All of the Above

In the wake of yesterday’s elections, the prospects around the electoral strength of the Democratic Party appear, at least for this moment in time, bleak. I caution you to beware of any simplistic accounting for what took place in Virginia and even New Jersey, as well as in many examples of local races in other parts of the country. That there was a broad uniformity to the bad news for Democrats is certainly a message. But of what exactly? 

Was this a natural swing in electoral fortunes against a sitting president, especially one with low approval numbers?

Was it an example of the potency of racist rhetoric around such topics as education? 

Should senators Manchin and Sinema bear blame for holding up a popular agenda in Congress and denying Biden a win?

Are many Americans just frustrated and tired as we continue to stagger through the pandemic?

Was this a turnout election, where it wasn’t so much that the Democrats didn’t turn out a lot of voters, but the Republicans just turned out more?

Are we seeing more evidence of the perniciousness of the lies and divisions promulgated by social media? 

Have Democrats lost even more working class white voters?

Is the media culpable for covering extremism in the Republican Party as politics as usual?

Does this mark a further erosion of our democracy?

Is America still cleaved and weakened by its racist history?

Are there more voters in play than many might have believed?

Will the next election cycle look different just as governors’ races in both blue and red states in the recent past have not predicted well what often comes next? 

Do many people in this country not pay close attention to the inner workings of our political system and make decisions at the ballot box that seem inscrutable to those who are much more informed?

As I write out this list, and know I could add many entries, my answer is simply, in some form, All of the above. 

Some of these questions above should give those who support the Democratic Party reason for hope. Elections often swing one way and they can, and often do, swing back. Sometimes those swings can be quite sudden. There is certainly a narrative where the Democrats finally pass the big bills languishing on Capitol Hill, Covid gets better, life starts to seem more stable and normal, and things look very different in a year. 

But other questions are much more worrisome. They speak to the structural inequities of our system, the potency of race as a means for whipping up angry voters threatened by a more diverse nation, the role of the media, the lies that ricochet across our political discourse. For anyone who hoped that a permanent backlash to Donald Trump would doom the Republican Party, those hopes seem faint or nonexistent at the moment

I recognize for many it will be hard to think of being “steady” with what has transpired. These are indeed worrisome times for the health of our democracy. But I think back to my own youth, when my father would caution me with “Steady, Dan. Steady.” The world was at war, fascism reigned on multiple continents, and I lay stricken in bed with rheumatic fever. Steady is about recognizing that life provides defeats as well as victories, challenges as well as successes. There is a lot that remains good about our nation and its people. There are millions who will have woken this morning and are already hard at work to help make this world better. I suspect that includes many of you. Nonetheless, I will not diminish what we face. There should be recriminations and post mortems. I will continue to come back to these ideas in future newsletters. 

I have seen the road to progress in my lifetime take many detours. Sometimes new chasms emerge that seem uncrossable. But the reason why progress often gets back on track is because people refuse to give up. They regroup, rethink, reorganize, but do not retreat. They maybe were weary and needed a break, but they ultimately keep pushing forward. I have no way of predicting where we will go. I do know, however, that fatalism has never been a winning strategy. And I firmly believe, with my life’s experience as my guide, that what we sometimes see in the moment looks very different in retrospect. But to change that fate requires energy and perseverance. Recovery is not inevitable but it is not impossible - not by a long shot. 

Normally in the midweek on Steady we have a topic for discussion. Here, I would like to just open the forum to your thoughts on what has happened. What are you thinking? What are you reading? What are you hearing? What might you be planning to do?