By Chris Satullo
Last Monday, I tweeted on my own – i.e. not for work-related reasons – for the first time in, oh, five years. Political Twitter is the devil’s playground and I try to stay away. I will scroll sports Twitter occasionally, especially during NBA free agency when I don’t want to miss the latest Woj bomb.
Here’s what happened the evening of our nation’s birthday to induce me to break my fast:
My wife and I took our 6-year-old grandson to watch the fireworks over the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was his first time; we’re veterans. We set ourselves up on our usual perch, the steps of a Catholic church in the Spring Garden neighborhood, overlooking Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Just as it came time for multicolored blooms of light to decorate the night sky, chaos broke out. Two police cruisers turned on sirens and flashers and tore like bats out of hell across sidewalk and turf towards the Rocky steps. I’d just had time to register that as “Uh-oh, not normal” when a screaming stream of people began surging towards us up Green Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. It didn’t take long, just hours after the Highland Park, Ill., horror, for the fear to dawn: “Oh, no, active shooter!”
Then the booms started, echoing off the condo towers that line the parkway. They could have been fireworks, but we didn’t see anything in the sky yet. Might they be gunfire? Was each boom a token of human flesh being ripped by bullets? The shouts and pumping legs on the street in front of us suggested we didn’t want to hang around to find out. We gathered up our frightened grandson and joined the stream racing east on Green and made our way back to our house in Center City.
That’s when I went on Twitter, figuring that was the swiftest, if still dubious, way to get some early intelligence on what the heck was happening.
If you follow the news, you know by now that two police officers had been hit (and mildly injured) by stray bullets falling from the sky, a plummeting residue of the ridiculous Philly tradition of firing guns into the sky on holidays. City police, prematurely but understandably, assumed a shooter was taking aim at the huge crowd and told everyone to flee, forthwith.
But when I was back at my house, scrolling Twitter, those key details were still a day away from being known. On the panicky night in question, Twitter was full (as usual) of both hysterical hot takes and useful DIY video.
A lot of tweeters were using the stunning turn of events to bash Philadelphia, which annoyed me, or to declare that they were “done with” or “so, so hate” the country where they live.
I surely understand being emotional, after Buffalo and Uvalde and Highland Park and…well, I could list so many names of so many American towns on an ever-growing roster or horror and grief. Did I feel shattered for the grieving? Of course. Feel rage at the elected cowards who allow the flood of killing machines to continue? For sure. Every day.
But hate America? Give up on the country that I love and the democracy that I revere? Never.
The tone of our society and the quality of our democratic decisions are directly correlated to the amount of care, thought and persistence – the quality of citizenship – that we put into them. If our society is sick, if our democracy is threatened, it is in part my fault, your fault, our fault. Days like last July 4 make me want to try harder, do more, reach out more generously – not go onto Twitter to emote hyperbolically and performatively declare my hate for America.
So, was it one of those tweets that led me to break my years-long fast? No.
It was a calmer tweet from a youngish (by evidence of his profile photo) progressive who wanted to blame Philly and Highland Park on President Biden. His tweet asked: Why doesn’t Biden take action on guns? Why hasn’t he said anything? He should give a speech about guns every day until this is fixed.
Sigh. It is hard to get democracy to do what you’d like it to do when you have no clue how it works.
The tweet sent my mind back to something I’d overheard earlier that same day, while hitting balls on a golf practice range. One golfer a few feet away was an immigrant who’d just passed his citizenship test. He was posing to his American-born buddies some of the questions he’d had to answer.
Who was president during World War I? “No clue.” How many people in the U.S. Senate? “How should I know? They never taught us that stuff.” (They did guess that the nation’s longest river is the Mississippi. Bravo.)
Double sigh.
So, I decided to give my tweeting friend a brief tutorial in the separation of powers. I told him that Biden owned no magic wand to fix gun violence; it was not within his constitutional powers. Any useful action had to come from Congress and, most of all, state legislatures, where too many lawmakers are sadly still in thrall to the NRA. That’s where, I suggested, he should direct his ire and his efforts to elect better officials.
A couple of people liked my tweet (Oh, JOY!) but my friend remained unimpressed. Biden should give more speeches, he repeated. Because, of course, that’s what gets things done, that’s what drives important change: speeches, slogans, clever signs at marches, fierce tweets. If our politicians just performed for us with the same brio as Rihanna or Drake, everything would be fixed.
Just a day or two later, the New York Times posted a piece that drove home how my Tweeting friend is not alone. The piece’s message: Alarmed and dismayed progressives want Biden to be more of a “fighter.”
Ironically, they want him to be more like Donald Trump. They want him to say nastier things about the people who frustrate them. They want him to issue more meaningless, unenforceable, and probably unconstitutional executive orders on issues such as abortion. They want their fierce slogans to be on his lips more often.
I surely get being alarmed and dismayed. If you’re not, you’re not paying attention. And I desperately want many of the same things as the denizens of progressive Twitter: urgent action to protect democracy, combat climate change, curb gun violence, make corporations and the rich pay their fair dues for the upkeep of our society. And so on.
But I know something it seems they don’t: You can only make these things happen if you win more elections than you have been winning lately: Elections for the U.S. Senate. Elections for the U.S. House. Elections for state legislatures, governor and (in places where this happens) for state appeals courts.
Just like MAGA voters, young progressives (and some older ones) live in geographical and cultural bubbles that fool them into thinking most people are like them – and think like them. Just like MAGA voters, they believe mistakenly that they constitute a working majority of American voters and that the only way they can lose is if the other side does something dastardly.
Memo to progressives: If you want to win, please understand that many of the votes you absolutely, positively must get belong to people who aren’t much like you, and whom you may not like all that much.
I’m talking about people who are not on Twitter. People who live in places you would not visit on a bet. People who do not share your cultural tastes in…well, just about anything. People who think some of your favorite slogans – e.g. Abolish ICE, Defund the Police – are scary and a little crazy. People who are pissed that someone they’ve never met suddenly decided one day that they should be called Latinx or cisgender or some other newfangled invention of identity politics. People who learned to love Bette Midler and can’t for the life of them understand why she’s being cancelled for saying “pregnant women.”
No, the elections you must work to win aren’t in Brooklyn or Berkeley or Philly.Those are in the bag. The ones that gain or preserve vital majorities – in Congress, in state legislatures, in appeals courts – will be won by candidates who are not going to chant all your slogans on demand,
candidates who are not going to hew to your ever-changing woke vocabulary, who are not always going to vote the way you (or, sometimes, even me) would prefer.
Please, for once in your tweet-heavy lives, understand just how precious, hard to win and indispensable a majority is. Tweets do not change things; speeches do not; most executive orders do not. Majorities do. And big majorities can do even more than narrow ones. (cf. U.S Supreme Court, 2022.)
What gets you a majority? Not retweets. Not applause from the choir. Winning elections does it. For that, you need the votes of people who are…less enlightened than you. If you want to win, you can’t provide so much juicy daily grist for the disinformation mills of the right, because the votes you need belong to people who read some of what those mills churn out.
No, you are not required to love everything your president and party standard-bearer does. Constructive criticism is always useful. But please grasp that every time you eviscerate Joe Biden on Twitter, or tell journalists or pollsters you are disgusted with him, you provide fuel to Trump 2024 or, perhaps even worse, DeSantis 2024.
We all want to have a better Fourth of July in 2023 than we just had. To get it, we all have a lot of pondering, reconsidering and working to do between now and November.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia