Voters Must See What Is Coming

While the United States is racing to the fiscal edge and functional collapse in this government shutdown, I am considering my new bathroom.

This is a basement 3/4 bath, a last-minute design-while-building project using reclaimed materials, just to complicate things. I have realized how many small decisions appear only when you build a bathroom: tile, sinks, toilets, faucets, showerhead, towel bars, shower curtains, grab bar, toilet paper roller, medicine chest, mirror, and other items I am surely still forgetting. Not a big list, but factor in choices for each fixture with their placements, and you get a math problem.

As Harvey Pekar said in American Splendor, “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”

Learning Curves

These weeks I learned, besides where to find architectural salvage, how easy it is to not see politics if you do not seek it. This bathroom was an absorbing project with a respectable learning curve, compounding my overanalyzing tendencies in a compressed time frame. And it felt good to not have politics so forward in my thoughts. I enjoyed a tangible project with solvable problems—and I am a wonk with a master’s in public administration who writes on Substack. What about most other folks?

Americans are not known for attention to politics. Collectively, we have a consistently poor grasp of history. People have limited bandwidth in a day, and absorbing the unexpected and unprecedented in politics is harder still. It is daunting to race from the standing start most Americans have to an understanding of the decades-in-the-making Republican fascistic agenda now culminating in the looming government shutdown.

Loss of serendipity

While villain algorithms may narrow views and inflame some politics, I believe social media’s political harm is more basic—the loss of serendipity. In pre-internet days, people could get news accidentally. Want to read a newspaper’s sports section, you saw front page headlines with straight-to-the-point first paragraph stories. Need tomorrow’s weather? You watched local news, which stations put at the end to keep viewers tuned in. And Americans watched a national news half-hour because that was what Americans did: upwards of 90% of dinnertime viewing households. So you saw civil rights marches or anti-war protests without ever seeking them out.

We once shared an information highway—driving the same Route 66, seeing the same sights, reading the same map. We had a shared reckoning of events because they were set in the passing scenery. Today, we have information teleporters taking people straight to what they want. If uninterested in politics, they see no politics. Add the fatalism about government metastasizing since Reagan, and you see why most Americans are deficit in understanding politics. It is too much at once, too many permutations, making such a project feel overwhelming. And so we don’t. Back then, Barry Goldwater was defeated. Now, we get Trump—twice.

There is no “messaging” for 2026 that will swing enough votes to overcome Trump, gerrymanders, and his DOJ interference in the next election. America needs a crash course in politics to begin the end of Trump’s reign in 2026.

No time for subtlety

We have a chaotic politics in the face of a shutdown. Polarized implies more order than is out in the wild. Too many people are too unaware of politics today to see the real aims behind Project 2025/MAGA/Republican Party. While Democrats consistently run with questionable election strategies, they have excelled in playing bad hands well to keep the most extreme right-wing policies from harming the country. For example, as much grief Chuck Schumer got for the last shutdown vote, baring a performative Elon Musk at DOGE reveling in a shutdown while a slim chance remained for a positive SCOTUS ruling was the best choice for a miserable position.

Yet Democrats cannot shift Americans’ conceptual inertia to reveal how fascistic the Republican Party is today to a broader base. No words will—many voters just forgot how bad a President Trump was during COVID and re-elected him less than a year ago. The only way America will grasp the true nature of Trump and the GOP is to see its will manifest in all its inglory. Today, the only way out is through.

Democrats must not deal with Republicans. Let the ruling party do what it has the votes to do—or not do. Government shutdown and ACA cuts will be ugly, painful, and destructive, with harm distributed unfairly across the country. But the only way to move voters at the scale required to stop Trump is to show people what is coming.

Time and again, when progressives warn of horrors, optimistic America does not believe it. Take abortion rights: a few said the obvious for years, against the many who thought it would never happen—until it did. There is no “messaging” for 2026 that will swing enough votes to overcome Trump, gerrymanders, and his DOJ interference in the next election. America needs a crash course in politics to begin the end of Trump’s reign in 2026.

Stop the bleeding

The next election cycle strategy for Democrats will then be clear. The ruling party controls the Congress, the Presidency, and Supreme Court. Look at what is happening to you and yours now. This is what they have wanted for decades. We all might not have agreed on everything in the past, but today we all can agree—first stop the bleeding. Then we can recover and build a fascist-free future.