Why We Have to Believe in Democracy

...especially when all seems hopeless

(Note to the reader: this isn’t the post I planned today.

I planned a beautiful video post for my paying subscribers, but I got sick with Adrienne’s cold over the weekend and I’m stuck at home trying to catch my breath as I also try to work out how to film it on my phone. Please stand by, I promise that’s coming.

In the meanwhile, I’ll write what I was planning to write later this week. )

Everybody’s already talking about the 2026 midterms, as well they might.

Everybody is saying that there are no guardrails anymore, while at the same time reminding everyone about the midterms. The midterms might provide a guardrail. Maybe even more than a guardrail; maybe caltrops all over the highway, to pop the tires of this authoritarian jalopy before it runs America down once and for all.

And then there’s 2028, when, if the Constitution is to be honored in any way, Trump will not be able to run again. Who are they going to run? Vance? A man with a personality so odious that he can’t even order doughnuts without becoming a laughingstock? Vance, who will be left holding the bag of all of Trump’s broken promises and disastrous choices? I like our odds, if that’s the case.

But when these things are brought up, somebody always answers “will there even BE a 2026 midterm? Will there be a 2028 election?”

I’ve been asking that too, to be fair. Will there be?

We’re heading into extremely dangerous times. Countries who have veered off the way America is veering now, have lost their democracies in a matter of months. That can happen. And, some countries who have veered this way still have a democracy but in name only, with elections that somehow only re-elect the despot over and over again, and an opposition party whose leaders tend to go to prison and get mysteriously killed and injured. That is a thing that could happen. It may even be likely to happen.

But we can make it less likely to happen. We can make it more likely that we’ll have a real election in 2026 and thereafter.

One of the ways that we can make that election happen, is by insisting on believing it’s going to happen.

Because democracy is a thing that only exists if enough people insist on believing in democracy.

That doesn’t mean democracy is imaginary; democracy is real. It’s just a different kind of reality.

Many things are real, all the time, even if you don’t believe in them. You can’t make a brick wall with a tunnel painted onto it stop being a wall by having faith that it’s a tunnel. You can’t turn pokeberries into blueberries by snacking on them as if they’re blueberries. The heavenly body known as Pluto existed before it was discovered and named, and continues to exist unchanged now that we don’t call it a planet anymore.

But there’s a different kind of real thing, that can only exist if a critical mass of people believe that it can. And I promise you, no matter how practical and sensible a person you are, you have also helped a thing to exist by believing in it.

A metal disc with a face stamped on it is really currency, because a large number of people agree that it’s currency. Otherwise, it would just be metal. A line of white stripes across a black road becomes a crosswalk, the safe way to cross the street, because pedestrians and motorists agree that that’s what the lines are. The Friday after Thanksgiving is the day when all the really good sales are, because we all believed in a holiday so much that retailers decided to honor it by lowering the prices. The world is full of real things we all depend on, that only exist because we all agree to believe they do.

Democracy is that kind of real thing. It exists because we agree that it exists. The first democracy was born when a group of cave men ten thousand years ago mutually agreed to stop hitting each other, and instead choose a leader based on a shouting contest or a show of hands, and to believe that everyone would honor that spoken contract. It went on from there. In the places where people have stopped agreeing to be a democracy and started hitting each other again, it’s died.

One of the reasons that the media hasn’t known how to report on Donald Trump and his cult, is that they don’t believe in very real things that exist by the consensus of thinking people. They don’t believe in democracy, and they would like us to go back to hitting one another. Our society doesn’t know what to do with that.

We can fight them, in part, by refusing to let go of our belief. It won’t be enough, but it’s the very first step. I promise you that if we all unilaterally decide that there won’t be a 2026 or 2028 election, there won’t be. And I promise you that if there is a 2026 or 2028 election where we’ve got even a snowball’s chance, it will be, in part, because we believed that there had to be, even though some would like us not to.

So go ahead and insist that the 2026 midterms are going to happen, and they’re going to be a blowout.

And believe that in 2028, we’re going to win 49 states at least. Ohio is going to turn blue and humiliate that carpetbagger who came back to his home state to write a book about how fat and lazy we are. Blexas will really happen, it just hasn’t happened yet. Hold that belief. Talk about it. If you don’t get the utopia you had faith in, you may at least believe your way into mitigating a disaster.

At the same time, understand that this is going to be hard, and we’re going to have to work. It’s going to be exhausting, terrifying, unglamorous, sometimes boring. But believe that we can do it, if we work hard enough. You have to believe or you won’t fight to make it happen.

Believe in democracy. It’s our only hope.

And then we figure out what to do next.