Barack Obama spent eight years telling Americans that we are not as divided as our politics suggests.
This week, his production company announced a new documentary series about civic trust, and the timing could not be more pointed.
The former president is now selling a message of unity back to a country that has spent a decade tearing itself apart.
Obama's own presidency helped midwife the era of perpetual outrage we now inhabit.
Every gesture, every tan suit, every coffee cup salute became a battleground.
The man who once said there were no red states or blue states was the first president to be litigated on Twitter in real time.
We have become a country that cannot agree on what happened yesterday, let alone what matters.
A recent Pew survey found that fewer than one in five Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.
That number was closer to three in four when Eisenhower was president.
What does that collapse of trust look like in daily life?
It looks like a school board meeting that devolves into shouting over mask policies.
It looks like neighbors who stop waving because of a yard sign.
It looks like families that split at Thanksgiving and never quite heal.
The abstract crisis of civic trust has a very concrete body count of friendships.
Obama's new project will likely offer earnest conversations and sweeping shots of small-town America.
It will be well made, well intentioned, and probably well reviewed.
And it will change almost nothing, because the problem was never a lack of documentaries.
The problem is that we have learned to hate each other for sport, and there is no streaming platform for unlearning that.
The former president is not to blame for all of this.
But there is a particular sadness in watching the great conciliator of 2004, the man who told us there was no liberal America or conservative America, now reduced to narrating our national divorce for a subscription fee.
We keep tuning in for the next speech, the next series, the next moment that will finally turn the tide.
But trust is not a product you can stream.
It is rebuilt in small, boring, untelevised acts, one neighbor at a time, usually without a camera crew present.
Maybe the Obamas' series will spark a few conversations.
Final Thoughts
But if we want to know whether civic trust can be restored, we should stop looking at our screens and start looking at the people across the street.