Stay Awake

Welcome to the first day of the rest of our lives

The tagline for my newsletter, Doomsday Scenario, has always been about trying to answer whether things are as bad as they seem? It’s hard this week not to feel like the answer is: If anything, it’s worse. But I’m not sure I actually believe that. Bad? Yes. Very bad? Also yes. Are we in for an incredibly hard time, where decades of hard-won social and political progress are unwound and major challenges, from climate change to health care, are pushed aside? Almost surely. But maybe not the worst.

Yesterday morning felt in many ways normal: I made coffee, fixed breakfast for the kids, talked about sloths and excavators, and packed everyone out the door. It was the same America as it had been both Monday and Tuesday. And yet, at a very different level, Wednesday felt entirely different—and an entirely different America. An America meaner and more vindictive than I one I imagine I live in, an America less committed to democracy at home and less committed to good and freedom in the world beyond, a more selfish America that cared less about its neighbors than I had been taught, an America more full of anger and resentment than hope and aspiration.

A victory on Tuesday by Kamala Harris always felt somewhat mystical and metaphysical; it seemed almost impossible she’d win and also impossible that she’d lose. All year, everything that came after Tuesday had felt to me like some sort of vast void, waiting to be filled in, so much hanging in the balance and unknown. I made plans for 2025 and beyond that always felt more abstract than concrete.

Now we know.

Donald Trump’s victory is so striking, so broad, and so deep—touching every corner of the country, his support improving across virtually every demographic—that it should remove any second-guessing from Democrats about their candidate, Harris’s strategy, or even the core politics of the Biden administration. Picking Josh Shapiro as veep wouldn’t have mattered; handling Gaza differently wouldn’t have made a difference; giving a few more interviews to mainstream news outlets wouldn’t have changed a thing. The economy was, by any objective measurement, as strong and robust as it could be, the Democrats outraised and outorganized the GOP, and none of that mattered a lick.

An angry America made a conscious, resounding, national choice for a different path on Tuesday. It was a total rejection not just of Democrats but of this century’s governing establishment—this campaign, of course, allied not just Harris, Biden, Obama, and the Clintons but also the Cheneys and the Bushes. America delivered a resounding message that this century’s status quo wasn’t working for middle-class (white) (male) Americans, that the priorities of the three other presidents this century didn’t deliver the results (white) (male) voters cared about. Eight years ago, Trump had offered a chance to stick it to the Establishment Elite; this time, he promised he’d burn the Establishment Elite down.

Tuesday night, as the first election returns came in, I stayed true to my own advice and read a book—finishing Jonathan Eig’s KING: A LIFE, the incredible Pulitzer-winning biography of historic Civil Rights leader just before I went to bed at 10 p.m. I was struck by the parallels of this moment and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final years. Eig’s book traces chapter by chapter how the King we remember is not the King who lived—he was more radical and far-reaching than we remember and, also, more rejected by America. Eig traces, particularly, how the final years of King’s life were disillusioning.

After his mountaintop “I Have A Dream” moment of 1964, the following years led King deeper into the wilderness. He felt disillusioned and pessimistic, and—contrary to the way we lionize a gilded version of him today—America lost interest in and respect for him. In his own movement, he was overtaken by more radical leaders. Southern whites had never liked him and as the 1960s progressed, northern whites rebelled as his organizing efforts moved to places like Chicago. In 1964, Gallup declared him the fourth most-admired man in the world; the following year, he fell to sixth, and in 1966 he fell off the list entirely. “He had concluded that only a small part of white America supported racial justice,” Eig writes. King persisted — “I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up in life,” King said — but it was clear, Eig says, “faith in King was fading.”

The fight for progress in America is always hard. It has never been easy. And it has never been linear. King’s civil rights battles were, in many respects, the battles to right the wrongs of Reconstruction a full center earlier and to push America closer to the promises of equality and justice it had long deferred. The fight for progress is often disillusioning, rosy and respected only in retrospect.

It’s a fight we’re still in today. And clearly one we will continue to fight for my entire life.

It’s also clear to me today anew how long and hard the fight will be. And how outmatched we still are.

It’s easy to forget how promising and full of Obama-era hope the future looked at the time Donald Trump entered the presidential race for the first time in 2015. In the two weeks after his golden escalator ride, we saw gay marriage embraced by the Supreme Court, the White House lit in a rainbow flag, the Confederate flag brought down from the South Carolina capitol at the urging of the Republican governor, a transgender Olympic decathlete (Caitlyn Jenner) appear on the cover of Vanity Fair, and the Pentagon end its ban on transgender troops. I thought then that we were on the verge of a different, better moment, one that more perfectly achieved the American dream and promise of freedom and equality for all. I was wrong.

American politics has changed dramatically since then, and while there are plenty of reasons for those political shifts—and some, like the struggles of the working-class and middle-class are undoubtedly real—there’s one particular change that deserves more attention and concern.

I’m struck more than anything today that this was an election conducted in the midst of an ongoing information war—one that Democrats have been bad at fighting and that the US government has been outmatched by for the better part of a decade. The path from Russia’s attack on the 2016 election to the apparently foreign bomb threats against polling places Tuesday is a short and very linear one. This election from start to finish was conducted in atomized media echo chambers, poisoned by misinformation and disinformation spread knowingly and willingly by tech companies, media organizations, and our foreign adversaries. The public does not understand the extent to which a concerted effort by the right-wing since 2016—and particularly since 2020—has encouraged, demanded, and harassed tech companies, media organizations, and researchers into removing the already-flimsy guardrails that had protected and defended truth and information online. Elon Musk spent $44 billion, after all, to buy Twitter and dismantle effectively all of its hard-fought and carefully mediated protections against hate and misinformation.

We have not adjusted to just how much the online torrent of ignorance and slop has destroyed our ability to civil conversations, inform voters, and educate citizens. And, particularly, Democrats and the mainstream traditional press failed to understand and reckon with just how much better Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk understood the power of modern social media.

Biden, Harris, and the Democrats in the end couldn’t overcome the international trend of anti-incumbent anger over inflation and immigration that has swamped government after government this year. I believe much of that blame, in our case, stems from the toxic information environment, a venomous and noxious world, full of isolated cul-de-sacs, that undermines facts, reinforces stereotypes, and remixes and reduces all viewpoints to the same base level. (We can’t seriously be having a conversation about removing flouride from water in 2024, can we?!) As just one example: President Trump received none of the blame for mismanaging Covid, and President Biden received none of the credit his policies deserved for righting the economy he inherited. For the third time in my lifetime, a Democratic president who fixed an economy broken by his Republican predecessor will now hand that roaring economy over to a Republican.

We must figure out how to confront and improve the information environment, to get Americans the facts they need to make informed choices, if we want any path forward as a democracy.

The final lines of Eig’s book are a quote of King’s, a line that haunted me and inspired me anew Wednesday morning when I got up: “Our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change.”

I will stay awake. I still believe America is capable of great things. I hope you will too. I want my children to grow up believing in the same dream of a better America that I do.

The truth is that America today is the same America it was yesterday—that’s the great pain, isn’t it!?—but we can still hope and work to make tomorrow’s America better.

GMG

PS: I hope to use this newsletter more to share history and context (and lots of book recommendations) about the time and challenge ahead. I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a couple people in your life who you think might find value in it: