07 Nov 2024 4 min read

They're good at winning. They're absolutely terrible at governing.

Inspiration for fighting back, including a list of groups that deserve our support

First of all, thank you, and I’m sorry.

Thank you to everyone who tried to help stop what is coming next. If anyone out there looked to me for guidance, inspiration, or a knowing chuckle, please accept my deepest apologies. I wish I’d done more and better with more actual chuckles. I offered false hope that felt real and did so with full knowledge that it might be false as a strategy. But I failed. And we all deserve the truth.

I’ll start with what we do next. We carry on and do everything we can to lift ourselves and those doing the work that must be done. As Elad Nehorai’s therapist told him, “…there will be a future. No matter what.”

Americans, from the groups that will suffer most under Trump, have suffered worse, with worse odds. And they have overcome, at least temporarily! We can, too.

Here is an excellent list of human rights champions we can follow and support that is cribbed from Kate Elliott on Bluesky, where the future we want will be built:

Electorally, groups that are building essential movements against fascism include:

If people want more ideas, I’ll add to this. And I will post about indie journalists who we should back soon.

Ok, now, if you can handle it, here’s my post-mortem.

Kamala Harris, the Democratic Senate, the Michigan House, and far too many others have joined “the graveyard of incumbents” worldwide.

There are two obvious explanations:

1. People want fascism.
2. Despite having the best recovery on the globe, Americans are reacting to the shock of COVID and inflation by rejecting the people who pulled back the unprecedented expansions in the safety net that got us to this recovery.

I need to advise people not to over-interpret a result that saw Republicans surging in Massachusetts as a vote for fascism.

Very few people want that, and those really who do always do. It makes much more sense to say people are pissed at incumbents and want to show it. (We ESPECIALLY need to drown out the noise of anyone who suggests there’s any reason to abandon anyone MAGA conveniently scapegoats because that’s what fascism wants—to divide us over absolute bullshit.)

So I side with 2. I don’t know if we could have ever overcome that.

However, I had three epiphanies that may offer some keys to understanding of how we fight back.

The bias against women is built into American culture, and we can only ever hope to overcome it once we free women from being our social safety net.
My mind has been irreparably “pilled,” for lack of a more current word, by the work of Jessica Calaraco. Her book HOLDING IT TOGETHER explains how you cannot separate misogyny from America’s broken approach to caring for those in need. And if you want to understand how Trump won, listening to Jessica will clarify a lot.
The media prefers fascism.
Marcy Wheeler sensed early in this race that the media was failing or succeeding, depending on your POV, by refusing to clarify what Trump and his candidacy meant. Blame consolidation, the billionaires, and the collapse of local media. It’s all the same thing. We can only do our best to replace journalism in the short term. That’s why we made Ball of Thread. Not because we thought it could replace a broken media but just because we had to do something. I believe Marcy has offered a history of 2016-2020 that DOES NOT EXIST anywhere else, and it provides the most straightforward explanation of what’s coming next as Trump obsessively seeks revenge. I promise you that’s what’s next.
Propaganda works. Strategic racism works. And we’ve tried everything we can to defeat it, except directly confronting it.
Ian Haney López should be the most famous academic in America. His work explains the rise of the right and the appeal of fascism better than anyone. And my conversation with him in October clarified how as good as the Harris/Walz campaign was—and it was so good in so many ways—they were not confronting Trump’s most effective weapon. And I point that out not because I want to look back or re-lose this election forever but because he has dire warnings about how the rise of AI will only make the situation worse.

So what do we do? I can only answer this for myself. And I have no idea yet other than I will do my best and keep my family well.

As The Clash told us, “If I go, there will be trouble/And if I stay, it will be double.”

Where can we go?

We have a rubric for surviving this: 2017-2021. We should compare how things are going now to that rubric. Are voices being silenced? Are people disappearing? Can we have elections where Republicans can lose?

We must continually adjust ourselves based on reality. I love Kim Kelly’s advice about expanding our bubble. I vow to challenge my intense social anxiety in new ways. Maybe you can, too.

We know one big thing. Republicans know how to lie. They know how to win. They don’t want to govern. They hate it. They don’t believe in it. It always falls apart, from Nixon to Trump. We’re usually given the chance to clean up their mess. And that’s, unfortunately, what we have to fight for next.

The Constitution still exists. I will not obey in advance to what we know they want: rule by intimidation and acclamation. You don’t have to reward Trump by pretending the fascism he wants already exists.

Instead, think about what makes you happy and inspired AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.

I’m thinking about Wisconsin.

“One bright spot for Dems: they picked up at least 10 seats in Wisconsin assembly and four in state Senate under fair redistricting maps,” Ari Berman posted. “That puts them in good position to flip both legislative chambers in 2026. And pivotal Wisconsin State Supreme Court election in April 2025 to hold progressive majority that struck down gerrymandered maps.”

We must put Susan Crawford on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.

There will be a future. And that’s it.

And if you want to support me in my effort to help rebuild democracy from the ground up, please subscribe here. Free or paid--your support means a lot.