We've known for many years that the country was in a prolonged and strange period of underlying 50/50 division. This election did not change that: according to the current vote count Harris received a greater vote share than Hillary Clinton did eight years ago. The results have dramatic implications, but the underlying situation has not changed.
I think Democrats have focused energy on tipping that balance a point or two, and that approach dictated a certain strategy and set of tactics aimed at peeling off "undecideds" for each next election and working to maintain and mobilize all elements of a disparate coalition. That worked in the context of the 2020 pandemic, but has failed to do more than maintain precarity.
The incoming administration's goals seem to be to engineer a fundamental shift in this balance through dramatic actions on the ground, such as mass deportation and domestic military deployment, and equally dramatic systemic reforms, such as the repopulation of the bureaucracy and curtailment of critical speech through legal innovations accepted by friendly courts. My hope is that this leads the Democrats to raise their sights accordingly, which will require imagination, leadership, and difficult choices made in response to the ongoing latent context that have seemed too risky to undertake in a contest at the margins.
Perhaps only the reality of defeat that cannot be blamed away on the electoral college or one-time mistaken perceptions could bring about this change of focus. We've seen some people pointing to marginal errors in the Harris campaign that seem to excuse much larger failures of understanding. I think Harris ran the best Democratic campaign since Obama 2008, and I've seen others acknowledge that the failure was not the campaign's but the Democratic coalition's. My hope is that this view prevails in leading coalition members to regroup and more fundamentally rethink how to move forward strategically to escape this 50/50 predicament, while tactically operationalizing the tools they have at national and state levels to limit the damage of the next two/four years in ways that serve rather than undercut strategic goals.
The one person who voiced this sentiment in a zoom had been an actual delegate to the DNC in the past so seemed to be wondering what the use was of all her hard work. I was once a Kerry delegate to the district convention because no one else wanted the job and cannot claim to be an expert on the politics of rural Missouri but I am dubious that the state legislature or federal House of Representatives does very little other than squabble over who is the most conservative because they are catering to their voters. To the extent that voters do not want government to work they will never "be sorry".
Your last line of course is right: true believers won’t rend their garments and have the scales fall from their eyes etc because they will either deny anything bad happened or because they will relish what comes to pass.
Your first line speaks for the emotional appeal of all of this, and it’s why it’s a good reminder to rotate troops off the front line …
Thanks for this painful but good truth. You’ve summed up why I can’t bring myself to simply look away. The suffering is great but looking away does nothing to lesson it.
We talk about so much of our existence in frameworks of absolutes. People speak of “no love lost” as if that’s really possible. In all of this love, hope, and trust are absolutely being lost to the greater suffering of us all.
Thank you for this. I am trying to work through the hurt, anger, confusion, disappointment, fear, and all this, but although my prescription isn't "bear witness to everything all the time" I also can't make it be "succumb to despair" or "indulge ignorance".
“And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.”
— Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
(Thanks for this, Paul. Hope you’re doing well.)
We've known for many years that the country was in a prolonged and strange period of underlying 50/50 division. This election did not change that: according to the current vote count Harris received a greater vote share than Hillary Clinton did eight years ago. The results have dramatic implications, but the underlying situation has not changed.
I think Democrats have focused energy on tipping that balance a point or two, and that approach dictated a certain strategy and set of tactics aimed at peeling off "undecideds" for each next election and working to maintain and mobilize all elements of a disparate coalition. That worked in the context of the 2020 pandemic, but has failed to do more than maintain precarity.
The incoming administration's goals seem to be to engineer a fundamental shift in this balance through dramatic actions on the ground, such as mass deportation and domestic military deployment, and equally dramatic systemic reforms, such as the repopulation of the bureaucracy and curtailment of critical speech through legal innovations accepted by friendly courts. My hope is that this leads the Democrats to raise their sights accordingly, which will require imagination, leadership, and difficult choices made in response to the ongoing latent context that have seemed too risky to undertake in a contest at the margins.
Perhaps only the reality of defeat that cannot be blamed away on the electoral college or one-time mistaken perceptions could bring about this change of focus. We've seen some people pointing to marginal errors in the Harris campaign that seem to excuse much larger failures of understanding. I think Harris ran the best Democratic campaign since Obama 2008, and I've seen others acknowledge that the failure was not the campaign's but the Democratic coalition's. My hope is that this view prevails in leading coalition members to regroup and more fundamentally rethink how to move forward strategically to escape this 50/50 predicament, while tactically operationalizing the tools they have at national and state levels to limit the damage of the next two/four years in ways that serve rather than undercut strategic goals.
The one person who voiced this sentiment in a zoom had been an actual delegate to the DNC in the past so seemed to be wondering what the use was of all her hard work. I was once a Kerry delegate to the district convention because no one else wanted the job and cannot claim to be an expert on the politics of rural Missouri but I am dubious that the state legislature or federal House of Representatives does very little other than squabble over who is the most conservative because they are catering to their voters. To the extent that voters do not want government to work they will never "be sorry".
Your last line of course is right: true believers won’t rend their garments and have the scales fall from their eyes etc because they will either deny anything bad happened or because they will relish what comes to pass.
Your first line speaks for the emotional appeal of all of this, and it’s why it’s a good reminder to rotate troops off the front line …
Thank you, Paul
Thanks for this painful but good truth. You’ve summed up why I can’t bring myself to simply look away. The suffering is great but looking away does nothing to lesson it.
We talk about so much of our existence in frameworks of absolutes. People speak of “no love lost” as if that’s really possible. In all of this love, hope, and trust are absolutely being lost to the greater suffering of us all.
Thank you for this. I am trying to work through the hurt, anger, confusion, disappointment, fear, and all this, but although my prescription isn't "bear witness to everything all the time" I also can't make it be "succumb to despair" or "indulge ignorance".