It's time to lose our heads

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Isadore Greenbaum, a young man who in 1939 rushed the stage of an American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden while screaming “Down with Hitler!” He was quickly tackled and brutally beaten by guards before police stepped in and took him away.

Greenbaum told the New York Times after his arrest “I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting, but being that they talked so much against my religion and there was so much persecution I lost my head and I felt it was my duty to talk.”

But contrary to Greenbaum’s characterization, his reaction was perfectly rational. And if that’s what it looks like to lose your head, maybe it’s time we lose ours.

I’ve struggled to find the words the last few days to adequately describe how I feel, nevermind trying to explain how this happened. Anyone telling you they know the answer to the latter is most certainly lying, especially since some states are still counting votes and a handful of races have yet to be called. 

Democratic Congressman Tom Suozzi, who I’ve written about extensively since George Santos was elected to his former seat in 2022 and since Suozzi won the special election earlier this year to replace Santos, offered an explanation. 

“The Democrats have to stop pandering to the far left,” Suozzi said Wednesday. “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports…Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”

I just want to make something perfectly clear: Concern over the existence and safety of trans people in public life had absolutely no impact on this election, and anyone saying otherwise is an asshole. In fact, it wasn’t even mentioned once in the entirety if this year’s Democratic National Convention. As Hayes Brown more eloquently wrote for MSNBC, “There is no excuse for cowardice in this moment of upheaval, especially cowardice that would sacrifice trans Americans at the altar of bigotry.”

The truth is, there is no One Unifying Explanation for why Donald Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election when more than 140 million people voted. Think about how much political opinions vary within your own family or community and then multiply it out. The variance is infinite. 

After every election loss, there’s a rush to diagnose what really happened. Who’s really to blame? While I may have found those conversations useful in the past, at the moment they leave me cold. It is less about what Democrats did wrong and more about what Republicans have been doing right for a decade now: Degrading the quality of publicly available information, undermining trust in government, and normalizing cruelty via written and spoken word. So as many of us in the media screamed about Trump’s heinous rhetoric and vision for his second term, our warnings ultimately fell on many eyes and ears primed to discount us. 

While large news outlets certainly could’ve done more to elevate the threat, in retrospect I don’t think it would have made the difference. The old institutions and the old ways of doing things are now obsolete. No Cheney family member or former Obama advisor is going to save us—particularly not one who hosts a podcast with Kellyanne Conway. 

There was this idea among Democrats during the first Trump administration that if we could just make it through the next four years then it would be over. That electing Trump the first time was some midlife crisis and the country would realize that we needed someone sensible at the helm. But even when Biden won in 2020, relief was fleeting. While we danced in the streets when the election was officially called, we were still in the throes of a global pandemic. And two months later, an armed mob stormed the US capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the government. 

By the time Biden was sworn in, any relief had already been subsumed by anxiety. On some level we understood that while we were diving into a Democratic presidency with a Senate majority, the other side was embarking on four years during which they would wait and stew and plan their comeback. The “Trump Era,” to which it’s often referred, never really ended.

I was wildly optimistic this time, in a way that felt different than 2016. I was in my late 20s then, still figuring out my own politics. At 37, I felt confident and grounded. There were no unknowns. Trump had shown exactly who he is for the past decade, and I expected him to be punished for it. I also still believed that some combination of goodness, common sense and a baseline respect for democracy would prevail. The thing I’d failed to recognize is how much all those qualities have been eroded via active discouragement by a malignant Republican party. And that bad behavior is now openly rewarded.

When I’ve tried to wrap my head around people who are politically undecided or disengaged, I’ve often chalked it up to incoherence. But these election results were clarifying in that they made clear there is a coherent support for hate. I vacillate between “voters don’t know any better” and “every voter has full agency,” when it’s obviously some combination of both. While voters have never had more access to information in history, they’ve also never had more access to bad information.

Another thing that was made clear in this election is that many voters don’t want to beat the rich guys; they want to be the rich guys. Even though they’re significantly closer to being unhoused than being Elon Musk, American exceptionalism has made them believe that by aligning yourself with the billionaires you are somehow jumping the line. And telling people that that’s pretty fucking stupid isn’t a winning strategy either. 

We also learned that a majority of voters don’t want someone who builds a coalition: They want someone who grabs the electorate by the pussy and says, “This is how we’re doing things.” For all the talk of personal freedom and government not treading on them, what they really want is a person they respect to take the reins. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good person. 

There’s pressure to say that it’s going to be ok. And if you refuse to say so, then you’re giving into nihilism. But I take a different view: Saying it will be ok is letting yourself off the hook. It is also deeply naive. By confronting the fact that it very well may not be ok, you are better mentally equipping yourself for a fight. By not saying it will be ok, you are allowing the gravity of this moment to fully sink it. Nothing about this is ok, and there’s nothing to indicate it will be. Saying so is honest.

Right wing personalities are always telling their followers to “wake up!” to the truth, but now it seems Democrats should’ve been the ones heeding the urge. We needed to wake up to the fact that we are surrounded by people who think all of this is good—who hate women, who hate immigrants, who hate trans people, who hate education. Or at its most benign, people who simply do not care about what happens to foundational pieces of our society either because they’re insulated by privilege or because their media diet has fed them lies about what happens when they crumble. 

The answer, however, isn’t to match their hate: It’s to match the unwavering certitude with which they express their beliefs.

Now is not the time for Democrats—and Progressives especially—to compromise. It’s time to unapologetically seek and regain power in order to enact the policies that will serve the greatest good. You don’t need to be a joyful warrior to participate; just someone willing to be in this fight.