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"Show the Way" by folk singer David Wilcox is a gift to this moment.
Love will show the way
Dec 09, 2024
I’ve spent nearly five decades encouraging citizens to move from debilitating despair to engaged activism. During all of this time, whenever I needed a break or a little inspiration, I turned to music, something I think more and more of us need these days. So it was a special treat to rediscover “Show the Way,” a song by folk singer David Wilcox and a particular gift to this moment. It begins:
“You say you see no hope.
You say you see no reason we should dream
that the world would ever change.
You say that love is foolish to believe
‘cause there'll always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your daydream,
put the fear back in your life”
Too many of us see no hope and feel the fear creeping back into our lives.
I heard warnings of that fear and hopelessness at the 2024 Miami Book Fair. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni spoke about his book “The Age of Grievance” and his concern about “our nation’s change from a fundamental optimism to a fundamental pessimism” and bemoaned “our love of simple answers that absolve us of any responsibility.”
Eddie Glaude Jr. — Princeton professor, MSNBC panelist and author of “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For” — warned that President-election Donald Trump “gives a permission structure for folks to hate and blame others for their condition.” Journalist and author of “We Are Home” Ray Suarez cautioned that “President-elect Trump is offering recycled hatred from the earliest time in our country” and worried that “threats are so huge that we’ll make room for cruelty.”
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But along with the authors’ deep concern were their calls to forge a better way. Bruni encouraged “civil discussion” and cited “the need to find common ground and seek compromise.” Glaude said that “for democracy to work we must become better people.” And Suarez’s own podcast, “On Shifting Ground,” aims to “give us hope for human resilience.”
In “Show the Way,” the songwriter’s relief from the bleakness comes in the chorus and points to the grounding that all great spiritual and political leaders offer:
“Look, if someone wrote a play
just to glorify what's stronger than hate
would they not arrange the stage
to look as if the hero came too late?
He's almost in defeat,
it's looking like the evil side will win
so on the edge of every seat
from the moment that the whole thing begins.
It is love who mixed the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene, set in shadows,
like the night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way”
Wasn’t the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “It’s love that wrote the play” when, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”?
And didn’t King offer further clarity on what each of us can do to contribute to this ultimate reality when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that”?
But this leaves us with the question, “How?”
Organizations that work to deliver transformational advocacy lead with love and train us to reach across the aisle. They 1) start with bringing people together and forming them into local chapters so we’re not working alone, 2) train us to become effective activists and 3) encourage us to have breakthroughs, to do things as activists we never thought we could do. They treat us as the powerful people that we are.
But most nonprofits don’t even take the first step. They fail at starting new chapters, or they avoid the challenge altogether, because they see their members as incapable and not really committed.
I find former Citizens’ Climate Lobby Executive Director Mark Reynolds’ approach to starting a chapter to be particularly inspiring:
“Before I go to a city to start a CCL Chapter, I decide that I am going to fall in love with them before I get there. So, when I arrive, I try to find evidence in them and in the environment about why I will never be the same from having spent time with them.”
There will be a lot of challenging and exciting work in the next few years. That makes it all the more important to find an organization that understands and operates from the realization that “In this darkness love will show the way.”
Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
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Brandon Bell/Getty Images
How to approach Donald Trump's second presidency
Dec 06, 2024
The resistance to Donald Trump has failed. He has now shaped American politics for nearly a decade, with four more years — at least — to go. A hard truth his opponents must accept: Trump is the most dominant American politician since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This dominance unsettles and destabilizes American democracy. Trump is a would-be authoritarian with a single overriding impulse — to help himself above all else.
Yet somehow he keeps winning.
Trump's political opponents must change course. The time for emoting your way through the Trump era is over. It's time to be rational, to earn credibility with swing voters, to win elections. It's time to stop helping Trump’s MAGA movement and, instead, to stop it in its tracks.
There should be four key features of Trump Resistance 2.0.
First, don't overreach. Despite Trump's legitimate electoral victory in 2016, many wanted him removed from office — one way or another — even before he was inaugurated. This impulse led Trump’s opponents to coalesce around Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump's ties to Russia. There was a simple problem: The evidence wasn’t there. The idea that Trump colluded in cyberspace to help Vladimir Putin hack into the Democratic National Committee’s email servers was always a triumph of partisanship over reason.
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Then came Trump's first impeachment. Trump shouldn’t have misused his office to seek dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. But the impeachment process — led by arch anti-Trumpist Adam Schiff — was never about seeking the truth for the American people. It was only about removing Trump.
And, finally, there was District Attorney Alvin Bragg's prosecution in New York. Bragg wasn't blindly pursuing justice with this case. The underlying facts happened seven years earlier and his legal theory was highly controversial, even outside pro-Trump circles. Bragg, like Schiff, had only one transparent goal — to hurt Donald Trump.
All this anti-Trump overreaching backfired. It had the opposite of its intended effect. It helped Trump. It mobilized and grew his base. Trump's narrative that he fought the machine and won powerfully resonates with many Americans.
Second, be accurate. Misusing the legal system isn't the only way to help Trump. Making highly inaccurate assertions does, too.
Take the widespread narrative that he's a dictator. The American people watched Trump be president for four years and come nowhere near establishing a dictatorship. He can't even get his choice for attorney general (Matt Gaetz) a confirmation hearing. He'd rather be golfing than plotting the takedown of our democracy. Are swing voters really supposed to believe he threatens to plunge America into dictatorship?
Third, respect American democracy. The myopic quest to resist Trump has led many to reject American democracy's essential principles. Many of Trump's opponents haven’t just cast aside the rule of law. They've suppressed speech. They've tried to defund the police. They've opposed incremental and rational immigration measures.They've railed against numerous hallmarks of American history and tradition. As the presidential election resoundingly reaffirmed: that is not a winning strategy.
Finally, to effectively resist Trump, anoint the right champion. The Democrats need a leader who's in tune with the American people. Politics isn't about forcing what you want on other people. It's about winning elections so you get more of what you want than if you lose. It was a startling error to put forth Joe Biden as Trump's alternative until a few months before the election. Going forward the Democrats must rally around a strong, vibrant leader with a mainstream message that resonates broadly with the American people.
Otherwise they’ll just keep losing.
The hearts and minds of Trump's opponents have come from an understandable place. But we need more mind and less heart. It's time to be rational and effective. It's time to stop losing elections and start winning them. It's time for something new.
Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.”
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Vice President Kamala Harris is greeted by staff during her arrival at the White House on Nov. 12.
Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Democrats have work to do to reclaim the mantle of change
Dec 06, 2024
“Democrats are like the Yankees,” said one of the most memorable tweets to come across on X after Election Day. “Spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lose the big series and no one got fired or was held accountable.”
Too sad. But that’s politics. The disappointment behind that tweet was widely shared, but no one with any experience in politics truly believes that no one will be held accountable.
It’s common after a national election to see partisans on the losing side join other operatives and media experts in autopsies of the defeat, pointing fingers or coming up with an abundance of excuses.
This time it’s the Democrats sifting through the wreckage of defeat to determine if Election Day was a circumstantial setback or the unfolding of a potentially long-term disaster.
That fear was only encouraged by the realization that the party was in for a repeat of the stunning disappointment Democrats suffered in their loss to Trump in 2016.
This time, Trump actually outperformed his 2020 margins across the map, winning the popular vote as well as the electoral vote, despite his well-documented negatives, including 34 felony convictions.
History also tells us that the parties have shown impressive resilience in their ability to come back from disaster in recent decades.
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But, first, comes a reckoning.
The day after the election, as the Washington Post reported, the Dems were “awash in angst-ridden second-guessing.”
Ah, yes, political junkies in the chattering classes produced ample scenarios to pinpoint where they went wrong.
What if Harris had picked, say, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate? Could that have helped her margins in the “blue wall” states? If Biden had stayed in the race, could he have retained the strong coalition that carried him to victory in 2020?
But the bigger question is, how could the party have so lost touch with the voters that they underestimated the numbers of voters who still wanted to vote for Trump’s mixed message?
The question reminds me of a fundamental principle of political campaigns and voter behavior that I first heard Democratic consultant James Carville express: “Every election is a contest between ‘change’ and ‘more of the same.’ ”
“Change” was the magic word that inspired and propelled the relatively unknown Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s long-shot campaign to victory in 2008, when the war-weary and economically shaken voters looked for change after eight years under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency. A similar desire for change worked in Joe Biden’s favor against Trump in 2020.
Unfortunately for Harris, she was too closely tied to the Biden administration to credibly promote herself as a change agent. Nor did she have enough time to come up with more of a platform of her own.
Things could have worked out better for her and other Democratic candidates if they had followed the advice offered by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.
Judis is a journalist from the left who has studied and written about American democracy for decades. Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at Washington’s conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and before that was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which makes him one of the few researchers I know who has worked at a liberal and a conservative think tank without losing his mind — a commendable achievement in Washington, a town too often hobbled by ideological segregation.
Their latest book, "Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes," offers a wake-up call for Democrats and others who they believe have lost sight of the people in America’s political center who both parties are trying to woo. Or should be.
Both parties are afflicted these days with new challenges, even as they try to figure out changes in the electorate that resulted from old challenges.
For example, the turnout of so many young, disenchanted and underemployed white males in this campaign year came as a surprise, particularly to Democrats, who were expecting the party’s support of abortion rights to carry them closer to victory than it finally did.
That, too, offers an important political lesson. Timing is everything, it is often said. But issues matter, too.
Where have all the Democrats gone? Maybe the party’s leaders need to go find out.
Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board.
©2024 Tribune Content Agency. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Keep ReadingShow less
Sen. Marco Rubio (left), President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be the next secretary of state, meets with Sen. Lindsey Graham on Dec. 3, in advance of Senate confirmation hearings.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Does it take six months on average for the Senate to confirm a president's nominees?
Dec 06, 2024
This fact brief was originally published by Wisconsin Watch. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Does it take six months on average for the US Senate to confirm a president's nominees?
Yes.
The average time the U.S. Senate takes to approve nominees to a president’s administration is more than six months.
The nonprofit Center for Presidential Transition reported that as of Nov. 11, 2024, the average number of days has more than doubled under presidents elected since the 1980s:
Joe Biden: 192
Donald Trump: 160.5
Barack Obama: 153.3
George W. Bush: 108.2
Bill Clinton: 100.3
George H.W. Bush: 64.7
Ronald Reagan: 69.4
The nominees include more than 1,000 leadership positions, including Cabinet posts such as attorney general.
One reason for the six-month average: Any senator can “hold” a nominee’s confirmation, sometimes to extract something in return.
An August research paper concluded it is doubtful that reducing the number of positions needing confirmation would speed up confirmations.
Trump has said he wants the Senate to allow “recess appointments,” which wouldn’t require Senate confirmation, for his next administration.
The issue was raised Nov. 21 by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who called for streamlining confirmations.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one
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Sources
Center for Presidential Transition: Senate Confirmations Slow to a Crawl
Bipartisan Policy Center: What’s the Hold Up on Senate Nominees?
University of Chicago Center for Effective Government: Democracy Reform Primer Series Reducing the Number of Senate-Confirmed Appointees
New York Times: Could Trump Install Gaetz Without Senate Approval? A Recess Appointment Primer
Cumulus News Talk: Donald Trump's Upcoming Confirmation Battles | The Vince Coglianese Show
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