So on a couple of occasions over the last five years, I tried to start writing regularly on this blog again and I quickly slammed into a brick wall. One of the reasons for that is what I described as a Crisis of Infinite Confidence. The set of beliefs I developed in my 20s as I went through grad school in the early 2000s took a beating starting in 2017. I wasn’t sure what I had to add to the conversation or if I could muster the energy to do it while I was also trying to fulfill my duties to my family and my job.
I don’t know if I am going to be any better with the regular writing. We’ll just have to see how that goes. But I do think I am coming out of the crisis. And just like DC Comics after the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the post-Crisis Dave is a bit of a messy reboot that tries to keep a lot of the old stuff while also making a fresh start.
One thing I needed to do in order to come to grips with the present was to let go of the past. I held on to the hope that a large enough group of people in the US would see what’s happened over the last ten years and recognize that the institutions at the heart of US society are in danger. I hoped and believed that they would act with urgency to fortify and improve those institutions.
Now, for many people, that was always a foolish hope; and many others abandoned it long before I did. For me, election night 2024 shut the door. I’m not saying that everyone who voted for Republicans in that election is anti-democracy and anti-pluralism, but I am saying that everyone who voted for Republicans in 2024 did not view being anti-democracy and anti-pluralism as disqualifying. (And I’m going to put down a marker here that I acknowledge that there are some anti-democracy and anti-pluralism folks who vote for candidates on the left, and I need to discuss that at some future point.)
I thought that over my lifetime, we had done more to build a strong culture where most people respected other people and were willing to live together, and the people who clung to a mean-spirited worldview hostile to others were a declining minority. I knew that a minority sought to use elections to take control of the government and tear down many of the structures that were built starting with Reconstruction, through the New Deal era and the civil rights movement, and into the 21st century. I thought that the rest of us would rally and defeat them, that we would continue to preserve those structures.
I don’t think that anymore, and it hurt a lot to give up that belief.
But the advantage of losing that belief is that I accept the wreckage around me. I see the task before me differently now. I am not trying to hold on to something that is unwinding and collapsing; I am trying to help build something new and better that builds on the strengths of what came before.
This is why I am completely serious about how important last year’s Superman movie was to me, by the way. Not just for the way it made me feel as an individual, but to see in the reactions afterward that there are lots of other people who felt the same way. When I look at things like the effort people in Minnesota put forth to rally around their neighbors earlier this year, I know that’s true. And obviously what real people have done to put themselves on the line is more important than a movie. But sometimes you need to see something in your imagination before you can accept the evidence for it in reality.
So the way I am looking at the country these days is that in terms of the horrible things the federal government is doing, that was all set in motion in November 2024. Like the light arriving from distant stars, we’re just seeing the consequences of that choice now. I don’t get pushed back into despair with every terrible thing that happens, because in a way, it’s not a new terrible thing. It’s just the latest aftershock of a terrible thing that already happened. The title of this post is a quote from the TV show Babylon 5; someone asks the enigmatic Vorlon ambassador Kosh to intervene in a dispute and he replies, “The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.” We can not undo what has already been done. We can only do what there is to be done, today.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doomposting or saying every possible disaster is already inevitable. Some of the current government’s bad decisions can be mitigated or contained or even prevented. But all of that is a holding action. Those fights are important to minimize the harm that is currently happening. But for there to be progress, the holding actions need to be accompanied by actions that build the future, that create space for us to envision new possibilities and lay the groundwork to make those possibilities real.
Shifting my mindset from preserving to building anew opened spaces for me to embrace ideas that I liked, but worried that they seemed too radical for the US population to accept. Expand the Supreme Court and reform its structure and jurisdiction. Expand the number of members of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than a century. Introduce proportional representation to the House. There are some things like granting statehood to Washington DC that I think ought to be ready to go in January 2029. There are others that might require years or decades to build support. But the scope of the task is clearer to me now, which makes the scope of the effort required clearer as well.
One thing I can do is look for ways to encourage other people to make that shift as well. The avalanche may have already started. But where all the rocks land is not determined. The next avalanche is waiting to be set in motion. Mourn for the things that have been lost, but look for the openings to create something new. With the lessons we have learned, we have opportunities to make different choices. We may as well take advantage of those opportunities and think about the way we should construct our institutions to meet the needs of today’s world, not 1976 or 1946 or anything else.
We are a long, long way from building the kind of democracy-as-a-way-of-living that John Dewey wrote about more than a hundred years ago, the vision that inspired me to start writing on this website and to plow forward with writing a dissertation. I will probably spend the rest of my life thinking about how to reconcile that vision with what I have learned about human behavior through further research and personal experience. But now I have a map in my head for the meaningful work I can do in the present to build a better society. So I’m good to go until the next existential crisis.
