Yes, Happy New Year. We can and now do have hope for the future of America. The people have spoken and will have an actual president in less than three weeks. But there's substantive work that can and must be done even if/as/when we are still isolated in our homes.
Getting that job done is NOT a matter of simply trusting a new federal administration to do it all. I'm confident that President Biden will provide genuine, legitimate leadership. But so must you and I. Elected officials still, based on the governmental model of the constitutional republic, obtain their authority from the consent of the people. That consent must be active, and must be exercised with critical analysis. To that end, I recommend Russian-born New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen's latest book. The first parts of the book recap the Trump administration. But then provides key prescriptions for active citizenship.
From Surviving Autocracy,
When the time for recovery comes, as it inevitably will, we will need to do the work of rebuilding a sense of shared reality. For journalists, the task is much bigger than returning to an imagined state of normalcy before Trump, or even than deciding to retire some words and rehabilitate others. A new focus on using words intentionally will not be a matter for usage manuals but rather will require that journalists accept a responsibility that anodyne [solutions to what ails America will not necessarily be painless] headlines, equivocal statements and the style of extreme restraint have helped avoid. To state directly what they are seeing, journalists will have to reveal where they stand. To tell stories that situation the current moment in history, journalists will have to acknowledge that the media is inherently a political actor and decisions journalists make--which words to use and which stories to tell--are political decisions. And to make these decisions, journalists, too, will need to abandon the idea that politics is the province of technocrats--and accept their responsibility for shaping and facilitating the political conversation citizens must have in a democracy.
In their relationship to the next president, journalists will have to reassert their position as representatives of the American people, guarantors of the people's right to know. Journalists will have to do their part to rebuild the expectation that statements made by the president have immediate meaning. Meaning is distinct from consequences, but their meaning is often secondary to their tone, hard to discern, or downright [unintelligible]. Political speech--that is, speech intended to find common ground across difference, to negotiate the rules of living together in society-- is speech that, on the one hand, brings reality into focus and, on the other, activates the imagination. The job of revitalizing the language of politics will fall primarily to political leaders, It will be the job of journalists to embody and enforce the expectation of meaning. It will also be the job of journalists to create a communications sphere in which people feel not like spectators to a disaster that defies understanding but like participants in creating a common future with their fellow citizens. This is the fundamental project of democracy, and the reason it requires media. -- Surviving Autocracy, pps 163, 164 by Masha Gessen.
Let's travel this journey together. One aspect of those travels is the upcoming iteration of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. I expect that process, for redrawing district maps for the state legislature and the AZ delegation to Congress to be no less contentious than the 2011 process proved to be. Though the players (commissioners and staff) will be different, it's still political blood sport.
Expect new challenges.
Mask UP, Arizona. Wash your hands frequently. And by all means get the Covid19 vaccination as soon as you can.
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