There’s an expression that I think comes out of Hollywood: “The only thing worse than people talking about you is nobody talking about you.” 

When I published The Nation We Knew, I quickly came to grips with the reality of that statement. Some of it was good; some of it wasn’t. And I find that curious.

Let me be clear: The Nation We Knew is a novel. It’s fiction. It’s not a treatise on political strategy, nor is it a political science textbook. It’s a fantasy. But based on the positive feedback I’ve gotten from the thousands of people who have read it, maybe it should be a political guidebook of some kind. And, based on the negative feedback the book garnered from the political fringes on both sides of the supposed ideological aisle, well, second that last comment. More than a few people have said to me, “This book should be required reading for anyone who runs for the position of dogcatcher all the way to those who have aspirations for the White House.’ Okay, I won’t go that far. Or maybe I will. Politicians have reached out with the same observation.

The novel is a thinly veiled exercise in leadership, the way I define leadership to be and as I’ve defined it for the last 30 years of successfully advising leadership teams on their approaches to being effective, courageous, passionate leaders. It’s about doing the right thing. And it’s about painting a picture for people of what could be, rather than a picture of what is. It’s about turning our backs on the status quo, about not accepting the phrase, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ about saying no to the idea that good enough is good enough. You know why? Because the moment we do that, we start moving backward, not forward.

When the book came out, it quickly rose to be the number one bestselling book in the world on Amazon in political fiction, and it stayed in that position for about two weeks. It still sells very well. But it also kicked off a firestorm of criticism: unrealistic, liberal, snowflake, and naïve were some of the words tossed at the book. But do you know what I found most interesting? More than half of the negative reviews—more than half—started out with a version of the following phrase: 

Well, I haven’t read it yet, but…

Seriously? And you’re therefore qualified to review the book because…?

Politically, I consider myself to be a centrist. I believe that we have two parties (I’m talking about the true Republican and Democratic parties, not the clown college that’s currently making noise in Washington) for a reason: They want the same things for the American people, and they approach those things differently. Fair enough. But I found it interesting that both I and the book were branded with the mark of the Liberal beast. 

I have a problem with labels, because labels are designed to oversimplify, to make it easy to categorize a person or idea or political stance without effort. So, I decided to go look up the definition of the label that had been affixed to my forehead. From the dictionary, I pulled this definition:

Liberal: “Willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.”

If that’s what ‘Liberal’ means, then I accept the label. What I don’t accept is the idea that different thinking means wrong thinking. Why? Because that kind of thought is what fossilizes us into the status quo, which is a deadly place to be.

The Nation We Knew is built around a very simple, but profoundly important, question:

What if.

There’s so much power in that. If only we gave ourselves permission to dream, and then acted on those dreams, it’s amazing what we could accomplish.

The Nation We Knew on Amazon