WWGFH#5: Engage f2f, p2p
There are two institutions responsible for where we are now. Only one can we do anything to change.
The one we can’t change is the judiciary. Trump is openly trying to transform the most basic principles of American constitutional government. I am not yet convinced the courts will allow that to happen. As important as it may be to secure to the President the power to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed,” it is even more important to assure that it is the laws that he is taking care to execute. Laws are passed by Congress. The President’s actions are repeatedly ignoring those laws. David Cole’s piece about the administration’s illegal war on the University of Pennsylvania illustrates just one of many examples. It is still possible that the scale of this assault will trigger a sufficiently aggressive allergic reaction, and the Court will shut this game down.
But whether it does or not, there is another institution that is more directly responsible for where we are now: Congress. Specifically, Republicans in Congress. As our Most Economically Ignorant President pushes the world economy off a cliff, destroying alliances older than he, while enabling his patron to break the essential parts of government, the only people who could stop all this are Republicans in Congress.
More specifically — and when you see it like this, it’s really kind of astonishing — a handful of Republican congressmen, and a handful of Republican senators. If five GOP members of the House were to defect from the MAGA caucus, and five in the Senate, all this could stop. Trillions of dollars in wealth is combusting, tens of thousands of lives across the world are threatened, the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans are being made more difficult — all because we can’t find 5 congressmen and 5 senators to end this nightmare.
I don’t know whether that’s possible. I do know how it would be done. It’s not going to be done by spending billions on digital and television ads. It’s not going to be done by pundits on TV (or Medium or Substack) exhorting people to do the right thing. It could only be done by people engaging with people directly, face to face, breaking through the constant propaganda that defines the lives of all of us.
That breaking through is not about changing anyone’s values. It’s not about convincing a conservative to become a liberal. It’s simply about getting them to see the catastrophe that is before us, and who among us could stop it: 5 congressmen, and 5 senators.
There’s a strategic way to work out which 5 from each House. (ChatGPT’s deep research identified these 10.) But that’s not my point here. We need to recognize that we’ve evolved a media ecosystem that has destroyed our capacity to understand each other. That ecosystem is not going to change. We have to find a way to route around it. Not just for this issue, but for many issues. This issue is just the first. We need to find a way to engage directly with those we otherwise disagree with, to get them to see and then agree with just this one idea: That their representatives are responsible for the disaster we now see. Each of them has done this. There needs to be stickers galore — an Etsy revolution—but stickers alone won’t do it. More important than stickers, people need to be willing to look their neighbors’ in the eyes, and get them to see what is true: MAGA is breaking America. Only MAGA can get MAGA to stop.
I am trying to practice what I preach. I’ve begun a conversation with a friend from high school, captured in a podcast. Today I’m recording Episode 4. But you don’t need a podcast. Just buy someone a cup of coffee, get some “I did that” stickers made for your MAGA congressman or Senators, and bring them along.
People can change their mind. Here’s my favorite example. In 1972, Richard Nixon won the presidency by a landslide. He was loved by Republicans as much as Trump is. He was hated by Democrats not as much as Trump is. But on Inauguration Day 1973, it would have been hard to imagine that 565 days later, the landslide winner would resign the Presidency. Even harder to imagine is this change in public attitude:
We’re not going to get Trump to resign. We don’t have to. All we need is the public to tie this disaster to the choices made by their own representatives. We will do that only if we do the work. Person to person, independently of the Democratic Party, as citizens begging fellow citizens: Please help us make this stop.
