What This Comedian Said Will Shock You

What holds a diverse democracy together when your information, identity, and incentives all pull you into rival tribes? In this book, Bill Maher argues that the American immune system is failing from both directions: the Republican Party has suffered a moral crash into anti-democratic indulgence, while a punitive strain of “wokeism” on the Left betrays classical liberalism by policing speech, merit, and evidence. You can neither indulge election denial and theocratic fantasies nor tolerate a culture that cancels debate and replaces inquiry with orthodoxy. If you want a functioning republic, you must recommit to shared facts, thick-skinned discourse, and policy realism over performative purity.

Maher threads this critique through the arenas that shape your daily life—media, schools, workplaces, courts, and platforms—showing how attention algorithms, administrative bloat, religious capture, corporate consolidation, and bureaucratic paralysis together corrode trust and competence. He pairs cultural warnings (presentism, cancel culture, entitlement) with material ones (infrastructure sclerosis, pandemic fraud, gig-economy precarity, climate risk). His bet is that you’re hungry for a politics that can walk and chew gum: condemn Trumpism’s anti-democratic rot and reject illiberal progressivism without retreating to cynicism.

Maher’s central plea

“Wokeism in its current form is not an extension of liberalism; it is more often its opposite… a small contingent who’ve gone mental and a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it.”

The twin breakdowns

On the Right, Maher catalogs a collapse of guardrails: religiosity fused with power, fiscal hypocrisy, climate denial, and Trump-aligned attacks on elections culminating in January 6. He points to figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and George Santos as symptoms of a party that prizes tribal loyalty over competence and truth. On the Left, he indicts a punitive moral culture—race-segregated dorms and ceremonies, administrators who police language, and media allies eager to flatten science or nuance (e.g., obesity “science” for kids in Every Body, or claims that sex separation makes no sense in sports). Tim Scott sounding more like Obama on race than Democrats do, he notes, signals how scrambled the discourse has become.

The attention machine

Maher attacks platforms that monetize outrage. Borrowing from Tristan Harris, he calls Facebook and peers “tobacco companies in T-shirts,” engineered for dopamine and division. A St. Petersburg troll farm weaponized those feeds in 2016, where lies like “the Pope endorsed Trump” outperformed real news. Legacy media, chasing clicks, now recycles “Twitter is outraged” stories (remember the Jennifer Lawrence coat uproar) as if they reflect the nation, leaving you angry, misinformed, and siloed. Smartphones intensify this: they are pacemakers for your attention, not neutral tools (compare to Jonathan Haidt’s work on teen anxiety and social media).

Institutions caught in crossfire

Universities, Maher argues, drift from liberal inquiry to managerial luxury and orthodoxy: Yale’s thousands of administrators, lazy rivers, grade inflation (A’s exploding from ~15% to ~45%), and a third of students studying fewer than five hours a week—all atop 500% tuition increases since 1985. This isn’t just waste; it feeds a broader culture of fragility and entitlement that treats discomfort as harm and dissent as violence. Fraternities can be dangerous (hazing deaths at places like Penn State), yet campus bureaucracies simultaneously micromanage speech while tolerating pockets of debauchery.

Culture wars and memory

Maher opposes “presentism”—judging the past only by today’s values—and “progressophobia” (Steven Pinker’s term) that denies gains like interracial marriage approval or marriage equality. Turning Joan of Arc into a nonbinary parable or claiming gender itself was “brought by white colonizers” misses the point: honest history demands context, proportion, and humility. The Left’s ritualistic purges alienate moderates; the Right exploits the backlash. Either way, the middle bleeds out.

Systemic emergencies, not lifestyle tweaks

On climate, Maher swats “zombie lies” (Galileo, the ‘70s cooling myth) and elite hypocrisy (private jets to climate summits). Grocery lists and bag bans won’t cut it; you need grid modernization, R&D, maybe more nuclear, and permit reform so green projects don’t die in paperwork. Guns? You must connect isolated, angry men to a culture that glamorizes vengeance, easy access to weapons, and radicalization playgrounds like 8chan.

What you can do

Rebuild your BS detector: diversify news beyond your feed, value reporting over outrage, and treat viral storms as noise until verified. Defend free speech in principle and practice—choose debate over cancellation, forgiveness over permanent banishment. Demand institutional competence: audit emergency spending, streamline permits, and insist universities deliver education rather than indulgence. And keep democracy’s frame intact: refuse national divorce fantasies, accept you can’t unfriend 47% of the country, and prize norms—peaceful transfers, voting, rule of law—over total victory. (Note: This echoes Jonathan Rauch’s “Constitution of Knowledge” about shared epistemic guardrails.)

In short, Maher asks you to be a small-c citizen: skeptical of grifters, allergic to purity, committed to evidence, and brave enough to call out your own side. That’s not centrism-by-brand; it’s the hard discipline liberal democracy requires.

Maher argues your mind is contested territory, and platforms design the battlefield. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok harvest your attention with algorithms tuned to outrage and tribal cues. Former insiders like Tristan Harris describe them as behavioral engines—“tobacco companies in T-shirts”—that exploit cognitive biases for profit. When your feed learns your fears, it sells you a parallel reality tailored to confirm them, which dissolves the shared factual ground democracy needs.

Algorithmic outrage, engineered

The business model rewards stickiness, not truth. In 2016, Russian troll farms in St. Petersburg didn’t need sophistication; they only needed to aim lies into segments primed to spread them. A fake headline—“the Pope endorsed Trump”—outperformed real journalism because it offered tribe-pleasing novelty. Maher notes how “personalized feeds” shrink your world until the other side looks monstrous; then political entrepreneurs monetize your fear. (Compare Cass Sunstein’s work on echo chambers and group polarization.)

From newsroom to click farm

Legacy media now chases virality. You’ve seen “Twitter is outraged” pieces blow up into national conversations based on tiny, unrepresentative mobs. Remember the breathless coverage over Jennifer Lawrence’s winter coat? That’s grievance laundering: outrage manufactured from a platform skirmish to feed the content machine. News that could widen your view—data, local realities, expert debate—yields to dopamine loops. Outrage rates, so outrage rules.

Smartphones: not tools, pacemakers

Maher stresses that phones shape attention rhythms, not just deliver messages. With every notification, you learn to prize immediacy over deliberation, performance over thought. Studies link the rise of teen anxiety to social media immersion, and adults aren’t immune. The upshot for citizenship is grim: you become quick to moral panic and slow to policy nuance, precisely the opposite of what complex problems require (see climate, guns, infrastructure).

Radicalization funnels

Some corners, like 8chan, convert grievance into violent scripts. There, manifestos and memes fuse identity with action, encouraging lonely men to embrace the “hero” arc of mass violence. Algorithmic suggestions can ladder you from frustration to conspiracism, then to tacit or explicit calls for harm. Maher doesn’t argue that speech equals violence; he argues that certain systems predictably steer a vulnerable minority into harm’s path.

The polarization feedback loop

Once the attention machine hardens identities, politics re-codes opponents as heretics. You stop meeting in a common public square; you gather in rival coliseums where your side always wins. Politicians and influencers learn to perform for bubbles, not persuade skeptics. The country becomes ungovernable not because disagreements are new, but because the infrastructure that once mediated them (local news, cross-cutting civic life) is gutted.

What you can do right now

Treat feeds as propaganda until proven otherwise. Build a daily diet that includes professional reporting across perspectives. When a “Twitter is outraged” piece appears, ask: how many people? what evidence? who benefits? Turn off nonessential notifications; set social media windows; reclaim focus for long-form work. Politically, demand platform transparency (recommendation logic, bot detection) and support reforms that tie amplification to verified identity or quality signals without censoring lawful speech (a tough but necessary balance).

Core reminder

If an algorithm can decide what you see, it can decide what you believe—unless you build habits that make your beliefs costlier to buy.

Maher’s bottom line: your attention is a civic asset. Guard it with the same suspicion you’d reserve for a stranger asking for your Social Security number. Because in 2024, they already have everything else.

Free speech, in Maher’s telling, isn’t a boutique libertarian cause; it’s the operating system for liberal society. Comedy stress-tests that system by pushing social boundaries. When institutions capitulate to social media storms, you don’t just lose jokes—you lose a core civic muscle: the ability to tolerate discomfort while sorting truth from error. The new puritanism, he argues, replaces debate and proportion with instant excommunication and managerial control.

How cancellation works

The pattern recurs: an outrage clip goes viral; coworkers or activists amplify; institutions panic. Alexi McCammond lost a Teen Vogue job over high-school tweets. At the Washington Post, a staff conflict escalated into Felicia Sonmez’s successful push to punish David Weigel. A leaked private call brought down Rachel Nichols. Regardless of merits, process disappears. Organizations act not to pursue truth but to manage brand risk, collapsing due process into PR.

Comedy as early-warning system

Comedians survive by testing edges. Norm Macdonald and Louis C.K. crossed lines and paid prices that, in Maher’s view, steadily move those edges inward. Colleges shun comics for fear of “offense” or lawsuits; TV writers’ rooms pre-sanitize scripts. You, the audience, inherit a narrower discourse, where satire and irony become liabilities rather than tools (note: Lenny Bruce and George Carlin once widened speech by risking offense; that lineage is now out of favor).

Presentism and progressophobia as fuel

The impulse to judge the past by today’s sensibilities (“presentism”) and to ignore gains (“progressophobia,” per Steven Pinker) feeds cancellation. Rewriting Joan of Arc as a nonbinary symbol or asserting in Portland curricula that gender is a colonial import compresses complexity into moral signals. Maher’s test is practical: does this educate, persuade, and improve policy—or mostly display righteousness?

The bright lines and the gray zones

Maher concedes real limits: threats, incitement, and child exploitation are criminal. But he resists expanding punishment to opinions, jokes, or clumsy phrasing. When the ACLU and universities shift from defending speech to pre-screening it for comfort, they abandon mission. In place of thin skin and thick speech, we get thick skin and thin speech—the opposite of liberalism’s promise.

A better norm set

He proposes cultural, not merely legal, repair. Distinguish crimes from embarrassments. Timebox social media storms; insist on proportionate responses. Replace “gotcha archaeology” of decade-old posts with contemporary conduct. Encourage apology and learning without turning confession into a civic religion. In practice: if a private call leaks, ask, “Is there a victim? Is there a pattern?” If not, host a public conversation and move on.

Maher’s rule of thumb

The answer to speech you hate is more speech—sharper arguments, better jokes, clearer evidence—not fewer speakers.

For you, the ask is humble but hard: defend standards before you know whose ox is gored. If it’s your ally under fire, apply the same fairness you demanded when it was your foe. That’s not moral equivalence; it’s moral consistency—the thing that keeps a liberal society from becoming a scold’s playground or a mob’s arena.

Maher paints higher education as the front end of a cultural assembly line that produces fragility: K–12 bulldozer parenting and trophy culture feed students into universities that act as luxury resorts and speech-policing bureaucracies, which then graduate workers primed for moralizing over merit. The result isn’t a smarter country; it’s a more brittle one—debt-burdened, quick to outrage, slow to grapple with trade-offs.

Administrative bloat, softer standards

Universities like Yale and Stanford now employ thousands of administrators. Amenities—from lazy rivers to wellness palaces—reframe students as customers. Meanwhile, grade inflation soars (A’s ballooning from ~15% to ~45%), and a third of students study fewer than five hours a week. Tuition climbed roughly 500% since 1985, making degrees costlier even as signals of rigor blur. You pay more and learn less—while graduating into a labor market that doesn’t guarantee returns for many majors (sports marketing, some arts degrees).

Illiberal islands on liberal campuses

Maher distinguishes classical liberalism from its campus imitators. Race-exclusive dorms and graduations, administrators who police language, and student statements about geopolitics that presidents hesitate to contextualize—all signal a preference for moral safety over intellectual risk. A culture that treats dissent as harm undermines the very capacity democracy needs: to hear what you dislike, ask sharp questions, and still keep your neighbor.

Fragility’s origin story

Childhood scripts matter: helicopter parents fight teachers, bulldozer parents remove obstacles, and everyone gets a trophy. Teens learn that validation is oxygen—Instagram and TikTok turn selfhood into a performance economy. By college, many expect constant affirmation. Disagreement feels like threat; failure feels like injustice. The civic effect: voters primed for purity tests, activists primed for cancellation, and citizens less ready to compromise.

The frat contradiction

Even as campuses moralize, pockets of excess thrive. Hazing deaths and sexual misconduct scandals (e.g., Penn State) show male-only enclaves can become accountability deserts. Bureaucracies that micromanage classroom speech often leave these harder problems to insurance adjusters and PR memos. It’s a split-screen: hyper-sensitivity in seminars, reckless bravado in basements.

Better pathways and incentives

Maher doesn’t want to abolish college; he wants to right-size it. Elevate vocational paths and apprenticeships; decouple job access from unnecessary credentials; pay teachers better; and hold universities accountable for outcomes and transparency. Reorient campus culture toward debate, data, and merit—teach students to steel-man opponents and tolerate discomfort. Parents can help by allowing failure earlier so resilience grows before debt does.

Practical reframe

College should be an earned, focused credential—not a debt-stuffed rite of passage or a four-year feelings spa.

If you want sturdier citizens, you can’t outsource grit to a freshman seminar. You have to build it—at home, in school, and in the way universities reward honest argument over identity theater.

Maher’s “Scamerica” names a system where bureaucracy, grift, and risk-averse politics turn public money into molasses. The villains aren’t cinematic deep-state plotters; they’re a sprawling administrative class, padded contractors, and performative overseers who can delay anything forever while sending you the bill. The costs are visible: delayed green energy, missing housing, gold-plated toilets, and rail dreams that never leave the station.

The cost of nothing

Consider San Francisco’s $1.7 million public toilet—an emblem of process gone mad. Environmental and public-interest reviews have value, but when they metastasize into endless loops, every project becomes a feeding frenzy for fees, consultants, and lawsuits. Offshore wind farms that should take years take decades. Meanwhile, the climate clock keeps ticking and housing shortages worsen. Paper success, real failure.

Emergency money, emergency fraud

COVID relief poured out in torrents—PPP loans, Shuttered Venue grants, expanded unemployment. Lacking tight controls, hundreds of billions in improper payments leaked into grifts big and small. When politicians treat oversight as optional and speed as the only virtue, opportunists feast. Maher’s indictment is systemic: both parties tolerated leakage because contractors, donors, and local machines benefitted.

Permits as climate policy

If climate is an emergency, permitting is an emergency tool. You can’t decarbonize without building transmission, nuclear, geothermal, wind, and dense housing near jobs. Right now, “process” is a de facto veto on progress. Maher isn’t anti-environment; he’s anti-stagnation. Smart reform means time-limited reviews, one-stop approvals with teeth, and clear off-ramps for endless litigation (note: countries with faster build times aren’t less green; they’re more serious about trade-offs).

Water, rail, and big bets

From desalinization to water pipelines to high-speed rail, America lags not for lack of talent but for lack of will and sane procurement. Others mobilize with unit-cost discipline and standardized designs. The U.S. too often starts bespoke, adds bespoke, then litigates bespoke. The outcome: nothing on time, everything over budget, and the public grows cynical about government itself.

How you push back

Back reforms that trade process theater for measurable outcomes: publish budgets and timelines up front; tie contractor pay to delivery; audit emergency spending like a crime scene; and prosecute fraud swiftly. Demand environmental review that measures net benefits—including the emissions avoided by building faster. You don’t have to romanticize markets or government; you have to insist they build what they promise.

Short version

If the paperwork saves more whales than the project costs, keep it. If it mostly fattens consultants while stalling green power and housing, cut it.

Scamerica thrives on your low expectations. Raise them, and pair them with rules that reward delivery instead of delay. That’s how democratic competence regains credibility.

Maher claims two forces—organized religion and organized money—operate like rival state churches in American politics. When faith becomes a political program and profit a theology, courts, laws, and work are shaped less by neutral rules than by metaphysics and margins. You can see it in Supreme Court composition, end-times politics, monopoly power, and the gig economy’s marketing spin.

Religion as political software

Evangelical end-timers who expect Christ’s return by 2050 view stewardship differently; climate and long-term policy shrink next to salvation timelines. Maher points to a Supreme Court heavy with devout Catholics—Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Sotomayor—and asks if homogeneity of faith skews jurisprudence. Amy Coney Barrett’s 2013 exhortation to help “build the kingdom of God” invites a basic civic question: which kingdom does a secular constitution serve? (Note: The point isn’t anti-Catholic; it’s pro-pluralism.)

Hypocrisy and policy

Maher flags the gap between sermon and statute: traditional gender roles in groups like People of Praise, Bill Barr’s moralizing paired with partisan hardball, and the judicial project to overturn Roe v. Wade. When the goal is theological victory, compromise—the beating heart of democracy—becomes betrayal. You should ask candidates plainly: do you interpret office as ministry?

Money as national religion

On the other altar sits profit. Amazon crushed Diapers.com, absorbed market share, and now “knows where you live.” Walmart’s low-price model hollowed out local retail and replaced many manufacturing paths to the middle class. Gig platforms—DoorDash, Uber, OnlyFans—package precarity as flexibility, shifting risk to workers while branding it entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, fees (resort, maintenance, late, “convenience”) weaponize complexity to extract value while you’re not looking (see airline seat maps and telecom bills).

Concentration begets capture

Economic power becomes political power. Monopolies don’t just set prices; they set policy—through lobbying, revolving doors, and market dependencies. The pandemic’s “we’re all in it together” turned out asymmetric: frontline workers took risks; tech giants saw stocks soar. (Historical rhyme: John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil versus today’s cloud-and-commerce empires.)

Rebalancing the system

Maher’s fixes are structural, not sermonizing. Enforce antitrust where markets tip into choke points; expand portable benefits so risk doesn’t crush gig workers; and restore the wall between church and state so judges and lawmakers answer to the Constitution, not catechism. Hold donor-class hypocrisy to the same light as activist excess—no free passes for billionaires who fund museums from platforms that impoverish communities.

Civic litmus test

Ask leaders two questions: Will your rulings reflect doctrine or law? Will your business model build broad prosperity or squeeze the seams?

If you want a pluralist, stable republic, dethrone both gods—sanctified certainty and sanctified profit—and recommit to rules that protect dissenters, workers, and the future you’ll actually inhabit.

Maher strips climate politics to brass tacks. Denial persists by recycling “zombie lies” (Galileo as patron saint of contrarians, the ‘70s cooling myth, snowballs in the Senate), even as scientific consensus is overwhelming. Meanwhile, elite hypocrisy—private jets to climate summits—undercuts credibility. And the most seductive distraction of all is lifestyle virtue theater: blue bins, bag bans, and grocery lists that make you feel green while the grid burns coal.

Kill the zombie lies

A 2013 MIT review captured near-unanimous agreement among climate scientists on human-caused warming. Galileo doesn’t save bad arguments; consensus isn’t infallible, but it’s the best bet we have when stakes are planetary. Cherry-picks—cold snaps, outlier studies—don’t dent the trend lines. If you’ve been fed these lines, Maher’s advice is simple: delete them.

Confess the hypocrisy—and act anyway

Maher admits his own private flights and calls out the class that moralizes while emitting. But hypocrisy doesn’t negate the problem; it highlights the need for systems that make low-carbon choices the default, not the saintly exception. Think national security, not lifestyle sermon.

Build, don’t brand

Recycling rates are lousy; most plastic isn’t recycled. Real levers are systemic: decarbonize electricity, electrify end uses, price externalities, and invest in R&D. Nuclear deserves a pragmatic second look; grid modernization and transmission need permit paths measured in months, not decades. Agriculture, cement, steel—heavy sectors—need innovation, not hashtags.

Population and consumption

Eight billion people, with rising expectations, strain finite resources—water, soil, sand. Elon Musk’s population-collapse worry, Maher argues, misses the nearer-term constraint: bringing everyone to American per-capita consumption would require multiple Earths. The honest frame: fewer emissions per person, smarter cities, and prosperity that decouples from throughput.

Mars is not Plan B

Dreams of escaping to Mars are sci-fi sugar. You won’t terraform your way out of governance failure. The only habitable planet in our budget is Earth. So preserve ecosystems, restore water cycles, and retrofit civilization for efficiency and resilience. (Parenthetical note: moon bases might help science, but they won’t house Cleveland.)

What moves the needle

Support permit reform that speeds clean energy; demand honest carbon accounting; tolerate trade-offs (wind turbines you can see, transmission lines you don’t love). Swap purity for progress: a nuclear plant prevents more emissions than a thousand tote bags. And when a politician waves a snowball, ask for their grid plan instead.

Blunt truth

You can’t shop your way out of climate collapse. You have to build your way out—and quickly.

Climate realism, in Maher’s sense, is grown-up politics: fewer selfies at summits, more steel in the ground.

America’s gun crisis, Maher argues, is not just about hardware; it’s about a culture that scripts lonely men into violent protagonists while making guns ubiquitous. Mass shooters are almost always men, often isolated, sometimes explicit about sexual frustration or social humiliation. Media and forums then supply both the revenge fantasy and the technical means. Easy access turns a story into a body count.

The shooter archetype

Santa Barbara, Virginia Tech, Timothy McVeigh—different ideologies, similar profiles: alienation, grievance, the hunger to matter. Instagram and TikTok amplify inadequacy by showing you curated triumphs that aren’t real. In parallel, 8chan and similar boards offer community through nihilism, mentoring despair into violence with memes and manifestos. You can’t fix this with a single policy; you have to pull multiple levers at once.

Hollywood’s revenge machine

Action canon is soaked in vengeance: the lone righteous man restores order with a gun. The “good guy with a gun” myth saturates entertainment and creeps into politics. Maher doesn’t propose censorship; he proposes honesty about how saturated narratives affect a tiny but deadly subset of viewers. Culture doesn’t cause most people to kill—but it can script how a few already broken people choose to.

Access and prevention

When high-lethality weapons are easy to acquire, the worst day gets deadlier. Maher supports tightening access for dangerous individuals—extreme risk protection orders, stronger background checks, and closing loopholes—paired with early-intervention mental health services. None of this requires demonizing responsible owners; it requires triaging risk so the angriest days don’t become massacres.

Community as counter-script

Loneliness is combustible. Invest in community-building: mentorships, local clubs, apprenticeships, and digital spaces that reward contribution over rage. Teach boys emotional literacy and purpose that isn’t performative dominance. The goal isn’t to sanitize masculinity; it’s to widen its repertoire beyond retribution.

Responsible speech, resilient minds

Platforms that incubate manifestos should face targeted moderation around direct incitement and detailed how-to content for violence, while preserving lawful speech. At the same time, you build resilience upstream—school curricula that handle conflict, shame, and failure without outsourcing dignity to likes or lies. (Note: this pairs with the “fragility pipeline” critique.)

Bottom line

If the culture glorifies vengeful men and the marketplace hands them tools, policy must narrow the pathway between grievance and gunfire—while society expands the pathways to belonging.

Do all of it—access controls, mental health, community, and narrative honesty—or keep rehearsing the same press conferences after the next tragedy.

Maher warns that the U.S. is flirting with a self-fulfilling doom loop: each side imagines the other’s victory as apocalypse, so ordinary political losses feel existential. That is the combustible ingredient in civil fractures from Sarajevo to Northern Ireland. America, he argues, is not immune. But it’s also not destined to break if citizens relearn how to share a house rather than win a crusade.

From disagreement to dehumanization

Political opponents aren’t just wrong; they’re traitors. Hyperbolic rhetoric and chants recode neighbors as enemies. The line between robust criticism and moral disqualification erodes. The result isn’t fiery democracy; it’s cold civil war. When people feel forever unwelcome in the polity, they stop playing by its rules.

Bubbles blind empathy

Self-segregation—geographic and digital—produces caricatures of the other side. Arizona’s Mark Finchem claimed he “can’t find anyone who will admit they voted for Biden,” a perfect bubble aphorism. In these worlds, no counterexample can penetrate; every fact becomes a shibboleth. That’s how you get unreason rather than mere disagreement.

The national divorce fantasy

Calls for a “national divorce” (Marjorie Taylor Greene, echoed by some on the Right and toyed with by pundits across the spectrum) ignore how marbled the country is: blue cities in red states, red counties in blue states, purple suburbs everywhere. A partition would be logistically impossible, economically ruinous, and morally reckless. More likely than peace is violence at borders imaginary and real.

Norms over dominance

The antidote is not kumbaya; it’s norms. Commit to peaceful transfers, independent courts, and truthful vote counts even when your side loses. Refuse purity tests that shrink coalitions into cults. Reinforce cross-partisan trust by living it: James Carville and Mary Matalin’s marriage works because politics doesn’t colonize every room in the house. Scale that up.

Small civic acts, big payoffs

Here’s what you can do: join a plural civic group (a union, PTA, volunteer corps) where politics is not prerequisite. Host mixed-ideology dinners with structured rules (listen first, summarize the other before rebutting). Fight algorithmic segregation by following credible voices across the aisle. Vote in primaries to reward norm-respecting candidates rather than performative flamethrowers.

Civic north star

The goal of politics in a republic isn’t total victory; it’s sustainable coexistence—so your kids inherit a country, not a score-settling machine.

Maher’s final test: can you want your ideas to win while wanting the other side to stay? If the answer is no, the country you want can’t exist.