On September 10, 2025, my mind was on my son, Trey. He was turning twenty-one, beginning his junior year as a musical theater performer at Indiana University, and I was doing what fathers do—reminiscing on the trajectory of his young life and feeling overwhelmingly proud of the man he was becoming.
Then the news broke. Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed while speaking to students in Utah. Much like I felt after the targeted shootings of two Minnesota legislators just months prior, I was aghast. I asked myself the same question millions of others did in that moment: What has our great nation come to?
Disagreements within the political sphere have existed since the birth of the republic and beyond. But what has happened to us? What has tipped the scales so decidedly that we are resorting to murdering those with whom we disagree? I didn't share Charlie Kirk's politics—in fact, I disagreed with most of his positions. But he was practicing politics. He was exercising his Constitutionally-given freedom of speech and trying to change hearts and minds. And since when did that carry a death sentence? Why is violence transitioning from an unthinkable aberration to a societal norm?
Democracy has always been an act of faith in human restraint. The American system, more than most, was built not on trust but on tension—on the belief that ambition, balanced against ambition, could channel our fallibility into a workable common good. Over two centuries later, that delicate machinery of self-government has seized. My new book, The Death of Compromise—available now on Amazon either as an e-book or hard back—is both a narrative history and a moral autopsy of how that happened.
America’s political decay did not begin with the internet, the 24-hour news cycle, or the latest populist wave. It began with a long psychological and cultural transformation: the decline of compromise as a civic virtue. The Founders viewed disagreement as inevitable, even useful, but they also understood compromise as a moral discipline—a means of governing the passions that make freedom possible. Today, those passions are ungoverned. Political identity has become social identity; persuasion has given way to performance; and compromise has come to signify treason.
In researching The Death of Compromise, I speak with the likes of U.S. Senators Tom Daslchle and John Danforth, former energy industry executive William D. Johnson, former NRA lobbyist Adam Kaufman, retired U.S. Navy SEAL Dutch Van Horn, former Federal Reserve economist David Andolfatto, the Rev. Michael Trautman, former NPR anchor Jack Speer and many others. The book traces our descent through the decisive moments and figures that have rewired our civic DNA. It explores how the Southern Realignment sorted us into ideologically pure camps; how C-SPAN transformed congressional negotiation into performative theater; how partisan media and algorithms weaponized our outrage; and how organizations like the NRA perfected the art of single-issue absolutism.
Throughout the book, I weave behavioral psychology and moral philosophy into the historical narrative. We must examine how our cognitive biases—confirmation, identity protection, loss aversion—reinforce our tribalism, and how moral narratives of purity versus corruption have hijacked civic debate.
The book’s argument is not partisan, but diagnostic: The crisis of American democracy is not that one side has lost its virtue, but that both sides have abandoned the moral grammar that once made disagreement productive.
The final chapters offer neither easy prescriptions nor empty platitudes. Instead, they attempt to recover what compromise once meant: not weakness, but the recognition of shared moral limits. The book closes by asking whether a nation founded on self-government can still govern itself when its citizens no longer believe in self-restraint.
The Death of Compromise provides both explanation and reflection. It invites readers to see America’s divisions not as a sudden accident, but as the consequence of losing an ancient civic habit—and to consider what it will take to restore it.
I hope you read it. But more than anything, I hope it drives you to reflect upon where we are, where we are going, and what power you have to influence our present trajectory.
Thank you.