Democracy Is Not Football
One of the many things that annoyed me in the wake of Trump’s upset victory was that for so many people on the winning side, this boiled down to “delicious librul tears“. And even a lot of Trump’s executive actions have been less about advancing his own plan, as about tearing down Obama’s legacy. We’ve also seen this with the ACA, where the GOP has been quite intent on repealing Obamacare, but has no idea what to replace it with, or how to get health care to everyone.
On the other side, I see people like the organizers of the March for Our Lives, and before them a thousand newly-hatched activists, whom Trump and the GOP awakened to the fact that government isn’t Them; it’s Us. You don’t have to choose among the two candidates that the major parties provide; you can run for office yourself. And if you can’t run and can’t vote, you can still write your representatives, and raise a fuss and bloody well make people care about the issues that you care about.
This is of a piece with the rise of prayer-shaming: a lot of the response to shootings like Parkland has been that offering “thoughts and prayers” is the same as not doing anything at all, and by now you are expected to know this. The young generation is the least-religious one yet in recent American history, and they know that praying doesn’t fix problems. Sitting down and fixing problems fixes problems.
This may turn out to be the silver lining of the Trump era: that so much stuff broke, that it woke people up to the fact that democracy isn’t a spectator sport.
(Originally started as a comment at chez Hemant.)