What Is To Be Done? Chronicling Our Future, as It Is Being Built.
The contest to define America's future begins once more. Recording what people are trying to do, as they are trying to do it.
Kirk Douglas (left) and Robert Arthur in the 1951 Billy Wilder movie Ace in the Hole, the darkest and also the best film ever made about the American media. In the film, local media operations were villains. Now they’re high on the list of potential civic heroes. (Getty Images.)
On the first day of this year, I started an ‘Election Countdown’ series, aimed at chronicling what Americans knew about the political choice ahead of them, before anyone knew how that choice would turn out.
Now we know.
The obvious next question for many people is: What do we do now? None of us can know what the period just ahead will mean for our communities, our country, our world. That outcome is in our collective hands. It will depend on the upcoming struggle between the forces of division and resentment in our public life, on the one hand, and what since 18611 Americans call have called “the better angels of our nature,” on the other.
The summary of the rest of this post is that I’m planning soon to keep an informal running list, updated and loosely categorized, of the ideas and possibilities for civic harmony, progress, and re-connection that people are discovering, and where and how these are paying off. It will be a new series on what comes after the election, after we counted our way down to November 5.
The plan is to note what people are trying to do, as they are trying to do it—and before any of us can be sure how this chapter in national life will play out. And as was the case more than a decade ago, when Deb and I did similar reporting all around the country for the ‘American Futures’ series in The Atlantic and the Our Towns book (and movie), I’d expect the most surprising and promising developments to be happening not in DC but at the statewide and community level, where US civic innovation has generally begun.
What’s the point of trying to follow and catalog such efforts? For the long run, it is to add to the real-time record of our era, written from behind our veil of ignorance about where things will eventually lead.2 More immediately, I hope to help connect—and hearten—people trying in their different ways to defend the America that I love.
A broad movement, already beginning.
With the impact of the election less than three weeks behind us, and Donald Trump’s second swearing-in less than nine weeks away, large numbers of people around the country have already begun preparing. They have been thinking, talking, writing, and organizing to advance the values they (and I) believe are both broadly universal and distinctively American.
A few examples, from many possibilities:
The press. Even before the election, many individuals and organizations drew up ‘What if?’ checklists, for a possible next age of Trump. On election eve, Dan Froomkin of ‘Press Watchers’ published his ‘be prepared’ manifesto for the media. Courtney Lewis, of the Institute for Nonprofit News, has an important new piece on reconsidering “news as a public good.” At CJR, Feven Merid has a useful story on how journalistic re-inventions of the past offer lessons now.
The states. In California, the governor and state legislature have already taken steps to protect the state’s ambitious environmental and civic goals. As the NYT put it in a headline last month, the state has been moving fast to “Trump-proof” its policies. Given polling data showing that most people don’t consider California really “American”—even though one American in every eight lives there—why should those California policies matter? My WIRED piece addressing this exact question is temporarily available without the usual paywall. I hope you’ll read it, and be encouraged by it. Leaders of other states have spoken up to similar effect.
Possibly bi-partisan national measures. Conceivably anti-trust could draw both right- and left-wing support. One illustration I’ve just seen: In The Washington Monthly, former Congressman Tom Malinowski argues that the best way to deal with today’s anti-reality information environment is to take on directly the tech companies that now dominate our information flow. The same magazine is preparing a detailed action plan—on the national, statewide, local, and individual level. Other publications and organizations are sure to follow.
Immunizing democracy. Scholars of authoritarianism and the inner rot of democracy, like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, have prepared checklists for fortifying democracy’s immune system, knowing that plague years are ahead.
Snyder’s “Twenty Lessons for Fighting Tyranny” is worth re-examining almost daily. Number one on his list is the best known: “Do not obey in advance.” News organizations should bear that in mind before describing grossly unqualified appointees as merely “controversial.” Conceivably US Senate Republicans did bear it in mind in saying No to one grotesquely unsuitable nominee, Matt Gaetz. (We’ll see whether “Vichy Republicans” are emboldened by this step to stand up against other grotesquely wrong choices, like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Sebastian Gorka. Or whether they consider their moment of backbone one-and-done.)
But Snyder’s list also includes important individual guides for daily life. Number 15: “Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay.” Number 19: “Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come.” So many people are asking, But what can I do? Actions like these are a start.Learning from our own history. This week I heard one of America’s best-known public historians remind a small audience that our own country has also been through extremely dark and anti-democratic periods, even after the official end of slavery with the Civil War.
When the country has come out of its worst phases, the historian noted, it has consistently been thanks to “bottom-up” movements of reinvention and reform. Ideas, ideals, and examples from around the country have prepared the way for big policy changes at the top. The anti-slavery and Abolitionist movements started out loosely connected and localized. The multiple reform movements of the late 1800s—women’s rights, labor rights, anti-Jim Crow, pro-conservation, anti-trust, many more—prepared for top-level policy changes under Teddy Roosevelt, and then again under FDR. The civil rights activists of the 1950s led to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
At the end of her talk the historian reminded us: If the country is now to protect its values, this is where hope will be reborn. Once again city by city. State by state. One small organization connecting with others. One person who stands up for principle, and gives heart to the next.
A version of this message is what Deb and I tried to convey in the Our Towns book, which after nearly five years of reporting we began writing during the week when Donald Trump was first sworn in. This is part of the book’s ending, in words that are more innocent-sounding than would be possible in 2024, but I think also newly relevant:
When the national mood after the first Gilded Age changed to favor reform, possibilities that had been tested, refined, and made to work in various ‘laboratories of democracy’ were at hand. After our current Gilded Age, the national mood will change again. When it does, a new set of ideas and plans will be at hand. We’ve seen them being tested in towns we never would have suspected, by people who would never join forces in the national capital but work together ‘at home.’…
Until the country’s mood does change, the people who have been reweaving the national fabric will be more effective if they realize how many other people are working toward the same end.
The “national mood” has indeed changed since we wrote those words—twice. Four years ago, the electorate removed Donald Trump. Now it has brought him back again. We cannot tell yet whether what has just happened is “the” decisive turn for America’s future. Or one more of the country’s many turns toward darkness, which will ultimately be reversed. Through what we do—each of us, every day, in our communities around the country—we will determine, starting now, which it will be.
A simple next step anyone can take.
Where is this going in practical terms?