Bad Polls Don’t Mean a Redeemed Nation

A few encouraging numbers can’t undo a decade of normalized bigotry, institutional failure, and political avoidance.

Waiting in line for the Orioles game knowing we should all be at a protest.

I’m not especially excited about the “No Kings” protest. Still, I want to give it the weight it deserves, especially for the people organizing, for those showing up, for the stubborn insistence that public action still matters.

But after nearly a decade immersed in political communications and the rhythms of the news cycle, it becomes harder to believe that protest alone can shift what has revealed itself to be structural. We are not confronting a momentary distortion. We are confronting a system that has long tolerated bigotry and incompetence, and now reflects them openly. That requires something deeper than symbolic resistance. It requires a rethinking of how we evaluate stakes, sacrifice, and what it actually takes to confront a shrinking democracy.

If I’m being honest, I’ve felt the pull to detach entirely and to step away from the churn, to stop tracking every turn of the wheel, you know, just let the noise collapse into silence. There is a certain peace in not knowing. But that instinct, however understandable, would also be a disservice to the people who read this work. If the moment demands clarity, then retreat cannot be the answer even when exhaustion makes it feel like the only reasonable choice.

The country does not feel close to redemption. People with qualifications that would have astonished previous generations now struggle to find even entry-level footing. The political allowances of the past have created fertile ground for a carnival-barking style of demagoguery. One that draws from a long American tradition: suspicion of multiracial democracy and disillusionment with entrenched power.

Trump is not the origin of this problem. He is its most visible expression. The deeper issue may be a political establishment still more invested in preserving its preferred narratives about Trump’s rise than in equipping people with the language and agency to name what actually happened. Trump is not an aberration. Rather, he is an outgrowth of the arrogance, blind spots, and permissiveness of a neoliberal and neoconservative consensus that refused to interrogate itself.

That means any strategy for addressing this moment cannot be limited to isolating “Trumpism” as a singular phenomenon. It must reckon with the ecosystem that produced it, and that continues to sustain it.

After ten years of normalized bigotry with little meaningful accountability, it is difficult to feel hope. Polls and focus groups offer fragments of reassurance, but they do not resolve the deeper truth: the ground has shifted, and we are still speaking as if it hasn’t.