Dear Jen: How can/will I survive the 2024 election?
This month's question is an amalgamation of several questions on the 2024 election – ranging from displeasure with candidates to staying sane.
This month's question is an amalgamation of several questions on the 2024 election. I have timed my response as an epilogue to Super Tuesday. It is now abundantly clear that we're in for an electoral re-match of two men who are the living manifestations of the "old man yelling at a cloud" meme.
I will abstain from describing which old man I prefer (and prefer by far – as in miles and miles of cumulonimbus clouds ahead of the other candidate). The questions submitted were not asking me what my politics are, but how to stay sane amid an election year that feels as stressful as receiving a Doodle Poll with 73 time options. I am not trying to reduce the importance of this year's election. I genuinely believe that hell is an eternal Doodle Poll with endless pages of temporal possibilities.
There were two buckets of questions related to the election. The first type of question articulated a general displeasure with the options ahead of us:
When will we get a good and genuine presidential candidate that’s not a pawn in whatever scheme the DNC or RNC are cooking up (Instead of the loud orange Cheeto, or old senile bumbler)?
– Maureen
The second type of question is what to do with the dread of another general election:
I barely survived the 2016 election year. How can/will I survive 2024?
– A Feminist
Well Maureen and A Feminist – thank you, buckle up and, most importantly, vote.
Here we go...
For Maureen: Why these guys and why are election years shitty?
Maureen, your question is about when we will get good candidates running for president on both sides of the aisle. My answer to this question is fairly simply: we will get better (and maybe good) candidates when we overturn Citizens United. In brief, circa 2010 there was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision for Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which established two things: 1) corporations have the right to first amendment rights (like people) and 2) spending restrictions were lifted, which allowed money to flood our electoral processes.
From my perspective, the implications of Citizens United are significant. I do not think that overturning the Citizens United decision will solve everything, but the inundation of money from corporations and wealthy donors makes it really hard for surprise non-ultra-wealthy grassroots candidates (a la 2007 Barack Obama) to fight well-established status quo candidates.
Additionally, the post-Citizens United world qualitatively feels different, namely that elections have an aura of all-encompassing shittiness regardless of your political affiliation. A few weeks ago, I drew a graphic entitled "If the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Asked You to Subscribe to My Newsletter," which is basically an illustration of what I regularly see in my inbox – a genre of writing I categorize as "E-mails written by Nancy Pelosi's angry intern":
Then you have the text messages. When I get a text message from an unknown number, I wonder, Is this the day that my childhood crush decides to inform me that she is leaving her very attractive husband and two beautiful children to be with me?
And is this the day I can finally respond with: "No ty, busy rn"
Is this finally it?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. Instead, it's usually Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Kamala, Jill, Barack, Bernie, Nancy. These people don't even use their entire names anymore ("Hey. It's Kamala.") because they text me more than my mother when she wants to go on a cruise vacation. My mother loves cruises, but apparently not as much as Nancy Pelosi likes to text about how apocalyptic the world is.
I have also somehow ended up on Republican text solicitations. I choose to stay on these text threads because the conservative messaging platform has a similar tone to the liberal ones – namely a fire and brimstone-like tenor that is designed to induce angry fear. There's a strange solace in seeing Donald Trump Jr. use the same "you're fucked" tactics as Nancy Pelosi.
Finally, there's the infuriating ads that algorithmically appear while scrolling on social media or that incise YouTube videos. The other day, my extremely on point YouTube algorithm suggested that I "watch" this video entitled "you're in a bathroom at a 2013 party." The screenshot below is essentially the entire video overlayed with 20 minutes of deeply nostalgic and absolutely terrible EDM:
So, here I am just vibing to some muffled Avicii, feeling nostalgic about the time I tried to unsuccessfully fish a number from a girl wearing double denim in a gay club bathroom and OH WAIT, HERE COMES ADAM SCHIFF! Exactly the type of person I wanted to run into in the bathroom line of Q Bar on a Tuesday night! A very straight white guy telling me our democracy is in peril unless I donate $3.99 on a monthly basis!
You're feeling stressed and disappointed in our choices? The political system has been designed to make you feel this way and it is awash in money to prop up the politics of fear and loathing. In my opinion, it has gotten substantially worse post-Citizens United where the intersection of money and social media have turbo-charged our angry and now invasive political climate. This has culminated in our choices – an angry man and the other man who has to be angry just to keep up. I hope this answers your question from one vantage point.
For A Feminist: How can we survive and what is enough?
A Feminist, I appreciate your question on surviving the 2024 election. I interpreted the question as how we can practice immediate care as we wait for greater changes to our systems, such as overturning Citizens United. As someone who also barely survived the 2016 election, I think about the question of sanity and politics a lot. At the time, my coping mechanism was creating a series of very generic protest signs for every rally that the new administration would inspire. If I couldn't be satisfied, at least I could strive for efficiency:
Years later, I am entering 2024 having made one positive change, which was regulating my media diet. To do so, I reflected on the following two-part question:
What information do I actually need to know for my work/personal life? What is enough information?
The purpose of this two-part question is to help me develop boundaries with news intake, which has an outsized influence on how I experience the world. The most ineffective answer to the aforementioned question is "to stay informed" because I find that response to be a vague and distressing impossibility. Informed on what and for what purpose? Is it even possible to stay completely up to speed considering that the last appropriations bill passed by the US Congress was in the trillions of dollars encompassing line items of breadth as vast as this country?
If helpful, here's how I would answer part one of my own question:
My Job: I work in education, so I need to stay up to speed on federal, state, and local initiatives that impact young people and educational systems. This single area of focus is already broad and exhaustive.
My Local Community: I care about the regional impact of economic inequality. I see the products of economic inequality on a daily basis. As a result, I try to track the progress of specific interventions (tax policies, expansions of the social safety net, etc.) that serve my neighbors and I.
My Sports Teams: I'm a masochist and I like feeling like a loser, so I read depressing takes on Houston sports teams and plot how I can get the FBI to designate the Houston Rockets a domestic terrorist group.
Through my favorite news analysts like Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Jerusalem Demsas, and JJ Redick, my information intake extends beyond the above three categories, but within the rationality and care of thinkers I have learned to trust.
The second part of the question on what is "enough" is much harder to answer. Although I have trouble establishing what is "enough," I find it helpful having standards of what not to do to keep me contained. Here's some examples:
Start with Policies over Politics: I generally try to track policies before politics/politicians. These are two very different categories even though they are inextricably linked to one another. From my perspective, the differences are:
Politics/politicians revolve around the process of and the people who are acquiring powers of governance. This entails following the general state of the US political parties or a specific politician's campaign.
Policies are courses of action that lead to intended goal or outcome. The reason why I choose to focus my attention on policy (i.e. reforming FAFSA) before politics (i.e. the dwindling Republican house majority) is because both political parties have produced impactful legislation on issues that I care about. For example, some interesting reforms transpiring in youth mental health are taking place in so-called "red states." If I leaned into politics first, I would be limiting the scope of perspectives on issues I follow, which is not my intended outcome.
This is a sub-bullet to a bullet point answering the second part of a two-part question of a broader newsletter about two categories of questions. That's all.
Read Directly from the Source: I try my best to go directly to periodicals and news sites as opposed to "clicking through" from social media. According to the Pew Research Center, this is an increasingly rare practice. I do this for 3 reasons: 1) I don't want my social media algorithms to continue to feed me the same news related content, 2) I am usually able to develop my own interpretation of what is transpiring as opposed to viewing an event from someone else's lens, and 3) I can "discover" more news articles on my own like I would be browsing a bookstore.
A Feminist, I hope these framing devices help provide some temporary solace and control in a world where we are bombarded with a cacophony of political and electoral messages. Like you, my sanity is top of mind this year.
For Everyone: Prepare with Community.
My best guidance on election pandemonium is to prepare. I don't mean pull a Sam Bankman-Fried by planning to buy the entire island of Nauru like some dooms-day prepper. What I mean is that governments, elected officials and politicians will never replace the people who will nourish, protect, and support us: our chosen communities.
Again, I don't want to downplay how consequential this year's election is. That said, in times of uncertainty and fear, I am reminded to lean further into the relationships that study after study indicate are the most meaningful and stabilizing part of our lives: our families, our friends, our partners, and more. They are the reason so many of us engage in political work and do our best to create a world where the people we love the most can be their best selves. From my lens, we care and stress over politics because we care and stress over the wellbeing of our loved ones. That is the lost plot line of this chaotic political movie.
For a vast majority of people, electoral politics are simply a means to an end – not an end in and of itself. Even when the people I voted for "won," there was still so much work to do on behalf of the people I cared about the most. From my view, that is the most important thing to keep in mind during an election year.
The world will somehow keep turning after November 2024, but what I fear is that so many of us will withdraw into the cynical recesses of our minds and into full disengagement. I see this among the young people I work with and I sometimes feel this myself. Please, whatever you do, don't permanently retreat now, in the future, ever. There's a whole set of things we must accomplish, including overturning Citizens United.
Thank you, Maureen and a Feminist. I wish you both well as you navigate this year's 2024 election. Godspeed, stay sane, and please vote.
Best,
Jen
See you on the first Thursday of next month. Interested in submitting a question? Submit here!
Love this post Jen! Thank you. Another thing people might want to look into is what political parties are, how they function, how to influence them, etc. Having given my own go at working in a political party, I found it interesting that it's easy to get in and influence what happens. I always bristle a bit when I hear people say that they are struggling with what the parties "are giving them." You can actually take some responsibility for that process if you are interested...