing and supporting me so enthusiastically at American University’s School of International Service.
As I struggled mightily with my title, my friend and poet Tom Healy never grew tired of bantering and ultimately led me to discover that Tough Love summed it all up.
Nothing forges strong bonds of friendship like being in the trenches together, especially when the figurative bullets are flying. Some of my closest friends and most valued colleagues are those with whom I worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations at the NSC, the State Department, and the U.S. Mission to the U.N. It was my fortune to work with several of these colleagues in multiple capacities over the years, but I will name each only once, usually in the context of where we first collaborated.
From my Clinton era stints at the NSC and State, I want to thank in particular Madeleine Albright, Erica Barks-Ruggles, Randy Beers, the late Sandy Berger, Annette Bushelle, Prudence Bushnell, Johnnie Carson, Richard Clarke, Ted Dagne, the late MacArthur DeShazer, David Dunn, Grant Harris, Vicki Huddleston, Howard Jeter, Don Kerrick, Anthony Lake, Shawn McCormick, George Moose, Eric Pelofsky, Tom Pickering, Nancy Powell, John Prendergast, Joann Rice, Witney Schneidman, Eric Schwartz, the late Michael Sheehan, Wendy Sherman, Elaine Shocas, Gayle Smith, Nancy Soderberg, Jim Steinberg, Strobe Talbott, John Underriner, Joe Wilson, and the late Howard Wolpe.