This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 9 episode of “Velshi.”
Politics is easier for most of us when the democratic ideals we cherish triumph — or at least persist. However, to be politically engaged is to not only risk losing in an election, but also to be prepared, and willing, to lose. It’s to put it all on the line knowing the outcome, at least the immediate one, might not be the outcome for which you worked so hard.
I know this lesson well. I learned it when I was 11 years old, working on my father’s first campaign in Canada in 1981. On election night, we expected the results to take some time, so we were in the car when the polls closed. When we turned on the radio, I heard the hosts say what I would learn to say years later when covering elections: It was too early to tell who would form the government. However, based on history, demographics and exit polling — things I was too young to understand at the time — they were able to project the results in one constituency: the one my dad was contesting.
But my father’s loss cut deep. Last week, I felt the depth of that cut.
Within the first minute of the broadcast, they announced he had lost. I was devastated. I looked at my dad and said, “I can’t believe we lost.” He turned his attention away from the road for just a moment to look at me and with a smile he said, “Of course, we lost. We were never going to win.” I asked, “Then why did we do this?”
“Because we could,” he told me. “We ran because we could. And more people voted for the other guy than voted for me. It’s OK. Life goes on.”
My father appreciated something I didn’t. He grew up in apartheid South Africa, where he couldn’t vote because of the color of his skin, let alone run for office. He ran because that’s what civic engagement looked like to him.
But my father’s loss cut deep. Last week, I felt the depth of that cut. This year’s election felt different from eight years ago when Donald Trump was first elected. That felt like an accident. This didn’t. There was so much on the line: Pregnant women are dying, the Earth is burning, wars are being waged and democracy is on the brink.
I’m fairly certain this country will see some dark days ahead, but you know what I don’t know? I don’t know where we are in this effort to forge a stronger democracy, a more perfect union.
Just as rebel colonists didn’t know on April 19, 1775, when gunfire erupted in Concord, Massachusetts. Or on Sept. 3, 1783, when the Revolutionary War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
America had declared its independence from Britain seven years earlier, a date we think of as the start of the nation, and yet on July 4, 1776, this new nation was not even a quarter of the way through that war.
America didn’t know on April 11, 1861, before the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter, how long that fight would take or whether it would be much of a fight at all. Or on April 9, 1865, after an estimated 750,000 Americans died and Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Back then, we still didn’t know what the future would hold.
History is steeped in examples of people who fought through the darkness, in the glow of candlelight. People who knew — like my father taught me that night in 1981 — that defeat paves the way for triumph.
In fact, many who have fought for human rights, freedom, liberty and democracy did not themselves live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But the seeds were planted and flourished after they were gone. They understood the fight was bigger than them. They understood it was important to nurture the seeds of democracy into a tree under whose canopy later generations could seek shelter and of whose fruit later generations would partake.
We fight not simply for ourselves, but also for the future of democracy.
Susan B. Anthony dedicated her life to social justice. For 45 years, she fought for women’s suffrage with little obvious success. In 1869, just after the end of the Civil War, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution eliminated voting discrimination based on race but not gender. (At least on paper.)
The overt exclusion of women was a huge blow to Susan B. Anthony and women across America. But they kept going. The 19th Amendment was first proposed eight years later, in 1878, yet it would take another 42 years for white women to vote freely.
During the Civil Rights Movement, countless individuals fought for years against segregation: Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, Thurgood Marshall, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, John Lewis and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to name a few.
Black Americans endured decades of discrimination, ridicule and violence. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 99 years after the end of the Civil War, that segregation was officially outlawed in public places and Jim Crow laws were banned.
Conflict often produces change, but change is slow. Sometimes, it may not even look like change at all, or in the case of last week’s election, it might look like a setback. But today’s setbacks are tomorrow’s comebacks — and the comeback is our work now.
As my father taught me all those years ago, the fact that your side did not win is not a loss; it’s simply a sign that your work is not yet done. In 1775, 1776, 1783, 1861, 1865 and 1964, our work was not done. It may never be done, because democracy is dynamic. We will confront issues in the future we didn’t know would be issues — but we will continue to fight.
I know that one of the toughest things to reconcile is the fact that half of America made a choice you inherently disagree with. Maybe you found out that your neighbor, a friend, maybe even your mom or your brother, voted for the guy who wants to take your freedoms away.
We fight not simply for ourselves, but also for the future of democracy.
That is a tough reality to come to terms with. As James Baldwin once said, “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
Votes were cast by people who would oppress and deny the humanity of some of us — but that fact is not true of all of the more than 74 million people who voted for Trump. There are people out there who fell for his lies but, I believe, don’t wish to see pregnant women bleed out in parking lots, or the planet burn up, or migrants deported.
And those are our fellow citizens with whom we must engage.
There is neither time nor space for cynicism about politics today. The right to engage in politics is a privilege; one with which my parents did not grow up. It is a privilege we cannot give up and one of which we cannot tire.
This is going to be a challenge. The end of the tunnel is there but, right now, it’s too far away to see the light. So, we will use flashlights until we get closer to the other side, and we will hold them for each other.
But what you have, what we have, is agency. America chose a republic over a monarchy 248 years ago, and we still have that republic, but, as Benjamin Franklin’s admonition comes back to remind us time and again, we only have a republic if we can “keep it.”
And now that is our work.