362 DAYS
Now We Can Go About Winning The 2024 Election In An Unstable Superpower Of A Democracy On An Unstable, Fast-Evolving Planet
“What’s next?” — President Jed Bartlet, on The West Wing
What’s Next?
Hey the 2023 election is over so…………
Welcome to the 2024 election cycle! Woohoo! Everyone loves politics!
For real — for this next year it’s time to actually sell that message, to decide to love politics, and to convince a whole bunch of folks that it’s the best tool we’ve got to realistically take on a huge mounting stack of problems facing us as a species.
We’re going to need to get more Americans into the citizenship game than any of us have seen in our lifetimes.
We’re going to need to get more Americans more engaged than ever before — not just because the US democracy and the world order and stuff is on the line, but also because our collective future is. As a planet. As humans. As people with any freedom at all whatsoever. All of it.
It’s true that a zillion Americans have already done a zillion things to help hold the line up in this increasingly unstable US democracy. Many of us have been at it actively since 2016 but there are hundreds of thousands who have been in the fight for way, way longer.
We’ve needed that. Every damn bit of it. Every action. Every bit of anger. Every piece of justice. Every tiny step of progress. Every huge gain.
We’ve needed all of that.
Now we’ve got to take it even further.
Now we’ve got to — for real — go all out.
Now we’ve got to pull ourselves out of this bizarre collective American society denial where we keep going around acting like everything is normal and we’ve got to start acting like nothing is.
Because it isn’t.
Like my dudes… there is absolutely nothing about this moment that’s normal. Okay I don’t know where the “my dudes” comment comes from but it’s 2:30 in the morning after an election night and I might be a little punchy.
The point is that we seem to want to keep acting like there is some “normal” to the persistently unfolding and traumatic chaos around us, or perhaps an elusive “new normal.”
NO. THERE ISN’T.
YO THIS IS WHAT WE’RE DOING NOW.
AND IT’S PROBABLY GOING TO KEEP GETTING WORSE FOR QUITE A WHILE.
That’s not said to incite panic. It’s said because it’s easier to aggressively, collectively tackle reality and to work together on huge, difficult problems that are coming anyway if you’re actually willing to accept that they exist.
A Few Huge Big Things
So let’s get into it. There are a couple of big huge things going on that we can easily cover without getting into all the millions of details about how we’ve got a bunch of religious zealots and people with many firearms gaining power over Americans and parts of American government in all kinds of ways that are dangerous to all kinds of Americans.
So. The big stuff…
One thing we’re doing is — we’re mixed up pretty deeply in two huge wars one of which is escalating pretty severely in a hotbed of tension that’s built up over centuries and which is currently being amplified by incredible violence, by complicated war involvement and attacks by various nation-states, by modern media, by social media, by propaganda, by disinformation, and by some pretty terrible collective decision-making on behalf of humans by other humans all around.
As humans, we’re not de-escalating what’s happening in the Middle East. That whole area alone right now is a metaphorical powder keg in the world, sitting on a metaphorical oil tanker of rocket fuel — but metaphor can’t cover how tough and horrid this could all get. It’s already unbelievably tragic all around and worsening by the hour.
But that’s just one thing. That’s just, you know, the escalating war in the Middle East.
There’s also the Russian war on Ukraine. There are the cascading effects from that which persist and which could intensify as well at any moment. Of particular note are supply chain issues and worldwide food supply impacts. We’re not going to magically get more grain out of a war-torn country with frequently insurmountable shipping issues, and Ukraine is critical to the survival of humans in many countries.
Our own politics in the US are unstable enough that we might see a federal government shutdown here shortly, and/or significant changes to US policy or involvement in either of the big wars — all of which will have huge cascading effects of their own depending on what happens.
Domestically, we’ve got an out-of-control domestic terrorist threat that almost no one talks about even though Americans are armed to the teeth with military grade weaponry. It’s way more weaponry than “foreign” terrorists suspected to be in the US ever had realistic domestic access to in the post-9/11 years — by orders of magnitude and currently stored in Americans’ garages, bedrooms, businesses, trucks, and barns. Now that the US is backing Israel in a Middle-Eastern war, however, suddenly folks want to talk about how the “terror threat” to the US is the highest it’s been in 10 years. Oh wait! They mean the foreign terror threat. Because we’re still denying collectively and certainly in the media that our own very well-armed neighbors pose a more likely threat to any of us than someone trying to get here from another country half a world away.
“Disturbingly, support for political violence has increased over the last two years. Today, nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that ‘because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country’ up from 15% in 2021. PRRI has asked this question in eight separate surveys since March 2021. This is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%. One-third of Republicans (33%) today believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats… Republicans who have favorable views of Trump (41%) are nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump (16%) to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country. Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump are more than three times as likely as those who do not believe that the election was stolen from Trump — 46% to 13%, respectively — to agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”
We’re not talking about all that, it seems, because it’s uncomfortable… and because these Americans who want violence (also known as terrorism) are all mixed up in all the parts of society including in our intelligence agencies, in law enforcement, in politics, and in our government oversight as elected legislators and governors.
If we paid any attention to terrorism, we’d know that it doesn’t take very many terrorists or terrorist activities at all to scare the living daylights out of entire societies for years.
Yo. We’re there.
We’re reeling from the shock of the threat itself, the bizarre federal non-discussion of it, the normalization of the threat despite how much of it comes from a US political party, and we’re frozen by the repeated mass shootings. It mixes together in messy ways and we continue to be unable as a society to push back on it. We could, but hold that thought.
Plus, we have media who don’t report on the hugest recent domestic terrorist attack (2021) as a terrorist attack because it’s easier to call it an insurrection. Plus, we have legislators and huge media conglomerates who were a part of both the coup attempt and the terrorist insurrection still in their positions in Congress and as huge media and online influencers.
Also of course we don’t have time with our news coverage to cover all the everyday-style mass shootings that happen weekly in the US because the news media is too busy giving heavily-indicted twice impeached Donald Trump almost unceasing free news coverage and free press which is totally helping a) his poll numbers, b) his fundraising, and c) our collective denial that he’s a threat to millions of Americans, to our democracy, and to millions of Americans.
That being said, our media cover enough mass shootings that we’re all good and scared by them and so that we can all recite the immediate first two days of news coverage and “analysis” in our heads before such coverage even starts. We can all predict the political yammering reaction of big talk and thoughts and prayers. We can all also guess the actual political reaction of absolutely nothing because this country has been deadlocked for decades now with one political party holding on for dear life to the levers of power in this jacked-up republic that protect minority party power because our founders didn’t trust the majority of the people and also because a bunch of other powerful Americans didn’t either and wanted to help wealthy white men stay powerful no matter how much empowerment non-white, non-men got.
We’re on the cusp of breaking out of that minority party stranglehold, though — but that’s not necessarily great news. Anyone reading this far likely recognizes the reckoning we’re in. The precipice.
The US Republican party has gone on all in on holding on to that minority party power as an authoritarian movement. They are finding ways every single day to hold on to minority party power protections.
They are all in. THEY ARE ALL IN.
The Real Actual Serious Deep Threat Hardly Anyone Talks About
If the US Republican party wins such power overall and in great enough numbers, this democracy may well not hold. It’s been under active institutional attack and active erosion since at least 2016 but perhaps even since the 1980s as a well-functioning government. Hard to tell for sure when it started… and now it doesn’t matter because if the US government falls, the people who need the government to protect them the most will not have the government to protect them.
The United States Government — the most powerful government in the world — protects humans.
The US government protects American humans.
The US government is currently protecting countless humans in countless countries where dictators or aggressive nation-states would hurt, oppress, abuse, or enslave the humans of those places if the US government wasn’t around to play big tough supercountry. For example, the US government is currently protecting Ukrainian humans through soft power and also through money and weaponry. The US government’s moves to help certain humans inevitably cause problems, of course. The US government sometimes makes a mess while it thinks it’s protecting humans because governments are made up of humans and decision-making is complicated and humanity is messy.
But if the US government was no more — it would be protecting millions LESS humans than it is currently able to protect.
But if the US government was no more — it would be protecting millions LESS
American humans than it is currently able to protect. And there is a whole heck of a lot out there right now that we’d like our government to keep helping us out with.
We Need To Get Better At Talking
We need to get better at talking about this stuff.
There’s a contingent of folks on the Democratic party side who think everything would be better without the US government and without it’s occasional (or perhaps frequent) mistakes and missteps and big tragedies as it goes around attempting to take the high road. Yeah, our path has not been ideal.
But if the United States falls… who protects Americans who need protecting?
Who is going to protect vulnerable women? Poor people who are getting help right now but whose already-limited help would evaporate? Who would protect the already-disenfranchised and historically under-served and over-oppressed groups of Americans who still have never seen true equity but in at least some cases were getting closer?
Hitler took apart Eastern European countries because those governments were protecting the people he was targeting to hurt. Once he got rid of government, he could damn well do what he wanted and he did. The fatality numbers from the countries where he was able to get rid of governments were much higher than those in Western Europe where governments remained somewhat in place yet in various levels of complicity with the Third Reich.
Are we going to dig in this election year and decide to fight with all we have to protect humans? To protect Americans? To protect children? To protect our collective future on this earth?
So much of this post so far has just been about what if the US falls. That’s just democracy. That’s just the world order. It hasn’t even gotten into how we’re not actively dealing with climate change in any real way yet and how some even now are actively denying it.
How are we going to collectively deal with fast-intensifying climate chaos if we can’t have a functional government that’s actually governing?
One of the reasons we even have government is to help us with big disasters… and we’ll be having more and more and more and more big disasters. Are we going to change any of our stances to be more ready for all this disaster? Everywhere?
Uh, no. So far we’re not. So far we’re basically watching it happen. So far we’re doing a certain amount of hand-wringing… because, you know, disasters suck and are traumatic and harmful. They might be less bad if we’d do anything at all to be more ready or to try to make climate damage less bad through mitigation, but we’re not doing any of that at scale.
Also, we have an increasing world population living in high-hazard (i.e., disaster-prone) areas with an expected increase in competition for food, with an increase in competition for water, with more failed nation-states, and with an increase in racist authoritarian/oligarchical power grabs attempting to secure increasingly limited resources using proven colonial, supremacist paradigms. There will be more war, more violence, more famine, less stability, and so on as the future unfolds. This risk assessment is based on science, on sociology, and on our own human history.
Coming into that future and that world… it would sure help to have a functioning, governing United States government.
If we could get that near-future US government to actually aggressively and proactively lean forward into a more sustainable, resilience posture to take all of that assessed coming future risk on we’d be much better positioned for a whole different and much more survivable future than the one we’re headed toward right now.
All of that is what this nonprofit is aiming to shift. This is a long game. Only it’s not a game.
362 Days
I make this case here at zero-dark-thirty on an election night because in the name of all that is good and holy… we have GOT to stop not talking realistically about these big huge things looming in front of us.
Or, we have got to talk about them differently. Or, we have got to talk about them in a million different ways, and in a million different places. We have got to get thousands more people engaged.
We have options.
One option is we could get a whole lot better at speaking truth, and at getting media and influencers to speak truth.
Like so:
The Republican party wants poor people to suffer. The Republican party has been actively condoning, endorsing, and enabling violence against women, racism, anti-LGBTQ sentiments, and anti-Semitism since at least 2016. The Republican party allows dangerous, unstable humans to have high-powered firearms. The Republican party is hiding and outlawing books about diversity, history, and the many complex aspects to navigating human biology especially related to reproduction, sexuality, and gender. The Republican party wants to control women’s bodies. The Republican party wants to decimate the middle class and move even more money to the rich. The Republican party wants poor children to work and has gotten rid of child labor laws so they can. The Republican party has been actively advocating against proven science. The Republican party has been actively against public health and through that position has endangered, hurt, disabled, or contributed to the deaths of millions of Americans. The Republican party has made it easier for men to be able to hurt, assault, and abuse girls, college-aged women, and adults without retribution or consequence. The Republican party wants working class people to keep their low-wage jobs so CEOs and shareholders can make thousands of times what working class people make. The Republican party wants to hold on to minority party power provisions from the Jim Crow era that were created to keep rich white men in power. The Republican party wants to get rid of safety provisions that keep workers safe and that keep our food edible and less dangerous. The Republican party’s deregulation leads to toxic drinking water and to more pollution. The Republican party encourages dirty energy through policy and law. The Republican party has refused to invest in American communities since the 1960s when they were told they had to share. The Republican party is re-segregating schools and calling it “school choice.” The Republican party is de-funding public schools and shifting funds to the private sector. The Republican party doesn’t want to spend money on the infrastructure or institutions the US needs to remain a superpower unless it’s war-related. The Republican party refuses to invest in innovation and small businesses to help our communities and to help us be more competitive economically worldwide. The Republican party endorses and enables the stealing of very highly classified national security secrets. The Republican party wants to get rid of the separation of church and state. The Republican party has attempted a coup yet is pretending it wasn’t a coup attempt. The Republican party wants the government to take away our privacy and to access our private data. The Republican party wants to do political retribution. The Republican party wants to take away our freedom and our votes.
And so on.
We Could Empower The US Majority
We have options.
We could message better… and we could also create a movement that gets into the very fabric of our society in the places where we live and in how we interact online.
We could foment action and conversation and civic engagement and creative stuff nobody’s even thought of yet but that makes the news. This nonprofit will post more on all that this week.
We could do more with connection. We could take community and coalition-building to entirely new levels. We could leverage the huge power of businesses or business pressure. We could champion vision, values, and moral courage and help empower each other to stand up and stand out and to stand together. We could spread all of this around through all of our own social networks and everywhere else.
^^ That’s the basic approach at this nonprofit — it’s 5 Things. It’s designed to take everything that’s been out there so far to hold this democracy… and to help people and groups and party orgs take it all to new levels and to whole new dimensions.
Because we can.
We have never yet gone all out to totally empower the entire US majority.
We could. This nonprofit and its approach is set up to help us get there.
What’s Next?
For now, one thing you can do is to consider committing to get involved in what this nonprofit is doing.
Like — by making a commitment to yourself to create the space to get engaged with this work… if it resonates with you.
Take some time. We’re all going to need to make big decisions as everything intensifies. This work is one option of thousands. If you’re interested in having a conversation about possibilities and what we’re planning here, holler at me at team@shiftthecountry.com. I’m planning to have hundreds of these conversations this month. We’re planting seeds and watering fields.
For now, you can also get involved by inviting us to speak with a group you’re involved with. For now, you can get involved by talking about all the stuff in this post with people you know or groups you’re involved in. For now, you could share this post and ask others to share it, too. For now, you could send us funding or subscribe here to help us ramp this up.
For now — any one of us can get started on anything. We’ll post big lists of ideas this week for more.
It’s good to see some huge wins in the 2023 election. Now we dig deeper and go farther. Because we can. Because we’re free to. So let’s do it. Let’s keep those freedoms, too. And get more of them back while we’re at it.
Be safe and be well. Talk to your people — this stuff is tough and awkard, but we’ll handle it better if we’re willing to look at it head-on.
And then let’s get going.