For the next how many years, now?

In which I lose however few readers I may have garnered. tl;dr here.

“The next four years.”

That’s what I keep seeing written over and over: “how will we survive the next four years?” As if we’ve made some sort of one-time little whoopsie that we just have to endure for one term of a presidency, and then we can get back to our lives.

As if our lapse of judgement on Election Day were the start of our troubles.

And as if it’s been preordained that our salvation comes in 2020. If you haven’t seriously considered the possibility that Donald Trump could very well be in office for eight years, I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the gravity of the situation.

Don’t think it could happen? Perhaps you’ve forgotten how unthinkable Trump’s first victory seemed. Do you think people will come to their senses upon seeing Trump in action? Consider the notion that our hole is dug deeper than you think, and that it could get worse.

Where we stand

Perhaps you read about Sean Spicer’s first press conference on Saturday in which he berated the media for supposedly lying about inauguration attendance. But you need to watch it to fully grasp the world we now live in:

the fireworks start at 2:53 and continue through the end, but the whole thing staggers belief. (Source: CNN)

We live in dystopian fiction. The primary spokesperson of our government is scolding the press for accurate reporting like one would lecture a room full of misbehaving schoolchildren. He’s dictating to the press what they should and should not be reporting on—and even that directive holds dubious truths.

But liberals keep viewing acts like this, or of course Trump’s various tweets and misdeeds in his time as President-elect, as disqualifying events. Acts which portray an irrefutable portrait of a man unfit to be President, one nobody could escape.

Something became apparent to me during the debates. I watched them with the anxiousness of a far-left liberal desperately hoping we hadn’t made a colossal error in judgement by selecting Hillary as our candidate. No, this still isn’t about Bernie. I have to this day deep faith that Hillary would have been an extraordinary tactician in office, and that she would have done remarkable things to protect the vulnerable here at home. I’m with her. But I also recognized that a large majority of our nation had ineffable and possibly incurable problems with her. And so as I watched the debates my evaluations came from a standpoint of what an undecided voter might think.

And I think she performed adequately, but not particularly brilliantly. Some of her answers wandered off topic, getting lost in asides and failing to land their rhetorical point. Others hit the points on the head but simply weren’t delivered in a very convincing manner—when she tried to crack jokes or nail a catchphrase she came off as particularly insincere: it wasn’t a good look for her. She often forgot to talk about her own ideas and policies after denigrating her opponent’s. Occasionally she’d knock it out of the park.

But then I’d log onto Facebook, or Twitter, and I’d see from friends hardly anything but rip-roaring praise. Post after post, tweet after tweet, my fellow liberals lapped it all up, because she said close enough to the right things for the gaps to be implicitly filled in the like-minded, and because it’s fun to watch your team deliver the jabs you wish you yourself could, on national television.

And I realized that for a sizable portion—possibly a majority—of Hillary’s supporters, she could do no wrong. Everything she said or did got filtered through some sort of distortion field wherein anything that was in the vein of social justice or stuck it to the other side was axiomatically good and whole and just.

And what of that other side?

People talk about fake news and fact-checking as if injecting reality back into the conversation is going to fix things. A lot of folk are—rightly—holding the press’s feet to the fire when it comes to the forthrightness with which Trump’s invented realities are refuted. But it’s important to remember that selective reality has been a huge part of the average Republican’s life for a very, very long time now. Pocket radical communities have existed on the Internet and elsewhere on both sides for some time now, but it was Fox News that bore the flag, legitimizing an entire army of fringe agitators through three simple words: the liberal media. As one of the big three cable news networks, Fox had a platform unlike any other to spread doubt, uncertainty, and eventually outright mistrust of any news or opinion that didn’t sound like their own.

A lot of hay is made about Facebook and the echo chamber effect of its filtering algorithms. But while this was liberals’ first taste of the conflict-free life, conservatives who had been watching Fox, listening to Limbaugh, and reading the Drudge Report, Breitbart, or worse for years were completely primed to dive straight into the phenomenon: nobody to disagree with you and yet a never-ending firehose of shit to get upset about. And being far more advanced down this road means that for the right, the cancer has evolved into something else entirely.

You can see it even just in the reaction to something as silly as the inauguration attendance numbers. The rationalizations begin immediately. And not only do they attempt to explain away any dissonant infractions upon the alt-right worldview, they often go further and serve to reinforce it. Washington is too expensive, so of course the liberal elite had money to attend Obama’s inauguration and the Real Americans do not. Angry violent liberal protestors prevented true-blooded patriots from attending. Patriots that had real work to do.

You see, we’ve left the realm of political discourse already.

What we’re dealing with is a new religion.

These people have developed an unshakable faith in their foundational view of America. It’s strengthened every day by the media they consume and the people they talk to. Inconsistencies within the narrative and conflicts with science and reality are rationalized away, because what’s more important than the exact content of the gospel is the purity of the faith itself. And if this is a radical new religion that has swept a third of the country, then Donald Trump is its newest, biggest megapastor. His every tweet preaches to the choir—even the vain ones. What he gets angry about, his followers get angry about. You see an impetuous tantrum, while across the aisle they see a vital threat to America. Liberals at large do not apparently perceive the same reality as an impartial observer, let far alone that of a Trump supporter. Trump knows this.

And we thought a march would change whose minds exactly?

Why we walked

I’m very proud of everyone who marched on Saturday. I’m proud we did it. I’m proud I joined. But I was also bothered by it: a nagging feeling grew in me as the miles ticked by and come the end of the day I was in a deeply sober mood.

It probably began with the lady on the sidewalk with the megaphone. She seemed awesome. But her message didn’t work for me: “are we going to let them walk all over us? Are we going to let them take away our rights? Are we going to let them repeal our healthcare?” This was a definite crowd-pleaser—big cheers and shouted “no”s filled the air. But all of it flies directly in the face of the fact that we live in a representative democracy, and that having chosen our representatives there is now not a damned thing we can do about any of those questions. The ACA is getting repealed. We’ve already lost rights and will continue to lose more. And not marching and not signing online petitions and certainly not any amount of sharing things on Facebook will do a thing to stop it.

The little high everyone got didn’t help. I got it too, briefly. But as people trickled home and started posting online, that same high became fuel for concern. “We did a great thing today,” everyone was saying, “we made our voice heard.” Of course, the only people that heard that voice were the people who already agreed with us—everyone else either didn’t care or, as illustrated above, rationalized it all away. But the broader statement points to something bigger.

We’re all taught in grade school about Martin Luther King, and his great deeds. And if your Civil Rights education looked anything like mine, it went something like “Rosa Parks and student sitouts and Birmingham and the March on Washington and then Civil Rights!”

For starters, this is a horribly whitewashy way to portray acceptable protest. To ignore the contributions of thousands of leaders of all philosophies and approaches creating action in all directions is to filter history in hopes of shaping the future. And now that the line of acceptability has encroached upon acts as simple and harmless as sitting for the national anthem, one can only conclude that it’s worked.

But there’s another problem here: for being the cornerstone—and perhaps, in many cases, the only—example of citizen participation and democracy in action of our primary education curricula, this version of events is remarkably sparse in any illumination upon the wheels of our democracy. By drawing a straight line from marches and “I have a dream” to the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, we paint a deceptively simple picture of how democracy in America works. That straight line ignores the fact that a confluence of events worked together to make that legislation a reality: the organizations and protests, yes—but also the political power derived from the creation of strong voting alliances, and the fact that the then-heavily-changing Democratic party was at a crossroads, unable to hold onto the Dixiecrats of the “solid south” while simultaneously reconciling the rest of their party platform, and thus needing a new demographic base upon which to rely, as well as the fact that Lyndon Johnson was interested in and sufficiently dedicated to the cause to make the legislation a key issue of his administration.

The people spoke, yes, but the system was also primed from the top down.

And so I hear people talking about what a great thing we accomplished and I worry that they’re thinking about that simplistic, filtered picture of democracy we’ve been fed. “We made our voices heard,” but who exactly is listening? Because the people in power couldn’t give less of a shit if we went and marched on the streets in the tens of millions every week. Because the people that support them are willing and ready to discard whatever intended message our demonstrations are meant to convey. It’s still the echo chamber, just held on our streets instead of our screens.

And it took me a long while to pin down that nagging feeling—it was too strong to be fresh. I eventually found it: I’ve indeed seen just this before.

In a recently past life, I worked for a company called Socrata, whose views and opinions my words of course are not meant to represent. The mission is to improve civic discourse and governance through data and technology, and our centerpiece work was around open data. Hospital metrics, traffic data, restaurant inspections—hell, every tree in a city—our goal was to not just get the data out but to make it as useful to as many people as possible, and to get the damned data into actual use by citizens and administrations alike. Part of this strategy was the hackathon.

For nearly all of our customers, open data was an entirely new concept and it was hard to know where to begin. Thus, they would turn to us for advice. What data should we publish? How should we do it? Where do we promote it? The typical answer to the final question, because it was relatively easy and popular, was to hold a public hackathon and invite interested citizens to come poke at the data and build things.

Over the 7 years I worked at Socrata, I attended a lot of hackathons, in every corner of the country. I’ve spent days in government building basements, school cafeterias, libraries, even planetaria. But I can count on one hand the ones that were really worth anything. It always goes the same way: eager-eyed participants trickle in early some Saturday morning looking to build something to benefit their community, they get together in groups and start cobbling something together, run out of time by the afternoon deadline, rush together a hack job and a presentation, and someone wins a prize. Everyone is fresh off their high of Doing Good for the day, handshakes and hugs and contact information are exchanged, along with promises to each other that they’ll stay in touch, keep working on those projects, and really do something great together.

Those projects never get touched again. Ever.

And what are those projects? I always cheer for the dead simple ones because they stand the greatest chance of making a directed point and actually making it into the wild. But with rare exception I’ve seen the same projects over and over again. 311 filing and tracking systems (there are entire companies and nonprofits working on this). Apps to get people to engage in local events (where will your information come from?). Service locator apps (ditto entire companies). More service locator apps. Yet more locator apps.

(If you go to a civic hackathon, please: don’t build a fucking locator app.)

The parallels here are, in my eyes, self-evident. Hackathons and protests are both enormously powerful tools in the right context, with the right intentions, and done sustainably. What doesn’t work is civic engagement tourism. What doesn’t work is participating in something larger than oneself, feeling the little high, and concluding that surely some good was done. What doesn’t work is diving into an area, be it technology for society or civic activism, without an understanding of the vast body of knowledge and experience that already exist in those areas, and having the hubris to think that in one weekend one can contribute appreciably to those efforts.

And of course: I saw all of the messages post-march to stay engaged, to let this be just the beginning, that it’ll take a lot more. That’s a good rhetorical start. But again, our current problems didn’t start three months or even a year ago. And here’s where I lose the handful of readers and friends I may have:

Where the hell have you all been all these years?

Look, I’m really glad you all care so much all of a sudden. Welcome. And I’m sure you’ve cared all these years. And that latent subscription to certain ideals has now blossomed into an environment where politics and social issues are inescapable, where they fill the air at every turn. Has granted some sort of implicit license for everyone to start shouting at each other about the right way to perform activism or be a progressive. Or who has it worse. My Facebook feed has, these past three months, been like it never has since its inception—it’s all infographics and quote-memes and people yelling at people and I’ve haven’t ever seen anything quite like it.

But where was all this passion for the past decade and a half, from whence the slow erosion of our civil protections that got us to this precipice was slowly engineered? For those who just checked in recently, allow me a bit of a refresher.

Where we really stand

The wheels of American democracy were deliberately engineered to change direction very slowly. There is a lot of momentum built into the system, and it takes a period of sustained effort to make an appreciable change.

And while we’d made a lot of progress in the Obama years on individual rights and protections, our democracy as an institution has continued to turn slowly in the wrong direction. This is not to mention the Bush years.

On one count we were lucky—the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allowed the government to, amongst many things, suspend habeus corpus for any detainee it classified an “enemy combatant,” was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and amended of its worst inclinations in 2009. Under the very generous definition of “enemy combatant” the Bush administration adopted, anybody resembling a terrorist could be detained without cause for any length of time, citizen or not. Given prevailing beliefs about Muslims in this day and age, one can feel palpably the bullet we dodged here.

Of course, the Supreme Court is also responsible for some huge losses. Citizens United v FEC from 2010 is one of the biggest—reshaping the picture of campaign finance dramatically and paving the way for an absolutely unbelievable amount of money to be poured by corporate interests and wealthy individuals into our elections and our lobbying. In the year 2016 alone $1.12 trillion was spent by Super PACs, out of $1.8 trillion raised. Conservative interests outspent liberal ones by a ratio of 1.5:1. And because of how Citizens United spun haphazardly out from a Supreme Court decision to actionable campaign finance policy via Speechnow.org v FEC (Speechnow being a conservative grassroots front group), no legislation was ever passed to properly regulate or expose any of it: it’s all entirely dark money. Think about that—16.5% of our 2016 GDP went into manipulating our political system and we haven’t the slightest clue where any of it went—or, frighteningly, where it came from. The equivalent of one out of every six of our dollars flew into a political hole—equal to or more than the amount we spend on healthcare every year.

Shelby County v Holder from 2013 is of course another huge loss we’ve endured. By striking key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, those very same rights that our activist forebears fought so hard to achieve have been significantly eroded. Without the 4(b) coverage formula that defines the limits of discrimination (and which had been updated at intervals since its inception), entire sections of the Act no longer function, allowing for implicitly discriminatory election practices to be put in place by partisan officials. Polling places were drastically reduced in count and no longer distributed evenly. At least one county closed 70% of their voting locations. And together with Voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and newly minted reductions on early voting, these restrictions serve to disenfranchise key and broad segments of the Democratic Party base. These are systemic changes that cannot be refuted unless those in power look to do so.

In some cases it’s not new legislation or interpretations thereof but rather the perversion of existing institutions that have set us back. In minority opposition to Obama, Republicans used every instrument within their grasp to prevent a successful administration, in the process establishing a new normal. This involved everything from widespread abuse of Senate cloture rules to holding the entire American economy hostage. Being the minority party no longer meant starting on your back foot in negotiations across the aisle—it now meant outright obstruction of the basic functioning of our country. But Democrats were too busy playing nice to deal with the problem: even when Senate Democrats, led by Harry Reid, sought to address the issue in 2013, filibuster reform still didn’t go so far as eliminating the silent filibuster, effectively maintaining the status quo without calling publicly to account those who prevent our government from functioning. It’s telling that a Republican Party so opposed to the Dems that they were willing to gamble with our country’s debt standing were happy enough with the filibuster “reform” agreements of 2013 that they voted overwhelmingly for them. And now that the tables have turned and the Democrats are now once again the minority, do we see them playing anything approaching the same kind of hardball?

And the Republicans? What will their resistance amount to? Very little, so far. Why would there be any? Trump’s policy platform doesn’t look so dissimilar from what the general Republican platform has slowly evolved into with the influence of the Tea Party, so why, broadly, would they put up a fight? Why would they resist the continuation of the discriminatory policies that have given them an edge in the political fight? Count on nothing.

And then the most recent election does little to improve the outlook. Ideologically we are more polarized than ever, with over 40% of each party regarding the policies of the other as posing threats to the nation’s wellbeing. But even worse is the geographic consolidation: there’s a reason Hillary lost the election in the electoral college despite winning the popular vote by a margin of nearly 3 million. And with the policies that are bound to materialize in the next two, four, eight, more years, and with the primary opposition to those policies coming from local government, how do you imagine that geographic self-segregation shall progress? If the persecuted rightly flee to sanctuary cities and states, we lose more and more of our opposition support in swing and red states. And the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere: again, who now in power has any vested interest in lifting a finger about it?

The increasing amplification of the echo chamber, the digging in of both sides, and the increasing vehemence with which views are held and espoused will only deepen the divide and serve the interests of the right.

So you see: the deck has been stacked, and the system has been slowly rigged. The institutions, the gears of our democracy turn against us. Failure to acknowledge how steep an uphill battle we face over the next two and four years are the quickest recipe to turning Trump’s four years into eight. And with eight more years to erode individual and collective voice and liberty, and to construct an alternate reality rooted in authoritarian rule (which, notably, is not the same as fascist rule), how many more advantages might the other side gain? If you’ll permit me to play the role of Chicken Little for a moment: it’s not entirely unthinkable to imagine a vicious cycle from which we never emerge.

Where we go from here

Alarmist rhetoric is easy to write. But it’s important in light of what we face to treat the situation with the gravity it deserves. And also importantly, the above problems, lessons, and cautionary tales are useful not just for establishing stakes but also for engineering lessons to move forward with.

Here are a few I would humbly suggest.

Stop underestimating Donald Trump

We all fell into this trap, yet some of us have yet to even perceive it as such. Every time we use infantilizing terms to describe him, his behaviour, and his rhetoric, we play into his hand. While we all marvel and laugh and gossip about his latest outburst and how out of touch with reality and childish it all seems, Trump will have managed to push through most of his radical nominees, signed a host of executive orders attacking women and opening old environmental wounds, built a communications wall around the executive branch, and established an authoritarian relationship with media and citizenry alike. And even those nominees aren’t entirely victors in a Trump administration. In other words, despite the tone of media coverage, Trump will have had a remarkably successful first week. I’ve never seen anything like it, and this was all written by Tuesday.

And it’s an easy trap to then ascribe all of Trump’s seemingly wild and random obsessions and asides to something akin to a big distraction while the men behind the curtain dismantle our rights and protections. This is yet another underestimate: all this blustering about alternative facts and the belittling of the press and the silencing of opposition within the executive all serve to deepen the divide, to consolidate extraordinary support. While the media excoriates Trump, breathlessly talking up how high his unfavorability ratings are, it’s important to note that his “dismal” 40% favorability rating isn’t like other 40% favorability ratings. This is the 40% of the American people who support the guy in spite of the last two months of transition, the last eighteen months of campaigning. That is the size of the faithful, the size of his unshakable base. And you can bet that when Trump directs them to, they will turn out for the polls. Hillary’s popular vote victory amounted to, by my calculation, around 33% of registered voters.

What’s more, beyond the populist maneuverings, aspects of Trump’s actual policies that make little sense on their own serve to boost his authoritarian views. In fact, the one consistency in all his policies is how they all fit together remarkably effectively into a coherent, complete picture of authoritarianism, from the law-and-order approach to law enforcement to the scapegoating of immigrants. The Wall is dumb in every aspect—from a financial standpoint; with regards to actually preventing illegal immigration; as it pertains to international relations; and so on—except in that it is a perfect physical manifestation of his authoritarian rhetoric. That’s why his supporters buy eagerly in, no matter as an abstract idea or as a concrete policy.

Even trade protectionism, the one policy independent experts and every elected official on both sides of the aisle can all agree will be enormously harmful to U.S. interests at home and abroad plugs—advertently or not—neatly into this scheme. “Trust no one but [the real] America” metastasizes from a fringe notion about immigrants and foreign policy into a blanket viewpoint that encompasses every aspect of American life, including the economy, our jobs, and our goods.

Stop reacting, start digging

Disengage yourself from the cycle of outrage. All these things that get thrown about on Facebook share one thing in common: they provide enough detail for you to get upset, for you to in turn hit that share button as well. No more, no less. Fact-checking is one thing, but actually connecting with and understanding the issues is another entirely.

As an example, let’s take the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Most people seem to have an opinion on it. And yet a vanishingly small number of the people I talk to can actually enumerate a list of concrete policy reasons why or why not to support it. “What does the TPP actually do?” is a question I’ve rarely seen answered to satisfaction. And yet, on vague grounds and talking points, many of those I know opposed it, because that was liberal orthodoxy: to oppose it.

American influence abroad—and by extension the Pax Americana—is predicated upon a complex web of strategic, military, and economic partnerships and leverages. What the TPP represented was a complicated package of tradeoffs constructed by Obama and his team to sacrifice a handful of the things we believe in in the name of preserving America’s waning stature on the world stage. Where NAFTA aimed to improve general economic markers and strategic closeness from Canada through Mexico at the arguable cost of labor and environmental standards and some number of domestic jobs, the TPP was a carefully engineered piece of geopolitical calculus leveraging an alliance of Pacific Rim countries against the growing power of China. I strongly recommend this piece, which examines in detail the origins and supporting frameworks of American and world power, and how the Trans-Pacific Partnership fit into that picture.

What’s important here isn’t that you take one side of the issue or another. What matters more is that we have these discussions from an informed perspective, one that accounts for all sides of an argument and considers policy proposals in whole rather than focusing on the parts we like or dislike. What matters is that we are in a position as an electorate to ask the question: if not the TPP, what holds China in check? Finally now some are asking the question, but it seems a bit late, doesn’t it?

But you don’t get those perspectives and those real questions unless you’re willing to entertain seriously opposing viewpoints. Stop reacting to the general shapes of arguments and listen genuinely to the principled points from all sides. If nothing else, understanding fully the argument of the opposition from a first-principles level better positions you to launch a reasoned counterargument. But remember also to listen for the valid oppositional points, even if they are really just accidentally valid. America was built to be a contest of ideas, and part of that contest is the betterment of our own ideas through the challenges of our opponents. We can’t perform that process of betterment and incorporation unless we turn off that filtered view of the world we seem to have adopted. We can’t evaluate objectively our policies or our candidates unless we stop granting them the same unquestioning support we gave Hillary in the debates.

As another check, consider the Affordable Care Act. Beyond the astonishing but too-easily focussed-upon fact that people don’t seem to know that Obamacare is the ACA (opposition to “Obamacare” is somehow ten points higher than to “the ACA”), not enough people are sufficiently knowledgeable about how the ACA actually works for an informed public debate to occur. To wit, can you answer these questions and tie them into the fabric of the ACA?

• How does the insurance industry as a business function?
• How does the Affordable Care Act tie into that business model to facilitate change?
• What are the key protection provisions of the ACA?
• Why are those provisions important for the long-term health of our citizens? And for the costs of healthcare moving forward?
• What enables those protections and provisions to be economically viable?
• What was the insurance industry’s viewpoint on the ACA? What actions did they take and what opinions did they espouse during its negotiation?
• How about the Republicans? The Democrats?
• What changes have been made to the legislation, the interpretation, and the implementation of the ACA since its initial passage?
• How do individual states fit into the ACA and how can they help or hinder its implementation?
• What are the economic and coverage effects of the ACA so far and what factors have played into those trends?

I know this shit is boring. It’s technical legislative and policy wonk nonsense that you don’t see in popular coverage for a reason. So, too, are things like Senate cloture rules boring and technical. But boring, technical shit matters. In fact, if we look back to Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act, it was in part thanks to Johnson’s intimate knowledge of absurdly obscure Congressional procedures and rules that allowed him to sneak the bill through committee and into an up-or-down vote on the floor. You have to care about these stupid boring details to get work done.

Listen to the experts

Political punditry is now an inescapable cottage industry of young upstarts on the Internet. From the Huffington Post to Vox to—for whatever reason—Buzzfeed, every Internet writer is throwing personal opinion left and right. But they, too, don’t talk about the boring shit, and they often lack the context of decades of in-depth political analysis needed to form the kinds of detailed understanding I advocate for above.

Stop yelling at each other on the Internet about the “right” way to be an activist. Stop sharing articles of Internet pundits yelling at each other. Yes, I recognize fully how hypocritical this paragraph is—and indeed more than that. Forgive me the transgression, if you may.

Stop relying on Facebook for your news. Don’t just focus on the biggest stories of the day—dig into the small stuff that’s happening on the side, because often that’s where the most insidious shit hides. Here are some resources I recommend for a deeper, more insightful take on each day’s political happenings:

• ThinkProgress is the easiest to recommend. Founded in 2005, they are unabashedly progressive but levelheaded in their analyses.
• If you have vague pinko-commie leanings like me, Daily Kos has been a more radical alternative since 2002.
• ProPublica is a reliable source of some of the most deeply and thoroughly-investigated pieces of journalism available on the web or elsewhere.
• If you’re on Twitter, I highly recommend Jay Rosen, who also writes here. A professor of journalism at NYU, Rosen is quick to recognize and contextualize the Trump administration’s media actions.
• L. Rhodes, who tweets here and writes on Medium, is a reliable source of some of the best thoughts I see each day. His articles contextualizing the Democratic Party’s fracturing coalition and tackling illiberalism are more than worth your time.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center has been at the forefront of dealing with discrimination and persecution in our country for half a century. Their tweets and news articles provide important data and history in what will be a key area of conflict in the years to come.

There is a pattern here: these are people and organizations who have thought and written about this stuff for years, in detail, day in and day out. These are professors and scholars. These are NGOs whose entire missions embody the things liberals talk incessantly about. Listen to them.

But it’s not just in news sources and arguments that I urge folks to look more towards the experts. Many of those turning words into action have plunged headlong into the abyss without first doing their research and absorbing what others have done—without listening to the wisdom of those already doing the work.

Reliably one of the best hackathons I ever attended was a joint event held in Chicago by the beautiful Adler Planetarium and a local organization called Mikva Challenge. It has angered me to see Chicago used repeatedly by the right as a talking point of urban decay and violence, because the reality is that Chicago has been through more than most communities and has as a result more of the answers than any place I’ve been in our great nation. The depth of knowledge and experience earned through decades of hard work by organizations all through Chicago west and south are humbling, and far beyond what I’ve seen elsewhere.

And that experience was brought to bear on both hackathons I attended with Mikva: they brought issues, framing, and ideas to the table, and fostered, in keeping with their mission statement, youth participation and leadership in the event. They provided key guidance and information to ensure that the resulting projects were focused and meaningful. Yes, it was still a hackathon, and the resultant projects were still bound by those limitations, but from a standpoint of impact and functional soundness these projects were a far cut above anything I’ve seen from elsewhere. The same goes for the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which workshopped its hackathon participants’ ideas for weeks and months leading up to the event, ensuring that they were targeted at concrete problems, with sound approaches for generating change in those areas.

Yet I see newly-minted activists running around trying to reinvent the wheel, building their own action lists and inventing their own coffee shop solutions to perceived problems.

Here’s a thought that’ll get me into trouble: your city has cultural and community centers for immigrant populations. They’ve existed for a long time, and are deeply in tune with the issues facing the minority communities they represent and protect. A lot of these issues pertain to local politics, something you have an outsized voice in. If every person who had marched on Saturday had devoted that day or afternoon instead to volunteering at such a place, which use of time would have generated more impact in the world?

When you move yourself to action, seek out people or groups who have dedicated their lives to the issues you care about and ask them, humbly, how you can help. Put aside your ego and your entrepreneurial spirit for a moment and make yourself a foot soldier at the command of those who know more than any of us laypeople.

Recognize that activism is fucking hard

I visited, a couple of weeks ago, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and wrote a brief piece on that experience. In short, we underestimate the ease with which something equally frightening could happen again, but while there are many complex factors, administrative and citizen resistance efforts really can count for something. So, too, does inaction.

But that resistance comes at a heavy price. The people that aided Jews, helping them hide or escape or evade capture, took a real risk. A heavy risk. A risk for which many of them (I can’t seem to find reliable numbers) paid the ultimate price, dying in death camps alongside those they endeavoured to save.

Measure yourself against that mark. If push came to shove, would you be willing to put your neck literally on the line?

Proportionally, how heavy a price are you already willing to pay? Activism and action isn’t some shit you do on the side as a hobby to make yourself feel good. If you truly want to make a difference, it should cost you—dearly—in time, money, or both. Did you donate money after the election or inauguration? Did you make that a repeating commitment? When you decided how much money to give, did that decision involve taking a hard look at your balance sheet, taking a deep gulp, and typing in a number far larger than you felt comfortable doing? My money is where my mouth is—I have no stable income currently and I’m sending close to $1,000 a month to the likes of the SPLC, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and others. How much can you possibly afford?

If you haven’t money or wish to be more hands-on, how much time are you willing to give? Are you devoting enough time to be constantly exhausted? Can you give up a hobby? Social engagements?

Yet so far I see people mostly whining. (Here’s where I add gasoline to the fire I’ll be thrown in for this post.) Oh, it’s so emotionally hard to think about this stuff. Don’t make me do the research. Don’t make me talk to people I disagree with. I already did the work of pointing out some great injustice, some infraction of liberalism, don’t make me do the work of proposing constructive alternatives.

A bit short of the mark.

And yeah, we all have our own problems, and some of us have it worse than others. Mental health is important, and some of us aren’t in a position to deal with the challenges of activism. But remember also and always that there’s someone who has it worse (exactly why arguing about who has it worse is futile), for whom activism and daily struggle isn’t a choice they get to make.

This Friday is, in fact, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I’m not going to say anything as silly as “make it a day on, not a day off,” because in the end even that just adds up to a single day. But take some time to consider the sacrifices paid by those who chose to do something in the face of the extraordinary, and how you might honor their deeds.

Stop disconnecting from each other

I’ve written about this before: this is both the easiest and the hardest item on this list. Keep your genuine connections. Importantly, with your fellow progressives: liberal cannibalism is a real and dangerous phenomenon. But equally importantly, with those that disagree with you. If it’s what it takes, stop discussing politics until the relationship feels healthy again.

Because if you pay attention to scholars you’ll learn at least a couple things:

In talking with researchers and looking at the studies on [reducing prejudices], I found that it is possible to reduce people’s racial anxiety and prejudices. And the canvassing idea was regarded as very promising. But, researchers cautioned, the process of reducing people’s racism will take time and, crucially, empathy.

This is the direct opposite of the kind of culture the internet has fostered — typically focused on calling out racists and shaming them in public. This doesn’t work. And as much as it might seem like a lost cause to understand the perspectives of people who may qualify as racist, understanding where they come from is a needed step to being able to speak to them in a way that will help reduce the racial biases they hold.

—a summary of scholarly research from German Lopez of Vox

Many pundits remarked that, during the 2016 election season, very few Americans were regularly exposed to people whose political ideology conflicted with their own. This is true. But it cannot be fixed by Facebook or news media. Exposing people to content that challenges their perspective doesn’t actually make them more empathetic to those values and perspectives. To the contrary, it polarizes them. What makes people willing to hear difference is knowing and trusting people whose worldview differs from their own. Exposure to content cannot make up for self-segregation.

—danah boyd (MSR, NYU) writing for her beyond-excellent Data & Society

Read those articles. To my point earlier, don’t be satisfied with my salacious pull-quotes. Dig. I’ll know if you did or not.

So to everyone who is unfriending and blocking their acquaintances and friends who disagree with them, who antagonize them, who actively support policy that strips them of their rights: I get it. It’s fucking hard to put up with. You shouldn’t have to do it. But it’s forming trusted connections in spite of all of this that stands any chance of healing this nation. It’s watching someone you still feel personally connected to be tangibly and directly hurt by your beliefs that could possibly crack open the wall and invite alternative thought.

And once again, I’ll refer you back to a previous section: nobody said activism is fucking easy. If you’re not willing to put up with some emotional conflict in your life, recognize that this is an area you could be contributing in and have chosen not to, and pick some way to make up for it.

Empower the resistance within the system

Our representatives in Congress are the true resistance, in a lot of ways. Again, America is a representative democracy, and we’ve made our decisions on representation. We can shout and march and sign petitions all we want, but in the end it’s our elected representatives that will make the decisions on our behalf.

Now is the time to call your representative, and remind them of that fact: that they are the resistance. That they are our last and greatest line of systemic defense against something quite extraordinary, and that they will have to be extraordinary in response. Tell them that you have their back no matter how much they’ll be ravaged by the other side and the press as long as they fight tooth and nail and use every tool, congressional procedure, and leverage available to them to fight oppression and the erosion of our democracy.

They need to be willing to fight for their ideals as hard as the Republicans spent the last decade fighting for theirs, and they will have to be as nasty and as ruthless while going about it. The time for meek Democrats playing not to lose and hand-wringing about how they’ll look in the press is long past over. Here’s a piece of information that should be unsurprising: everyone’s already made up their minds. Moderates see Democratic congressfolk as spineless and ineffectual. Conservatives already see Satan incarnate. So what have they got to lose in growing a spine and refusing, for once, to budge? To plant themselves as trees beside the river of truth and to say, “no—you move.”

And yes, this directly opposes my previous section. But the audience is different. These are the people we have sent to represent us within the system, and the system is not the same context as the rest of our country. Remember that, and make them remember it too.

Eight years

That is my (very long) plea. For the exactly zero people who made it this far, allow me to summarize:

• It’s worse than people seem to be letting on, and failing to take seriously the possibility of eight years of Trump is exactly how we will get eight years of Trump. Do not underestimate him. Do not infantilize him.
• It’s gotten this bad because while nobody was paying attention, the institutions of our democracy were slowly dismantled. The deck is stacked heavily against us.
• Respect and seek out the counsel, reporting, and scholarly studies of people who have dedicated their lives to the things you believe in. They might be academic scholars, they might be career journalists covering politics and society, they might be local grassroots organizations that have been working on this stuff forever. Until you do so, shed any belief that you have something original and valuable to contribute.
• Activism is painful. Resistance is painful. Armchair activism is useful for naught.
• Engage with issues and people deeply. Don’t just read enough of an issue to get upset about it. Dig. Seek opposing opinion for the sake of bettering your own. That may mean incorporating some version of it. Connect with opposing people because disconnection serves nobody.
• Consider what you learn from a perspective outside of liberal orthodoxy. How does this issue, this policy, this candidate look to the other side, or to an impartial observer?
• Remember that your elected representative is your warrior in congress, local or federal, and that more than random opinions about stuff they already know, what’s most important for them to hear from you is that you’ve got their back. That they won’t pay a price for fighting.

These are just beginnings. I am not an academic in these areas. I don’t have a lifetime of fighting these particular kinds of injustices. But I’ve been engaged for long enough to recognize some of what works and what doesn’t. And if you mash all of the above together, all I’m arguing for is deeper understanding, more carefully directed passion, and to value the advice of those lifelong activists whose arena everyone just poured into.

I love you. Let’s do some good work.