Tomorrow Is Here
Sometime today, if all goes according to custom, Pennsylvania will join Michigan in formally certifying the vote and the obvious will become the undeniable — Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be the next President and Vice President of the United States. For their administration to succeed, indeed for America to succeed, we have to do more than “turn the page” on the Donald Trump years. We need to confront our social and political realities, without flinching, and shape our own better tomorrow.
More Americans participated in this presidential election than ever before in our history. Though the COVID-19 pandemic presented unusual challenges, our voting systems on the whole performed well. According to the accounts of officials and party observers present, the vote was fairly counted and recorded — delivering to Joe Biden the highest vote count ever. But our democracy is damaged, and not just by Donald Trump’s evidence-free complaints of voter fraud and characteristically childish refusal to concede.
We have a democracy to repair. We have a pandemic to defeat, and an economy to revive.
Apart from Trump’s noise, it is still true that our voting system is uneven and ill-equipped with modern tools like voting online, by mail or by early voting. It is still harder to register and to stay registered than it ought to be. Congressional district lines are still often drawn so that candidates and parties pick the voters they want rather than the other way around. Voter suppression by legislation and party operatives is open and notorious, and central to the modern Republican playbook. And our politics are awash in money, too much of it dark.
So we have work to do. We have a democracy to repair. We have a pandemic to defeat, and an economy to revive. We have an immigration system to modernize, a health care system to reform, and a planet to save. We have to address the lasting damage that recession does to families, communities and small businesses, and that racism does to generations of citizens. Many good ideas surfaced during the Democratic primaries. There is more to learn by listening to people in urban neighborhoods and rural communities, to workers and management in small and large companies, to people who have solutions not just grievances.
But none of it matters unless we learn to reject false choices.
I am a proud and loyal Democrat. I know you don’t have to hate Republicans to be a good Democrat. You don’t have to hate business to believe in and work for social justice. You don’t have to hate police to believe Black lives matter. Choices like these are false, yet they are the steady diet of modern politics. And they are holding us back.
In reality for most people most issues are interconnected. For example, we need an expanding economy because everyone needs work and an opportunity to provide and to flourish, but we need those opportunities accessible to everyone and the conditions of work to be fair. Similarly, most people understand that we can transition to a carbon free future without turning off the lights because it’s already happening. In these examples and others, we can have and, more importantly, must have both. Treating them as alternatives is a false choice.
The truth is that unless we defeat the virus the economy will suffer.
Trump’s management of the pandemic foundered on the false choice of either shutting down the economy or defeating the virus. He positioned Democrats as advocates of “national shutdowns” or “mask mandates,” arguing that the cure would be worse than the disease. The truth is that unless we defeat the virus the economy will suffer. People will not risk serious illness or death to shop for shoes or have dinner out, but they can do all that and more safely if we take seriously the precautions that public health experts have advised. Defeating the virus by denial was never going to work for Trump. Disassociating the virus from people’s economic needs won’t work for Democrats. We can have and must have both health safety and a functioning society.
Democrats must be careful not to fall for a false choice posed today within the party itself. Though we succeeded in winning the White House, we were less successful down ballot, which led to party infighting over whether being “progressive” or “moderate” is a better way to win elections. Here again, we need both. As long as all sorts of Americans in every corner of the country are dealing with economic fragility, social isolation and despair, we need bold, progressive ideas that help people help themselves. But those ideas must work, must put us on the best path for lasting, meaningful change. Progressive objectives are often achieved by moderate means.
Healthcare is a perfect example. Democrats want every American to have affordable, accessible, quality healthcare. Republicans don’t. That contrast could not be clearer or more important. How we deliver on our commitment is less important than that we deliver the desired outcome.
In Massachusetts, we delivered health coverage to over 98 percent of our residents. No other state has yet achieved that goal, and we did not use a single payer system to get there. Medicare-For-All may well be the best means to achieve universal national coverage in the end. But if Biden’s public option achieves the same outcome within the ACA, isn’t that success?
Instead of being defensive about our objectives, Democrats ought to challenge Republicans to come up with better means.
Progressives are no less bold if we deliver universal care by a blend of public and private strategies. And if we do moderates are no less exposed to standard Republican cries of “socialism.” Remember Republicans want to take health care away from Americans, even in the midst of a public health emergency, and have no alternative of their own. Apparently, any health care solution that involves the government is too radical for them. So let’s stop trying to adjust our agenda to theirs.
When Democrats and pundits claim we lost political ground because of Black Lives Matter protesters, think about what that means. By all objective accounts, we need better, more responsible, less repressive, more engaged, less militarized and more comprehensive public safety. Democrats would be both morally wrong and politically foolish to deny those objectives. That does not mean we have to take the activists’ “defund the police” slogan literally. We can achieve progressive objectives through more moderate means without abandoning our convictions.
That is, after all, what Republicans want. Republican charges of “socialism” or “tax and spend” or you name it are predictable. To an irritating degree, they cause us to start negotiating with ourselves. Republicans should care about universal health care, affordable housing, modern infrastructure and quality education, just as Democrats care about economic competitiveness, job creation, budget deficits and military readiness. Instead of being defensive about our objectives, Democrats ought to challenge Republicans to come up with better means.
The most maddening false choice we face is the one between the impact of a media campaign versus grassroots organizing. It’s maddening to me, personally, because the emphasis on media advertising seems most often to win out. Both have value. But I am convinced that Democrats and our agenda suffer from the lack of a permanent grassroots infrastructure. Because we have not everywhere invested the time and money to develop local relationships, neighbor to neighbor, community by community, we are easily tagged as elites, out of touch with local needs. And because Republicans have invested the time, what people know about Democrats in many places in America is what Republicans have been telling them.
We have much to celebrate, but still so much work to do.
To see what Democratic success can be, look at what Stacey Abrams has built in Georgia. Over many years of showing up, listening, and engaging in community organizing, Abrams and her coalition of grassroots organizations registered 800,000 voters in Georgia. She was pushing neither a progressive nor a moderate agenda. She has been about solving the problems people are facing and she has been focused on helping those who often do not vote, a community that tends to skew younger, less affluent and more racially diverse than the electorate at large.
Because Abrams’ coalition emphasizes problem solving over party, because they are a permanent part of the communities they serve instead of an operation assembled for the next election and dismantled right after the vote, Georgia “turned blue” for Biden in 2020. Imagine taking a portion of the obscene amounts of money spent on television ads this cycle and investing instead in organizing at the grassroots to meet local needs. And imagine doing so in every community in every corner of America. Not only would it be a foil for the massive Republican propaganda machine, with it’s sometimes inventive but mostly recycled attack lines, it would position Democrats for electoral success and Americans for fundamental change well beyond Georgia.
We have much to celebrate, but still so much work to do. I hope the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will go big and bold, unyielding in their goals and willing to compromise on how best to achieve them, progressive and moderate at once. I hope we won’t listen to those who want to push voices and views out of our party and our politics because they are new, brash or jarring, especially at a time when we need to model the kind of politics that says we don’t have to agree on everything before we work together on anything. And I hope we will keep our eye on what America needs most, which is not more partisans but more progress.
