By Chris Satullo
If you’re not petrified, you’re not paying attention.
The polls are clear. Donald Trump could retake the presidency in November. If he does, it’s doubtful whether he – or the people who put him there – will ever give it up willingly.
Ready or not, Americans face a weighty choice in 2024.
Do we want to rehire an incumbent who, despite a few fumbles of the kind even the best of presidents inevitably commit, has:
- Ably led the nation out of a brutal pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and cratered the world economy.
- Pushed the nation to take its most-promising-ever steps to curb climate change.
- Played a deft role in helping the national economy achieve the “soft landing”- strong growth, low unemployment, tamed inflation and real growth in many household incomes – that a host of nay-sayers declared impossible.
- Earnestly honored his oath to uphold the Constitution and sought to be a president for all Americans, not just those who cheer him at rallies?
Apparently, about half of us don’t want that guy, Joe Biden. Half of us, the polls indicate, are tempted to restore to the Oval Office a man well described by Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark as “a dangerous ranting authoritarian lunatic, bent on torching the Constitution in his rage for power and retribution.”
Yes, it’s baffling and distressing. Yes, it devours sleep and makes us daydream about lightning strikes, strokes, or long-shot court cases coming to save us.
But wishful thinking is not a strategy. Neither are paralyzing anxiety or fatalistic despair. What we need is an evidence-based, optimistic determination. That, plus a confidence in our own ability to make, in our own ways, a small but significant difference in the outcome.
I’m here, as a kind of overture of the themes I expect to explore again and again this year, to offer you 12 heartfelt and perhaps helpful tips on how to navigate the follies and stresses of the coming year, while exerting a meaningful impact on how the votes tally up next November. They derive from my 40 years’ experience covering politics and my 30 years as a practitioner and teacher of civil dialogue.
I’ll share six tips today, and keep you in suspense until I post the the other six next Saturday.
A few involve foundational things to work on inside your head and soul. The rest are practical things you can do with other people, with your voice, your hands or your wallet, to nudge the electoral outcome toward sanity.
Let’s begin:
1) Renounce Progressive Depressive Syndrome
What is this PDS, you ask?
It’s the growing tendency of progressives to treat their hyperbolic and counterfactual gloominess as evidence of intellectual seriousness and moral fervor.
This catastrophizing syndrome pooh-poohs the mounds of data showing that Biden has done quite well, that things look way better now than most thought they would. But PDS people insist that until everything is fixed, no smiles or optimism is allowed.
If you point out that inflation is tamed, with wage increases for middle-income households outpacing the CPI by an encouraging margin, PDSers will tell you that can’t possibly be so because from inside their privileged bubble, buster, you just don’t get it.
If you point out that recent steps to combat climate change are showing encouraging results, the PDS sufferer will toss back at you scientists’ worst-case scenario extrapolations – as though they represented, not a warning against inaction, but an inevitable calamity. Consider yourself lucky if they don’t insinuate that you’re a paid prevaricator for Big Oil.
One notorious 2023 tweet by millennial Taylor Lorenz, comfortably ensconced as tech columnist for the Washington Post, is a platinum-level example of PDS: “We’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w[ith] record wealth inequality, 0 [zero] social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”
Who’s writing that material for him, Donald Trump? Whoever’s running the sorry country he describes, people shouldn’t vote for that incumbent.
BTW, Taylor, you’re actually living (pretty well, it would seem) in the richest, freest country in the history of the world, during the healthiest, most peaceful, most innovative epoch our species has ever enjoyed. Stop doom-scrolling for a moment and read a little Steven Pinker, will ya?
2) Do bone up on your history – and share what you learn
A) First, American history.
To combat PDS, I’m not proposing a Panglossian, mindless optimism. We do have major challenges to tackle – including a very real threat to the foundations of our representative democracy in the short run, and wicked problems such as AI and, yes, climate change in the long run.
But every era in American history confronted its own thorny bundle of problems – yet muddled through, in part because of what used to be the American trait of resilience fueled by stubborn optimism.
The reflexive, self-pitying, blame-mongering fatalism of the Twitter left overstates the severity of our challenges compared to those of past generations, while refusing to acknowledge the real achievements and progress achieved by those generations – thereby shutting its eyes to a host of useful, encouraging lessons.
So don’t do that. Read your U.S. history – cultivating perspective, hunting for the good as well as the bad – and don’t let the PDS prattlers paralyze your will or sink your spirit.
B) World history.
Spoiler alert: It’s a tale rife with avarice, invasion, conquest, usurpation, forced migration, occupation and enslavement. All of which are sadly still with us, but happily less so than in any other epoch.
This may surprise some on the left half of the political spectrum, but the human capacity for evil did not begin with the founding of the United States. So, know your facts and gently call the PDS crowd on their Uncle-Sam-is-the-root-of-all-evil rhetoric, which is catnip to right-wing media and a lousy narrative with which to try to win an election.
To paraphrase a famous line attributed to Winston Churchill: Yes, the U.S. is the absolute worst major power in the history of the planet – except for all the others.
3) Do not wish-cast
Do not cherry-pick positive polls to convince yourself that the threat of Trump 2.0 isn’t real. (I did some of that in 2016, and my wife has never forgiven me for it.) Don’t tell yourself that there’s no point fretting right now because Nikki Haley…or No Labels…or Taylor Swift…or the ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg or SOMETHING! is going to swoop in later and save you from Biden vs. Trump. Do not excuse yourself from paying attention or doing what you can right now. 2024 is already hurtling down the ski slope; there is no maybe later. If you’re going to do something useful, the time to start is yesterday.
4) Do not throw your vote away
If you don’t want Trump to return to the Oval Office, repeat after me:
This November, any vote for anyone other than Joseph Robinette Biden will be, functionally, a vote for Trump.
A presidential election ballot is not a Twitter thread, where you get to express your fondest dreams or display your exquisite taste so that others might applaud. It’s a daunting, binary choice; you must decide which of two people you want to carry the nuclear football, command the Armed Forces, deal with tyrants and terrorists, appoint judges and justices, try to outwit poverty and uphold the Constitution.
Also, recognize.: The Electoral College is not going anywhere before November. Our antiquated system of deciding the presidency currently has a built-in tilt for the GOP candidate, enabling him to win with less than 50 percent of the vote. To breathe easy, Biden needs at least 54 percent of the popular vote – so every potential vote he loses to non-voting apathy or polling place whimsy is a terrible thing to waste.
So, if you end up voting for Jill Stein or RFK Jr. or whoever No Labels might throw out there, or if you oh-so-cleverly write in AOC or you stay home on Election Day as a juvenile protest because your choices don’t include anyone under 50, do not kid yourself:
What you really will have done is vote to return to the Oval Office a corrupt, lying, bigoted, misogynist, narcissistic egomaniac who disdains democracy, spits on the Constitution and dreams Caligula dreams.
5) Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
People on the left have an unfortunate penchant for purity tests, for casting out those whose views don’t conform exactly to the groupthink. The thing is: Book clubs or prayer groups perhaps can afford to exile the heterodox, but political parties that want to win national elections cannot. Whatever your views, they don’t represent as large a percentage of America as your Twitter feed would have you believe. A winning pro-democracy coalition can’t be choosy; by definition, it’s needs to include people whose takes on certain hot-button issues don’t align with yours. If you want to defeat Trump and save democracy, deal with that. Grit your teeth and save the arguments, the insults and the calls to exile until after the election.
6) Do get over your reluctance: Talk politics
When big election choices with big stakes loom, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless. No, you can’t singlehandedly deliver your home city or home state to the pro-democracy side. No, you can’t donate enough on ActBlue to outweigh Koch or Adelson money.
But think of it this way: What if every person who is already determined to preserve our system of constitutional, representative democracy by denying Trump his tyrannical dreams can persuade just one ambivalent or apathetic person to vote for Biden? If that happens, then Joe will win in a walk. Our democracy and our hopes for a kinder, wiser, more just nation will live on.
You can do that. You might have to talk to a half dozen people to nudge that special one the right way, but you can do it.
When I urge you to talk to friends, neighbors, colleagues or relatives about this election, I’m not suggesting that you can or should try to convert a full-on MAGA cultist. That’s too hard and there is too little time. The people I suggest seeking out and engaging fall into three groups:
— Disgruntled progressives. These would be the aforementioned people – often young, but not always – who show signs of PDS and a reluctance to “settle” for Biden.
— True swing voters. A sizable chunk of Americans – maybe 9 million – voted for Obama, then for Trump, then for Biden. If and when they show up on Election Day, they pretty much decide the presidency. They often decide their vote late, or not at all, due to factors or issues that may mystify you if you don’t explore how their minds work.
— Marooned, anti-Trump Republicans. These are people who see clearly who Trump is and hate it, but who have never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. (And to be fair to them: Have you ever voted Republican for POTUS? It’s mighty hard to betray a lifelong identity).
If you think for a bit, you can probably identify a half dozen folks you know who fit somewhere in those categories. You can vow today to begin a conversation with them about the election and to continue it as long as they’re willing. If they recoil at the idea of “talking politics,” just reassure them that you don’t want to talk horse-race or tactics or to jam your views down their throat. What you’re interested in is hearing how they are experiencing and thinking about this pivotal moment, so you can understand them better, even maybe learn something.
Different approaches are called for with each group. With the PDS crowd, you’re going to emphasize that failing to vote, or spending their vote on anyone but Biden, is in reality a vote for Trump and against democracy.
With the swing voters, you may try to counter some Fox-fueled misimpressions they harbor about Biden’s strong, centrist record. But mostly try to impress upon them that, well beyond anything Joe did or didn’t do, what’s on the ballot is the preservation of democracy and the Bill of Rights.
With marooned Republicans, by contrast, a quixotic vote may be the most you can elicit. If they just can’t bring themselves to pull the level for a D, gently plant the idea that writing in a Republican they admire could be a principled and meaningful protest against Trumpism.
But your dialogue with all groups should share certain hallmarks. First off, redefine the win. While, yes, you hope to help persuade these folks to vote to save democracy, you’re not going to charge in hellbent on “changing their mind”; you’re not going to hector, lecture or hard-sell your views. You’re seeking to learn their mind. You’re going to listen carefully as they speak, so as to actually understand their experiences, their values and their quandaries. You’re going to play back what you heard them say, to make sure you got it right and to show them that you’re actually listening.
Then, you’re going to acknowledge that you agree with this or that part of their problems with Biden or “the Democrats.” Only then are you going to share your own views and the evidence that supports them; and you’re going to end by welcoming their questions and counterarguments.
According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, these first two things – demonstrating active listening and understanding, then admitting doubt about some piece of your own position – are prerequisites for getting a person who disagrees you with to listen to, and fairly consider, what you have to say.
Maybe the folks you chat with will never tell you directly that you’ve changed or settled their vote. Still, you might well have opened a window in their mind that will let light in until Election Day. Plus, you’ll have learned something about how issues or events look to people in that group that will help you frame your thoughts in a way that’ll hit home with the next person you talk with.
Remember, you don’t have to single handedly create a majority in your city or state. Just help one or two or three minds commit to voting for democracy, and you’ll have done more than enough.
Had enough tips for now? We’ll share six more next Saturday.
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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