The Revolution Has Been Deferred
Reflections on a year of trying to change the world with a laptop
Almost a year ago, I announced the launch of this site with a piece entitled “The Revolution Is Coming Soon.” The post began with an admission:
It should have arrived sooner. A lot sooner.
Well, dear readers, I regret to inform you that the foretold societal transformation is still facing indefinite delay. The new day that was promised hasn’t dawned yet. We need a much brighter light.
I also spelled out the mission:
What matters is abnormalizing the hatred of our countrymen and women and rebuilding our nation’s unity.
The two halves of that sentence can be read as if they were unchecked boxes on a rubric. Abnormalize hatred. Completion rate: 0%. Rebuild unity. Completion rate: 0%.
And I laid out an incredibly ambitious vision:
Perhaps historians will look back on the first Tuesday of June 2024 as the day when the reformation of American democracy began. It has to start somewhere, right?
Why not here?
Maybe the first Tuesday of June 2025? Or 2026? 2027?
The originally referenced day was the date of my site launch, a week after I announced its arrival. My launch post envisioned an America in which we would all be guided by our better angels:
Once we understand that people who disagree with us are still pursuing the same core goals that we are, we can start to interpret the things they say and do through that lens instead of seeing them as menaces to the world. Once we realize that, at the core, we are all seeking the same things, we can begin to realize that we really are all in this together.
And we don’t hate each other.
Those words were published on June 4 of last year. In the intervening time, Donald Trump was nearly assassinated and had a second attempt made on his life. United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was allegedly murdered by Luigi Mangione, who promptly became something of a “people’s champion” to a lot of people. And just last week, Israeli Embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim were shot outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C., by a gunman who reportedly shouted, “Free Palestine.”
Those are just a few of the events that have happened in the last year that would seem to indicate that people view people who disagree with them politically as even bigger menaces to the world. And, if possible, they feel even less solidarity with those folks than they did before.
Completion rate: 0%.
In my first post, I also spoke of turning this site into a space for likeminded individuals with shared convictions about our debilitating political divisions:
More than that, AWDHEO seeks to become a community for people who are done with the status quo of toxic, national polarization or at least would like to be.
I guess we are a community. If you follow me regularly, you are part of a readership (if you didn’t have a sense of this already) that consists of… dozens. A few of my articles did get hundreds of views, particularly pieces that were picked up by other substacks. One story that was republished on another substack actually broke 1,000 views.
But, none of those results had any carryover that led to a lasting spike in readership. So, on an average week—yeah, dozens.
And I’m incredibly grateful for each one of you. Don’t get freaked out by the Big Brother aspect of it all, but Substack has some nifty tracking tools that let me see exactly who reads my stuff. I know who’s on the nice-list.
I also know how busy life is. So, the fact that I’m blessed with a small but dedicated core of readers who find enough value in my work to consistently take time out of their weeks to read my Tuesday dispatches isn’t something that I take for granted.
When I wrote the words contained in the quotes selected above, I thought I was doing so with eyes wide open. I was aware just how fantastical the goals I had set sounded. Abnormalizing hatred? Rebuilding unity? Reforming American democracy? Those aren’t tasks that can be accomplished through a blog.
Yet, I suppose I still was naive in some respects. I thought that my site’s title was pure gold, such that people would be drawn to it merely by the inherent appeal in the name. Then, all I would have to do is consistently deliver high-quality content to keep them coming back.
This was probably my most foolhardy presumption. Many of the top-ranked politics-themed substacks fall into the “do hate each other” genre. They could be comfortably subtitled “[fill-in-the-blank] who do hate [fill-in-the blank],” and they have thousands of followers who show up religiously to hear it preached that Republicans/Democrats/anyone who disagrees with them is worthy of their hatred.
But, that wasn’t my only faulty expectation regarding this experience. For one thing, I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that, a year later, I would be writing random weekly columns that aren’t that different from run-of-the-mill editorials.
When I started my site, I was very upfront that one of its primary purposes was to serve as a platform to promote my book, “The Anti-Partisan Manifesto,” which, at that point, was yet-to-be-published. What I didn’t disclose is that had I prewritten the first nine posts that had I planned to put out—ten, counting the announcement post. Of course, they didn’t end up coming out in that order, as my intended schedule was interrupted by events that, as a politics substacker, I absolutely had to cover, namely the almost-assassination of Trump and Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race.
The prewritten articles are intended to serve as kind of CliffsNotesTM versions of the major arguments that I make in my book. Reading all of them (or listening to them— “The Defined Nine,” if you will, also feature author voiceovers)—will provide you with an adequate, summary understanding of the theory of anti-partisanism and how it translates to the real world.
My original schedule had these posts wrapping up at the start of August, which was when I originally planned to release the book. Since I already had enough material for June and July, I divided those months between promoting my book/site and putting the book out.
I decided to self-publish for multiple reasons, one of which was that it was the shortest route to release. After working on the book for five years, I didn’t want to spend another two years in the publication process—which is how long it can take—by which point some of the material would be dated. And that’s assuming that I could first get signed by an agent and then by a publishing house, so that the book would even get published.
However, I soon discovered that that even self-publishing is a fairly involved process. By the beginning of August, my book was nowhere near ready to come out. It finally dropped in mid-October.
This meant that for two-and-a-half months, I had to write about…stuff. I had already used up all my canned content.
So, I adapted more material from my book. I also fell back on my journalism experience and drew from current events to illustrate my points in each story, a practice that I continued after the book came out.
But, the site’s mission remains unfulfilled. Americans Who Don’t Hate Each Other was launched with the ideal of starting a movement and a dialogue. But, the only conversation of this sort that is taking place is ours. And I don’t think we’re being heard.
The primary means of getting your messsage out today (for free) is social media, and that’s where I initially concentrated my efforts, in terms of promotion. But, I quickly discovered something that is a universal truth among non-digital natives like myself: social media is a rabbit hole.
Since there are so many platforms, the only way I knew to think of them was in terms of ROI (return on investment). So, if posts that I made on social media sites received engagement, I spent more time on those sites. If not, I moved on.
But there’s an art and a science to getting engagement on social media, and neither were part of the non-digital native curriculum. In other words, I wasn’t getting any significant returns.
So, when I was offered the chance to start a podcast, I leapt at it and abandoned all but the most basic social media promotion. The shift in focus wasn’t just due to the potential for growth through a podcast, but because it was something concrete and tangible, not another rabbit hole.
So, about the podcast— “We’ve Got Issues” (WGI) and its quartet of immortal episodes. Currently, WGI lacks a co-host, though I do hope to bring it back in some form eventually, perhaps as “IGI” (“I’ve Got Issues”).
Right now, apart from my weekly post, my efforts are directed at getting “The Anti-Partisan Manifesto” into print—which is an even more involved process— and just generally breathing new life into the project. I also want to revamp my site itself and make it more of a resource.
But, when it comes to promotion, there’s no (free) substitute for grinding away on social platforms and slowly building over time—not one that I’ve found, anyway. Eventually, I’m going to have to go back down the rabbit hole.
In the meantime, the work continues.
Portions of this post have been inspired by the ideas in my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
Follow me on X at @JeffGebeau or on Facebook