What can come next

[evolves]

Excellent essay from last week regarding the current moment and how best to meet it:


https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-looks-permanent-until-it

Political pragmatism is not about fighting only the battles you expect to win. It is the refusal to let probable failure dictate what you attempt. This is the Perkins disposition. She did not know the Depression would come. She did not know Roosevelt would call. She prepared anyway, because preparation is itself a form of politics—a way of insisting that the world you are ready for is a world that could exist.

My deepest fear is not that we fail to survive this moment—it’s that we survive it only to return to the status quo that made it possible. That we exhale, declare victory, and leave in place the Electoral College, the filibuster, the gerrymandered maps, the money-soaked elections that allowed a minoritarian movement to capture the state in the first place. The point is not to get back to normal. Normal is how we got here.

The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.

Those who say these problems can’t be solved are really saying they can’t be solved here—confessing a belief that Americans are uniquely incapable of what dozens of other democracies have achieved.

Despair makes sense when nothing can be done. We know exactly what can be done. We can see it working.

The work now is the same as it was in 1911: document the failures, design the remedies, prepare for the moment.

The America described above is not some utopian dream. It is a set of solutions waiting to be implemented.