The Continued Audacity of Hope

Like many of you, I'm feeling a mix of emotions right now: a strange cocktail of shock but also of familiarity, of energy but also resignation, the kneejerk desire to blame every racist-homophobic-gun-loving redneck who voted for him but also the desire for the Left to take a hard look at itself.

Harris did not lose the election for any one strategic decision, or policy, or position. She was placed in a near-impossible situation, and she and her team did just about the damned best job they could have. Given the hand she was dealt, maybe we were foolish to hope for any other outcome. But maybe not. Trump sweeping all seven swing states was the most likely outcome in Nate Silver’s model at 20%, but a Harris sweep was the next most likely at 17%.

I’m tempted, then, to just dismiss my disappointment as what poker players call being results oriented–just because you lost the hand doesn’t mean you should have done something differently, and if we ran the election 100 times, Harris would have swept the swing states 17 of those times to Trump’s 20. But in this election, things just fell his way. As the wonks have said, the election was still very close, even though it might not feel like it right now. If things had swung 2 points left instead of 2 points right, we would be celebrating the final repudiation and defeat of Trumpism at the hands of the new Harris coalition.

But despite the overall narrow margins, I want to linger on my disappointment a bit because the apparent demographic shifts in Trump’s coalition should give us pause, they must give us pause. As everyone is saying, we’ll know more in the coming months, but it’s clear that Trump made huge inroads with urban, with young, and with Latino voters. In fact his margins increased with every single demographic except white people. He gave the Republican party its first popular-vote-win in 20 years. And he did all of this despite the insurrection, being a convicted felon, and all the rest.

The question I want to ask is this: what does any of that say about us? What does it say that Trump was apparently more appealing than we were? Answers could range from something like: “nothing because the right wing media lies and deliberately manufactures a caricature from which it stokes rage”, to “the Democrats haven’t actually delivered any relief to the middle class in ages and instead its spent the entire time slogging through a tar pit of woke.” It’s probably somewhere in the middle.

Over the last 20 years, and especially in response to Trump’s first election, the Left has focused more on the reasons why someone should not count as a member of the Well-Meaning Class than on actually being the Big Tent party we claim to be. By being so eager to call out the latest transgression against our Orthodoxy, we’ve trained our candidates to try to not alienate or offend anybody. We’ve stifled our ability to make the trade offs that are necessary when forming any politically viable coalition. We’ve made it harder for candidates to articulate their positions and their values without sounding like a ChatGPT rendition of a focus group finding. And voters can tell. We come off as insincere, our sentences as sound bites, and our sole value as smugness.

And look, I know that at heart of the Left’s coalition is the lofty dream of what this country could be: a place that nurtures all people, a country where we are accepted just as we are, and where, like Harris said in her concession speech, we use our strength to lift each other up. In her silence that followed you could hear the implied “not beat each other down.” But my question is: How have we allowed ourselves to be portrayed in any other way? Why are we so easy to demonize and caricature?

I don’t know what the answer is exactly, but it’s something we should be asking ourselves. Like Jon Lovett said on Pod Save America recently, “We have to be a movement people want to join.” How do we recapture that?

One of the most enduring lessons from my foray into Buddhist meditation practices is that anger is fleeting. For it to persist, you must feed it continuously. As soon as you step back and just watch the anger, it fades away. Anger is not our default mode of being…peace is. Anger is strong, it’s easy to stoke, and studies have shown us that it’s more motivating than its more positive counterparts. But it’s also forever slipping away and burning off. The success of the right wing media is built on the shaky substance of anger, and now that it’s coupled with the psychological onslaught from ad-driven social media companies, maybe something like Trump was almost inevitable. And maybe there’s no simple way to stop feeding that anger, to cut off its supply of oxygen and let our lost better angels finally surface, but even though it’s not simple or easy or obvious, I still think there’s reason enough to hope for it.

It’s a hope that’s admittedly hard to hold on to. The message from the Right has become unmoored from reality, and ironically this is precisely why it’s so hard to fight. How do you change someone’s mind when pointing at what’s right in front of their face won’t convince them anymore? How many damn times do we have to say “That’s not how fucking tariffs work?” Obviously it didn't matter. Breaking through to the insulated, inflamed world of FoxNews, Rogen, Musk, and the rest, seems too daunting a task. Where is there room for hope here?

My answer is that it’s small, but damn I find it to be persistent. It’s in my Florida Man neighbor who is so Trumpy he won’t even watch FoxNews anymore, but he’ll keep an eye out for the gaggle of kids running around the cul-de-sac, lend me a tool, or come and shoot the shit with a beer at the picnic table. It’s in Tangle, a newsletter by Isaac Saul which has managed to appeal to readers from the left and the right, maybe even saving a few marriages along the way. I found some in “We Live Here Now”, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin from The Atlantic about what happened when the mother of Ashli Babbitt– the woman killed by Capitol Police on January 6th–moved into their DC neighborhood. It’s in Aaron Sorkin’s writing in his shows “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom”. It’s in the fact that, whenever we take the time and have the courage to see past each other’s labels, past the yard signs and bumper stickers and social media profiles, we find just another person, a person who, like us, is a product both of large social forces out of anyone’s control and a messy tangle of life and family and love and loss. In other words, a person who is understandable.

Others have said it, but I’m more and more convinced that elections really are vibes all the way down, and that’s a fight I think we can win. No one really likes to feel angry. We don’t watch movies in order to feel angry: we watch them to laugh, or to make us think or learn something, to get a thrill or be surprised, to feel uplifted and hopeful. But anger is exhausting, it’s fucking exhausting. Part of the surprise I feel at the election is that I thought more people were just tired of being so angry. But we can be the alternative to that anger, we can be the reason people go to the movies.

But first we have to stop kicking people out of the tent who don’t pass a purity test, stop eating our own, stop treating voters like idiots, stop interpreting every single interaction as oppressor vs oppressed, stop being so damned fragile. We have to realize that coalitions require tradeoffs. This doesn’t mean we have to compromise our values, but it does mean that we have to be willing to work with people who don’t espouse all of them. We need to go on the podcasts, build progressive media, have the difficult conversations, and be able to joke about ourselves along the way. Joy was a good start, but it has to be more than the joy of suddenly not running a completely doomed candidate. It has to be the joy of what Richard Rorty called “achieving our country.” It has to be patriotic, and it has to be authentic, because people can tell when it’s neither. We have to become a movement people want to join.