Selected media coverage:
LA Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, NBC LX, American History Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, Toronto Star, Fox 32 Chicago, KGO-AM San Francisco.
It wasn’t just racism, or Russia, or the media bubble. In Patriots of Two Nations, national media commentator and presidential campaigns veteran Spencer Critchley (bio below) shows why the election of Donald Trump, or someone like him, has been inevitable since the creation of the United States, and shows how we can reunite our divided country.
That’s because America is actually two nations occupying the same territory. They not only have different values, but different ways of perceiving and understanding reality — even different ways of defining what’s true and what isn’t.
One nation is descended from the Enlightenment and the triumph of reason, the other from the Counter-Enlightenment, which was based on faith, intuition, tradition, and ethnic identity.
This fundamental division — which was unintentionally designed into the country at the Founding — is why we’re now going through a Cold Civil War.
But Patriots of Two Nations ends on a hopeful note, with advice on what we can do to heal the division, and save our democracy.
Get Patriots of Two Nations in Kindle and paperback versions at Amazon.com, and as an audio book at Audible.com. The EPUB version is here.
Excerpt
On Nov. 8, 2016, I was at a hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, at a party I had helped organize for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Like everyone else there and at similar gatherings across the country, I assumed we were about to celebrate Hillary’s election as the next President of the United States.
It wasn’t that Hillary had run a great campaign — far from it. That’s why I was there. I had flown to Phoenix just eight days before to help with media relations, social media, photography, and anything else I could contribute, including setting up the stage and wrangling reporters at this party.
Like many people who had worked on previous Democratic presidential campaigns, I had planned to sit this one out, figuring I wouldn’t be needed. On paper if not on the stump, Hillary was one of the most qualified candidates in history. Her opponent looked to us like one of the least qualified in history — and he himself seemed to assume Hillary would win.
Donald Trump was a real estate promoter and TV personality with a bad reputation in his home city of New York and no experience in government. He had built his political profile by exploiting a racist conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He had campaigned on xenophobia and an evident contempt for democratic norms and institutions. He had invested little money or effort in his run and appeared to see it as a brand-building exercise.
But as Election Day had approached, I had started to get nervous, and so had others like me. We called up friends on the campaign, asking, “Can I help?”
The answer should have been, “Nah, we got this.” It wasn’t.
“Yes, can you come now?”
And so here I was, volunteering alongside veterans with experience going back to Bill Clinton’s campaigns.
Still, she had to win, right? How could she not? That didn’t make any sense.
And then Ohio was called for Trump. And then Florida. And then the world turned upside down.
On Election Night 2008, at an Obama campaign party, I had cried tears of joy. It wasn’t just because my side had won. It was because I believed the whole country had won, no matter how they had voted, because of the inspiring values Obama stood for and — as his campaign staff knew well — lived by.
I cried in 2016 too, for very different reasons. But across the street, the Arizona Republicans were holding their election night party. From there, I heard a rising roar of exultation.
On my side of the street, it was close to silent. Almost no one felt up to talking to the media. I happened to take a call from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I couldn’t begin to explain what had just happened — how had the same country that had elected an Obama now elected a demagogue?
A few days later, I tried again, by writing a piece for the Huffington Post (now HuffPost) called “A Letter to a Friend Who Voted for Trump.” In it, I addressed, anonymously, a person I knew to be good, honest, and patriotic, asking him to help me understand what could lead him, like millions of others, to make this choice.
I’ve been working on understanding that every day, ever since. Along the way I’ve studied not just where we are now, but how we got here, going back to the founding of the United States.
This book is the result.
I believe I now do understand what happened. What led us to 2016 was bigger, and had deeper roots, than any of us realized, or than has been reported elsewhere.
The election of Donald Trump should not have been a shock. Whether he came along in 2016 or a little later, Trump, or someone like him, was inevitable.
And yet most of us were blindsided by his victory, and few yet see the full scope of what it means. Understanding how and why Trump won — including how all of us helped make it happen — is critical to our future as a democracy.
In these pages, I’ll show how our history has led us, inexorably, to this present. I’ll show what I believe is coming next. And I’ll offer some hope for how, if we can meet the true challenge of this moment, it might work out for the better.
About Spencer Critchley
Spencer Critchley is a writer, producer, and communications consultant with experience in journalism, film, digital media, public relations, advertising, and music, and the Managing Partner of communications consulting agency Boots Road Group.
As a consultant, Spencer has worked for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, former Congressman Sam Farr, the U.S. Department of Labor, the University of California at Berkeley, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and many others.
As a digital media producer, his clients have included David Bowie, Moby, Santana, Britney Spears, and others while he was with Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik Inc; the Silicon Graphics-Time Warner-ATT interactive TV system; Silicon Gaming; and the multiple award-winning Choosing Success multimedia program for CCC/Viacom, described by Wired magazine as “the most inspired piece of educational software ever created.”
As a journalist, he reported stories for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and others, winning awards for investigative reporting from the Associated Press and Public Radio News Directors Inc. His reporting exposed a cult operating in eight U.S. states, and human rights abuses and murders in post-Gulf War Kuwait.
For CBC Radio, he was a correspondent and guest host for the national entertainment and popular culture show Prime Time, the host of the syndicated Canada Rocks record review, and a contributor to The Entertainers and other programs. He has written for Business Insider, HuffPost, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Toronto Star, and other publications, and is the host of the Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good podcast.
As a composer and music producer, he was signed to Warner-Chappell Music Publishing. He created music for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, including for the Peabody Award-winning CBC Radio drama Paris from Wilde to Morrison and the series Prime Time, Radio Banned, and Metro Morning. He composed the score (with collaborator Marco D’Ambrosio) and produced the music, dialog, and sound design for the Emmy-winning PBS documentary Blink.
Spencer has been an adjunct lecturer in Journalism for the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a guest speaker for Stanford University’s documentary film program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Art Center College of Design, California State University Monterey Bay, the American Constitution Society, MacWorld, Intel Developer World, the New Teacher Center, the California Association of Public Information Officials, and the SXSW, Hot Springs, and Bermuda Film Festivals.
He has been interviewed or quoted by ABC News, the AP, the CBC, CBS Radio, the Christian Science Monitor, CTV News, the Daily Mail (UK), Deutsche Welle, Fox News, The Hill, ITV (UK), the Los Angeles Times, NBC, Newsweek, NPR, the Saturday Evening Post, Sky News (UK), USA Today, and others.
Web: spencercritchley.com
Twitter: @scritchley
Facebook: spencer.critchley.page
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good: dastardlycleverness.com
