I’ll be honest, when I first came across your page in I’d like to say February 2025 I rolled my eyes.

“How quaint. We have a group of wanna be authoritarians running roughshod over the government and promising to abuse its citizens. One of the first acts of this government was to pardon the rioters and insurrectionists of January 6, and here’s another liberal leaning “both sides bad!” guy who just wants liberals to make nice with people who spit in our faces and relish using the government to harm us. Just another Charlie Brown who’s absolutely sure that this is the time that Lucy won’t pull the football away”

(I swear this is not me being a paragraph guy full of insults, I think it’s important to let you know where I’ve started to see where I have arrived)

I will admit that the more I have thought about your thesis, the more interesting it is to me

I started to think about my own journey. In law school in 2009-2012, I used to attend conservative legal organization events not because I agreed with them, but because I found people who could exchange ideas in an intelligent way that helped me think better about my own views. I had friends who were committed conservatives, but we had basic respect for each other’s views and intelligence.

I didn’t start to walk around with contempt for Republicans until about 2015 when the leading candidate for the Republican nomination rode his way to the top by telling everyone how much he hated people like me (aka people from California), how people like me (ie anyone left of Mitt Romney) hated America and we basically weren’t even people.

After years of a political movement not only telling me they hated me, but they wanted to use the government to make life worse for people they disagree with politically (and when in government did just that), then yes, the contempt that didn’t used to be there suddenly came out. I found myself less patient with people with different political views, and yes, more contemptuous of them. I was much more likely since then to judge someone for a handful of views I disagree with rather than view them as a complete person.

To me, it didn’t matter if someone was reluctantly supporting Maga as a lesser of two evils or strongly disagreed with how Trump behaves publicly, they in my view were still complicit in his worst abuses and deserving of the contempt others have showed even if they were only halfway in.

So to a certain extent, I have started to see the thesis of your argument play out in real time: that the cycle of contempt is self sustaining, and it makes people not want to make peace because they’re so angry at the contempt being thrown at them

Basically, I had been of the view that I don’t want to make the first move for peace because I don’t think it will accomplish anything, and yes, I’m aggrieved at the decade of contempt and disrespect from the political movement that controls all levels of government

For me, what I would like is for the other side to come to me first and say I’m sorry, and then I would be more amenable to a dialogue. But what I don’t want to do is apologize for the sake of apologizing and then get nothing back, because then it feels like contrition is treated as a punch line rather than as something that everyone needs to do

I see that in the comments a lot, you have people say that it’s the other side’s fault and they don’t want to be the first to say sorry and they are “tired of doing the work and getting nothing in return”

Anyhow, as much as I retain skepticism about whether this project would work, I’ve come around to the view that I could probably stand to explore this topic further

It seems like there might be something to the idea that you don’t seek to lower the temperature because you demand the other person apologize back, or even first, there is a value inherent in not walking around hating millions of strangers based on your own assumptions of who they are as people. Because you cannot run a government or a society with this high level of societal hatred or distrust, and what we’re doing obviously is making things worse.

Which leads me to ask: do you have any hard copies of your book for sale or is it only on Kindle?