Kamala Harris lost. Here we are. So it goes.

Are you sad? Are you scared?

I am very sad. I am very scared.

But, like everyone else in this position, most of all, I want to know what to
do next.

A Mission For Progress

I believe that we should set up a missionary organization for progressive and
liberal values.

In 2017, Kayla Chadwick wrote the now-classic article, “I Don’t Know How To
Explain To You That You Should Care About Other
People”.
It resonated with millions of people, myself included. It expresses an
exasperation with a populace that seems ignorant of economics, history,
politics, and indeed unable to read the
news.
It is understandable to be frustrated with people who are exercising their
electoral power callously and irresponsibly.

But I think in 2024, we need to reckon with the fact that we do, in fact,
need to explain to a large swathe of the population that they should care about
other people.

We had better figure out how to explain it soon.

Shared Values — A Basis for Hope

The first question that arises when we start considering outreach to the
conservative-leaning or undecided independent population is, “are these people
available to be convinced?”.

To that, I must answer an unqualified “yes”.

I know that some of you are already objecting. For those of us with an
understanding of history and the mechanics of bigotry in the United States, it
might initially seem like the answer is “no”.

As the Nazis came to power in the 1920s, they were campaigning openly on a
platform of antisemitic
violence.
Everyone knew what the debate was. It was hard to claim that you didn’t, in
spite of some breathtakingly cowardly contemporaneous
journalism, they
weren’t fooling anyone.

It feels ridiculous to say this, but Hitler did not have support among Jews.

Yet, after campaigning on a platform of defaming immigrants, and Mexican
immigrants
specifically
for a decade, a large part of what drove his victory is that Trump enjoyed a
shockingly huge surge of support among the Hispanic
population.
Even some undocumented
migrants
— the ones most likely to be herded into concentration camps starting in
January — are supporting him.

I believe that this is possible because, in order to maintain support of the
multi-ethnic working-class
coalition
that Trump has built, the Republicans must maintain plausible deniability.
They have to say “we are not racist”, “we are not xenophobic”. Incredibly,
his supporters even say “I don’t hate trans
people”
with startling regularity.

Most voters must continue to believe that hateful policies with devastating
impacts
are actually race-neutral, and are simply going to get rid of “bad” people.
Even the ones motivated by racial resentment are mostly motivated by factually
incorrect
beliefs
about racialized minorities receiving special treatment and resources which
they are not in fact receiving.

They are victims of a disinformation machine. One that has rendered reality
incomprehensible.

If you listen to conservative messaging, you can hear them referencing this all
the time. Remember when JD
Vance
made that comment about Democrats calling Diet Mountain Dew racist?

Many publications wrote about this joke “bombing”, but the kernel of truth
within it is this: understanding structural bigotry in the United States is
difficult. When we progressives talk about it, people who don’t understand
it think that our explanations sound ridiculous and incoherent.

There’s a reason that the real version of critical race
theory is a graduate-level
philosophy-of-law course, and not a couple of catch phrases.

If, without context, someone says that “municipal zoning
laws are racist”, this
makes about as much sense as “Diet Mountain Dew is racist” to someone who
doesn’t already know what
“redlining” is.

Conservatives prey upon this
confusion to their
benefit. But they prey on this because they must do so. They must do so
because, despite everything, hate is not actually popular among the American
electorate. Even now, they have to be deceived into it.

The good news is that all we need to do is stop the deception.

Politics Matter

If I have sold you on the idea that a substantial plurality of voters are
available to be persuaded, the next question is: can we persuade them? Do
we, as progressives, have the resources and means to do so? We did lose, after
all, and it might seem like nothing we did had much of an impact.

Let’s analyze that assumption.

Across the country, Trump’s margins increased. However, in the swing states,
where Harris spent money on campaigning, his margins increased less than
elsewhere. At time of writing, we
project
that the safe-state margin shift will be 3.55% towards trump, and the
swing-state margin shift will be 1.69%.

This margin was, sadly, too small for a victory, but it does show that the
work mattered. Perhaps given more time, or more resources, it would have
mattered just a little bit more, and that would have been decisive.

This is to say, in the places where campaign dollars were spent, even against
the similar spending of the Trump campaign, we pushed the margin of support
1.86% higher within 107 days. So yes: campaigning matters. Which parts and
how much are not straightforward, but it definitely matters.

This is a bit of a nonsensical comparison for a whole host of reasons, but
just for a ballpark figure, if we kept this pressure up continuously during
the next 4 years, we could increase support for a democratic candidate by 25%.

We Can Teach, Not Sell

Political junkies tend to overestimate the knowledge of the average voter.
Even when we are trying to compensate for
it, we
tend to vastly overestimate how much the average voter knows about politics
and policy. I suspect that you, dear reader, are a political junkie even if
you don’t think of yourself as one.

To give you a sense of what I mean, across the country, on Election day and
the day after, there was a huge spike in interest for the Google query, “did
Joe Biden drop
out”.

Consistently
over
the last
decade,
democratic policies are more popular than their
opponents.
Even deep red states, such as Kansas, often vote for policies supported by
democrats and opposed by
Republicans.

This confusion about policy is not organic; it is not voters’ fault. It is
because Republicans constantly
lie.

All this ignorance might seem discouraging, but it presents an opportunity:
people will not sign up to be persuaded, but people do like being informed.
Rather than proselytizing via a hard sales pitch, it should be possible to
offer to explain how policy connects to elections. And this is made so much
the easier if so many of these folks already generally like our policies.

The Challenge Is Enormous

I’ve listed some reasons for optimism, but that does not mean that this will be
easy.

Republicans have a tremendously powerful, decentralized media
apparatus that
reinforces their culture-war messaging all the time.

After some of the post-election analysis, “The Left Needs Its Own Joe
Rogan”
is on track to become a cliché within the week. While I am deeply
sympathetic to that argument, the right-wing media’s success is not organic; it
is funded by petrochemical
billionaires.

We cannot compete via billionaire financing, and as such, we have to have a way
to introduce voters to progressive and liberal media. Which means more
voters need social connections to liberals and progressives.

Good Works

The democratic presidential campaign alone spent a billion and a half
dollars.
And, as shown above, this can be persuasive, but it’s just the persuasion
itself.

Better than spending all this money on telling people what good stuff we
would do for them if we were in power, we could just show them, by doing
good stuff. We should live our values, not just endlessly reiterate them.

A billion dollars is a significant amount of power in its own right.

For historical precedent, consider the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast For
Children program.
This program absolutely scared the shit out of the conservative power
structure, to the point that Nixon’s FBI literally raided them for giving out
free food to children.

Religious missionaries, who are famously annoying, often offset their
annoying-ness by doing charitable work in the communities they are trying to
reach. A lot of the country that we need to reach are religious people, and
nominally both Christians and leftists share a concern for helping those in
need, so we should find some cultural common ground there.

We can leverage that overlap in values by partnering with churches. This
immediately makes such work culturally legible to many who we most need to
reach.

Jobs Jobs Jobs

When I raised this idea with Philip James,
he had been mulling over similar ideas for a long time, but with a slightly
different tack: free career skills workshops from folks who are obviously
“non-traditional” with respect to the average rural voter’s cultural
expectations. Recruit trans folks, black folks, women, and non-white
immigrants from our tech networks.

Run the trainings over remote video conferencing to make volunteering more
accessible. Run those workshops through churches as a distribution network.

There is good evidence that this sort of prolonged contact and direct exposure
to outgroups, to help people see others as human beings, very
effective politically.

However, job skills training is by no means the only benefit we could bring.
There are lots of other services we could offer remotely, particularly with the
skills that we in the tech community could offer. I offer this as an initial
suggestion; if you have more ideas I’d love to hear them. I think the best
ideas are ones where folks can opt in, things that feel like bettering oneself
rather than receiving charity; nobody likes getting handouts, particularly
from the outgroup, but getting help to improve your own skills feels more
participatory.

I do think that free breakfast for children, specifically, might be something
to start with because people are far more willing to accept gifts to benefit
others (particularly their children, or the elderly!) rather than themselves.

Take Credit

Doing good works in the community isn’t enough. We need to do visible good
works. Attributable good works.

We don’t want to be assholes about
it, but we do want to make sure that
these benefits are clearly labeled. We do not want to attach an obligation to
any charitable project, but we do want to attach something to indicate where it
came from.

I don’t know what that “something” should be. The most important thing is that
whatever “something” is appeals to set of partially-overlapping cultures that I
am not really a part of — Midwestern, rural, southern, exurban, working class,
“red state” — and thus, I would want to hear from people from those cultures
about what works best.

But it’s got to be something.

Maybe it’s a little sticker, “brought to you by progressives and liberals. we
care about you!”. Maybe it’s a subtle piece of consistent branding or graphic
design, like a stylized blue stripe. Maybe we need to avoid the word
“democrats”, or even “progressive” or “liberal”, and need some independent
brand for such a thing, that is clearly tenuously connected but not directly;
like the Coalition of Liberal and Leftist Helpful Neighbors or something.

Famously, when Trump sent everybody a check from the government, he put his
name on it. Joe Biden did the same thing, and Democrats seem to think it’s a
good thing that he didn’t take credit because it “wasn’t about advancing
politics”,
even though this obviously backfired. Republicans constantly take credit for
the benefits of Democratic
policies,
which is one reason why voters don’t know they’re democratic policies.

Our broad left-liberal coalition is attempting to improve people’s material
conditions. Part of that is, and must be, advancing a political agenda.
It’s no good if we provide job trainings and free lunches to a community if
that community is just going to be reduced to ruin by economically catastrophic
tariffs and mass deportations.

We cannot do this work just for the credit, but getting credit is important.

Let’s You And Me — Yes YOU — Get Started

I think this is a good idea, but I am not the right person to lead it.

For one thing, building this type of organization requires a lot of
organizational and leadership skills that are not really my forte. Even the
idea of filing the paperwork for a new 501(c)3 right now sounds like rolling
Sisyphus’s rock up the hill to me.

For another, we need folks who are connected to this culture, in ways that I
am not. I would be happy to be involved — I do have some relevant technical
skills to help with infrastructure, and I could always participate in some of
the job-training stuff, and I can definitely donate a bit of money to a
nonprofit, but I don’t think I can be in charge.

You can definitely help too, and we will need a wide variety of skills to
begin with, and it will definitely need money. Maybe you can help me figure
out who should be in charge.

This project will be weaker without your support. Thus: I need to hear from
you.

You can email me, or, if you’d prefer a more
secure channel, feel free to reach out over
Signal,
where my introduction code is glyph.99 . Please start the message with “good
works:” so I can easily identify conversations about this.

If I receive any interest at all, I plan to organize some form of meeting
within the next 30 days to figure out concrete next steps.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on
this blog. If you like what you’ve read here and you’d like to read more
things like it, or you’d like to support my various open-source
endeavors, you can support my work as a
sponsor! My aspirations for this support are more in the
directions of software development than activism, but needs must, when the
devil drives.
Thanks especially to Philip James for both
refining the idea and helping to edit this post, and to Marley
Myrianthopoulos for assistance with
the data analysis.