Ken Stern, the former CEO of NPR and lifelong Democrat, set out for conservative America to find out why Republicans are so wrong about everything.
It turns out, they aren’t.
REPUBLICAN LIKE ME: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right
Lifelong Democrat Ken Stern doesn’t believe that our political world is as binary as pundits keep telling us. Extensive research has demonstrated that much of the partisan divide in our country is artificial, driven by media, campaign spending, and the increasing social and physical isolation of political communities.
Stern believes that you can break down that divide with a little listening, and a little human contact—which is exactly what he set out to do when he spent a year across the aisle listening to, talking to, and praying with Republicans of all stripes. He writes about this experience in REPUBLICAN LIKE ME: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.
With his mind open and his dial tuned to the right, Stern went to evangelical churches, shot a hog in Texas, stood in pit row at a NASCAR race, hung out at Tea Party meetings and sat in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. He also read up on conservative wonkery and consulted with the smartest people the right has to offer. Doing his best to keep an open mind, Stern hoped to find common ground, rationality, and maybe even persuasion from the other side. Structured around the key topics that divide and inflame Democrats and Republicans: immigration, gun control, abortion, the environment and global warming, philosophies of government, and attitudes toward race and racial preferences, REPUBLICAN LIKE ME reveals what happens when a liberal sets out to look at issues from a conservative perspective. Spoiler alert: Some of his dearly cherished assumptions about the right slipped away.
REPUBLICAN LIKE ME will challenge the assumptions and attitudes of liberals and liberal orthodoxy, while giving Americans of all stripes a road map to coming together.