I got an email from TPM Reader DH this morning asking what people in their everyday lives, people who aren’t close to the levers of political power, can do to, for lack of better words, help to save their country. I took a moment to write down a few thoughts and I decided to share it with you not because there’s any particular wisdom in it or because the prose is very polished but just because I’ve gotten the same question a number of times recently.
That’s a good question. I’m not sure I always have in mind who I’m talking to. But I think it may be more “ordinary” people than you might think. What I learned from the last ten years is that one of the most potent things ordinary people do is become part of fairly normie organizing in their communities. In Trump’s first term Indivisible groups down at the town and county level were a big big deal. Not always visible. Not big performative demonstrations. But ground level organizing focused around electoral politics in people’s communities. I think at moments like this that can feel somehow inadequate to the moment. But it’s not. It’s some of the most important stuff. There’s contributing to political activity, whether or it’s campaigns or groups. There’s showing up at things like townhalls. Again those are big deals. And many things we’ll sort of know when we see them.
But my personal opinion is that it’s actually very significant the posture we take in our ordinary lives. Cowering vs impassive. A cowering population is a defeated one. And vice versa. We literally send signals to ourselves and the people around us through our basic civic posture. Are we cowering or not? I was tempted to say scared, but that’s not the right measure. It’s okay to be scared. Just like in every other aspect of life. It’s how we deal with fear etc. A cowering civil society is made up of its parts. So I really think our individual civic posture is a critical perhaps the baseline level of activism. It communicates to ourselves and to others whether we’re going to join a group, show up, take risks, etc.
I don’t know if any of this is helpful. A lot of it comes down to we’ll know the key things when we see them. But a really key thing is a baseline decision, am I going to accept getting less of the package of citizenship than I am entitled to? And the answer I think should be no. And once we make that decision a lot flows from that pretty clearly.