Kamala Harris mobilized over 70 million people to support her bid for the presidency and save our democracy from authoritarianism. Yes, we lost. But that doesn't mean we have to stop working for a better America.
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We canvassed. We called. We rallied. We texted. We did everything we could to support the pro-democracy ticket against a man who has been convicted of crimes against the state, who has been adjudicated as a sexual predator, and who has committed frauds large and broad for his entire “career.” We worked long shifts, hiked across neighborhoods familiar and unfamiliar, and brought up politics in difficult spaces. We imagined how we could build an even better, freer, fairer country that embraces people.
And it wasn’t enough.
Donald Trump is returning to the power of the presidency.
It feels impossible to believe after the years of myths about American exceptionalism: how the United States is different, how we are more moral, more worthy, more capable of self-government than other nations, how we are the shining city on a hill of global democracy. Most of us have been stewed in these stories from childhood, moved here to chase them as adults, have family in our past or present who came to the United States because they too believed in the power of the people making us special. To have our voting public choose someone who should have been disqualified from ever holding office again, to do so when his argument was cruel, incoherent, hateful, and insulting, feels like more than a wound against the republic but a full blown assault on our idea of what the country is and can be.
Electoral politics was supposed to be sufficient to put the genie back in the bottle after every other layer of our system had failed to curtail the excesses of Trump. He sent a mob to storm the Capitol, rejected the peaceful transfer of power, tried to force Congress to install him as dictator at the point of a gun—and his impeachment failed to cast him out. He was brought up on charges in a spate of courtrooms—for intimidating election officials in Georgia, for falsifying business records to protect his 2016 presidential campaign in New York, for the illegal hoarding of state secrets at his McMansion resort in Florida, for the autogolpe of January 6th in D.C.—and not a single one could make the consequences stick. When Colorado attempted to comply with the plain text of the Constitution and remove Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court majority secured by Trump himself ordered that he be allowed to stand for office. And when we tried to hold him to account for his betrayals as President, the same extreme Supreme Court made him a king.
Our ballots were meant to be the last line of defense.
Yet as we were handed the responsibility to preserve the republic, we were not prepared for the nature and weight of the task we had been given. We did not realize how easy it would be for people to be called to their worst selves, to embrace cruelty and malice, to imagine that the world was owed to them, and the lack thereof was a failure of the world and not themselves. We didn’t understand the impact of the slow dissolution of reality, the way our perception of facts would be poked and prodded until they were disassembled, the ease with which truth itself would become a matter of opinion. And we did not realize, among all the warnings about doing nothing, what it would feel like when doing something was not enough.
Now that votes have failed, the guardrails are gone. The electorate has consecrated the policy agenda that Trump embodied even if he did not articulate it. Already, autocrats around the world have expanded their terroristic behavior as they know the United States will at least look away, and at most support the effort. The lists of appointments grow to include extremists who disdain the missions of the departments they will lead and the humanity of the people they’re supposed to serve. Climate change, public health, food safety, consumer protections, the right to protest: All of it is shortly to be the responsibility of the worst people in the country. Civil servants rush to see what they can save, and businesses brace for the brutal impact of tariffs that will bring the gargantuan American economy to a near standstill. Plans to inhibit our fundamental rights are already in the works, and the barriers to restrain or slow their intentions are nearly non-existent.
We will not be able to rely on voting to push them out. There can be no assumption of a well-informed public, a truth-seeking fourth estate, or a capable elected resistance. For all we have given to electoral politics, we are at its limits. The myths of American exceptionalism cannot and will not protect us from what is about to happen. We are not better. We are not stronger. We are not uniquely resistant to the lure of easy answers to intractable problems, even if those answers are horrific. Instead, in the midst of the rise of a fascist regime in this country, we will have to imagine something more—of our system and of ourselves.
The last decade has been a rough learning curve for the American polity, an unexpected interrogation of our fundamental values, principles, and systems that has forced us to accept unpleasant truths about ourselves. It is not hard to succumb to xenophobia, exclusion, hierarchy, and hatred when the environment encourages it. We are not new or blameless in the development of fascist ideology, not helpless in its promulgation, not innocent of its inherent excesses; many fascist horrors have been gleefully perpetrated here and await only a kind of leadership willing to invoke them for their own ends. We have made it too easy for our politics to be co-opted—whether by the ultra-wealthy or the viciously cruel, as both operate from the premise that some people are born better than others, that the fortune and favor of society should reflect this, and that any attempt to reject this self-evident inequality is itself a crime. We have discovered that nostalgia cuts both ways: making it easy for us to take hard-fought progress for granted, and allowing “greatness” to be conferred on times of immense hardship and cruelty.
The reality of the United States is that we have always been messy. The same Constitution we praise as visionary was itself a desperate second draft of a country, foisted on an unsuspecting public, crafted in a boiler room of conflicting interests and emotions, and held together by the collective charisma of George Washington and a handful of guys who simply refused to shut up. We are a country that spent decades trying to preserve slavery as a means of preserving peace, and only pried it, reluctantly, from our body politic after the inevitable war made it impossible to ignore. We have made sacrifices of thousands of people, of states, of nations to satiate the appetite for empire. We have created systems of apartheid and oppression, and we have sanctified the atrocities those systems have spawned. And yet, we are also on the other side of every one of our failures, demanding equity and equality, invoking our better angels, demanding the radical imagination of a nation made more perfect.
What we did once, we will have to do again. We will have to reject the authority of kings; we will have to assert the equality of humanity; we will have to bog down every act of suppression with a ruthless resistance to submission. We will have to make space for each other—for our anger, our fears, our anxieties, our hopes—with all the energy and effort that we have given to the systems that failed us. And the more we reject the regime that disengagement and disinterest foisted upon us, the more we will rediscover what actual popular sovereignty looks like. Donald Trump or no, the people of the United States will continue to rule ourselves.
The system would not stop Donald Trump. Ballots didn’t either. But we will be enough. We will not acquiesce. And when we meet our next turn at the crossroads of time, we will know that we did everything we could.