Do We Even Understand the Importance of this Moment?

On several levels, it is clear the news distracts us from the real meaning of the times in which we live

“The earth turns... But we don't feel it move. Then one night you look up. One spark, and the sky is on fire." -Gangs of New York

This line resonates with me for multiple reasons today. Although in the movie, it is a harbinger of a massive conflict to come, the first part of the line speaks to a sense I have had frequently recently.

From the perspective of our individual life experiences, it speaks to something I’ve become increasingly aware of as I get older. It is a distant cousin to “life is what happens when you are making other plans.” Although I think the meaning for me is closer to “life is what happens when you think you’re busy doing something else.”

We get caught up in the day-to-day business of living and lose sight of what is important. How many “obligations” fill our daily to-do lists and and suck away the precious little time each of us has. But they do more damage than just that. They distract us from what is really meaningful and important.

Life is What Happens While the Right Is Destroying American Democracy

Of course, there is also a political corollary. It struck me clearly this week as the Supreme Court handed down its end-of-term decisions. While a few of these garnered media attention for a moment or two, with wars going on and perhaps the most destructive malevolent piece of legislation in American history moving closer to passage in the United States Congress, it was hard to take them in or give them the attention they deserved.

In addition, some of the decisions were hard for the average person to understand. Take the decision in the “birthright citizenship” case. It did not even address birthright citizenship. Rather, it made it harder for lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions. This, in turn, will make it easier for Trump and future extremists to attack the Constitution or other laws and harder for citizens to challenge their action.

It is likely, for example, that because the language of the Constitution is so clear on birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court will ultimately block Trump’s efforts. But when? The ruling suggests that plaintiffs have to either go through the cumbersome task of seeking a class action decision or cases would have to be pursued in district court after district court with decisions only having an impact on the plaintiffs or the district in question. There are 94 federal judiciary districts.

The president comes away more empowered. Those most negatively impacted are, of course, as usual in our society, the poor who cannot afford lawyers, do not understand the process and are the actual targets of major Trump initiatives—like his draconian and racist anti-immigration measures. Earlier, the court had ruled that while the case against renditioning migrants without due process makes its way through the courts, Trump could go right on doing it.

Take decisions like these together and they have the effect of allowing the president to violate any law he wishes for at least as long a period of time as it will take these matters to work their way up to the Supreme Court. Like the immunity decision last year, this greatly increases the power of the president to do as he sees fit for periods of time in which he could do great damage.

Recognizing this, Justices Sotomayor and Jackson spoke out strongly against the ruling. They condemned its arbitrary nature (the court did not take this action when district courts were issuing nationwide injunctions against the Biden Administration). They decried the perversity, ahistorical and anti-precedent logic of the decision. And most importantly, they warned of where this could lead.

Another decision, regarding whether citizens could sue to preserve certain forms of essential healthcare coverage under U.S. civil rights law, produced another decision that cut away an avenue of legal redress—and thus another check on executive power. It was a bad decision concerning Planned Parenthood (the organization that had been targeted by a Texas law). But it was a worse decision concerning U.S. civil rights law making all of us more vulnerable to executive branch abuse—and again, making the most vulnerable among us the most at risk.

How do you calculate the cost of each such decision? Do they diminish our rights as citizens by a set amount? By 5%? By 10%? It’s impossible to calculate. What is clear though is that cumulatively, the actions of the Roberts Court—by which I mean the actions of the extremist right wing majority on that court—have year-after-year, from Citizens United through Shelby County through the immunity decision through this year’s decisions, granted unprecedented power to the executive, undermined our fundamental freedoms, stripped away vital checks and balances to constrain presidential abuses and made this country less and less of a democracy, more and more inequitable to those who are not at the very top of our society.

Democracy, it turns out, may not die in America due to a foreign invasion or even a coup.

Instead, democracy in America is dying the death of a thousand cuts.

Which is good news for the would-be authoritarians in our midst.

Because when it happens in increments it is less noticeable to the average citizen. (Even when the actions taken are egregious, often profound violations of the trust the American people have placed in the justices on our Supreme Court or our Congress or the executive branch. Even when they behave in profoundly corrupt or intellectually dishonest ways. To pick just one example tied to what happened in the court this week, most people don’t realize how out of step the court is with the rest of the judiciary…because the rest of the judiciary tends to follow the law and the Supreme Court these days tends to act in a purely political fashion.

We are, after all, busy with other things.

Life is What Happens When Demography Redefines Who Is In Power

But good things happen all around us too. Good things of significance. Good things that also are under-appreciated or obscured by the way they are reported or widely perceived.

Take the subject of my last Substack, the NY mayoral primary and the success of Zohran Mamdani, the 33 year-old presumptive Democratic nominee to be the next chief executive of the country’s biggest (and best) city.

Quite apart from the various debates swirling around about Mamdani (which I will address in a minute), the success of a 33 year-old candidate against the party establishment, particularly when part of that success is due to the support he received from one of the most important rising voices in the Democratic Party, 35 year-old Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, is clearly part of a demographic story worth noting.

I made that point in the last Substack and was very pleased to see it born out by data about the election that has come out in the past couple days. It was not just Mamdani being a younger candidate offering fresh perspectives that was a game-changer. It was the fact that younger voters—contrary to almost all our recent experience in elections in this country—were the demographic group with the largest turnout in the election.

In other words, the election was younger New Yorkers saying if you speak to us in our language, if you address the issues that matter to us, if you propose ideas that resonate with us, we will turn out. If Democrats digest this information and internalize it properly it could have a huge impact on the 2026 and 2028 results—a decisive impact.

In other words, the earth is turning and though we may not feel it move, one chapter is ending in U.S. political history and another is beginning.

Despite being associated in chronological terms with the generation that will soon be seen in the rearview mirror of history (not too soon I hope), I find myself relating enormously to the ideas that Mamdani is offering (AOC too) and to which younger New Yorkers are responding. In fact, he is daring to articulate ideas that many of us have long thought and felt and probably too often kept to ourselves.

I was particularly struck by some of his recent interviews in which he was very blunt about things that more seasoned politicians would dance around. One of these is his willingness to embrace his socialist impulses and ideas. Too many of us have for too long been cowed by the techniques of right wing opponents of more fair and equitable economic and social policies in the U.S. (see the Harry Truman quote in my last Substack) that we would never associate ourselves with the word. Indeed, once again Republicans (like Trump) are suggesting that embracing socialist ideas that means Mamdani is a communist.

Of course, that is absurd. It is simple-minded. It is a lie. But it works. It keeps us from taking steps to improve the quality of our communities, the quality of life of our neighbors that in virtually every other developed nation in the world are seen as being among the essential minimums of decent governance. Only here is access to good healthcare or education or a dignified retirement or a social safety net if your company fails not considered basic.

But of course, these things should be basic. We should have had them long ago. But we have not fought as hard as we should for them because they are attacked by those on the right as “socialist.” What they don’t say of course, is that they reject such programs because someone would have to pay for them and administer them and that would require having a fairer tax code or more reasonable regulations.

Further, of course, in our economic theology not only can we not embrace socialism (despite the benign origins and history of the idea) but we cannot speak ill of capitalism. That is considered being un-American. Even if what is really un-American is the inequality that our extreme version of capitalism promotes and institutionalizes.

That’s why it is so refreshing to hear Mamdani in recent interviews speak of these ideas openly and without the baggage the outgoing generation of leaders brought to them. When asked about capitalism, he explains, unflinchingly why he is a democratic socialist—because he seeks a more equitable society. When asked about billionaires, he says he doesn’t believe we should have billionaires and well, sorry folks, but of course, he is right. Why is it in the interest of society for people to be able to earn vastly more money than they could ever spend—when, if they money were taxed more fairly, which is to say very aggressively—the benefits to all in society could grow enormously.

We get so caught up in living within the rules of our society as it is that we do not ask often enough “why have we entered into this social contract to have a society?” The answer is not so most of us can work hard to provide disproportionate benefits to very few of us. The reason we have, for example, corporations is to provide a benefit to the state and by extension to the people of the state. That is why corporate charters are handed out. Somehow we have lost our way and forgotten that benefitting the community is more important than benefitting any individual within society. (And we know that arguments that people need the incentive of having an unlimited amount of money to build successful businesses is a lie inside a scam wrapped in an easily disprovable political slogan.)

We need to rebalance how we view the rights and prerogatives and duty of individuals with how we cultivate and preserve just thriving communities and good governance.

That requires being able to speak the truth and with some luck, a new generation of leaders will be able to do that better. Especially since we have reached a kind of apotheosis of lying in our political culture.

(Nothing illustrates that better than the abomination of a bill passing through the Senate right now—one that will put tens of millions of lives at risk and cause huge suffering to tens of millions of others in order to fund greater luxury for our richest and underwrite the racist enterprises of our twisted leaders.)

One final point: Mamdani also has spoken very clearly in recent days about the accusations unfairly made against him concerning words he did not say with regard to his belief that Palestinians deserve fundamental rights and freedoms and how those should be achieved. It makes more clear than ever that his opponents are attacking him via every means necessary including via misstatements and distortions. Which should lead each of us to ask why. I think the answer is clear and it lies in the paragraphs above. The rich and powerful want their gravy train to run on endlessly at the expense of all the rest of us. They view someone who can speak the truth as a special threat.

With some luck, he and the new generation of leaders he represents, will be just that.