This is an invitation to sharing your words, reflections, grief, anger, and even hope as we struggle to make sense of this year of deep loss: loss of life, loss of safety, loss of hope and culminating in the terrifying loss of the US Presidency on Tuesday – terrifying not because it’s a typical election loss. To the contrary, it is a triumph for those driven to eviscerate any semblance of democratic governance in the US and around the world.

Join me on Friday, November 8th, 2024 at 3:00 pm EST to Reflect on The US Elections. 

Friends,

Sometimes it’s hard to find the words. And you can only begin to find them by sharing them with others. This is an invitation to sharing your words, reflections, grief, anger, and even hope as we struggle to make sense of this year of deep loss: loss of life, loss of safety, loss of hope and culminating in the terrifying loss of the US Presidency on Tuesday – terrifying not because it’s a typical election loss. To the contrary, it is a triumph for those driven to eviscerate any semblance of democratic governance in the US and around the world.  

Personally, I was not surprised, but I was shocked.

The truth is that the US has never been governed by a representative democracy. We have been shackled by profoundly antidemocratic institutions: electoral college, Senate, and first by the post legislative districts. This contributed to the growing gap between what people need and the governments capacity to respond to those needs. Thus, experience of a government that neither represents me and, in any event, is profoundly dysfunctional.

We have also allowed our electoral politics to be managed by a multi-billion-dollar marketing industry because the more money they spend, the more money they make. Alone among “liberal democracies” we treat money as speech and bar any constraints on spending: this creates a market drive by infinite demand. Instead of political practices rooted in relational engagement with one’s fellow citizens we pay for access to the narrowly targeted transactional messaging that fragments rather than unifies. On top of this a self-governing civic infrastructure is being replaced by donor driven NGO’s. And for many years we have allowed our pollical economy to be driven by a neoliberal ideology responsible the accelerating economic, political and cultural inequality.

Is it any surprise this adds up to the disorientation, alienation, and anxiety that enables would be leaders to draw on historic reservoirs of racism and misogyny to construct a politics of fear (and loss of agency) able to ’trump’ a politics of hope (enhancement of agency): a politics of “yes I can” over a politics of “yes we can”. Even in this very campaign one candidate campaigned as an agent of vengeance and the other as an agent of protection

What’s missing is our failure to develop a political story, strategy or structure (e) rooted commitment to democratic values expressed as who we are, what we are for and what we want to be. In its absence, we begin to define ourselves by what we are against, to do so in terms set by the opposition, allowing ourselves to be defined by what we oppose.

Sometimes recovery can only begin when one hit’s ‘rock bottom”. It can create opportunity to shed crippling practices of the past in favor and healthful practices to shape a future.  Trying to predict the future is a fool’s errand. And the radical uncertainty within which we have been living can create opportunity for a radical regrounding of the democratic project: morally, strategically, and organizational. Historically it has been social movements, driving values-based change, fueled by a depth of commitment, risk taking, and imagination, and unafraid to engage in partisan politics, that have made things work. There is no blueprint we can follow, but we can get on a pathway, joining with others, rooted in shared values, schooled in strategic power, operating within a ’brave space, and committed to practice action-based learning, not prior to the action but emergent from it. 

This is why I wrote a book focused on the basic, accessible, practices which any human is capable of learning, teaching, and adapting. 

Thanks for reading

Marshall Ganz