"Look at Hiroshima—all those people. Look at D-Day—all those people. They all died together. If we can all die together, we gotta learn to live together." A retired janitor in Detroit, Michigan said this to me years ago in a dive bar. It got me thinking about the course of the Republic.

From the twilight of Donald Trump’s first lap around the Oval to today, this middle morning of his second, a particular diagnosis of the state of our so-called “Union” has become ubiquitous to the point that it feels like a national motto: “This country is more divided than it’s ever been.”

​For anyone checking the pulse of popular sentiment through a screen—social media, the internet, network news, etc.—that assessment might ring true. Since these mediums are implicitly isolating and inevitably divisive, they've come to represent a poison pill. A pill too easily and too often swallowed, each thumb scroll a spoonful of sugar making medicine go down.

​At the beginning of this decade's collective descent into division, I was living in Brooklyn, New York. Besides being one of the most maligned/celebrated bubbles of progressive politics—an “either/or” depending on where one gets their news—Brooklyn has another distinction: it is home to a great many dive bars.

​A dive, if it’s a good one, is never truly empty. There’s always the barkeep, for one. And, apart from the ghosts of the liver-spotted stay-outs who came and went before, there’s almost always somebody looking for an ear to bend, somebody who wants to be heard.

​On a cold night in March of 2019, I found myself inside one. A pillbox on Fulton and Grand, the stale air all Ajax and Naugahyde. Five minutes into my first round, the door swung open, and a soul strolled in: a big hoss with a booming Texas drawl.

​He settled into the stool three away from mine, matched my Miller Lite and whisky with his own, and then started talking, bending both my ears and incidentally planting the seed of an idea that would shape the next chapter of my life.

​Apart from our shared preference for bottled domestics and bourbon, we were diametric opposites in many measurable ways: he was stocky, I was a stalk; my hair hung past my shoulders, his was cropped high and tight; he raised championship bulls and farmed dirt (each of which he sold at a premium), I tended bar in Red Hook and wrote poetry on napkins that I sometimes published for a pittance.

​Despite these differences, and many more, we talked though the night. As often happens in exchanges as far-wandering as this, the conversation took a political turn.

​Of course, the differences between us persisted. But instead of the conversation ending acrimoniously when it came to light that he’d volunteered for and contributed to Trump’s 2016 campaign, and that I’d done the same for Bernie Sanders, we fell out laughing. Then we ordered another round, and another. On the way out, we shared a cigarette and embraced.

​When I relayed the details of this chance encounter to some coworkers the next day, they were aghast. Shocked not only that I’d been willing to talk to somebody who proudly professed his support for Donald Trump, but, doubly so, that I’d enjoyed the conversation so much.

​After work, I went to Sunny’s, a dive by the Brooklyn waterfront. I took out my laptop and put together a funding proposal for a project I hoped might put a dent in the great divide. From the proposal’s first page:

The Common Sense Project is a 4-6-week road trip through the Rust Belt and the American South, designed to bridge the gulf in our present political landscape ahead of the 2020 election. The driving force behind this project will be the simple act of having conversations with strangers. These conversations will take place in dive bars along the route.

I raised $5,000, then I bought a field recorder, then I rolled two hundred cigarettes. In the pre-dawn darkness of May 28, 2019, I pointed my 2001 Toyota Camry toward Youngstown, Ohio.

In certain parts of the United States, the neighborhood dive is more than just a place to drink. In the blue-collared middle, in what so many folks on the two coasts call the “fly-over states,” a dive bar is more public square than public house. It’s a sacred spot—a third space between home and work. It is a place where one often feels far more relaxed than they do anywhere else. And, to paraphrase Whitman, they do contain multitudes.

​In the five weeks I spent on the road, I would visit forty-six bars in nine states, conducting over eighty-four hours of interviews with sixty-eight subjects.

And in spite of my New York plates, long hair, tattoos, Birkenstocks, political alignments (closer to Ho Chi Minh than the typically elected member of an American government), I was never once turned away.

I spoke to gay republicans in Sandusky, Ohio: “Trump doesn’t care where we put our dicks. He only cares where we put our wallets.”

​A married couple of retirees in Toledo who, after suggesting we could solve all the world’s problems by simply dropping a nuclear bomb on the Middle East, and who vehemently opposed the possibility of a woman ever becoming president, offered to put me up for the night and insisted I meet their daughter.

Then there was the black reverend in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a year before Kyle Rittenhouse put the sleepy lakeside city on the map with a double murder, who foresaw what would ultimately come to pass: “The perpetual postponement of attention never seems to end well.”

​There was a contractor in Michigan City, Indiana, whose service overseas in the Vietnam War had been the only time he’d left the Hoosier State. He was a pot-bellied wino who opened our conversation with a toast to Donald Trump’s birthday, a man who questioned what goes on in Pete Buttigieg’s bedroom and went on to call me a slur I will not print; nevertheless, this man talked to me for over an hour and paid for all my drinks.

I recall a retired nurse in Frankfort, Kentucky with an accent belonging in a museum. She drank Budweiser and smoked reservation menthols. She consumed all of her news from the local radio station and showed me a matchbook with Mitch McConnell’s phone number on it that he'd slipped her decades ago, when she was a waitress and he was a Jefferson County judge. A fiercely independent woman who, without knowing the name of my project, declared, “I want the party of common sense.” And who, when asked what an ideal candidate would look like, said, in all seriousness: “I want Jon Stewart to run for president. I really do. Jon Stewart’s a cowboy.”

Meeting people who pleasantly surprised me and hearing things that patently disgusted me, I, to borrow another bar from Whitman, heard America singing.

​Listening to America’s latest song—Trump 2.0—is enough to compel even the most committed teetotaler to reach for something stronger. And it compelled me to revisit the barroom music I captured on that trip, to try and relive the revelatory feeling one can only get by reaching across the aisle from the same side of a bar.

Listening back to the mosaic of so many distinctly American voices spill out of my speakers like booze from a carelessly-tipped bottle left me wondering just how much the country’s tune might’ve changed some seven years later. I was curious as to whether or not the camaraderie that colored every conversation might still be conjured up in the aftermath of a pandemic, a protest movement, a contested election, and the return to power of the most polarizing president since Lincoln.

There was only one way to find out.

The Wayside Inn in Kingsbury, New York, is the distillation of everything that makes a dive a deified destination: a log cabin on a country highway; low lights and antique neon; the biggest buck competition is tracked on the wall during hunting season; a beer and a shot costs $6.50; everybody knows everybody. It’s like if Cheers traded khakis and sweaters for Carharts and Trump hats.

The night before my visit, the United States had carried out an extrajudicial military operation in Venezuela. All twelve eyes in the wood-paneled room were glued to the television as the evening news rolled the highlight tape of the latest national distraction.

I slapped a twenty on the bar. It was reduced with speed to $13.50 and a “Here ya’ go, darlin’.” I turned to the tube and made the twelve eyes fourteen. At the commercial break, I pulled out my field recorder.

For the next hour, the hot takes bounced around the bar faster than the beer flowed. The talking heads on TV were drowned out by boisterous laughter and half-drunk declarations. What started as a spirited debate about national security and socialism evolved into a passionate discussion on the need for greater investment in hydroelectric power in upstate New York. This would bring more jobs, higher wages and a sustainable future right in the bar’s backyard. It was something that everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, agreed on.

While I can’t deny that recent events suggest we’re living through a singular cultural schism, I will contend that there is a place that might just be able to solve it.

Here one, if they’re willing, can become incapable of antipathy toward the so-called “other side.” A place where all men, women whatever besides are created equal. A safe space where even the most violence-scented disagreements might be miraculously disarmed by a barkeep’s joke, a borrowed shot or the blow of a tailpipe in the parking lot.

Sometimes, the lights are just right. The surly bartender smiles just enough to fill the heart with gratitude. You wonder if the aroma of bar-stuck beer on surfaces can ever be washed out of this window-lite hole that has seen all sorts of action. The perceived distance between oneself and neighbor shrinks. It continues shrinking with every drink. So keep drinking. Our democracy depends on it.