Regret

I spent the last three months wrestling with a fundamental question of purpose. Since election night November 2022, I struggled with a long litany of decisions I’ve made as a husband, father, citizen, and human. That night was specifically difficult because it exposed the reality that safe, approachable, liberal candidates in Ohio were no longer effective against the anger, sadness and fear being promulgated amongst the rural and suburban (predominantly) white working class. Tim Ryan had started to announce his intention to run for an open Senate seat in the winter of 2020/21. My heart ached for that moment when I realized as early as Lunar New Year 2021 that the labor centric strategy executed for three terms by Sherrod Brown, giving Ohio the appearance of being a purple state and not a complete lost cause, was coming to an end.

In 2018, I flew from Asia to Ohio to vote for Sherrod Brown in person. He was a political figure that I felt a kinship with. He saw labor as important. He saw the working class as a large part of his own identity, as a large part of the identity of the region. At that time in my life, I had scaled my first company in a market where commercial success was not assumed. My brewery, Great Leap Brewing Company, in Beijing, China had gone from a small nano brewery in a historic courtyard residence to a four location retail group. Earlier that year we had successfully closed a Series A fundraise securing both U.S. based Private Equity funding and Hong Kong Family office funding. This gave us the ability to build a production brewery in the industrial development zone of Tianjin that would be capable of distributing our beer in cans and kegs to every province in China and abroad. I was living the American Dream in China.

My upbringing was unconventional at best. I was born to a lower middle-class family in Painesville, Ohio. My father was a journeyman tool and die maker and my mother was a social worker. Both found comfort in a version of Christianity that Christ would’ve had a hard time identifying with. A separatist non-denominational cult, Shiloh Christian Church devolved into anti-government rhetoric and doomsday preparations in the hope that the Y2K computer “virus” would lead to a hard reset and realignment of the United States Government with evangelical fundamentalism. As a homeschooled youth, I would not have guessed that by the age of 30 I would find myself on the cover of the USA Today and featured on Rock Center with Brian Williams as an example of the American spirit shining brightly in foreign lands. I was punching above my weight when it came to upward mobility. I wasn’t successful because I was homeschooled, I found myself on a path that had been paved by patient, empathetic people who saw a spark in me regardless of the hate-filled vitriol that was a common aspect of my identity through early to mid-twenties. It’s something that we often forget as co inhabitants of any society, no one is finished yet. We are all evolving identities and personalities, effected heavily by those moments in our life when we are most vulnerable and in need. I was exposed to the ideologies of what is now lazily called “MAGA” at a very young age. A bundle of xenophobia, religious ideology and prideful ignorance to the “other”. My growth within and through extreme conservative circles showed me what doesn’t work in complex, dynamic environments.

The prohibitive and punitive aspects of irrational ideological communities is a source of comfort for the chronically insecure. Marx called religions the opiate of the masses, but I’ve always found this to be heavy handed and lazy. Religion is a million different things to the billions of people that find comfort and hope in its practices. If you want to create a movement, tell someone yearning for hope derived from religion that they are stupid, if you want a martyr, tell the same person that religion is forbidden. It’s a fool’s exercise to censor, censorship creates curiosity and desire where the full and open debate of religion creates understanding, boredom and apathy. Religions are only dangerous when you try and suppress them, when suppressed they turn into movements. Irrational ideologies are always dangerous. Marx was being satirical and lazy in his prose, which was common in most of his written ideas. If he truly understood how a cult becomes an organized religion, he would have seen the value of letting religions do themselves in by exhausting their talking points.

I watched the cult of my youth morph into a national movement from ten thousand miles away, while I was creating some of the most American expressions of hope and creativity. It wasn’t hard for me to understand really. My father was radicalized via shortwave radios, church pulpits and newsletters from North Dakota P.O. Boxes. An incredibly inefficient way to reach the angry and fearful. The internet and targeted marketing have made this conversion cycle insanely efficient. What used to take months or even years can now be part of the common culture belief system within weeks.

I read about Tim Ryan’s desire to run for Senate from a Chinese medical concentration camp. The same cot I had witnessed the January 6^th insurrection from. The juxtaposition was clear to me in that little room. We, as the Democratic Party, were responding to anger so palpable and so focused as to attempt to siege Capitol Hill through violence with a political platform and candidate that was the definition of inoffensive, safe and entirely unimpressive. The GOP and Peter Thiel would cede their nomination to JD Vance. When that reality truly sunk in, on a hard cot, illuminated by fluorescent light 24 hours a day and on a diet of 800 calories per day, my heart exploded with anger and regret. Anger that there wasn’t anyone awake and in power on the side of the DNC to see how absolutely terrible this match up would end up being. And regret that I believed that it wasn’t my fight. A moment in history that resulted in eventually placing an oligarch’s stuffed suit within one heartbeat of the Presidency.

It's impossible to express how important a plan is. From the age of 16 forward I have been adjacent to the scheming of the ideologically minded. I didn’t know what grooming was at the time, but my church started a mentorship program that led to me being paired with an attorney that was attending our church regularly. He was a Marine Corps reservist with the billet of being a Judge Advocate. He immediately started coaching me on my future. How I would need to enlist in the Marine Corps, serve four years, use my GI Bill to obtain a four year degree, apply to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, attend law school and then run for Congress. Does that sound familiar? Watching JD Vance ascend off the check book of his billionaire benefactors is a point of irritation that keeps me up some nights. I stayed in China too long, I wasted too much time dealing with investors and the regulatory machine of Beijing. I should’ve sold my brewpubs in 2016 and moved home the minute it became clear that Trumpism wasn’t just an SNL sketch. When it became clear that he would become a magnet attracting every anti-federalist, anti-regulatory and anti-tax political action group into a coalition that we are currently watching attempt to hack our civil society to pieces.

Democrats don’t seem to realize that they are fighting against a well laid out plan. They think this is proof of America’s inherent racism, evidence of late-stage capitalism or proof that America hates women. It isn’t not those things, but it’s much more than that, it’s a calculated attempt to turn us all into renters and indentured debtors. The other bits that so captivate the American left are just happy side effects of what it looks like when unchecked capital has an opportunity to finally rid itself of the opinions of the working class. It’s just a cherry on top that they are using the very disenfranchised working class to eat itself alive.

I’ve chosen to stop wallowing in my regret of not returning earlier. I wouldn’t be the same version of me today if I hadn’t lost my brewery to the meat grinder that is Private Equity. I wouldn’t be the same version of me if I hadn’t experienced first-hand what being denied the Writ of Habeus Corpus actually feels like. Regret is a thief.

Instead of regret, I’ve chosen to understand what it takes to make the decision to participate. What it takes to actually make the choice to run for a political office with the intention of not just “resisting” an opposition intent on changing the very configuration of our society. What it takes to come up with a better plan, a plan capable of convincing those that feel unseen and despised that they matter. Their work matters. Their kids matter. Their dignity matters. Maybe we should devise a plan that includes them?