How to Save Democracy This Week
Week of 3/28/2022
On Sunday night, I finally worked myself up to phone banking for the first time in the midterm elections season. As always, it was much better than I expected. Only one person yelled at me for calling on the Lord’s day. I had a few really good conversations with older women about their concerns around gerrymandering and housing costs. At the end of the session I signed up for two more shifts. It was an exceptional reminder that doing something always feels better than not doing something, and that the experience of doing politics is often much better than talking about it.
And let’s be honest, talking about it hasn’t felt great lately. Brian Beutler’s Big Tent newsletter this week validated some of the frustrations I’ve been feeling with Democratic politics (highly recommend reading it if you have time), but there’s an even broader cognitive dissonance that’s been hard to get a grip on. On the one hand you have a very real economic concern around inflation and taxes that is feeding into the rather standard conversation about how Democrats are likely to lose control of Congress in the midterms. The president’s party always fares badly in the first midterms after a presidential election. Economic conditions are not looking good. Politics as normal suggests that voters are going to swing back towards Republicans.
I can’t say for sure whether or not that’s going to happen. Everything’s a pattern until it isn’t. But right now Republicans are making it illegal to get healthcare for trans kids. They are outlawing abortion. They are turning citizens into vigilantes and schools into surveillance mechanisms. They are banning books with unbecoming glee. In the nomination hearings for future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican questions were vehicles for vile, racist attacks and absurd diatribes on gender and race. At the same time we found out that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife was involved with several attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
It’s not that economy and our experience of it isn’t important. It’s not that we should ignore the traditional forces of politics even as we try to change them. It’s that a piece of the ice shelf the size of Manhattan slipped into the sea. And while the planet melts, Republicans are determined to get power by any means necessary and use it to trample democracy, uphold white supremacy, and suppress and control anyone who wants to live and thrive outside of their rigid binaries. Only when we can all excavate this from beneath the trappings and pageantry of “normal” politics can we actually deal with the crises we’re facing. Here’s some ways to do that.
If you want to join a community of volunteers and you’re open to one more weekly email about politics in your inbox, I highly recommend signing up for Vote Save America’s Midterm Madness. I volunteered with their Adopt-a-State program in 2020 and they are exceptionally kind, organized, and make it as easy and as fun as possible to get involved. Plus the whole ethos of Crooked Media is to get past all the pageantry to have a real conversation about politics, so it fits with the theme.
You can also donate to the Swing Left’s Protect the House Majority fund so we can keep Democrats in power where we can pressure them to continue investigating the insurrection and impose actual penalties on those who organized it.
Check out this piece I did a few weeks ago about abortion and gender affirming care.