Sarah had a master's degree and a career in marketing. She lived in suburban Phoenix. By any reasonable measure, her life was successful.
But somewhere in the middle of it, she started feeling invisible — not to her family, not at work, but in the larger cultural story. The one being told about whose concerns mattered, who the future was for, whose voice counted in the national conversation. The world was accelerating in directions nobody had asked her about, and she didn't know where to put that feeling.
Then she heard the phrase: "Take our country back."
And here's the part that's easy to misunderstand: it didn't sound like hatred to Sarah. It didn't register as an invitation to exclude anyone. It sounded like someone had finally looked her direction and said, I see you. Something was taken from you. You matter here.
That feeling — the relief of being seen — is where the drift begins.
Psychologist H. Stephen Glenn spent decades studying what he called the three core needs: the need to feel significant (I matter to something larger than myself), capable (I can handle what life throws at me), and influential (my presence changes things). When those needs go chronically unmet, we don't get more careful and cautious. We get more susceptible — to whoever shows up first with an answer.
Strongman politics is extraordinarily good at meeting counterfeit versions of all three. You matter — the elites are trying to silence you. You're capable — the system has been rigged against you, not because of any failing in you, but because they've tilted the table. And together, we're powerful enough to change it all.
None of that is true. But it feels true to someone who's been starving for recognition.
Sarah didn't drift because she was secretly hateful. She didn't drift because she was naive or uneducated. She drifted because she was reaching for something real — acknowledgment, belonging, the sense that her life was meaningful in some larger story — and someone appeared offering to provide it. The offer was fraudulent. The hunger was not.
This is why I resist the framing that treats the drift as a moral failing. Not because people who supported Trump bear no responsibility — they do. But because "you should have known better" doesn't explain anything. It doesn't help us understand how intelligent, decent people drifted. And it guarantees that anyone who's starting to question — quietly, privately, not yet ready to say it out loud — will stay silent. Nobody's going to admit they're reconsidering if reconsidering means joining the people who think they were fools.
Reversing the Drift is my attempt at a different kind of conversation. One that begins with: I understand why it made sense at the time. And then asks: now that you can see it more clearly, what does the way back look like?
Not back to a party. Not to a label. Back to yourself.
Sarah eventually found her way. The quiet questions she'd been pushing aside started getting louder, and she let herself listen. That's all the drift back requires — a willingness to ask the questions you've been avoiding.
That's the book I wrote for people who are starting to wonder.