Welcome to the D.I.Y. Election, Get to Work!

Democracy is the Job of the People Not of the Pols Who Work for Them

I’m so old that I remember all the lyrics to the theme song for the television show “My Mother the Car.” And I can’t remember a week in American politics like the one we just lived through.

But, I hope that by the time Election Day rolls around, the momentum, energy and magnitude of the positive developments of the past seven days have blurred into memory and have been matched by 14 more weeks just like them.

That is not to say we need to have a major presidential candidate drop out and be replaced every week…although there is one more such candidate who definitely long overdue to be put out to pasture. No, on the Democratic side of the ledger we’ve now got a great candidate and we should celebrate that.

Rather, it was everything else that happened last week that we need to study and replicate. Literally within moments of Kamala Harris’ endorsement by President Joe Biden, people at every level of the Democratic Party moved into action as never before.

An avalanche of endorsements poured in and suddenly no one was talking about Democrats in disarray or open flash primaries or any other such nonsense. Kamala Harris was chosen the Democratic nominee by acclamation. Because she deserved it. Because she is the right candidate for the moment. Because she did not make a single wrong move in the hours and days that followed her announcement that she would seek and accept the nomination.

Record amounts of money poured in. Record numbers of volunteers stepped up. It was breathtaking and inspiring.

More importantly, in my view, we saw campaigns reinvented in the blinking of an eye. In fact, I think last week was one of those historic turning points when transformational change happens before our very eyes. We all remember instances like it. Back in the late 1970s, there was a big transit strike in New York and people had to walk to work. So it was practical for women to wear sneakers on their way to the job and then switch to dressier shoes when they got to the office. We never went back again.

Not big enough? Ok, what about when we all stopped going to work for COVID and in a matter of weeks we all learned what Zoom was and found we could do much of our work remotely? The workplace would never been the same. Real estate markets would never be the same. How people organized their homes would never be the same.

Last week, with a little nudging from some smart innovators, we saw political campaigns transformed. Before last week do you recall big mass virtual rallies? Virtual rallies attended by tens of thousands of people or more across the country? Virtual rallies that raised millions of dollars?

But last week these started to take place and more are scheduled for this week. Groups affiliated with the Harris campaign and those who just want to support it, official and unofficial, top down and grass roots up, we have found a new, powerful, convenient way to engage millions upon millions of Americans who want to save democracy.

They in turn have been augmented by others who are using digital media more creatively and aggressively than ever before in a political campaign. This is not just about the coconut tree memes, love them though we do. It is about having thousands upon thousands of influencers and creators and activists daily producing content for their followers…by the tens, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions.

Television and radio networks, where campaigns used to take place, have been left in the dust. (See John Oliver’s hilarious take down on the July 28th episode of Last Week Tonight of the struggles of broadcasters to explain what brat summer was—sorry Jake. It captures the moment well.) Grassroots groups and activists but also students and families with guitars and a need to sing are making a difference.

We’ve seen examples of this before. But have you ever seen such scope, such energy, or such an impact?

Perfectly, just as intellectual black hole that is MAGA has chosen to spit out the idiocy that America is a republic and not a democracy, we are becoming more of a democracy than we have ever been. Just as the corrupt Federalist Society GOP is seeking to hand all the power in our democracy over to the super rich through decisions like Citizens United, we are finding that regular people have vastly more power to influence election outcomes than ever before.

Once you needed a printing press and to “buy ink by the barrel” to be a media power broker. Later needed you needed a broadcast network. But now…now the platforms have proliferated and provided you are not on one that is run by a damaged Trump-Putin anti-free speech clown with a ketamine stew burbling between his ears you can get the word out, reach your friends, reach strangers, raise money, convene a virtual rally, convene a real rally, trigger collective action, get out the vote and, working with others like yourself you can be the power that decides the election.

That is what I found so miraculous about last week. Though all the elements existed before, they had changed and coalesced and gained power by quantum leaps. And all of a sudden here we are in the D.I.Y. election, the one that is going to be decided not by Fox News or Rupert or a bunch of oligarchs or a bunch of dimwitted thugs with tiki torches but instead, it is going to be decided by people like you.

No. I’ve got that wrong. Not people “like you.” By you. You are going to decide in the next 99 days whether America remains a democracy or not…and if you preserve democracy you are also going to likely have played a role in reinventing that ancient form of governance, of reclaiming the power that once went ever more to the rich. (I’m not a shnook. I get that the rich will always have hugely disproportionate power. But there is a way forward here. Kamala Harris has raised $200 million in small donations. from tens of thousands of donors, about two-thirds of which have not donated before. That’s big. And that’s one week. What if that is every week?

What if for the next 99 days each of us decides we value democracy and the rule of law and our personal freedoms enough to devote an hour a day to D.I.Y. democracy? That’s roughly the equivalent of four days. A long weekend. Instead of a long weekend celebrating what a bunch of dead guys did 250 years, you can devote one real, long weekend out of your life to help keeping their dream, to help keeping the ideals to which they aspired alive. And then imagine if everyone you know did that. (Go on. Coax them. Email them now. Text them. Make a message for them on Tik Tok or Insta.)

The result will be that last week will be remembered as the week everything changed, the week we took the steps we needed not only for Kamala Harris to defeat Donald Trump but for Democrats to win big in the Senate and the House so they could codify into law our reproductive freedoms, our freedoms to choose our own spouses, our freedom from the fear of gun violence, our freedom to live in a clean, healthy environment. If that’s what happens, last week—which was a big fucking deal by any measure—will be an even bigger deal. It will be a bright line in history. It will be the beginning of the moment of rebirth we owe ourselves, our families, our neighbors and generations to come.