It's Giving ... Thanks
A brief note of gratitude in a dark period
The last time I wrote you was before the election. I have been quiet since then, and I have been working, but I have not yet, quite, worked out what I want to say to you or the world about what happened since that last message.
What I can offer now is my gratitude. My thanks for your support, my humbled appreciation for your attention, and my pledge to be worthy of both in the future.
I mean to offer gratitude not in an empty sense but to combat an emptiness I’ve seen growing in the comments sections and the social-media forums. I have seen not a few folks retreat into, or embrace in a headlong rush, a sort of seductive, performative despair. If this is what they voted for, then burn it all down, the posts cry. They chose this, they can have it. One day, they’ll be sorry.
A cornerstone of my outlook—not just on politics, but on life—is that you will never receive catharsis. There will never come a time in human history or your own biography where the apokalupsis, the apocalypse, comes about in its literal sense, bringing not an end so much as an unveiling, a revelation so complete that all debate and fighting cease. Refusing to act in the belief that one day they will be sorry—or, even more, they will deserve it, and know it—means abandoning your post, shirking your duty when it needs done most, in the vain belief that your position is so right that it will, one day, bring justice of its own inexorable logic.
That hope—that one’s enemies will be smote by the fate they helped bring about—is poetic but rarely fulfilled in a satisfying way. And the costs can be high even if that fulfillment does come about. Fantasizing about our eventual vindication after others’ suffering is, in the end, still fantasizing about others’ being harmed in the service of our ego. One day, they’ll be sorry, but they probably won’t, and wishing it were so means wishing for them and others to hurt. However appealing it can be to proclaim that you wash one’s hands of the affair, history tends not to view the hand-washers well.
Sarcasm, cynicism, nihilism … these are poses of resistance that undermine action. Indulging in pre-nostalgia for a lost cause—ah, it would have been so glorious had we won—has all the attraction, and there are attractions, of teenage rebellion, without the promise of later maturity. Faith, hope, and charity: these are, in the long run, greater, but they are not easy and they are far from riskless.
Today reminds us to give thanks even when there may seem like little to be grateful for. Practicing gratitude is effortful but as risky as any form of love; it is a recognition of blessings and favors, a forced consideration of enduring values and connections. To be grateful is to be connected, and to be connected is to be obliged. And obligation requires action, not surrender.
Comments for this post are open to all.
“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.