In 2020, after four years of Donald Trump and in the midst of the divisiveness of a pandemic response, I wrote a book called Better Politics, Please.
It was hopeful.
Maybe naively hopeful.
On January 6, 2021, as the nation witnessed a violent attempt to overthrow an election—an unprecedented assault on our democracy—that hopeful book felt worse than naive.
Here we are four years later, barreling toward the 2024 election. Are our politics any better? Please?
Yesterday former President Donald Trump made a series of racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, challenging her biracial identity. I try to bite my tongue on the latest controversy of the day (and often fail), but this is just nuts.
It’s really wild (and kind of gross) to watch people struggle with race and not understand being biracial or mixed race in 2024. You can have more than one identity, and that’s not inconsistent. Claiming one of those identities does not negate the other.
White people claim multiple European roots and celebrate both—for St. Patrick’s Day it’s “I’m Irish!” and for Oktoberfest it’s “I’m German!”
Using my father’s last name does not mean I disowned my mother’s family. I can claim both.
Sometimes a blog like this works best as a time capsule. What did I think at the time? Our perspective tends to distort over time, so capturing an honest assessment in the moment is important for the sake of accuracy. With politics and history, doubly so. Everything seems inevitable in hindsight. But at the time it often didn’t feel that way.
And politics in the last month? Oof. From President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, to Biden withdrawing from the election and Vice President Kamala Harris taking the mantle—it’s been wild.
I could write about this for days, but nobody wants to read that. So I’m going to try to capture my thoughts in short, quick bursts. Here goes nothing…
In the summer of 2020 I published a book, Better Politics Please, yearning for a better way. Six months later January 6 happened and it felt like we were further than ever from coming together as Americans.
That book was written in hope, and I’ve felt awfully hopeless since.
Today I finished reading Barack Obama’s 2006 memoir, The Audacity of Hope. You have to read any political memoir, especially one released in the build up to a presidential run, with a grain of salt. There’s a lot of humble optimism and positive framing of life experience.
I’m not sure I have much to say on the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump. But this feels like one of those moments in history that we’ll be reliving and coming back to for decades to come. So I feel compelled to set down a few thoughts.
Every time we sing the national anthem we ask the question, “does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” amid the perilous fight and the bombs bursting in air.
These past two weeks, since violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capital, the answer has been in doubt. Not literally—Congress reconvened that same day and democracy carried on—but the spirit of the nation has been dazed as we suffered this terrible attack and reckoned with the deeper divide.
But today, Inauguration Day, as Lady Gaga belted out “The Star Spangled Banner” on the same Capital steps that two weeks ago held a swarming mob, it did the spirit of this nation well to see those broad stripes and bright stars so gallantly streaming.
Yesterday a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as a joint session of Congress attempted their Constitutionally mandated task of approving the electors for the next president. We spent yesterday watching the news unfold on Twitter and live TV.
I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m grieving for our nation.
There will be so many better opinions and commentaries and I hesitate to add to the noise, but I keep coming back to one thing that I think is important to emphasize.
An erosion of trust and a lack of common truth has imperiled our democracy.
Since 2020 has been such a dumpster fire, I thought it might help to recap a few accomplishments. One of the big ones is my latest book: Better Politics, Please.
The Idea
I came up with this idea before the pandemic struck, but really fleshing it out and making it happen was a total pandemic project. I needed that. I needed something to focus on in the midst of all the chaos.
A project I worked on for 15 years came to an end at the close of 2019. I went into 2020 not knowing what was next (whoa, boy howdy!). Better Politics, Please was a fun way to try something different. It gave me a lot of hope, despite a real lack of hope in the rest of the world.
I’m grateful for all the help that made this project a reality. I couldn’t have done it without the many people who supported it.
I’ve been too busy to blog. We’re in a weird time here in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and probably the most important presidential election in my lifetime. That pandemic has caused an economic scare (never mind, you know, death), and things are just weird.
I wrote about it a bit this spring to capture my feelings, and those days feel so long ago. So maybe it’s time to do it again. (This is going to be a bit scattered, so I apologize in advance for that.)
