On building something better than what we’ve been given.
I was a young writer relatively early in my career when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Based out of California with most of the team in New York, I was also the only writer still online at the magazine where I worked when the election was called. In a fugue state, I wrote the story I’d been assigned: a neutral news piece laying out the facts. Then, I drank a Miller High Life and went to bed, knowing there wasn’t much else I could do until morning.
Two election cycles later, and again, I was the only one still online at my job when they announced the results of the race. But this time, my mother was sitting next to me. It was her fourth presidential election cycle as an American citizen, and watching the television screen, we both held our breath—not just in anticipation of the results, but for everything before and beyond them, and the chaos we knew would follow, regardless of who won.
When it was finally called, we both exhaled. Despite whatever other feelings we might have had as individuals, neither of us, I think, was surprised: Between us, there was a mutual understanding that anything is possible in America—for better but, more often, for worse.
~
It is impossible to convince someone who has bought into their own delusions that what they see in front of them is, in fact, a delusion. This fact is non-partisan, and applies as much to the Democratic Party as it does to the millions of Trump supporters who voted in favor of a candidate whose policies would cause them harm. If you are surprised by Trump’s victory this year, then you, too, have bought into a delusion—an idea of security either afforded to you by privilege or passivity or both. This is different from being disappointed, or scared, or even angry about it, although sometimes they can all feel the same.
“A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his new book, The Message, which grapples with the narratives we tell ourselves in order to maintain our sense of moral righteousness when confronted with an immoral reality. Coates cites the Trump years as proof of this: The illusion of America has been crumbling for years, but accepting this requires facing your complicity in the facade—something not everyone chooses to do, particularly those that benefit from it.
Our democracy has long been broken. The 2024 election just tore down the last vestiges of the veneer for those still unable to see it. Now, the US must reckon with what remains. We cannot call ourselves a democracy when we live in a country where nearly 38 million people live below the poverty line, where basic healthcare isn’t a human right, and where ordinary citizens have no say in what wars we participate in and who we send weapons to. Nor can we call ourselves a democracy when the salary for a sitting member of Congress is more than twice the average total household income, and when the judges that sit on the nation’s highest court are appointed for lifelong tenures, able to change the fate of an entire generation, and entirely dependent on the political party in power when a justice either steps down or dies. Perhaps most obviously, we also cannot call ourselves a democracy when we elect a president based on an electoral college rather than a popular vote—and the outcome of any election, including this one, should not change our stance that this is fundamentally undemocratic; as is the frequent redlining, gerrymandering, redistricting, and voter suppression that happens openly and without shame.
This is not the track record of a country with a functioning moral compass, although it begs the question if a country can even have one. Morality is a thing for people, not for nation-states. Change in this country, in perhaps all countries, has almost always been reactionary. So, too, will change be on the other side of this, whatever shape “this” takes; something I would have said even prior to the election, because no amount of voting has ever been enough to save us from ourselves, to guarantee the safety of the millions affected by our government’s actions, or to definitively “fix” things for good.
A “functioning” democracy is dependent on the buy-in of its people, but I’d argue also on an electorate’s collective desire to do what’s best for the majority of its populace. This baseline isn’t automatic, but built through its foundations, which are fortified by the choices we make each day in showing up for one another, far beyond the ballot box. When we treat voting as our only tool against oppression, we’ve already lost. When we only engage, and demand, and pay attention every two or four years, we’ve already lost. This doesn’t mean that voting isn’t important, just that we cannot solely rely on something that was originally designed to exclude the vast majority of us to enact meaningful change for that same majority.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde said, something I see quoted time and time again. But people rarely seem to include the rest of the sentiment, and its context: “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” The reality, should we choose to see it, is our toolbox is often much larger than we believe it to be, our sources of support much wider. It is, I believe, our moral obligation to utilize both.
To do so, however, requires us not to do the work of our oppressors for them. “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression,” Lorde said in the same speech. “But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
If a diverse people’s history of the country is our guide, when has the United States ever been a beacon of morality? When has what is ethically sound ever been achieved in this country without an uprising or without violence, or at least some degree of incivility? The modern Republican Party has always understood—and, arguably, romanticized—this in a way the Democratic Party has not, because the latter fundamentally believes the system works when it has continuously proven it doesn’t. (At least, never for all of us, or even for most.)
The real work, then, is in building the world we want to live in through organizing and action and care, not by solely relying on systems of bureaucracy and government that depend on our dysfunction and discord to keep us reliant on their mercurial benevolence in order to continue funding themselves. The work is in taking care of each other when the systems that purport to have our best interests at heart continuously fail to protect them. The work is in not only dreaming that something better is possible, but realizing it, every day, in our actions and in our communities, both close to us and far away. We achieve this by investing in our communities, not just financially, but through the creation of long-term, sustainable support systems and networks of care; by establishing community processes that encourage collaborative, collective decision-making and problem-solving; by sharing responsibility for our communities’ well-being and safety; and by making resources accessible to anyone who needs them, whether healthcare, food, or otherwise.
In spite of everything, we have done this. We are doing this. Even before the election, I saw the fruits of these efforts in my community every day: people rallying to find breastmilk for a baby who needed it, someone looking for help doing their dishes while struggling with their mental health, another person looking for housing leads after their current living situation proved unsafe. All three found the support they needed, not from the government, but from their neighbors.
So if you are seeking comfort right now, this is the one thing that has given some to me: We still have each other.
~
The day after the election, I text back and forth with a friend. He is disappointed, hungover, knee-deep in political analysis, doomscrolling.
“I left one country 15 years ago because I tried to be a part of something, and ultimately it led to me having to flee, and then everything got a lot worse than I even anticipated at that time,” he says. “Now I see the same thing happening here, but this time I don’t actually believe that anything will get better.”
What do you say to someone who’s already lived through worse? I tell him that I’m sorry and I love him and he deserves more.
~
In the lead-up to this year’s election, I am often very angry. Around me, a lot of people are, too. While some of this anger seems to circle around the election specifically, much of it does not—and it might be more accurate to say it is actually the election which is orbiting around the anger, and not the other way around. This is mostly because there’s been so much to be angry about: the way the United States continues to fund a genocide; the catastrophic reality of climate change; the endless threats to abortion and bodily autonomy; the rampant racism, transphobia, and xenophobia; how quickly the world has backslid into fascism, embracing right wing extremism in elections around the globe. All of it feels impossible to ignore, an endless cacophony of horrors; but still, some people manage, and this makes me angry, too.
None of this goes away after the election is over.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about anger since Trump was first elected in 2016; about its manifestations, its purpose. This curiosity began, in part, because of my own relationship to it: Historically, I’ve never been good at holding on to interpersonal anger, yet I’ve always felt it, deep and terrifying, in response to the world’s seemingly endless capacity for injustice, violence, and other forms of harm. I see it everywhere, notice the various shapes it takes. I learn that rage can be a guiding force when we really listen to it, or a parasite that hollows us out when we don’t. I ask my friends what pisses them off, discuss what our anger tells us about ourselves, and try to better understand what my anger might tell me about me.
What enrages us often reveals something that terrifies us, anger and fear just two sides of the same coin. People often vote (or don’t vote) because they’re angry about something. But fear, too, drives people to the polls: fear for how their lives might change if it goes one way or the other, fear for their livelihoods, their family, their friends, their safety, themselves, the world; and, inversely, fear of other people—although history suggests this isn’t anything new. “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Life of the Mind, her final unfinished work. But somehow, this has always felt scarier to me, more dangerous, more unpredictable than the alternative. When morality is an afterthought, evil is gradual, more insidious, a slow burn that starts small, until eventually we’re so deep into it, it feels impossible to close the gap between where we are and where we were and where we want to be.
How, then, do we push back? The most optimistic answer I can come up with is by making the “good” so obvious a choice that there are actual consequences to being “evil,” rather than a deepening of the status quo. Rather than moving the threshold for what we accept, for how we categorize and define “good” and “evil,” we make up our minds not to waver from what we know is right—critically, not just in our elections, but in how we move through the world every day. It is stoking the fire of our anger, and our terror, and actually using it for good.
Back in 2020, I read On Anger, a Boston Review forum led by philosopher Agnes Callard. The book was released just before COVID shut everything down, a few months before that year’s election. “Maybe anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world,” editors Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen write in the book’s introduction. Some of the writers agree; others less so. There is debate on whether it is possible to be both justifiably angry and morally sound; whether anger is “useful” from an evolutionary standpoint; whether anger is, in fact, what makes us human. All seem to agree that it’s a powerful emotion; Callard, perhaps, most of all.
“When people commit injustice against us, we feel it: our blood boils,” she writes in the book’s seminal essay. “At that point, we have to decide how much we want to fight to quell our anger, how much effort we are going to put into repressing and suppressing that upswell of rage.”
“The answer,” she concludes, “is rarely none.”
~
The night of the election, a friend calls me, afraid and alone in her grief, her husband already asleep. “I feel guilty for calling,” she says. I tell her not to, that I’m glad she did. The next day, another friend calls. He asks why I sound so calm. “Aren’t you worried about NATO?” he asks. “I’m worried about NATO.”
“Well,” I say. “Everything is shit.”
“Everything is shit,” he repeats.
Another friend and I text back and forth on Election Day. “I’m so deeply jaded by this country at this point,” she says. “I feel like politicians aren’t as scared of us as they should be.” My response is immediate. “Well, to be fair, I don’t think we’ve given them enough reason to be.”
~
Much like America itself, the American Dream has always been one of deluded and individualistic self-exceptionalism, selling itself as a meritocracy when in reality, it is a lottery stacked in favor of a very small minority, the buy-in rarely worth the pay-out.
While American exceptionalism is unlikely to be the death of us all, it’s already been the death of too many of us, the vast majority not even American, but people whose greatest sin was being born somewhere the US had a financial and/or political interest in, a Venn diagram that I’m pretty sure is just a circle. But to believe this type of unfettered power through violence could be limitless and without consequence is foolish: Global imperialism is a cancer, and like all cancers, it ultimately feeds on the host. “Nobody is exceptional, we are all just people worthy of life and dignity,” writer Fariha Róisín posted in a message on Instagram. “US Americans made domination a world order and what they didn’t realize was that fascistic glean would rear its ugly head and turn inward.” It should come as no surprise that fascism is now in full bloom on American soil: Its keepers have been watering it for years.
There is little we can do but try to plant something better that might outgrow it, by not abandoning our humanity when it may feel “easier” to give it up. I often revisit Muriel Rekeyser’s poem, “Elegy in Joy,” as a reminder it is always possible to grow something new: “Not all things are blest, but the / seeds of all things are blest. / The blessing is in the seed.” Each choice we make is a seed, each choice a new beginning. Not all will bear fruit, but that doesn’t mean the planting is fruitless.
I know we—the collective we—will survive this, in part because there isn’t much of a choice. What devastates me and enrages me is how many will suffer unnecessarily in the process, how many already have; and the people who won’t survive this at all, who already haven’t. “Where there is power, there is resistance,” writes Foucault. And it’s true: As long as people give a shit, there will be resistance. As long as there are people who haven’t given into their own complacency, there will be resistance. And for all my own disillusionment, I’m not so far gone that I can’t see it’s there: Right now, there is despair, but despair is just a reminder there’s still something human left in you yearning for better, that there’s still some sliver of hope, kicking and screaming and furious and terrified, buried underneath the muck.
“Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country,” Ursula K. Le Guin said during her commencement address at Mills College in 1983. “Why [do] we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there…Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
It is also in this darkness where we must grow a backbone, because the longest stretch of the fight is always still to come.
~
Late Thursday afternoon, two days after the election, my mom’s phone dings. Looking at it, she groans.
“Forget it, Nancy Pelosi,” she says. “Jesus. It’s over!”
~
In the early afternoon, long before any of the polls closed on Tuesday, I began donating. Not to any political campaign (despite the onslaught of texts, I never understood what possible use my $20 would do in changing an election on Election Day), but to Palestine, to Sudan, to mutual aid. I signed up to make lunches for my unhoused neighbors. I spoke with friends. I chose to respond to a situation that felt dependent on the cooperation of millions, many not interested in mutual liberation, with small choices that felt, comparatively, within my control—a practice I try to keep in my everyday life. These actions may have been insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but they felt more significant than any vote I’ve ever cast, more fortifying. Closer to a version of the world I want to live in, but don’t.
At the 2001 Connecticut Forum, Toni Morrison was asked, “How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?” She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part,” she said. “But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about, you know, being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”
For the last few years, so much has felt impossible. So much has felt enraging, and heartbreaking, and terrifying, and worse. But I’ve seen enough jokes about the relentlessness of living in “unprecedented times,” and counter-jokes from historians that the times are not, in fact, unprecedented at all, to know that what feels impossible is less impossible than we might believe.
“The worst thing about being human is our ability to adapt,” a friend tells me. But maybe it’s one of the best things, too. Even if we are no longer whole, we are changed—and it’s precisely because of this change that we can begin to build a new whole from our parts.
