The Right Kind of Hope

Hello! My kids have flown the coop; Covid finally got me, but I seem to be okay; and for those of us who celebrate the New Year in the fall, it’s a time to turn.

If you receive this by email, directly from me, the day I send it out, you probably supported my run for City Council last year. If so, 1) Thank you once again!, and 2) You just might be the kind of person who, while observing the grim direction of our national politics, believes that, if we keep our minds wide open and work together, we may yet make things better. On that theory, I’m turning toward writing more often, about democracy and other things, and today about our prospects for positive political change, and the wrong and right kinds of hope about it.

I’m starting there because it’s tough times for team equality-freedom-decency in American politics, and in everything I’m scrolling through, only two possible responses ever seem to bubble up: despair and denial.

Despair, though thriving, doesn’t make a spectacle of itself, so we hear of it mostly from those warning against it. We all know the brief, and we all agree with it. To win, we must keep fighting. To keep fighting, we must maintain our morale. To maintain our morale, we must choose hope.

So yes, hope, but choosing hope doesn’t mean lying to ourselves. It doesn’t mean telling ourselves that what we’re doing is working when it isn’t, and that we just need to do it better or faster, when better and faster has already been our failing plan for a long time.

That’s choosing denial, and it doesn’t lead to victory. It leads to despair.

Choosing hope demands that we look down the path we’re on to see where it leads, and if it leads to defeat, then to find hope instead in our ability to find a better path. The better path may not be a shortcut, may not be easier, may take us straight into the howling wind. But it will take us forward.

So, four truths pointing to a better path, only the first one today (I’m serializing):

ONE: We Are Losing

Nobody knows what will happen in the midterms. We might hold the Senate, even pick up a seat or two, or we might lose it. We’ll probably lose control of the House, but we might not. Some statehouses and governors’ races are close. All of it’s important, and we don’t know what will happen.

But wherever we land next week, the broader picture is clear.

In the Senate there’s no reasonably likely midterm result that would give the Democrats their fair share of seats. Currently, based on votes in senatorial elections the Democrats should hold a 53-47 majority, not a 50-50 tie with the Democratic VP as tie-breaker. As we’ve seen these past two years, every seat matters. If the Democrats had held 53 after 2020, Manchin and Sinema would have been unable to weaken or block vital legislation. Following the midterms, Democrats will almost certainly hold fewer seats than they should, and it’s likely that either we’ll remain in a situation something like the current one, with a red-state Democratic senator deciding what passes, or else Democrats will lose control of the chamber despite having won more votes over the relevant six-year period—as was the case after 2014, 2016, and 2018.

The House will probably fall. If it doesn’t, it will likely hold by the slightest margin, giving a few conservative, red-district Democrats near Manchin-like power.

Whatever happens to Congress, the anti-democratically composed Supreme Court will continue eliminating rights and striking down laws favored by most Americans.

After the midterms, the particular Republicans in positions of power, in both Congress and the states, will be even more right wing, more anti-democracy, more Big Lie, than those currently in office. In 2024, when we vote for president, they will be the well-placed accomplices Trump mostly couldn’t find to help him subvert his loss in 2020.

On the other hand, a Republican presidential candidate who loses the popular vote in 2024 may not even need the help of the 2020 election deniers. The Electoral College may cancel the will of the people all by itself, as it did in 2000 and 2016. In that case we may simply watch in the same state of helpless rage as we did then. And then, as they dismantle what little was accomplished during the Biden years—as swiftly as Trump reversed the meager progress of Obama’s two terms—and as they then pull us further backwards and push us further to the right, we may once again take to the streets of our deep blue cities, crying out to no one but ourselves.

This is not a momentary setback but long-term losing. The pendulum swings, and it swings back again, and at the end of each round trip the situation is worse than it was the time before. Trump is worse than George W. Bush is worse than Reagan/H.W. The right more effectively blocks Biden’s agenda than it did Obama’s than it did Clinton’s. On the Supreme Court it’s been O’Connor→Alito; Kennedy→Kavanaugh; Ginsburg→Barrett. The court protected abortion rights in 1973, chipped away at them for decades, and unprotected them in 2022. Our victories have often been minor or short-lived, and others are under threat. Losing is the trend.

“Why are you being so pessimistic right before the midterms? Do you want people to give up and stop making phone calls and sending text messages?? Maybe even not vote???”

We need to get out the midterm vote, but we also need to see the midterms in this broader context, whatever the results.

What I’m saying is the opposite of pessimistic. We have the power to make our system democratic, so that we can build a better future. It will be hard work but we can do it, and I’d like to say how. Despair and denial are not our only options.

In that spirit, coming to you soon:

TWO: We Are Losing Because of Structural Bias in Our Election System

THREE: To Build a Better Future We Need to Remove the Bias

FOUR: There’s a Way to Remove the Bias

Thanks for reading. Keep up the good work. Get out the vote. Peace, love, solidarity.

Best,

David