Nov 4

It’s all good news today. It’s great news, in fact.

Resist anyone who tries to reductively encompass the electoral results in the United States, to see them as just being about a couple of narrow mistakes: a war here, a tariff there. That bullshit is already being shovelled by the usual suspects. This was a strong national majority saying that they’re sick of it all: sick of the dysfunction, sick of the cruelty, sick of waking up in the morning and finding out the American government is threatening to attack Canada and seize Greenland, sick of watching masked paramilitary goons drag men and women out of their cars, sick of twenty-three year olds going by the moniker “Big Balls” being allowed to glide through secure computer systems of the US Treasury and the IRS, sick of thousands of dedicated people being fired for no reason at all, sick of the corruption, sick of spending more time building expensive monuments to one man’s ego than governing the country, sick of the sycophancy. Sick of oligarchs doing as they please, sick of a gravel-voiced maniac plugging beef tallow and ivermectin as a substitute for science and medicine. Sick of seeing a President kiss Putin’s ass and sick of watching white-collar criminals buy their way to pardons.

It may be, as Trump said, that the people at his rallies will applaud anything he says. That’s his cult. But everybody else has had it, whether they experimented once with voting for him or not.

I won’t belabor the point that many commentators have made in the last week, that I’ve often made in this newsletter. The Democrats need to understand that the voters who went their way are furious over the last two years, but also over the entirety of the last decade, with everything from 2016 until November 3, 2026, including the Biden interregnum. People in the Biden Administration misunderstood their brief: they were handed a stake and a mallet and asked to finish the monster off. Instead they dithered and delayed, they fed the monster a fresh supply of blood, and the horror movie continued.

We want to go to sleep for once untroubled by nighmarish thoughts of being roused from our beds by secret police who have moved on from immigrants to dissidents, of the decimation of civil society, of the looting of the government, of dictators rewarded and bombs dropped, of midnight cruelties spilled out over social media that turn into moral catastrophes by the time the sun rises.

The Democrats can’t yet do the truly important work of transforming public health, rebuilding education, and checking the power of an unaccountable oligarchy. They can’t remake the Supreme Court or restore faith in the justice system. But they can begin the work of holding failures and criminals responsible for what they’ve done to us all. They can turn over every rock and show the world the squirming nightmares festering underneath. They can absolutely block any appointees by this administration who do not meet minimal standards of competency and probity. They can reclaim the power of the legislature.

What I want to talk about is the work that the new Congress can’t do that has to run parallel to the work the Democrats must now tackle. Governors, state legislatures, municipal leaders, local governments can help in this undertaking but it’s work that largely falls to us, the citizens who have risen up and spoken through our ballots in a way no one can mistake, divert or ignore.

The Democrats have to finish off the monsters in the executive branch and their political enablers. We have to chase down their Renfields.

For the last two years, a wide swath of civil institutions needlessly bent the knee almost immediately to a corrupt, discriminatory and anti-democratic regime. University presidents and administrations scrubbed their websites, abandoned commitments, paid millions of dollars in ideological bribes, fired people, expelled transgender students from teams, stopped using words and the ideas behind those words. At the start of this woeful era, I optimistically predicted that once “compliance” was taken away, many administrative leaders in academia would rediscover the importance of valued. Unfortunately in some cases, they just chased “compliance” into the fever-swamps of an incipient fascism. They obeyed executive orders that had no legal force rather than digging in hard for a legal fight, when in other circumstances and times, those same leaderships would litigate endlessly to avoid conceding even the most modest liabilities. They did no thinking about their vulnerabilities, real or possible.

In the past two years, elite law firms and their leadership caved right away so that a senior partner or two could keep chasing whatever dreams of oligarchic belonging they’d fancied back in 2022 or so.

For the past two years, the editors and senior reporters of the most storied and important American newspapers relentlessly sanewashed Trump, regularly reframed stories in his favor, dismissed and derogated challengers to the Trump regime. They gave a platform to people who rightfully would have been anathema a decade ago and refused to ask them even the slightest tough question.

For the past two years, more than a few actors and screenwriters and publicists and producers all hastily scrubbed their social media feeds and began to laboriously reinvent themselves as loyally MAGA-adjacent, and David Ellison began to steadily unleash his resentful surrogates on 60 Minutes and beyond.

Old-line corporations began to purge anything that looked like social responsibility. Big Tech got high on its own fascist supply while it waited for its own catspaw-in-waiting, J.D. Vance, to ascend to the throne.

This is our job now. To hold the cowards accountable, to make them understand how badly they betrayed us, betrayed democracy, betrayed liberty, by giving in so easily to bullying. There are a lot of lost jobs, a lot of compromised futures, a lot of unfunded projects, a lot of important work, that these weak leaders and managers are partially responsible for, the consequence of a lot of lines they didn’t draw. That’s what this election should show them: it was only two years that they needed to dig in before this country’s people forcibly demanded change.

We need that generation of leaders and managers to step aside, to step back. They didn’t fulfill the promises that their institutions so frequently made for so many years. They ran in cowardly disarray at the first shots fired.

The new Congress has its assignment. So do the rest of us. We need to be ready in 2028 to move decisively into a future where dreams are possible and nightmares a fading memory.