Here's where we are

and where we have to go

Here's where we are, as I see it (for the we composed of those who loosely share the values that I adhere to). We’ve suffered an enormous loss. And it seems to be a decisive loss.

It can’t be blamed on the electoral college - it appears that Donald Trump will gain a majority of the popular vote. It can’t be blamed, obviously, on turnout. Nor, do I think, can it be blamed on the candidate or tactics. There many things that I disagree with Kamala Harris about - her politics are much more moderate than mine. But she ran a fine race. I don’t see any other plausible candidate who would likely have won in her place.

That all has some obvious implications. For sure, the Democrats labour under some structural disadvantages. There are many things that are unfair, which we can blame for having made this much harder. But saying that this or that thing was unfair only gets you so far, if you don’t have any obvious way to remedy the unfairness. And for many, perhaps most of these problems, we are not going to have immediate fixes. Indeed, over the next few years, the system is going to become more rigged against the kinds of politics that we want, not less.

And there is no getting around the fact that Democrats didn’t have a big enough coalition to win the election. Again - Donald Trump, a convicted felon who tried to overturn the last election, has apparently won a popular majority. If we want to beat him and his politics, we will need a bigger coalition than the one we have right now.

Perhaps Trump will create his own political disaster. He will be a terrible president. But that cannot be relied on. There is a great deal of ruin in a country, and a great deal of capacity to make disaster look like someone else’s fault, as we should know well from recent experience.

So we need to experiment. We need to talk to people who we don’t usually talk to, not in the from-high-to-low ‘tell us what you need so that we can get your votes and you can go away again’ mode, but to build solidarity. We don’t just need to learn from the other side, but to coopt some of their coalition so it becomes ours, so that, indeed, it becomes us. That is never comfortable. But its necessity is a fact of democratic politics. Without the capacity to build a majority coalition - for the sake of democracy, an enduring coalition - we cannot win.

What sense I have of how we might do this, I owe to two women, Margaret Levi and Hahrie Han. Both are scholars whom I have collaborated with. Both are friends. And both have a similar understanding of what democracy involves, when it works.

Margaret writes about “communities of fate” - building groups and organizations where people have a deep commitment to each other that they can build on and extend to demonstrate compassion to others. Hahrie talks about publics and social movements, examining how they can survive and thrive even under adverse circumstances. And in her most recent book, Undivided, she writes about the messiness and partial, vexing successes of a megachurch’s efforts to confront racial division and the transformations that some of its members underwent.

There is a lot to learn from the book - and indeed from megachurches like the one that Hahrie studied. The Democratic party is a weak party, composed of factions who don’t particularly trust each other. It could stand to learn from megachurches, which are perhaps the most successful example in the United States today of organizations that can build community at scale. And as Hahrie says, the notion of grace is not just a powerful concept for religion, but for organizing community. We are all sinners, all equally undeserving, and embracing that truth creates a kind of solidarity.

It is in that spirit that we need to start to talk and build new communities. And it is going to be really hard. But it is only through experimentation, through reaching out, and allowing ourselves to be changed while trying to change the minds of others, that we have any chance of getting anywhere. There is something deeply, fundamentally wrong with American democracy, and with the ways that the American public conceives of itself. Building a new coalition, and building new foundations for our collective sense of democratic self have to be done together if they are not to fail separately.