The great problem of the human condition is both A) immediately solvable and B) completely impossible to solve. The solution: if all 8.2 billion human beings on the planet all agreed, and meant it, to stop being cruel to each other, to stop being greedy and venal, to love each other as themselves, to help each other out across all gulfs of culture and distance, and to never shoot another human being again, some 90% of all the world’s problems would vanish overnight. Most problems of diplomacy and ethics and criminal justice would disappear, and the rest of our problems, of housing and food and mental health support and disease and climate, would become problems of science and logistics, not problems for philosophy. Wars would cease immediately, resources could be happily distributed from places of overwhelming plenty to places of dire poverty, and life would be paradisical.
This is, of course, completely impossible. Human beings won’t do this. Call it original sin, call it Moloch, call it some remnant of evolutionary biology, call it the Hobbesian natural state of human beings, call it the influence of the Devil, call it whatever you like. If even some small percentage of human beings defects from our utopian agreement, the whole thing falls apart, and suddenly we need laws and militaries and all the rest.
And yet! And yet. History overflows with examples of times when groups of people have gotten together and made things better. These things did not become perfect, and they were not improved perfectly, and the people who improved these things were themselves far from perfect, but things have been made better, despite dire odds and poisonous apathy and terrible violence.
I’ve been thinking about this since I got back from my honeymoon a few weeks ago, which we spent driving from Maryland to New Orleans and back again, stopping at many exciting places on the way. Among those places were the battlefields at Vicksburg and Shiloh, major sites of the American war against slavery, and the Memphis and Birmingham civil rights museums, which documented the great mid-20th-century struggle for civil rights for African-Americans. I did all these things as some 77,000,000 of my countrymen decided to pull the lever for Donald Trump, either in endorsement of or indifference towards his many manifest failings and his promise to cause abject suffering everywhere he goes.
I wept, I drank, apparently I ranted and preached at length to Julia in the patch of grass near our hotel as we smoked cigars. I say “apparently” because I was far too drunk to remember this portion of the evening, having spent the time immediately previous to this gorging myself on crab boil and Hennessy margaritas. I also gave a dumb, drunken speech at the end of the night of November 8, 2016, as I vaguely recall; this showcases in me at least some virtue of consistency.
But in the ensuing weeks I have found myself turning my mind back towards the things I saw in Memphis and Vicksburg and Birmingham; those museums and monuments to the great Movements of times past. There was a time in this country when we allowed people to own other people, and, seeing this great evil, many men and women, statesmen and writers and ordinary people and thinkers and zealots, bound themselves together in loose cells riven by internecine strife, and they did Great Works. They smuggled people away from enslavement and moved them to places of relative freedom; they pressured the places of power and preached in the streets and fed the hungry and strove mightily against this great scourge, until eventually a war was fought and the lash was abolished. This group saw laws passed and slaves freed and wars won and the American Congress bang the Constitution into a shape better in keeping with its stated purposes.
Then, nearly a century later, when it became clear how badly the inheritors of this Great Work had failed to live up to its mighty promise, another group of women and men, college students and old sharecroppers and lawyers and preachers and schoolteachers and housewives and every other kind of ordinary persons bound themselves together in loose cells, riven always by internecine strife, and they did Great Works. They thrust the injustice of Jim Crow into the spotlight and down the gullet of every complacent person in the country; they made such a nuisance of themselves on buses and at lunch counters and in the streets that eventually, like the persistent widow, they saw laws passed and schools desegregated and made the Supreme Court bang the Constitution into a shape better in keeping with its stated purposes.
And no, none of these things are fixed; all is still broken; the crooked has not yet been made straight. But people, gathered into loosely organized cells, riven always by internecine strife, bound themselves together and made things better. We must do so again.
For we now face many problems. (So has it always been, so shall it always be.) The problems we face are, again, many, but the big ones boil down into three categories:
Our people keep electing fascists. Vast swaths of the American public keep entrusting the seats of power to wannabe grifter dictators who promise vast cruelty directed towards the powerless and/or anybody who annoys them.
Our economic system has continued to fail us, moving power and money into the hands of a vanishingly small number of greedy idiots and away from the people who do all the real work.
Our callous treatment of the environment has reached such a point of inflection as to create ecological devastation on a planetary scale, causing tremendous human suffering, and promising to create even more.
These three problems are different, but linked. They can be, in some sense, understood to all be the same problem, listed above as #2. For surely the environmental catastrophe is caused in large part by our capitalist need to grow at all costs, our unwillingness to ever just live within our means; our peculiar decision to structure our entire economic system on investor returns, thereby incentivizing our entrepreneurs to behave like sociopaths. Surely also #1, the return of fascism, is linked to the ways in which our capitalist society has so radically failed the working class of this country, and so incentivized a portion of the middle class to prioritize their “business interests” over all else, as to drive these voters into the arms of the grifter fascists of the modern age. (Note that this is an explanation, not an excuse. There is no excuse for cheerfully placing Trump and his gaggle of greedy lickspittles anywhere near positions of power.)
The Democratic Party is clearly not going to save us. They are now 1:2 in Presidential elections against a semi-sentient pile of slobbering ooze in the rough shape of a man. Given control of 2/3 of the government after 2020, they proceeded to do some neat things, but as far as I can tell they just sort of hoped that the problem of rising fascism would go away if they ignored it enough. (This is probably not fair. Surely many intelligent people worked very hard on many carefully consulted-upon strategies; surely things could have been worse; surely they had a difficult job and were facing a number of headwinds. But whatever: if you fuck up so badly that you lose the popular vote to Donald Trump, I am not inclined to try to make excuses for you or soothe your hurt feelings.)
I don’t have any clever Hot Takes as to why Harris lost the election, or what, specifically, the Democratic Party should do in 2026 and 2028, etc. My gut instinct is that they could try to propose an alternative vision of the future that’s more than just the words “not Trump” combined with a nebulous pitch to return to some mythical bundle of pre-2016 political norms, but maybe there’s some reason that’s obviously not going to work. Maybe there is a way to get the American People really excited about means-tested tweaks to the incentive structures of our healthcare system and I’m just too idealistic and overzealous to see it. Maybe it’s not their fault, maybe there was no victory possible, but it seems clear to me that the DNC’s bundle of strategies is simply not working, and I have little reason to think they are going to suddenly start working any time soon.
So we’re on our own. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote, and presumably vote Blue, in 2026 and 2028, but it does mean that we need to start thinking of that as an “also” alongside the main thing we are doing, which is banding together into loose cells riven by internecine strife, and thereby doing Great Works. If the government starts trying to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country (and thereby putting them in vast holding camps for indeterminate amounts of time, almost as though they are being concentrated somewhere) we need networks of people to help our undocumented neighbors mysteriously disappear whenever ICE comes calling. If the government starts imposing tariffs in such a scale as to drive inflation through the roof, we’re going to need networks of people to make sure our neighbors don’t starve to death. We need networks of people to help women travel across state lines to get essential healthcare; we need networks of people to help those who have been most affected by our rapacious treatment of our environment, both within and beyond our borders; we need networks of people to help watch courts and pay for legal fees when activists and protesters get targeted by the police; we need networks of people to unionize workplaces and support striking workers; we need networks of people to protect our trans neighbors who have been heinously scapegoated by the cowardly jackals of the Trump Cult; we need networks of people to produce candidates who will run for local office; we need networks of people to help educate our neighbors about basic civics and loving their own neighbors; we need networks of people to try to deprogram as many members of the Trump Cult as possible; we need networks of people, in short, to throw sand into the gears of the fascist machines and support our communities at every level. What we need, in even-shorter, is a movement.
I am far from the first person to point this out, and many organizations already do these things. But we’re going to need a massive increase in scale. American civic life has been devastated over the last hundred years or so, for many reasons that are beyond the scope of this post and not my expertise anyway. Many of us (certainly much of the Terminally Online) are disconnected from our local communities. The churches that formed the bedrock of the Civil Rights Movement and much of Abolitionism are depopulated and impotent, and many of them have been captured by the Trump Cult outright. The civic organizations and local political parties and mass-membership organizations of our past are in ruins. We are going to need to start dedicating our Wednesday nights to eating stale donuts and drinking bad coffee; we are going to need to start forming chapters again. We must get over the inherent hokeyness of these things, and get to work.
I am as guilty as anyone of not wanting to leave my house. I am not currently a member of much of anything. Please understand that I am lecturing myself more than anyone else. I am tired, at the end of a work day, and would much prefer to read books or watch TV while snuggling on the couch on my weekends. I am not much of an activist. I have allowed myself to slide into complacency by telling myself that I fight the government all day for a living. That’s true, but it’s not enough. I’ve got to join something.
So should you. Go find whichever little cell speaks to you: a church, a union, a Marxist reading group, a polycule of effective altruists, a D&D group that also volunteers on the weekends, a mutual aid society, whatever flavor best floats your boat. Coordinate on the Internet, yes, but also leave your house and get to work in your IRL community. Find an organization, and give them your time, your money, your elbow grease, whatever you have to spare. If no such cell exists in your vicinity, start something. You’re not going to fix everything, but you’re not going to fix anything on your own or just by doomscrolling on Bluesky. And no one is going to fix this country for us; we’re going to have to do it ourselves.
Is this all pretty generic? Yes. I am, as I said, not much of an activist; I do not claim to have any granular advice as to what, specifically, is going to be the most useful thing to do right now or right where you live. But I know that any improvement is going to have to start from the bottom, with average people working together. Go find a group, work together to suss out a useful thing you can do, and do that thing. Because the alternative is dystopia.
And because despite everything, I love this stupid country, and I am not willing to cede it to the craven politicians and illiterate tech CEOs and cowardly jackboot-fantasists that have seized its institutions. I intend to be of use. I hope you do, too.
I signed up online to volunteer for the local planned parenthood but haven’t heard from them!