What Next?
It’s always too soon to go home.
-Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
This piece is as much for myself as for anyone reading it, because the day after Election Day has been a hard day.
The election, in multiple ways, was not what I hoped it would be. Enough has been said about Donald Trump, and I don’t feel like adding more. But in South Carolina, we also saw a further expansion of power by the GOP, a party which has been in control of every branch of government for most of my lifetime.
A few weeks ago, I was driving out into Lexington County and saw a sign that read, “Fed up? Vote Republican”. And with all due respect to my Republican neighbors, I had to laugh at how inappropriate that messaging was— how much more Republican power could possibly be in effect? The GOP in South Carolina— as in the country at large, come January— controls all three branches of government, and both houses of the legislature. It has shaped the courts. It has drawn the electoral maps that keep it in power (and, in doing so, has disenfranchised thousands of voters, especially Black voters).
The result has been the defunding of public schools, the expansion of school vouchers, the loss of abortion access, the banning of gender-affirming care for minors and sever restrictions in the rights of LGBTQ+ students, the banning of books, the bungling of several expensive energy projects, and a massive increase in partisanship in races that should be nonpartisan, like State Superintendent of Education and School Board. When state courts have tried to check the power of the other branches— as they did with both school funding, in the Abbeville case, and with abortion access— the legislature has simply ignored the courts and chosen new justices.
Moms for Liberty-backed candidates won more elections than they should have.
But you probably know all or most of this.
I’ve seen a lot of pronouncements (many of them probably written before Election Day, and some of those probably accompanied by a completely different pronouncement in the case of a Harris victory, and/or the unlikely event of a Blue Wave) that we “know” what Trump (or other politicians) will do next.
I think if that were true, many of us would be less frightened.
But as Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark, “Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”
Later in the book, she writes, “Hope is the story of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the risk involved in not knowing what comes next, which is more demanding than despair and, in a way, more frightening.”
The past decade has made me very cynical about politics— the abstract kind of politics that treats elections like a game and human beings as demographic components on a map— but much more hopeful and optimistic about people. I believe we have been duped into believing that voting, in itself and by itself, is our only contribution to democracy, that to know our place is to elect our betters and then to sit on our hands and watch what they do.
I’ve heard this explicitly stated. I once listed to SC Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (a man who faced no opposition in the election he just won for the seat he and his colleagues openly gerrymandered for partisan gain) say “I’m not a lowercase ‘D’ democrat”. He went on to say that anyone who disagreed with him on policy should “win some freakin’ elections”.
This deeply cynical view of democracy, which holds that once we elect our betters we should shut up and go home, which holds that even elected officials who have made the mistake of not belonging to the majority party have essentially no place in making demands on behalf of the people who elected them, strikes me as corrupt and self-defeating at its core. And it strikes me as deeply fearful— perhaps rightly so— of the power of the people when they engage in collective action.
In 1849, Henry David Thoreau wrote,
This American government,—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves; and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
I don’t know if all of that is true. I personally believe we need government to be more than a wooden gun, because unfortunately some strong people, if left to their own devices, will hurt and exploit and dehumanize their neighbors.
At best, I think government could one day be the imperfect will of the people, mostly protecting the weak from the strong and malicious.
And I haven’t observed “a single living man” to be able to stand up for long to the tremendous weight and relentless power of capital and entrenched power. (To be fair, Thoreau was writing in a very different time.)
But the idea of government as a “wooden gun” has always stuck with me. “Government” is, objectively, an idea, given only the flesh and blood of the people who make it up and prop it up. It only has power if we believe it does, and it can only improve our lives if we work to direct it, like a huge, unwieldy piece of equipment, to that task. It is no more a thing unto itself than a school of fish without the fish.
To really believe in democracy is to believe in a potential which has never really arrived, and which may never fully arrive. To be clear-eyed about democracy is to know it means that leaders do not have the power (or, often, the inclination) to save you, and that other people will not save you either, if you aren’t willing to work with your neighbors so that you can save one another. That going to the polls and voting is merely a first step in making change. That focusing too much on national elections for people you will never meet, who will never know your name, and who will not even read your emails, can obscure the potential you have— if you are able— to leave your house and join with other people and make actual change.
Years ago, in the wake of a growing, overdue new focus on America’s police violence, I was a still-fairly-young white guy, a teacher who hadn’t really figure out how to teach, with students who were mostly not white. I had a vague idea that I wanted to do something after the killing of another young Black man by the police. I went to the State House to attend a demonstration by the South Carolina NAACP.
I realize now I was there more for myself than for anyone else. I realize now I had gained just enough wisdom to know that something had always been wrong, but it just hadn’t been standing close enough to me for me for me to worry about it.
Most of the people there were much older than me. Most of them were Black South Carolinians. Some had likely seen a level of systemic injustice I couldn’t imagine clearly. I felt out of place, but I stood with a circle with them, and people held my hands on either side, and their hands were warm in the cold night air, and I awkwardly joined them as they sang “We Shall Overcome”.
The good part about dark days is that they can sometimes force us out of our comfort zones to see one another with new eyes. They can sometimes inspire us to reach out for connection where we previously felt privileged enough to avoid connection, to do the comfortable thing. And in other people we can find comfort and community and solidarity.
If you’re reading this, I hope you feel that I am in community and solidarity with you, regardless of how you voted, however you’re feeling right now, and whatever you are struggling with. Even if we don’t meet in person, I feel as I write this that you are with me, and I’m with you. I believe that’s more valuable than knowing what will happen next— especially because we never know what will happen next.
So anyway, more concretely, I have nothing new to add, but I’ll echo what organizers and people who truly seek justice have always said: now is the time to comfort the downhearted, to defend the weak, and to organize together to push for what we believe in for ourselves.
No individual politician, leader, clergyperson, or prophet will simply hand us justice or peace; we will have to work together to find out where we agree and to build and maintain those things. Forever. Until we die, and pass that task on to whoever comes after us. That’s life.
I know that’s rough, but at the same time, I have found most of the joy in my life in community with other people. And yet if I didn’t need other people, if life wasn’t hard, I would never have reason or occasion to feel that joy.
So while I am feeling deeply the pain that this election cycle and its outcome have caused for my friends, my neighbors, my family, and myself, I also hope we can joyfully get to work together.
Powerful words on this difficult post-election day. Thank you!