An American Habit

I have been on an emotional rollercoaster since the mid-term elections. Vacillating between excitement and the dread of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Think about it: Mississippi is about to send its first Black senator to Washington, D.C. since Bruce K. Blanche in 1874. Texas flipped. Folks in Georgia elected an African American woman as its governor. Nevada and Wisconsin elected Black men as theirs. Three Black women will serve in the United States Senate at the same time, and so much more.

African American voters showed up and showed out on Tuesday.

Then I think about Angie Nixon, Jamie Davis, and Charles Booker and what could have happened if the Democratic Party had supported them. My palms get sweaty as I worry about what the Democratic leadership will do with this new-found power and the drama that is to come (especially as they try to take credit for what organizers on the ground achieved.)

And then there is Donald Trump with his veto hat in the Oval Office and his appointment of Stephen Miller as chief of staff. These people, and I know this in my gut, are preparing (have prepared) for an existential war. Nothing about who they are and what they have done over the last twelve years should lead anyone to believe that they are going to accept the results of the mid-terms sitting down. We should expect the madness to intensify in the coming months.

I don’t want to downplay what happened on Tuesday. It was, in part, a massive rebuke of the cruelty of the Trump administration and proof that large portions of the American electorate have not turned their backs on democracy.

Some even believe that this marks the beginning of the end of the MAGA era. Their faith in the American project has been renewed. This concerns me, and here I am following the hard-earned lessons of a people who have seen this before.

The mid-term elections do not constitute absolution: that somehow the choices people made over the last twelve years are behind us, because the Democrats now control Congress. Those who made the choice to hand over government to these illiberal thugs are still here. Some even voted against Republicans. No matter. The ugliness of our days remains.

It is an American habit, after all. One good choice can wipe away the nation’s sins. Ratify the 15^th amendment and the question of the role and place of Black people in this country is settled. Pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the goals of the movement have been accomplished, America redeemed. The horror and the bodies be damned.

Rarely do Americans dig beneath the service and struggle with what motivated the choices in the first place. Instead, the country pats itself on the back as the fever dream breaks and declares its inherent goodness. Meanwhile, the sickness simmers, waiting to boil over again.

We see the reporting on what motivated voters this election cycle: affordability, corruption, the Iran War, and, for some, accountability and, for others, democracy itself. Again, I am not denying the power of what American voters did on Tuesday.

But when I hear some of the talk about affordability, my eyes narrow. Were people fine with the cruelty until the policies of this administration touched them? Did some Americans decide to throw away other people with the hope that they would flourish in the world Stephen Miller and others imagined? And now that they are hurting, they want relief.

Selfishness and hatred mingled like snakes in high grass.

We watched the assault on DEI, the attack on Affirmative Action, the devastation of DOGE, the lies standing in for history, the Callais decision and the efforts to hurl us back to days of old.

We experienced all of that and the affordability crisis.

Our response, along with others, was to show up to the polls in record numbers in defense of democracy—to do what we have always done when the country’s demons threaten to overwhelm everything. No matter how the pundits spin what happened on Tuesday or how the political elites claim credit for what was done, we know how we got over.

And we must remember that.

Forgetting the reasons for the fever dream dooms us to a cycle of backsliding. It covers the sickness in the promise of America. For our children and children’s children’s sake, we cannot do that, again. We must dig out the sickness, root and branch, or face the consequences of our sins, again.

Electing Democrats isn’t a cure for what ails the nation in these dark times. What we need goes beyond current political parties. We caught a glimpse of the cure in the midterms. It is us.

We just have to be honest about what is in some of us.

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