I have been away two months processing loads of painful political and history stuff. Happy Jan. 6 to all who celebrate. In today’s This Again:
Toward a coping strategy for the next two to four years (or more).
Toward a post-Trump vision (reply if you want to participate).
But first, some introspection (sorry—hopefully it’s literary).
Under blankets of snow and security today, the vice president certified her opponent’s victory. Absent was any warfare or lawfare; Jan. 6 should rightfully be a day of service and repair. For many people, the usual tasks, routines, and rituals are back, and I expect continuity Friday when the president-elect is scheduled for criminal sentencing in New York. (But 50-50 he defeats that too.) It’s very normal now.
I did not expect Democrats to win 90 percent of battleground Senate races but lose every swing state in the presidential race. I did not expect Kamala Harris to underperform Joe Biden’s 2020 results; there are probably tens of thousands of voters who can explain that. I expected the election results to come at a crawl’s pace as they did in 2020.
After the election, I watched the sunset into the Pacific Ocean. There was one seal (or was it a sea lion?) bobbing along the horizon. I drove to my favorite burger shack, which opened two years after the Second World War. I ate alone and stared through a side window. Stop and go, bright car lights passed by on a boulevard named for the last Mexican governor of California. Maybe all this is pablum; I gave myself the day to feel and process the grief and disappointment, like 2016 again but much worse, of the national direction.
For six months last year, I wrote history in the foreground of current events. With polls and predictions gridlocked in October, I articulated antecedents for both major party candidates. The Rarest of Comebacks and The Road to Madam President culminated with my Letter to my child on Election Day. I did not intend to write any of those. But when I published them I was clear I wanted words to matter, actions to have consequences, and to start a new story.
My coping strategy is my start toward a post-Trump worldview.
A coping strategy’s very rough draft
To remind myself and keep me true to my values:
Winning would-be Democratic voters back from the Republican column matters to me. Comforting contemporary Anne Franks and their families, be they nannies, gardeners, women, children, farm and food industry workers, gender nonconformists, and federal government employees, matters to me.
This country needs an ambient wall of sound to maximize progressive ideas and messages. Right wing media has no rival or opposition in this country; there is corporate, independent, and nonprofit media and each institution has its own reactionary impulses.
Institutionally, victory in 2026 will blunt more harm, theft, and corruption in the years after. The campaign will start earlier than usual because of our semiquincentennial—the country turns 250 next July 4. I would like to see an American truth and reconciliation event that sincerely and satirically stalks the president’s military rally and spectacle.
Long term, if time and money were infinite, I would facilitate an American birthright program for free travel for young people. Inspired by What the Constitution Means to Me, I would organize a movement for a Third Founding to update the terms of service and privacy policies of our 18th Century founding parchment.
Whatever flaws here (and FYI this post was written and edited at 5 a.m. over the last couple mornings) these intersecting problems can create and sustain a movement to cope and contain populist, polarized, and post-truth forces that give autocrats political power and staying power.
With dire consequences in sight, I desire a new deal for hope and change—a next chapter that moves the country toward its sacred honor and magnanimity.
I thought your piece was very daring and pointed in a good and fair way. I think it was intellectually patriotic. And well-written as usual.