Democratic socialism isn't a bad word, or a scary idea. It *is* democratic. The Democratic Party needs to get with the times. The times call for change in candidates.
Your daughter is brilliant.
“That is not bad luck. That is a party that does not know how to talk to the people it needs.”
“You sound like someone who has been told to be realistic for so long that realistic started to feel like wisdom.”
I think I might love her more than I love you now 😉
She's going to see this and it's going to go straight to her head.
And honestly, fair. She earned those lines. I was just the one sitting across the table taking notes.
The realistic as wisdom line is the one that got me too. Still getting me. I've been thinking about it for three days and I don't have a good answer for it yet.
Don't tell her you love her more than me. She already thinks she's winning.
You just described the trap exactly. And I don't have a clean way out of it.
Newsom is what the party produces when it optimizes for optics. Good on camera. Sharp on social media. Completely fluent in the language of change without any real intention of disturbing the people who fund him. My daughter would say he's the system's best defense against itself.
And yet. Him versus MAGA and I'm in the same booth you are.
The two years question is the hard one. I don't think you change the top of the ticket in two years. I think you change what's underneath it. School boards. City councils. State legislatures. The Mamdani model. Build from the ground up and make the ground impossible to ignore.
Whether that's fast enough I genuinely don't know. I hope you're proven wrong too.
Politically homeless- that’s a good description of how this 69-year old retiree identifies these days. With the exception of a handful of politicians I have lost respect for the Dems and haven’t had respect for most of the GOP since before I could vote. We have settled for the lesser of evils at the ballot box for too long. The ruling parties are too concerned about appeasing donors than actually legislating for the people they represent. My income is limited and I’ve decided I’m done squeezing donations out of my grocery budget until government starts working for people. So until some frozen day in hell, I guess. They could start earning trust and respect by raising the income cap on social security taxes, by feeding and housing children and parents who are barely getting by. By making sure people aren’t bankrupted by medical bills and codifying a path to universal healthcare. By honoring and enforcing the separation of church and state. And a dozen other basic human rights concerns. I’ll vote for a Democratic Socialist given the opportunity, at least through the primaries. I’ll probably suck it up on Election Day as I’ve done for years.
If this year’s elections are not invalidated, and if we actually have an election in 2028, I’m gonna bet we’ll see my state’s current Governor (Newsom) running for President. He says all the right things, just like they all do. Hell, he even goes head to head with Shitler on social media. But we all know that he is so deep in the pockets of the oligarchs that even if he somehow wins, very little will change on the ground. But if it’s him vs any of the MAGA’s at the end, I will have no choice but to vote for him. Voting for the third party will again be a vote for the fascists. That’s sad, but that’s reality. How do we change this in 2 years? I don’t think it can be done. But I hope I’m proven wrong.
Thanks for sharing an important story. I appreciate it and hope that we can learn from it.
I want to take this opportunity to share an important reason why so many people deeply distrust the Democratic Party, at almost a cellular level. Most cannot even tell you why, yet they deeply distrust the party. Here is my explanation:
When the chips are down, the so-called party leadership turns its back on the very constituents it claims to represent. This goes back decades, and the Party Leadership has never done a thing to correct it. They have not even acknowledged it.
To understand what I am talking about, we need to go back to the National election of 1944: During the initial campaign for the office of President, the then Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, had HUGE popular support. He had demonstrated impeccable integrity, brilliance and creativity in solving difficult problems and that he was a fabulous representative of the people. Just what a real democracy needed.
He was running to be FDR's VP. Clearly, he was the people's choice by a massive margin. He should have been on the Democratic ticket.
But there was a problem: The Democratic Party leadership knew they could never control him. He would do what he believed was right, regardless of their agenda. So, they used dirty tricks at the last minute to keep him off the ticket. This came to a head in the final primary caucus. The dirty tricks they used to support the election and keep him off the ticket likely rose to the level of felonies. Instead, the Democratic Party leadership rammed Harry Truman down the throats of the people and lost the chance to elect a VP and eventually a president who likely would have gone down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever.
No real investigation ensued. (Harry Truman used his office to see to that.) And the Democratic Party leadership has never even acknowledged their obscene betrayal of their membership.
Unfortunately, this was NOT a lone incident.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders was clearly the people's choice. Again, because he was incorruptible and would always do what he believed to be right. Again, because the Democratic Party backroom leadership knew they could not control him, they sabotaged Bernie's primary campaign and tried to shove Hillary Clinton down our throats, instead. The people did NOT want her for very good reasons. So, the Democratic Party lost a critical election that had been in the bag. The entire country has since paid the price in the form of giving the current, putrid gasbag in the White House a foothold in the office of the Presidency.
If the Democratic Party had abided by the Will of the Peolple, we would be living in a very different country, and likely a different and better world.
Until the Democratic Party acknowledges their crimminal, anti-democratic behavior and cleans up their act, they will not have widespread trust and they will not be worthy of it.
You know your history. The Wallace story is real and most people have never heard it.
I'd push back gently on Bernie being clearly the people's choice. Hillary won more primary votes. The system was tilted, but the math is complicated.
Your core point though, when the party has had to choose between control and conscience it has chosen control, that one I can't argue with. And people feel it even when they can't name Henry Wallace.
You know your history, as well. I will return the favor and gently push back about Bernie Sanders and his campaign: Yes, Hillary got more votes. But I believe that was because of the dirty tricks that the so-called Democratic Leadership Council used to sabotage his campaign.
As you pointed out, they again chose control over conscience.
They refused to share their mailing lists with Bernie. They withheld campaign contributions that should have gone to his campaign. There are other dirty tricks that they likely engaged in, but no real investigation has ever been conducted. So, we don't know for sure. I also am not sure whether the dirty tricks the evidence proves are real, rise to the level of criminality, or were merely a gross breach of trust.
I would like to see a real, unbiased, and 100% transparent investigation.
If the Democratic Party wants to regain real, sustainable power, they need to acknowledge the breach of trust and set about repairing the trust.
You are correct, and you didn't even mention the relentless propaganda by Democratic pundits, establishment figures, "intelligensia", legacy media...who insisted that Bernie was "unelectable" (literally the exact same people who said this about Mamdani).
They preyed shamelessly on the Black community, all but shouting that Bernie was racist....leading directly to a lack of support by the Black community, as intended (that's your "math").
Anyone can spend an hour researching OpenSecrets.org and see the corporate donors who run the Democratic party.
Most of them are so busy insider trading and fundraising, it's a miracle that any work is done.
Even now, with the Oversight Committee constantly holding hearings about the Epstein files, what has changed? Who has been held accountable or referred for prosecution?
Let's look at Gilibrand, whose only action during Trump 2.0 has been to lobby for the Genius Act, which eliminates any real scrutiny or regulation over crypto...partly because she's funded by crypto billionaires, partly because her son's new investment firm will directly benefit from the legislation.
I could go on and on. Tom's daughter was kind about establishment Democrats' complicity. They're not just out of touch or in a DC bubble, they're making choices that benefit themselves and their donors, with a few bones thrown to the 90%.
Of course, you are spot on. I could have written for many pages about the corruption, actions, and betrayals committed by the so-called Democratic Party leadership over the last 80 years or so. There is no shortage of egregious acts to cite.
The point I wanted to make is that the arrogant elites who really run the party have lost the trust of much of their constituents, and the party itself has not done jack shit to acknowledge this, let alone make amends and change their ways.
"In 2016, Bernie Sanders was clearly the people's choice."
When I read your story of 1944, I almost jumped to note that was exactly what happened in 2016.
Thanks for beating me to it!
I think it was FDR who said something like, "When faced with a choice between a Republican and a Democrat who acts like a Republican, the voters will pick the real one every time."
That is absolutely not true, sorry. I just can't fight this propaganda mill against Dems anymore. They do everything well. Impeached Trump twice, exposed him via J6 and abetted the DOJ prosecution w evidence for the cases only to be turned out and rendered powerless - yes POWERLESS - by voters. DOJ was steamrolled by courts not incompetence or loss of will. And yet the lie is that they were cowardly. They NEVER abandoned issues - they were turned OUT for their successes. I can't fight the lies anymore. If one believes the propaganda mill, we are doomed.
Your comment, or perhaps reply to my comment, is interesting. Here is a question I have for you: What part of my comment above is not true? Did the Democratic Party leadership not use dirty tricks to keep Henry Wallace off the ticket in 1944? Did they not repeat their anti-democratic behavior with regard to Bernie's campaign in 2016?
If I am wrong or am spreading propaganda, I really want to know. Please show me.
Your analysis is a good one and worth chewing on for quite a while. However, I want to make a technical historical correction. Henry Wallace was the Vice President during FDR‘s third term. Prior to that he was FDR‘s secretary of agriculture. The Democratic Party leaders with FDR‘s agreement or acquiescence, decided that Wallace needed to be dropped from the ticket if FDR was planning to run a fourth time. The leaders knew that FDR‘s health was fragile and that he would likely not survive the term though I bet they didn’t think he would only survive for 2 1/2 months after being inaugurated for the fourth time. But despite these technical corrections, your analysis is very good.
"I think she was brilliant. I think she was the most prepared candidate in modern history and she was treated with a contempt that had everything to do with the fact that she was a woman…"
Let's not get into how she treated Sanders the same way the electorate treated her. Not because he was a "woman" — no, Sanders was much worse: he was a socialist.
I'll bet you guys split that vote. You voted for Hillary. Your daughter was one of the 0.5% who voted for Sanders anyway — which, as everyone told me when I told them who I voted for, was really just a vote for †rump.
The "two-party system" is the problem. You are only allowed to vote for corporate power. I voted for the only anti-growth, anti-corporate, anti-genocide party, and we were THIRD! With 0.5% of the vote.
Helen Caldicott says, "The US has a one-party system with two right wings." Not really much difference at the polls than Russia.
Sanders had absolute equality and was never abused . She certainly did not steal HIS data and use it. Whitewashing the most ineffective member of Congress ever is absurd. Voters just can't stand him. The role of Congress is LEGISLATION to help us protect our rights, realize our dreams. Bernie is racist, anti immigrant, misogynist and we all saw it. HRC never abused him. She once embarrassed him asking IN THE DEBATE, "What have I ever done for Wall Street", and he stood gawping because he had no answer. She never once had abetted Wall Street. She didn't lie about him, didn't use his past, his vile essays on rape, didn't go for the jugular. And he lost because we all saw how vapid and useless he is. He lied. He took help from Russia. He's despicable. And she didn't maximize what she COULD have done to him. He did it to himself.
You are so lucky to have such a clear thinking daughter. I've been a Democrat since shaking JFK's hand in 1962. No more. I'm totally in sync with your daughter's position. There is no time left politically or ecologically for incrementalism. We must change or we will perish. Thank you for a great article.
You shook JFK's hand and you're still paying attention sixty some years later. That's not nothing. That's everything actually.
I am lucky. I don't always tell her that but I am.
The incrementalism argument is the one I keep losing. I keep looking for the place where slow and steady wins and she keeps showing me the clock. I don't have a good answer for the clock.
Thank you for being here. And for still caring after all of it.
I read this in my email inbox. You brought me back to Substack just so I could respond. I have been avoiding Substack and most of the news for quite a while because it causes me so much despair. This is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this platform. I would hope that a lot of people will read it, especially those of our generation. I’m 73 and I’ve spent a lot of the last year coming around to your daughter’s way of thinking. She’s absolutely right. We’re going to fuck this up unless we change our minds.
I’ve been working on a project for a while now about why our participation rate in our democracy is so low. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no political party that represents the needs and values of most of the people. The democrats have been losing voters for years because they quit representing the values and needs of the voters and the party today has quit listening to the base.
We need to change. We need to accept that doing the right thing may mean short term losses. And that may lead to long term gains. It’s time for us old folks to embrace the younger generation. They are right about a lot of things.
What you said about despair, I know that feeling. I think a lot of us our age have been managing it by looking away, and I understand why. Sometimes you just need to not know for a while.
But what you're doing with that project matters. You put your finger on exactly what my daughter keeps saying and what I keep circling around. It's not just that people aren't voting. It's that the choice they're being offered doesn't feel like a choice. That's not apathy. That's a rational response to a system that stopped asking what they needed.
The short term losses thing is the one I keep wrestling with. She'd say we've been avoiding short term losses for forty years and calling it strategy, and the long term is here now and it doesn't look great. I'm not all the way there yet. But I'm closer than I was before she sat down at my kitchen table.
Thanks Tom! I think I’m actually going to write a piece about my project and how I’ve changed my mind about the people who don’t vote. I was very angry with them and wanted to blame them for the situation we’re in now. Instead, I now sympathize with them and question how much I am going to support the candidates that are in my district and in my state. I still believe in the democratic process, but if we don’t make a lot of structural changes, we’re going to lose it.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve voted for the democrats for my entire life and while I won’t go so far as to say all those votes were wasted, I feel like I’m almost as responsible for the shape the country is in as the republicans. If the party can’t grow and fully embrace the progressive wing of the party, it’s time to abandon it. I feel right now like even if we win this fall, we’re still going to lose where it counts.
I don’t consider anyone voting their conscience to be wasting their vote. I’m coming to believe that voting for the lessor of two evils is still voting for evil. We’ve got to change the system! Let’s all rally around those who are calling for a new constitutional convention!
The US has the most-dated constitution in the world at this point. It still says that a black person is counted as 3/5ths of a white one! (Albeit "fixed" in the 12th-14th amendments.)
But certainly, such an exercise would require much less polarization than we have these days.
That's quite the discussion dad. She's got a sharp eye. I know the housing issues as I am a long time volunteer and leader in low income housing in the Quad Cities (Humility Homes and Services). It's going to be a tough few years. On the positive side, we're breaking ground on our first new build in a week. Will be great low income family housing!!
She does. And she'd love you for what you're doing in the Quad Cities.
Breaking ground on new build low income housing in this climate takes real stubbornness. The good kind. That's exactly the kind of thing she talks about when she says the work matters even when the system doesn't make it easy. People just doing it anyway.
Congratulations on the groundbreaking. That's a big deal. Those families are going to live in something that exists because you showed up for years before anyone broke ground on anything.
Tom, I'm a Boomer about your age and I agree with your daughter 100%. The system is fucked and the corporate Democrats like #Chuckthecuck and Jeffries are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to keep the donor class happy. We need a new FDR to burn it down and rebuild the right way. I think a lot of people voted for trump just because they thought maybe he would make a change. And he did, just in the wrong possible way. The New York primary showed that people are pissed off at the corporate Democrats and they had better read the handwriting on the wall. I would love to have a drink with you and your daughter and thank her for doing the impossible day after day. Another great essay.
I think a lot of people reached the point where they knew the old arrangement wasn't working anymore. The tragedy is that anger, by itself, isn't a compass. It can point toward reform or ruin, and we've seen plenty of ruin.
My daughter would probably agree with you that too many Democratic leaders still seem more concerned with managing decline than confronting the forces that created it. The New York primary felt less like an election result and more like a warning flare. People are tired of being told to be patient while their lives get harder.
And if we ever do have that drink, I suspect my daughter would spend most of it explaining exactly where both parties went wrong while the rest of us tried to keep up. She's doing work that few people have the stomach for, and I'm proud of her every day.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the kind words.
John, I'm 64. Voted for Democrats since Carter in 1980. I think we need AOC in 2028. I have reasons that I'll get into if you're interested. But I think if she runs, she'll win. And that will start the turnaround. Maybe institute a Brand New Deal.
I'll be 75 soon. I agree with your daughter. it’s time for system reform. And we should allow younger folks to choose their way. It's their future now. Maybe we should even http://ad.itthat we have failed, though with decently good intentions.
That last line is the hard one. Good intentions matter. They also aren't enough. Our generation has had trouble holding both of those things at the same time.
Letting go of the wheel is not a natural instinct for people like us. But I think you're right that it's time.
My Mother is the Boomer who believed Bill Clinton was a great man. I am your daughter. I still remember how angry I was when Clinton 'triangulated" and signed welfare reform, gutting a program that delivered actual benefits to actual poor people. That was the day I understood that the Democrats are not the side of the people, not really.....they just soften up the brutality a bit to make it more palatable to Boomers.
Your daughter is right. About all of it. Corporate Democrats attack Mamdani because he has the audacity to get real about the harms that Boomers have allowed since Clinton. Harms thst they can look away from because they are not directly affected by them.
Harms that mean at 63, I am a worker in a gig economy with no safety net, no healthcare, and likely no social security. Which, BTW, is money I have paid into the system for 45 years. My Mom has a pension, healthcare, social security, a home she owns outright....Im not saying she didn't work for those things because she did - she.worked hard for them. But she also looked the other way while corporate Dems chipped away at what was possible for me and your daughter and your granddaughter. Now, there's nothing left and you Boomers do not understand what it means to live with what you've left behind.
What struck me about your comment is that you're not talking about ideology. You're talking about lived experience.
My generation was told that if we worked hard, played by the rules, and voted for the "responsible" people, the system would more or less take care of itself. Your generation did those things and discovered the rules had changed while nobody was looking.
I don't think most Boomers set out to leave their children and grandchildren with less. But I do think too many of us accepted compromises that looked reasonable in the moment and devastating in hindsight. Welfare reform. Deregulation. The steady transfer of risk from institutions to individuals. Piece by piece, what had once been a social contract became a personal burden.
What I hear in your comment isn't resentment. It's grief. Grief for a future that was promised and then quietly taken away.
And that's exactly why conversations like the one between my daughter and me matter. The point isn't to assign blame. The point is to finally tell the truth about what happened and what was lost.
Tom, this is exactly right. It is grief. My Mom made a lot of money in the stock market, so she looked away when pensions were replaced with 401Ks - though she kept HER defined benefit pension when the system offered her the choice to go one way or the other. I was never offered the choice. It was all "put your money in the big casino and hope it's still there when you retire". HA HA HA - housing bust in 2008 took everything I had and now I don't have enough in there to live for a year on it.
Triangulation - i.e. corporate-friendly policy with the brutal edges sanded down - started under Clinton and never stopped. It happened under Obama. It happened under Biden. And now we have corporate Dems (an aide to Hakeem Jeffries, no less...) going to work for Palantir. It's just more of the same - taking the side of big money while watching the rest of us slip further and further away down the slippery slope. Now they want to call the money that I paid into Social Security for 45 years an entitlement - as though I am a freeloader for wanting my damn money back.
I'm not mad that my Mom is having a comfortable retirement - she worked hard all her life and she should have a comfortable retirement. But I am mad that she and my dad never really listened all those years ago when I tried to tell them that what Clinton was doing was chipping away at the social contract little by little. Their stocks were doing great, they were making lots of money, and they thought the party would go on forever. The party is over now and all that is left is precarity and corporate Dems who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, much less do something about it. I will be in that first generation to do less well - by a LOT - than my parents.
I love Mamdani because he SEES OUR STRUGGLE. He does not give a rat's ass about corporate Dems and I chortled the other night when Jeffries tried to take him to the woodshed about his endorsements and failed. Jeffries can't hear the sounds of people drowning over the whoosh of corporate wallets opening to buy his vote. Mamdani hears the people LOUD AND CLEAR and he's trying to do something about it. I would throw Jeffries out IN A NEW YORK MINUTE if NYC is where I voted. Schumer, Jeffries - the whole lot of them have betrayed us again and again and again. Sure, they're better than the alternative but that's not saying much. Will I vote D? Or course, it's better than the alternative. Do I expect them to improve my life? No, not at all.
"You can spend a lifetime being on the right side of history and still be on the wrong side of the room." That line alone is a Heavy Round. You captured the exact structural collapse we are all trying to map right now. The working class is politically homeless, and the daughter isn't radical; she's just the only one looking at the actual math. Thank you for sending this across the wire. The signal is converging.
Labels outlast their usefulness. There will never be Republicans or Democrats again. The times call for something else. In fact socialism has no roots in our system. We do have room for progressives and also a realm for reactionaries. To me the language I use is important because it makes and explains our world. Each language is also its own universe so terms like left and right coming from Europe are equally meaningless in a country that superficially experienced the expression of some exponents but not the soul of these ideological constructs.
In this our outdated America there is room for populism. That we have a history of. When entangled with Racism, we can also get White Christian Nationalism, and that is where real social pathologies appear. Lurking in the shadows of an unresolved Civil War are a Second Confederacy and the erosion of the Rule of Law. Now there are two huge failures of the historical political system.
Having lived in the violence of a real left inspired brutal guerrilla war that lasted half a century abroad and still living violence from a real right in this country (in my State black men have a greater chance of dying while being stopped by the police than white men do, and have), I abhor violence. And yet I study conflict.
Germane to this discussion is that the more inroads people who believe in social justice through economic means (Democratic Socialists DS) have, the more of a fringe they are made to be. In our context they can generate local and possibly state-level change, but not national regime change and much less revolution. The system is too unwieldy for that. Even if Congress was DS, unless the Judiciary at all federal levels was, along with what will likely be a less Presidential executive, changing the Constitution is akin to climbing Everest. I cannot do it. But some of us can, and through them all of us can.
I do not give my Democrat or previous Liberal credentials away. But I have taken on many progressive ideas in my 63 years because either I changed with the world, or change would have passed me by. In what I do and where I am (the world of higher education) I inject ideas that can surprise me. I want to leave my co-learners uncomfortable as my faculty did with me. I am not more successful but the feedback over time is that at times the progressive bug has somehow gotten to them. I cannot hope for more. I believe.
But, the conversation between you and your daughter has a lot to sit with. Just not on a front porch with a glass of Jameson’s right now. But the issues, dreams and realities you raise are ones we need to take into the voting process with us. Because when we vote we do so not only for our pocketbooks. That is too simple. No we actually vote for the world we would like to live in.
This is the comment that is going to stay with me longest.
You're right that the labels outlast their usefulness. My daughter and I spent a whole night on arguing inside a vocabulary that was built somewhere else for conditions that don't entirely apply here. Left and right from Europe. Socialist from a tradition we never fully had. We use the words because we don't have better ones yet.
What you said about the Second Confederacy and the unresolved Civil War is the thing that doesn't get said plainly enough. We keep treating it as history. It isn't history. It's the current argument with different vocabulary.
And the idea that you inject uncomfortable ideas into your co-learners and measure success in feedback years later, that's exactly what my daughter does. She's not waiting for the system to change. She's changing the people who are going to change the system. That takes the kind of patience I'm not sure I have.
I wish you had a porch and a glass of Jameson right now. This conversation deserves it
Like always when I sit with your writing, I sit. There is more that is worth responding to and participating in than is even possible in this short space. The different vantage points from here in the Comments section are needed, too. Here's one more, which I hope you and your daughter can maybe sit for.
Prince George’s County, Maryland, suburban DC where I've lived for over 25 years has problems your daughter could relate to all the way from Boise, and across vast swaths of cultural and geographic distances. This is, by all accounts that I am aware of, the wealthiest majority Black county in the country. My wife and I practically live on top of Andrews AFB, where President Fill-in-the-Blank has flown in and out of for decades. PG County is probably number one in a lot of other ways I'm not even aware of, and not all of it is in a good way. It is a Democratic one-party state, and corruption is rife, rampant, and virtually unchecked.
Angela Alsobrooks, who won the seat for U.S. Senate, was our previous County Executive. PG has seen worse, but after receiving no response from her office when a tree from County property fell in our yard, and after seeing one add from her opponent, I made a decision. I am *never* impressed by political adds on TV. But there are exceptions, I suppose, to everything. Her opponent? Former Governor Larry Hogan....a Republican.
And not just any Republican. His father, Larry Hogan, Sr., was the only Republican on the Judiciary Commitee to vote yes on *all three* articles of impeachment against Nixon. He, and not Alsobrooks, promised to oppose "the dangerous Project 2025", and I strongly believe he would have done it, too. Plus, his track record speaks for itself, which would take another long paragraph. My wife, who is impressed by very little, saw his office in action during Covid, and not just about Covid per se, either.
From Angela? Not one peep about Project 2025. Talk about strange...but not really surprising. It wasn't really that difficult a decision, and I'd do it again without a moment's hesitation.
Not that I agreed with Hogan on everything; I didn't. But integrity among political leaders is rare today, from either party, and Larry, Jr. has it.
Between that experience, and the 2024 election, and reading Chris Armitage's blueprint for federalism, I have decided that as far as possible, no one gets my vote who does not at least respond to a letter, an email, or a phone call. So when one of the candidates for our Council District dropped a flyer in my mailbox with lingo crusading against corruption in South PG County, with a promise that phones are answered, and then responded to my email, he had my vote right then.
And, in the department of "there are no coincidences", I got to meet him at an outdoor church service on Father's Day, two days before the election - unplanned and unexpectedly. He was talking with my pastor, who just days before, on a one-on-one, I had shared some more thoughts and where we were both coming from, where socio-political issues and matters of faith meet, separation of church and state, and so forth.
My candidate got the second most votes in the primary (which, in this case, means the general election), but it was for one district seat only, and it was a distant second. But it's important that people like this keep running. I'll be writing and keeping in touch with him, for sure.
I find myself, per the above commentary and my experience, edging closer to your daughter's position - doing and supporting the work, supporting candidates who we know are about something substantial beyond mere talk, in that order. I know that's where you come from too: organize first, vote as priority 1a. The difference is, I think, more of an emphasis above all, on the *doing* what we know is right and needs to be done regardless of whether anyone else is doing it, or the "odds" of success, or of any recognition for it. I am encouraged by the tone of the debate you two are having, and the fact that you're even having that kind of discussion. It may "only" be a discussion, and far from sufficient in and of itself. But by God, we have to start somewhere, and the best and only place we can start is where we live.
If you have read this far (and I have a feeling from experience that you will at some point) - thank you. Keep up the good work; you are doing something, and it's not nothing. And the good "point-counterpoint".
The Hogan vote doesn't surprise me as much as it might have a few years ago. Integrity is rare enough now that when you find it you follow it across party lines and explain yourself later. That's not confusion. That's paying attention.
The PG County corruption piece is something my daughter would recognize immediately. One party control without accountability produces the same results everywhere. Doesn't matter if it's red or blue. The tree falls in your yard and nobody calls back. That's not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. That's a power problem.
What you said at the end is where I've been landing too. Start where you live. The council candidate who answered his email. The pastor. The outdoor service on Father's Day. That's not small. That's actually what it looks like when it works.
Thank you for sitting with this long enough to write all of that. I mean that.
Your daughter bears witness daily through experience. A keen awareness she has of the missing components. Many bear witness by reading about those experiences, and fortunately for them, they do not have to experience them firsthand. I also see that your daughter cares deeply about helping those who need her help. I certainly hope that "we the people" can produce some leadership prospects that are genuine with intention; to achieve the change that must arrive to include all of us; no exceptions. No excuses. Life should not have such an exorbitant price tag simply to exist.
Democratic socialism isn't a bad word, or a scary idea. It *is* democratic. The Democratic Party needs to get with the times. The times call for change in candidates.
Your daughter is brilliant.
“That is not bad luck. That is a party that does not know how to talk to the people it needs.”
“You sound like someone who has been told to be realistic for so long that realistic started to feel like wisdom.”
I think I might love her more than I love you now 😉
She's going to see this and it's going to go straight to her head.
And honestly, fair. She earned those lines. I was just the one sitting across the table taking notes.
The realistic as wisdom line is the one that got me too. Still getting me. I've been thinking about it for three days and I don't have a good answer for it yet.
Don't tell her you love her more than me. She already thinks she's winning.
She doesn't think she's winning.
She knows she is😄
That’s for sure😀
She is on the right side of this.
You just described the trap exactly. And I don't have a clean way out of it.
Newsom is what the party produces when it optimizes for optics. Good on camera. Sharp on social media. Completely fluent in the language of change without any real intention of disturbing the people who fund him. My daughter would say he's the system's best defense against itself.
And yet. Him versus MAGA and I'm in the same booth you are.
The two years question is the hard one. I don't think you change the top of the ticket in two years. I think you change what's underneath it. School boards. City councils. State legislatures. The Mamdani model. Build from the ground up and make the ground impossible to ignore.
Whether that's fast enough I genuinely don't know. I hope you're proven wrong too.
Politically homeless- that’s a good description of how this 69-year old retiree identifies these days. With the exception of a handful of politicians I have lost respect for the Dems and haven’t had respect for most of the GOP since before I could vote. We have settled for the lesser of evils at the ballot box for too long. The ruling parties are too concerned about appeasing donors than actually legislating for the people they represent. My income is limited and I’ve decided I’m done squeezing donations out of my grocery budget until government starts working for people. So until some frozen day in hell, I guess. They could start earning trust and respect by raising the income cap on social security taxes, by feeding and housing children and parents who are barely getting by. By making sure people aren’t bankrupted by medical bills and codifying a path to universal healthcare. By honoring and enforcing the separation of church and state. And a dozen other basic human rights concerns. I’ll vote for a Democratic Socialist given the opportunity, at least through the primaries. I’ll probably suck it up on Election Day as I’ve done for years.
If this year’s elections are not invalidated, and if we actually have an election in 2028, I’m gonna bet we’ll see my state’s current Governor (Newsom) running for President. He says all the right things, just like they all do. Hell, he even goes head to head with Shitler on social media. But we all know that he is so deep in the pockets of the oligarchs that even if he somehow wins, very little will change on the ground. But if it’s him vs any of the MAGA’s at the end, I will have no choice but to vote for him. Voting for the third party will again be a vote for the fascists. That’s sad, but that’s reality. How do we change this in 2 years? I don’t think it can be done. But I hope I’m proven wrong.
I do too, and I am older than the Author is.
Thanks for sharing an important story. I appreciate it and hope that we can learn from it.
I want to take this opportunity to share an important reason why so many people deeply distrust the Democratic Party, at almost a cellular level. Most cannot even tell you why, yet they deeply distrust the party. Here is my explanation:
When the chips are down, the so-called party leadership turns its back on the very constituents it claims to represent. This goes back decades, and the Party Leadership has never done a thing to correct it. They have not even acknowledged it.
To understand what I am talking about, we need to go back to the National election of 1944: During the initial campaign for the office of President, the then Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, had HUGE popular support. He had demonstrated impeccable integrity, brilliance and creativity in solving difficult problems and that he was a fabulous representative of the people. Just what a real democracy needed.
He was running to be FDR's VP. Clearly, he was the people's choice by a massive margin. He should have been on the Democratic ticket.
But there was a problem: The Democratic Party leadership knew they could never control him. He would do what he believed was right, regardless of their agenda. So, they used dirty tricks at the last minute to keep him off the ticket. This came to a head in the final primary caucus. The dirty tricks they used to support the election and keep him off the ticket likely rose to the level of felonies. Instead, the Democratic Party leadership rammed Harry Truman down the throats of the people and lost the chance to elect a VP and eventually a president who likely would have gone down in history as one of the greatest presidents ever.
No real investigation ensued. (Harry Truman used his office to see to that.) And the Democratic Party leadership has never even acknowledged their obscene betrayal of their membership.
Unfortunately, this was NOT a lone incident.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders was clearly the people's choice. Again, because he was incorruptible and would always do what he believed to be right. Again, because the Democratic Party backroom leadership knew they could not control him, they sabotaged Bernie's primary campaign and tried to shove Hillary Clinton down our throats, instead. The people did NOT want her for very good reasons. So, the Democratic Party lost a critical election that had been in the bag. The entire country has since paid the price in the form of giving the current, putrid gasbag in the White House a foothold in the office of the Presidency.
If the Democratic Party had abided by the Will of the Peolple, we would be living in a very different country, and likely a different and better world.
Until the Democratic Party acknowledges their crimminal, anti-democratic behavior and cleans up their act, they will not have widespread trust and they will not be worthy of it.
You know your history. The Wallace story is real and most people have never heard it.
I'd push back gently on Bernie being clearly the people's choice. Hillary won more primary votes. The system was tilted, but the math is complicated.
Your core point though, when the party has had to choose between control and conscience it has chosen control, that one I can't argue with. And people feel it even when they can't name Henry Wallace.
Thank you for this.
You know your history, as well. I will return the favor and gently push back about Bernie Sanders and his campaign: Yes, Hillary got more votes. But I believe that was because of the dirty tricks that the so-called Democratic Leadership Council used to sabotage his campaign.
As you pointed out, they again chose control over conscience.
They refused to share their mailing lists with Bernie. They withheld campaign contributions that should have gone to his campaign. There are other dirty tricks that they likely engaged in, but no real investigation has ever been conducted. So, we don't know for sure. I also am not sure whether the dirty tricks the evidence proves are real, rise to the level of criminality, or were merely a gross breach of trust.
I would like to see a real, unbiased, and 100% transparent investigation.
If the Democratic Party wants to regain real, sustainable power, they need to acknowledge the breach of trust and set about repairing the trust.
You are correct, and you didn't even mention the relentless propaganda by Democratic pundits, establishment figures, "intelligensia", legacy media...who insisted that Bernie was "unelectable" (literally the exact same people who said this about Mamdani).
They preyed shamelessly on the Black community, all but shouting that Bernie was racist....leading directly to a lack of support by the Black community, as intended (that's your "math").
Anyone can spend an hour researching OpenSecrets.org and see the corporate donors who run the Democratic party.
Most of them are so busy insider trading and fundraising, it's a miracle that any work is done.
Even now, with the Oversight Committee constantly holding hearings about the Epstein files, what has changed? Who has been held accountable or referred for prosecution?
Let's look at Gilibrand, whose only action during Trump 2.0 has been to lobby for the Genius Act, which eliminates any real scrutiny or regulation over crypto...partly because she's funded by crypto billionaires, partly because her son's new investment firm will directly benefit from the legislation.
I could go on and on. Tom's daughter was kind about establishment Democrats' complicity. They're not just out of touch or in a DC bubble, they're making choices that benefit themselves and their donors, with a few bones thrown to the 90%.
Of course, you are spot on. I could have written for many pages about the corruption, actions, and betrayals committed by the so-called Democratic Party leadership over the last 80 years or so. There is no shortage of egregious acts to cite.
The point I wanted to make is that the arrogant elites who really run the party have lost the trust of much of their constituents, and the party itself has not done jack shit to acknowledge this, let alone make amends and change their ways.
1,000%.
We need only look at the recent audit debacle as a stunning corroboration of your point.
"In 2016, Bernie Sanders was clearly the people's choice."
When I read your story of 1944, I almost jumped to note that was exactly what happened in 2016.
Thanks for beating me to it!
I think it was FDR who said something like, "When faced with a choice between a Republican and a Democrat who acts like a Republican, the voters will pick the real one every time."
That is absolutely not true, sorry. I just can't fight this propaganda mill against Dems anymore. They do everything well. Impeached Trump twice, exposed him via J6 and abetted the DOJ prosecution w evidence for the cases only to be turned out and rendered powerless - yes POWERLESS - by voters. DOJ was steamrolled by courts not incompetence or loss of will. And yet the lie is that they were cowardly. They NEVER abandoned issues - they were turned OUT for their successes. I can't fight the lies anymore. If one believes the propaganda mill, we are doomed.
Your comment, or perhaps reply to my comment, is interesting. Here is a question I have for you: What part of my comment above is not true? Did the Democratic Party leadership not use dirty tricks to keep Henry Wallace off the ticket in 1944? Did they not repeat their anti-democratic behavior with regard to Bernie's campaign in 2016?
If I am wrong or am spreading propaganda, I really want to know. Please show me.
Your analysis is a good one and worth chewing on for quite a while. However, I want to make a technical historical correction. Henry Wallace was the Vice President during FDR‘s third term. Prior to that he was FDR‘s secretary of agriculture. The Democratic Party leaders with FDR‘s agreement or acquiescence, decided that Wallace needed to be dropped from the ticket if FDR was planning to run a fourth time. The leaders knew that FDR‘s health was fragile and that he would likely not survive the term though I bet they didn’t think he would only survive for 2 1/2 months after being inaugurated for the fourth time. But despite these technical corrections, your analysis is very good.
Your daughter is a blessing in countless ways.
Yes she is!!
"I think she was brilliant. I think she was the most prepared candidate in modern history and she was treated with a contempt that had everything to do with the fact that she was a woman…"
Let's not get into how she treated Sanders the same way the electorate treated her. Not because he was a "woman" — no, Sanders was much worse: he was a socialist.
I'll bet you guys split that vote. You voted for Hillary. Your daughter was one of the 0.5% who voted for Sanders anyway — which, as everyone told me when I told them who I voted for, was really just a vote for †rump.
The "two-party system" is the problem. You are only allowed to vote for corporate power. I voted for the only anti-growth, anti-corporate, anti-genocide party, and we were THIRD! With 0.5% of the vote.
Helen Caldicott says, "The US has a one-party system with two right wings." Not really much difference at the polls than Russia.
Sanders had absolute equality and was never abused . She certainly did not steal HIS data and use it. Whitewashing the most ineffective member of Congress ever is absurd. Voters just can't stand him. The role of Congress is LEGISLATION to help us protect our rights, realize our dreams. Bernie is racist, anti immigrant, misogynist and we all saw it. HRC never abused him. She once embarrassed him asking IN THE DEBATE, "What have I ever done for Wall Street", and he stood gawping because he had no answer. She never once had abetted Wall Street. She didn't lie about him, didn't use his past, his vile essays on rape, didn't go for the jugular. And he lost because we all saw how vapid and useless he is. He lied. He took help from Russia. He's despicable. And she didn't maximize what she COULD have done to him. He did it to himself.
You are so lucky to have such a clear thinking daughter. I've been a Democrat since shaking JFK's hand in 1962. No more. I'm totally in sync with your daughter's position. There is no time left politically or ecologically for incrementalism. We must change or we will perish. Thank you for a great article.
You shook JFK's hand and you're still paying attention sixty some years later. That's not nothing. That's everything actually.
I am lucky. I don't always tell her that but I am.
The incrementalism argument is the one I keep losing. I keep looking for the place where slow and steady wins and she keeps showing me the clock. I don't have a good answer for the clock.
Thank you for being here. And for still caring after all of it.
I totally agree!
I read this in my email inbox. You brought me back to Substack just so I could respond. I have been avoiding Substack and most of the news for quite a while because it causes me so much despair. This is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this platform. I would hope that a lot of people will read it, especially those of our generation. I’m 73 and I’ve spent a lot of the last year coming around to your daughter’s way of thinking. She’s absolutely right. We’re going to fuck this up unless we change our minds.
I’ve been working on a project for a while now about why our participation rate in our democracy is so low. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no political party that represents the needs and values of most of the people. The democrats have been losing voters for years because they quit representing the values and needs of the voters and the party today has quit listening to the base.
We need to change. We need to accept that doing the right thing may mean short term losses. And that may lead to long term gains. It’s time for us old folks to embrace the younger generation. They are right about a lot of things.
Thank you for coming back. Genuinely.
What you said about despair, I know that feeling. I think a lot of us our age have been managing it by looking away, and I understand why. Sometimes you just need to not know for a while.
But what you're doing with that project matters. You put your finger on exactly what my daughter keeps saying and what I keep circling around. It's not just that people aren't voting. It's that the choice they're being offered doesn't feel like a choice. That's not apathy. That's a rational response to a system that stopped asking what they needed.
The short term losses thing is the one I keep wrestling with. She'd say we've been avoiding short term losses for forty years and calling it strategy, and the long term is here now and it doesn't look great. I'm not all the way there yet. But I'm closer than I was before she sat down at my kitchen table.
Keep working on that project. I'd read it.
Thanks Tom! I think I’m actually going to write a piece about my project and how I’ve changed my mind about the people who don’t vote. I was very angry with them and wanted to blame them for the situation we’re in now. Instead, I now sympathize with them and question how much I am going to support the candidates that are in my district and in my state. I still believe in the democratic process, but if we don’t make a lot of structural changes, we’re going to lose it.
The present "two-party system" is short by at least one more party.
Both the Republicrats and the Demicans are pro-growth, pro-corporate, pro-genocide.
I can't, in good conscience, vote for either.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve voted for the democrats for my entire life and while I won’t go so far as to say all those votes were wasted, I feel like I’m almost as responsible for the shape the country is in as the republicans. If the party can’t grow and fully embrace the progressive wing of the party, it’s time to abandon it. I feel right now like even if we win this fall, we’re still going to lose where it counts.
I've "wasted my vote" on third parties for a couple decades, since Ralph Nader first ran.
But I vote in ultra-Blue Washington, where Kamala took almost 60% of the vote. So no guilt here!
I don’t consider anyone voting their conscience to be wasting their vote. I’m coming to believe that voting for the lessor of two evils is still voting for evil. We’ve got to change the system! Let’s all rally around those who are calling for a new constitutional convention!
I've been making that argument for years!
The US has the most-dated constitution in the world at this point. It still says that a black person is counted as 3/5ths of a white one! (Albeit "fixed" in the 12th-14th amendments.)
But certainly, such an exercise would require much less polarization than we have these days.
That's quite the discussion dad. She's got a sharp eye. I know the housing issues as I am a long time volunteer and leader in low income housing in the Quad Cities (Humility Homes and Services). It's going to be a tough few years. On the positive side, we're breaking ground on our first new build in a week. Will be great low income family housing!!
She does. And she'd love you for what you're doing in the Quad Cities.
Breaking ground on new build low income housing in this climate takes real stubbornness. The good kind. That's exactly the kind of thing she talks about when she says the work matters even when the system doesn't make it easy. People just doing it anyway.
Congratulations on the groundbreaking. That's a big deal. Those families are going to live in something that exists because you showed up for years before anyone broke ground on anything.
That's the whole argument right there.
Tom, I'm a Boomer about your age and I agree with your daughter 100%. The system is fucked and the corporate Democrats like #Chuckthecuck and Jeffries are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to keep the donor class happy. We need a new FDR to burn it down and rebuild the right way. I think a lot of people voted for trump just because they thought maybe he would make a change. And he did, just in the wrong possible way. The New York primary showed that people are pissed off at the corporate Democrats and they had better read the handwriting on the wall. I would love to have a drink with you and your daughter and thank her for doing the impossible day after day. Another great essay.
I think a lot of people reached the point where they knew the old arrangement wasn't working anymore. The tragedy is that anger, by itself, isn't a compass. It can point toward reform or ruin, and we've seen plenty of ruin.
My daughter would probably agree with you that too many Democratic leaders still seem more concerned with managing decline than confronting the forces that created it. The New York primary felt less like an election result and more like a warning flare. People are tired of being told to be patient while their lives get harder.
And if we ever do have that drink, I suspect my daughter would spend most of it explaining exactly where both parties went wrong while the rest of us tried to keep up. She's doing work that few people have the stomach for, and I'm proud of her every day.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the kind words.
John, I'm 64. Voted for Democrats since Carter in 1980. I think we need AOC in 2028. I have reasons that I'll get into if you're interested. But I think if she runs, she'll win. And that will start the turnaround. Maybe institute a Brand New Deal.
I'll be 75 soon. I agree with your daughter. it’s time for system reform. And we should allow younger folks to choose their way. It's their future now. Maybe we should even http://ad.itthat we have failed, though with decently good intentions.
That last line is the hard one. Good intentions matter. They also aren't enough. Our generation has had trouble holding both of those things at the same time.
Letting go of the wheel is not a natural instinct for people like us. But I think you're right that it's time.
Happy almost birthday.
My Mother is the Boomer who believed Bill Clinton was a great man. I am your daughter. I still remember how angry I was when Clinton 'triangulated" and signed welfare reform, gutting a program that delivered actual benefits to actual poor people. That was the day I understood that the Democrats are not the side of the people, not really.....they just soften up the brutality a bit to make it more palatable to Boomers.
Your daughter is right. About all of it. Corporate Democrats attack Mamdani because he has the audacity to get real about the harms that Boomers have allowed since Clinton. Harms thst they can look away from because they are not directly affected by them.
Harms that mean at 63, I am a worker in a gig economy with no safety net, no healthcare, and likely no social security. Which, BTW, is money I have paid into the system for 45 years. My Mom has a pension, healthcare, social security, a home she owns outright....Im not saying she didn't work for those things because she did - she.worked hard for them. But she also looked the other way while corporate Dems chipped away at what was possible for me and your daughter and your granddaughter. Now, there's nothing left and you Boomers do not understand what it means to live with what you've left behind.
What struck me about your comment is that you're not talking about ideology. You're talking about lived experience.
My generation was told that if we worked hard, played by the rules, and voted for the "responsible" people, the system would more or less take care of itself. Your generation did those things and discovered the rules had changed while nobody was looking.
I don't think most Boomers set out to leave their children and grandchildren with less. But I do think too many of us accepted compromises that looked reasonable in the moment and devastating in hindsight. Welfare reform. Deregulation. The steady transfer of risk from institutions to individuals. Piece by piece, what had once been a social contract became a personal burden.
What I hear in your comment isn't resentment. It's grief. Grief for a future that was promised and then quietly taken away.
And that's exactly why conversations like the one between my daughter and me matter. The point isn't to assign blame. The point is to finally tell the truth about what happened and what was lost.
Tom, this is exactly right. It is grief. My Mom made a lot of money in the stock market, so she looked away when pensions were replaced with 401Ks - though she kept HER defined benefit pension when the system offered her the choice to go one way or the other. I was never offered the choice. It was all "put your money in the big casino and hope it's still there when you retire". HA HA HA - housing bust in 2008 took everything I had and now I don't have enough in there to live for a year on it.
Triangulation - i.e. corporate-friendly policy with the brutal edges sanded down - started under Clinton and never stopped. It happened under Obama. It happened under Biden. And now we have corporate Dems (an aide to Hakeem Jeffries, no less...) going to work for Palantir. It's just more of the same - taking the side of big money while watching the rest of us slip further and further away down the slippery slope. Now they want to call the money that I paid into Social Security for 45 years an entitlement - as though I am a freeloader for wanting my damn money back.
I'm not mad that my Mom is having a comfortable retirement - she worked hard all her life and she should have a comfortable retirement. But I am mad that she and my dad never really listened all those years ago when I tried to tell them that what Clinton was doing was chipping away at the social contract little by little. Their stocks were doing great, they were making lots of money, and they thought the party would go on forever. The party is over now and all that is left is precarity and corporate Dems who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, much less do something about it. I will be in that first generation to do less well - by a LOT - than my parents.
I love Mamdani because he SEES OUR STRUGGLE. He does not give a rat's ass about corporate Dems and I chortled the other night when Jeffries tried to take him to the woodshed about his endorsements and failed. Jeffries can't hear the sounds of people drowning over the whoosh of corporate wallets opening to buy his vote. Mamdani hears the people LOUD AND CLEAR and he's trying to do something about it. I would throw Jeffries out IN A NEW YORK MINUTE if NYC is where I voted. Schumer, Jeffries - the whole lot of them have betrayed us again and again and again. Sure, they're better than the alternative but that's not saying much. Will I vote D? Or course, it's better than the alternative. Do I expect them to improve my life? No, not at all.
Again, I say. YOUR DAUGHTER IS RIGHT.
Thank You Melissa
"You can spend a lifetime being on the right side of history and still be on the wrong side of the room." That line alone is a Heavy Round. You captured the exact structural collapse we are all trying to map right now. The working class is politically homeless, and the daughter isn't radical; she's just the only one looking at the actual math. Thank you for sending this across the wire. The signal is converging.
Labels outlast their usefulness. There will never be Republicans or Democrats again. The times call for something else. In fact socialism has no roots in our system. We do have room for progressives and also a realm for reactionaries. To me the language I use is important because it makes and explains our world. Each language is also its own universe so terms like left and right coming from Europe are equally meaningless in a country that superficially experienced the expression of some exponents but not the soul of these ideological constructs.
In this our outdated America there is room for populism. That we have a history of. When entangled with Racism, we can also get White Christian Nationalism, and that is where real social pathologies appear. Lurking in the shadows of an unresolved Civil War are a Second Confederacy and the erosion of the Rule of Law. Now there are two huge failures of the historical political system.
Having lived in the violence of a real left inspired brutal guerrilla war that lasted half a century abroad and still living violence from a real right in this country (in my State black men have a greater chance of dying while being stopped by the police than white men do, and have), I abhor violence. And yet I study conflict.
Germane to this discussion is that the more inroads people who believe in social justice through economic means (Democratic Socialists DS) have, the more of a fringe they are made to be. In our context they can generate local and possibly state-level change, but not national regime change and much less revolution. The system is too unwieldy for that. Even if Congress was DS, unless the Judiciary at all federal levels was, along with what will likely be a less Presidential executive, changing the Constitution is akin to climbing Everest. I cannot do it. But some of us can, and through them all of us can.
I do not give my Democrat or previous Liberal credentials away. But I have taken on many progressive ideas in my 63 years because either I changed with the world, or change would have passed me by. In what I do and where I am (the world of higher education) I inject ideas that can surprise me. I want to leave my co-learners uncomfortable as my faculty did with me. I am not more successful but the feedback over time is that at times the progressive bug has somehow gotten to them. I cannot hope for more. I believe.
But, the conversation between you and your daughter has a lot to sit with. Just not on a front porch with a glass of Jameson’s right now. But the issues, dreams and realities you raise are ones we need to take into the voting process with us. Because when we vote we do so not only for our pocketbooks. That is too simple. No we actually vote for the world we would like to live in.
This is the comment that is going to stay with me longest.
You're right that the labels outlast their usefulness. My daughter and I spent a whole night on arguing inside a vocabulary that was built somewhere else for conditions that don't entirely apply here. Left and right from Europe. Socialist from a tradition we never fully had. We use the words because we don't have better ones yet.
What you said about the Second Confederacy and the unresolved Civil War is the thing that doesn't get said plainly enough. We keep treating it as history. It isn't history. It's the current argument with different vocabulary.
And the idea that you inject uncomfortable ideas into your co-learners and measure success in feedback years later, that's exactly what my daughter does. She's not waiting for the system to change. She's changing the people who are going to change the system. That takes the kind of patience I'm not sure I have.
I wish you had a porch and a glass of Jameson right now. This conversation deserves it
For sure one of your better ones! It hits home. EVERY Democrat in the country should read this.
Amazing piece! I will finish reading tomorrow. I hope this gets the attention it deserves
Like always when I sit with your writing, I sit. There is more that is worth responding to and participating in than is even possible in this short space. The different vantage points from here in the Comments section are needed, too. Here's one more, which I hope you and your daughter can maybe sit for.
Prince George’s County, Maryland, suburban DC where I've lived for over 25 years has problems your daughter could relate to all the way from Boise, and across vast swaths of cultural and geographic distances. This is, by all accounts that I am aware of, the wealthiest majority Black county in the country. My wife and I practically live on top of Andrews AFB, where President Fill-in-the-Blank has flown in and out of for decades. PG County is probably number one in a lot of other ways I'm not even aware of, and not all of it is in a good way. It is a Democratic one-party state, and corruption is rife, rampant, and virtually unchecked.
Angela Alsobrooks, who won the seat for U.S. Senate, was our previous County Executive. PG has seen worse, but after receiving no response from her office when a tree from County property fell in our yard, and after seeing one add from her opponent, I made a decision. I am *never* impressed by political adds on TV. But there are exceptions, I suppose, to everything. Her opponent? Former Governor Larry Hogan....a Republican.
And not just any Republican. His father, Larry Hogan, Sr., was the only Republican on the Judiciary Commitee to vote yes on *all three* articles of impeachment against Nixon. He, and not Alsobrooks, promised to oppose "the dangerous Project 2025", and I strongly believe he would have done it, too. Plus, his track record speaks for itself, which would take another long paragraph. My wife, who is impressed by very little, saw his office in action during Covid, and not just about Covid per se, either.
From Angela? Not one peep about Project 2025. Talk about strange...but not really surprising. It wasn't really that difficult a decision, and I'd do it again without a moment's hesitation.
Not that I agreed with Hogan on everything; I didn't. But integrity among political leaders is rare today, from either party, and Larry, Jr. has it.
Between that experience, and the 2024 election, and reading Chris Armitage's blueprint for federalism, I have decided that as far as possible, no one gets my vote who does not at least respond to a letter, an email, or a phone call. So when one of the candidates for our Council District dropped a flyer in my mailbox with lingo crusading against corruption in South PG County, with a promise that phones are answered, and then responded to my email, he had my vote right then.
And, in the department of "there are no coincidences", I got to meet him at an outdoor church service on Father's Day, two days before the election - unplanned and unexpectedly. He was talking with my pastor, who just days before, on a one-on-one, I had shared some more thoughts and where we were both coming from, where socio-political issues and matters of faith meet, separation of church and state, and so forth.
My candidate got the second most votes in the primary (which, in this case, means the general election), but it was for one district seat only, and it was a distant second. But it's important that people like this keep running. I'll be writing and keeping in touch with him, for sure.
I find myself, per the above commentary and my experience, edging closer to your daughter's position - doing and supporting the work, supporting candidates who we know are about something substantial beyond mere talk, in that order. I know that's where you come from too: organize first, vote as priority 1a. The difference is, I think, more of an emphasis above all, on the *doing* what we know is right and needs to be done regardless of whether anyone else is doing it, or the "odds" of success, or of any recognition for it. I am encouraged by the tone of the debate you two are having, and the fact that you're even having that kind of discussion. It may "only" be a discussion, and far from sufficient in and of itself. But by God, we have to start somewhere, and the best and only place we can start is where we live.
If you have read this far (and I have a feeling from experience that you will at some point) - thank you. Keep up the good work; you are doing something, and it's not nothing. And the good "point-counterpoint".
I read every word. Twice.
The Hogan vote doesn't surprise me as much as it might have a few years ago. Integrity is rare enough now that when you find it you follow it across party lines and explain yourself later. That's not confusion. That's paying attention.
The PG County corruption piece is something my daughter would recognize immediately. One party control without accountability produces the same results everywhere. Doesn't matter if it's red or blue. The tree falls in your yard and nobody calls back. That's not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. That's a power problem.
What you said at the end is where I've been landing too. Start where you live. The council candidate who answered his email. The pastor. The outdoor service on Father's Day. That's not small. That's actually what it looks like when it works.
Thank you for sitting with this long enough to write all of that. I mean that.
I know you do, Tom. And that goes both ways. All the best, all God's best and godspeed, to you and your daughter, and everyone in your circle.
Your daughter bears witness daily through experience. A keen awareness she has of the missing components. Many bear witness by reading about those experiences, and fortunately for them, they do not have to experience them firsthand. I also see that your daughter cares deeply about helping those who need her help. I certainly hope that "we the people" can produce some leadership prospects that are genuine with intention; to achieve the change that must arrive to include all of us; no exceptions. No excuses. Life should not have such an exorbitant price tag simply to exist.