My pep talk for when everything sucks
Why didn't dems codify Roe? Can anything fix the Supreme Court? How can I find hope again?
I just got a DM that read “It’s all so depressing and overwhelming and it feels so hard to battle.” Girl, snaps.
It was one of hundreds that said similar things - some less appropriate for the Substack.
I’m going to give you the pep talk I give myself: the path to finding hope in politics again is by getting involved in fixing it.
Coming off the awful presidential debate last week there has been a negativity firestorm online. One report I saw said 95% of social media coverage of the event was negative.
The Supreme Court has issued a series of bangers:
The Chevron Doctrine decision which, combined with today’s Corner Post decision, has polished the glidepath to becoming the United States of Amazon.com
The immunity decision which gives a president the right to act as a king
And the recent lifesaving care decision where the Supreme Court punted to another day the question of if ERs have to treat pregnant women who might die.
Ughhh.
My social media is an unhinged swarm of negativity, and not just about these events but about politics and government writ large. There’s so much content pushing the futility of engaging at all, pushing a nihilistic narrative and the feeling that blowing it all up is the only answer. With nothing on the other side.
Now is not the time to check out. I know you are burnt out on politics. I hear you! But the only way this suckage can be fixed, and I’m talking about the big suckage - the infrastructural problems, the minority rule, the presidential candidates no one likes - is if lots of people get involved to fix it.
Climate doomerism may get views, but the government is the only thing that can possibly solve the climate problem our world is facing.
I’m so pissed about the possibility of a future where women may not have access to lifesaving healthcare, and government is the only way to fix it.
We CANNOT just hand over power to the people who want to exploit our labor, our environment, our attention spans to make cash and fulfill some freaky religious fantasy.
When people ask me how I still have hope, what I really want to say is…what’s the other option?
Give up?!
I have worked in politics for a long time and I think one of the reasons I have hope is that I have experienced things actually change. I have seen members move quickly on an issue where we thought there was no possibility of movement. I have also seen this country move, over longer periods of time, on important cultural issues.
I think people view politics as this immutable beast, and indeed the Supreme Court can’t change overnight, but people also said Roe and Chevron were settled law and look at what happened to those! Two votes can switch the majority of the Court. It could happen with impeachment, by adding more justices (Congress needs to do it), or a bit of patience (my last pep talk started with “Thomas and Alito will die” - perhaps motivational speaker is not my vocation.)
I often think about the blue collar men who switched from being lifelong Democrats to hardcore Trump voters. There wasn’t a slow drift, it was fast and intense like the romances in those dragon sex books TikTok loves.
People are so often screaming about how Democrats didn’t codify Roe (most recently, of all people, James Charles, the makeup influencer). I’ve always said that the most salient reason this wasn’t done was because it would have been a bad idea - reproductive healthcare *should be* a constitutional right - for what is liberty if half the population can’t control their own bodies? Practically, a constitutional right was also far harder to change (you have to give Republicans credit, they did in fact work very, very hard). Abortion as a political football is not the ideal place to be.
But there is another reason that is less discussed, on the rare occasions in modern times when Democrats had a trifecta of power (meaning when they controlled the White House, the U.S. Senate & the House of Representatives) AND they had a supermajority in the Senate of 60 votes necessary to overcome the filibuster …. there weren’t 60 pro-choice Democrats in the Senate. The idea that being pro-choice is a threshold issue for Democratic candidates is a very recent innovation. We still have one anti-choice Democrat in Congress, Henry Cuellar. He also happens to be under indictment.
People (read: political nerds) often discuss the 72 day supermajority during the beginning of the Obama Administration. It was a tenuous supermajority at best: Ted Kennedy was out for hundreds of votes because of fatal brain cancer and Al Franken’s seat was litigated by Republicans - it was a mess. But the point here is that even of the 60 Democrats when they were there, they were not all pro-choice. Senator Ben Nelson was a notorious an anti-choice Democrat from Nebraska who was the final senator to vote on Obamacare *because* of abortion.
Why am I veering into history lesson territory here? Because “The Democrats” have changed as we have changed. Yes, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have been around since the Stone Age, but the actions of the past do not dictate the actions of the future. Change comes when we elect people at all levels of government who share our views and then push them to act, change is the work that we are doing now.
We have power over this change and we cannot forget it.
Next year’s Congress will not have Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, the last true holdouts supporting the preservation of the Senate filibuster. There is a world in which we elect the right group of people AND exert pressure so that we can codify reproductive healthcare in the next Congress. But to do that, we need to keep the Senate and win the House. This election is not just about the presidency.
And there are ballot measures in states across this country, including nine that will protect abortion. As we saw from Ohio…even ‘red states’ are winnable on this issue. There are also state legislatures where the control of power is on the precipice. There are ones where Democrats have the opportunity to flip the state house and state senate - like in Arizona - and there are ones where Democrats' power is at risk, like in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
There is a Tiktok guy named Nick Powers who makes massive spreadsheets to use data to convince people of civic things. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but it’s actually great content. Because he makes the point, with math, that even in places that people think of as fully calcified as red, there are enough blue voters to turn the tide. If you live in a red town where you think no one is a Democrat, it’s probably because everyone else probably thinks the same thing. If you think there’s no point in voting, you don’t vote. When you deliberately sit out, you are just handing power over to the status quo.
Maybe this isn’t the right pep talk for you since upon re-reading this I see it is written for my fellow pragmatics. Hope outlooks very much shape how we engage with politics and this is why in Democracy in Retrograde we have a quiz and give advice specifically based on your response.
To summarize my points here:
Change is very possible. We can elect new politicians, we can change the platform of the party (I’ve been arguing EYP fam do a bottom up takeover for a while), we can find back doors and trap doors. Every piece of legislation that passes is a change to a system of law that previously seemed set in stone. Every judicial decision is a change to law that was the rule. Our entire system is set up to change, the question is merely in what direction.
The past does not dictate the future. Things like abortion and guns, marriage equality and how to regulate social media are not static issues; the views of the populaces change and the elected politicians' views change with them. The fact that Democrats didn’t previously codify Roe is not an indication of what they will do in the future. There are reasons they did not do that in the past, but that does not dictate what we and our elected leaders do now.
We hold the power. I often joke that while we still have democracy, we can change things. But if Trump wins he will undoubtedly move us towards autocracy, and even then I will still argue we can change things! You get to choose what civic actions you do and how you do them. You might find these national issues too much to deal with, but I bet you have stuff going on in your community and state that could use your mind and soul.
In Democracy in Retrograde we try to take your hopelessness and channel that into civic engagement that is authentic and sustainable for you. My political philosophy is that a rising tide lifts all boats, but that tide only rises with thousands of raindrops. It requires all of us to do a little.
And just a reminder that Democracy in Retrograde is available at Amazon, Target, Bookshop and anywhere you get your books! Thank you for supporting my work and for pre-ordering the book - it means a lot.
I agree that more civic engagement is the answer. Even past November, we need to elect folks who will act on the issues that matter to us. We, as voters, need to hold electeds at every level accountable. Many leaders I have spoken to recently highlight the sad fact that campaigns don't actually want everyone to vote, they focus on turning out "their" voters. Our system is calcified with each party concentrating its base, and we need new folks to get involved and advocate for their issues. I focus on getting parents involved and having discussions around the issues that impact families and in which we are failing so terribly. I hope if we can get this community to speak about the issues and have a productive dialogue there, we can start looking at where candidates stand and shift the dialogue. That's my hope.
As a fellow pragmatist I needed this. Thanks!