There’s been a lot of big talk, big hope, and big denial that the Republican fever that is Trumpism and an authoritarian movement is somehow dissipated and on the downswing now that we’re on the other side of the election.
That’s wishful thinking, it’s counterproductive, and it can actually be dangerous. We’re really in more of a holding pattern that’s going to stick, because sanity just barely won out overall over extremism and election denialism last week.
I’m not out here writing this to cause fear. I’m writing because we need to see reality, and we need to deal with it. Our overall denial of what’s really going on is keeping us from more effective collective and cooperative mitigation strategies for the extremism that very much continues to threaten this democracy.
It’s not just in the media. It’s in the population; because people want the wacky, unstable, dangerous extremism to have gone away. It’s in elected political leadership, too. Interviews about the election with Democratic party officials have been glowingly positive; especially since it became clear on Sunday that Democrats would have control of the US Senate with a very slight majority. Not enough to overturn obstructive Senators Manchin and Sinema; perhaps not enough to overturn the filibuster; perhaps not enough to get voting rights passed. But still — a very slight majority.
There’s lots of talk about success. And there absolutely was success. There was very huge turnout, and we absolutely needed all of the efforts that were undertaken that got us this far.
Yet from within a state where our anti-public health governor and Senator-Forever Grassley were both re-elected, the jubilation sounds tone-deaf. I’m thrilled too that election deniers were defeated for key positions in swing states. We needed that.
But I’m really, really angry that my own neighbors re-elected the Iowa governor who contributed to covid deaths and suffering that continue; and re-elected a Senator who contributed to the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, and who has actively enabled and condoned Trump and Trumpism.
I’m really angry that voters in Florida did not see Governor DeSantis’ blatant, clear, out-front, often-now-legally-codified bigotry as a dealbreaker. I’m really angry that the media skim right over all that; and normalize DeSantis as some kind of less toxic and more viable version of Trump. He’s just as toxic; as are other Republicans such as Governor Youngkin in Virginia.
I’m really angry that voters in state after state re-elected governors and legislators that are legalizing intolerance, targeting LGBTQ+ individuals, removing measures meant to facilitate equity, banning books, whitewashing history, un-funding and under-funding schools, and a huge list of other things. We’re collectively embracing and enabling gun proliferation, even as we get news today of yet another mass shooting — this time at UVA in Charlottesville, VA.
We can fight in so many more ways than how we’ve been fighting.
We can hold the media to better account; and pressure them to stop sanitizing and normalizing dangerous politicians.
We can work with and pressure politicians, community leaders, group leaders, and Americans at every level to call out hate more. We can work on how we do this better. We can get every single group and church and any other organization that we’re involved with to get way louder about what’s not okay.
We can provide more solidarity and support where there are threats, and threatened groups.
We can spread courage. Courage is contagious.
We can talk more — way, way more — about what we want for the future of this country. It can’t just be about what we don’t want. It’s got to be about the future we envision together, collectively. We have to bring that to the table. We have to make that way more clear than what we’ve been doing. And it isn’t in policy specifics. It’s in big vision.
We need to learn how to say what we want for ourselves and our kids and our relatives and our friends. We want jobs where humans can earn a living and pay rent. And thrive. We want a country where CEOs don’t make hundreds of times more than employees who have to go to food pantries to eat. We want to fund our schools. We want science. We want decent, accessible healthcare. We want government everywhere to work, and to actually serve us. We want government programs that support a flourishing economy for everyone — not just the already-rich.
We want our kids to be able to go to school without having to learn how to hide under tables and not make a single sound for hours so an active shooter doesn’t murder them.
We want a government that actually invests in communities; rather than refusing to for 50 years as we watch American communities decay and atrophy. It’s no surprise that there’s widespread resentment. Republicans created the conditions for it over decades; and leverage it to remain in power. Why aren’t we calling them out more for that?
Just because we pushed back a loud, dangerous, wacky, extremist threat overall this round doesn’t mean the threat has gone away.
Authoritarian movements grow and take hold with noise, rancor, confusion about the truth, growing outrage, and eroded institutions. We’re there (here’s one example of institutional erosion in the homeland security realm; Twitter’s erosion/meltdown is another huge example in several zones).
Authoritarian movements bring chaos and shock so they can offer supposed solutions to it by putting the authoritarian in power… but all they offer is more chaos. They offer nihilism, and an abyss. They offer more rage; and ongoing fights. That’s the playbook. That’s all that’s on offer. The Republican party hasn’t even bothered to spell out an agenda. It’s just anything against all that Democrats and “liberals” are. It’s a party against anything that makes “the base” uncomfortable. Let’s call out that base for what it is; for who they are. We can do way more of that.
After the insurrection, there was a very brief period where the hopeful pundit crowd went around declaring that the extremist fever broke.
What it did instead is metastasize.
Before January 6, 2021 we had one main demagogue. Now we have more demagogues. Now we also have an empowered movement with tens of thousands or more of fired-up, radicalized, extremist Republicans; and millions who just voted for more of all that. The Republican party and all that it currently embraces and condones was not a dealbreaker for millions last week. In fact, millions were excited and highly motivated to vote for more.
How do we turn that tide?
We get way louder. We need to make things much more uncomfortable.
We need to call out way more of the intolerance, the hate, the bigotry, the racism, the anti-Semitism… but also the policy decisions, and the priorities. The Republican party is no longer pro-democracy. It’s not here to fight for all Americans. The Republican party is here to fight for pale, powerful, supposedly Christian men.
The majority of people in this country are Democrats, or independents.
We need to better empower that majority.
Governor DeSantis picked a fight with Disney, for crying out loud, about bigotry. DeSantis lost that fight. Famous person Kanye West, now called “Ye,” took a blatant and brazen anti-Semitic stance… and lost the fight against Adidas. Adidas chose to cut that tie (eventually) to the tune of hundreds of millions; because they know where they want their brand to be. We can bring big pressure — or big partnerships — with businesses, too. There are opportunities all over the place.
So let’s do more.
Shift the Country has a 5-part plan to help. We’re setting up online events now based on the election results to help us start building a different fight. We’ll announce events here. We build on what’s happened so far… and take it further.
Get your group and get your people and let’s find ways to shift the direction this country is going in. We can.
Share our stuff. Talk about it. Check out the website. See what you think.
And let’s get going.
Agreed. I'm in a red state, sitting in the wake of an election where the re-elected incumbent called his opponent a groomer and possibly a pedophile. Why? Because his opponent is a teacher who has said that he would not work to overturn Title IX law requiring teachers to call children by their chosen name and gender pronouns. The incumbent is bad enough that the former head of the Republicans here in my district endorsed the challenger.
Things are not okay. Not even remotely.
The country remains in a kind of limbo land until we know which party will control the House. I think a lot of people are exhausted by everything that led up to the election. Some are breathing huge sighs of relief about the Senate--and hoping Warnock can notch up one more win. But the House. It's problematic. If the Republicans win it, there will be chaos. We need to brace ourselves. Initially there may be a lot of chaos around who will become the speaker; my bet is that it will be McCarthy--but the MAGAs will extract a pound of flesh in the process. And then the "fun and games" will begin. The fact that they will be stymied in actually getting any ridiculous legislation passed will not deter them from introducing it--an ugly, ugly path. And then there are the investigations...and perhaps even impeachments. Talk about a circus. And all of this will be accompanied by the return of daily outpourings from trump--who just cannot ever remain on the sidelines; let's hope Musk figures out it's best not to allow him to return to Twitter, but I'm not banking on it. So anything that Shift the Country can do to help shine a light on the shenanigans, cut through the noise of disinformation and help change the narrative in the media will be incredibly important in focusing attention and action on saving our democracy.