After the year we’ve just experienced, I had every intention of sitting around quietly over Thanksgiving and experiencing as much nothing as possible.

But a friend of mine offered me an opportunity to join him and another middle aged traveling lad on a 5-day trip to Havana, Cuba.

On an whim that is uncharacteristic of my standard issue risk avoidance, I chose to go.

We flew red eye to Miami followed by a short hop to Havana. My only computer was the small one we commonly refer to as “phone”, which could only connect to the internet when I was in my historic AirBnB, itself hidden on a dilapidated street in Old Havana.

That, in and of itself, was a freedom that I could only taste ironically in a place like Havana.

The trip gave me an opportunity to reflect on where we are in the United States, through the lens of a country that has been gripped by authoritarianism since the 1950s –both from the Batista regime, and from Fidel Castro’s excessively long stay in power.

Havana is a case study in deferred maintenance. The stunning and ornate buildings, which line street after bustling street across historic Havana were in varying stages of decomposition, most of which were built in the middle of the 19th Century. Now and again, I saw second floor balconies being held up by straining wooden stilts, resting on the narrow sidewalk below. Others had trees growing out of their roofs or bushes that had established commanding beachheads half way up the edifices of cracking buildings.

I thought of my historic preservation friends here in Phoenix would certainly weep for days at the traumatic carnage, undoubtedly only to rally their strength and fight to save the lives of these grand old ladies.

To be fair, an impressive number of buildings around the Plaza Vieja have been beautifully renovated, though most still sit empty.

The phrase “two things can be true at once” rang in my head through the entire trip.

It is true that Fidel Castro simply replaced one repressive regime with another, which served only to stifle opportunity and maintain a hopeless dragging poverty over decades, despite its stated intentions of freeing the poor from the shackles of the rich.

It is also true, however, that the United States played a terrifying role in this tragedy. Rather than recognize the injustice of the Batista regime, the US supported the conditions in which a person like Castro could come to power.

As I walked around its streets I could see how Cuba’s historical lessons have echoed through these many decades. If you are quiet you can hear them bouncing around our current political malaise in the US. We should not ignore the similarity between the destabilizing excesses of the Batista regime and the democracy-threatening excesses of our current wealth disparity in the United States. Both resulted in foundational change in each country.

After all, it was the Gilded Age that led to the rise of communists and anarchists in America. The Batista regime lead to the rise of Castro. From the perspective of a person who loves representative democracy, I don’t see a distinction between communist authoritarianism, and any other kind of authoritarianism. Both delete freedom and increase poverty.

However, the Gilded Age also lead to the rise of the Progressives who’s reforms we still live by today. As such, we see a historical example of one country that fell to authoritarianism in the form of communisms following the overthrow of a repressive regime where the other moved toward progressive reform as a response to oligarchy, dodging the bullet of violent revolution.

My graduate study was in US foreign policy. The US-Cuban relationship was central to how we understood recent applications of the Monroe Doctrine. We were taught that the US was trying to stem the tide of communism near its borders.

But it was also apparent that the US acted like a spurned lover after the fall of Batista. Cuba was a playground for the American wealthy classes. Familiar yet distant to it’s visitors. Having been founded in the same era as our proud capitol, its architecture and streets were a familiar but sunny playground.

Unfortunately, that playground was fundamentally unjust to anyone not connected, with money or who toiled for a living. So in 1959 our lady Cuba walked out on an abusive relationship and her lover would never admit its role in the abuse. Then she walked in to the arms of another abuser.

Despite multiple opportunities over the last 70 years to open relations in ways that our allies in Canada, Mexico and Europe had, the US chose to isolate Cuba. Not until the Obama administration did we begin to open relations, 20 years after the fall of communism.

Certainly, it is reductive to ignore the legitimate grievances that the Cuban diaspora in Florida have with Castro’s Cuba. However, as my trip showed me, it is also short-sighted to ignore the reformative power that opening trade can have on a closed regime.

The European, Canadian and Mexican tourists who visit the city, after all, can only do so much to leverage their dollars, pesos and euros to encourage reforms in the Cuban government. Only a powerful wave of US investment, only 90 miles to the north, could have a meaningful effect.

That is why, after all, former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake fought to open relations with Cuba. Number 47’s pick as Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, however is poised to continue the old rifts –possibly even reverting to past closures.

But Rubio seems to be a scripted actor in a telenovela plot that has been passed down through two generations. But that script does not acknowledge the opportunity we have. It is possible to leverage the trade that Cuba needs against incremental and positive changes to Cuban policy.

Still, as I bought a Banksy-inspired illustration from a street artist, with its own subversive message, I knew that we need to protect Cubans from America’s worst habits if we hope to foster long-term stability.

The United States is in a particularly gruesome era of wealth inequality. Naturally, I hope this era will end the corrupt dealings of the corporate and religious right and will guide us to an era of federal and state reforms the reflect the best features of the Progressive Era in the US.

However, given our current struggle in our country, is this even a good time to flood Cuba with American misguided corporatism, strip malls and disregard for dense historic infrastructure? I am certain that this coming administration would, if given the chance, replicate the failed “shock therapy” approach that the US applied to Eastern Europe –and which only served to empower corruption, organized crime and oligarchs there.

With arrogance, the US would impose its failed health care and education systems on Cuba, which has universal (but faulty) health care and 99% literacy.

In pursuit of dollars for billionaires, the US would destroy habitat to install resorts where US visitors would never really learn about the country they are visiting.

We would see a short term rental industry that would certainly repair many structures, at least superficially, but which would displace thousands in the process. We know this because we see it at home.

As such, I’m conflicted. I saw desperately poor people and I know that they could have more opportunities and more stability through an era of détente. There are others whom I saw working the system in ways that could certainly propel them to fabulous wealth if more money ever floods the local economy.

How do we could protect people, their culture or their pride from the worst excesses of American greed while still helping them find the freedoms that they deserve?

The process would be as delicate as buttressing a sagging balcony full of tourists over a narrow Havana street lined with children.

But I left Havana feeling that it is worth a try. I reject the notion that the US has no role to play in Cuba’s future. We are too closely tied, even if our love affair is at a nadir.

After all, this old lady deserves to wear her finest again.

Phoestivus is old enough to get a learner’s permit!

But I wouldn’t want it driving my car. Certainly not Phreddie the Yeti. Have you seen that guy? He’d get fur all over my seats.

If you’ve not blocked some time on December 12th, 13th (from 5pm to 10pm) and Saturday the 14th (from 8am to 1pm), pull out that ol’ calendar and do it now!

Follow us on Instagram because we gave up on Facebook long ago. And we certainly would not lower ourselves to post on Twitter.

We will have all of the favorites. Hipster Santa is joining us again this year. We can’t wait to hear the stories from the North Pole. He always has something good for us.

We have a whole list of local brewers, food trucks and over 150 vendors ready to share their new creations with you.

And, don’t forget, we are doing this for a higher cause. We are supporting the downtown farmer’s market. This is their biggest fundraiser of the year.

We are also thumbing our noses at the billionaire class who would rather you order meaningless junk off their websites to they can build more space ships in some kind of Ayn Rand fever dream.

Personally, I want to encourage y’all to lean in to your most festive costumes, bling and creative adornments. I did last year and I have more planned for this year!

See you at Phoestivus!

In a blatant rip-off of Cliff’s Notes, I thought I’d share some bullet points on some of the most compelling things I’ve been reading or hearing over the last month. I know that you, like me, are processing so much right now. I have been seeking out conversations about how we can escape this festering hole in our country’s story before it is too late. I’ve been ignoring the news as much as possible.

I’d love to hear what you are reading, hearing and sharing. Sure, I could share on social media. But I’m tired of the algorithms separating us from one another. I’m turning to this “old fashioned” way of sharing ideas.

Plotting Our Way Back. Stacy Abrams speaks with historian Heather Cox Richardson.

• None of this will be easy, but this podcast gave me hope.
• Heather Cox Richardson compares the corporate authoritarianism of today with that of the 1880s and how that resulted in the broad consensus around the Progressive Era.
• They discuss strategies for countering disinformation, preparing to use states’ rights to their advantage to challenge Trump’s federal overreach.

Speaking to Real American Needs. Rahm Emanuel, who oversaw the Dems’ return to power in 2006, speaks to Ezra Klein about what Dems need to be doing now to turn the tide.

• Not a fan of podcasts? See the edited transcript here.
• In 2024, Dems failed to carry on their long tradition of being reformers.
• They need to find their way back to being reformers, rather than defending a broken system. (I made this same point in my post-election list, here.)
• Dems took back the House only two years after GW Bush was re-elected in 2004.
• Emanuel is on the short list to lead the DNC again.
• Emanuel says we will have many targets of bad policy in 2025, but we need to prioritize what we go after.
• The similarity between Bush and #47’s ability to convince voters to reject more qualified opponents is striking.

Can We Finally Stop With This Myth Already? A video graphic on what trickle down economics has given us.

• Trickle down economics set the stage for the ills that we have today.
• This is why we need a fair tax structure:
• Tax the rich what they owe. Fund the IRS to go after tax cheats. Help people get out of poverty.

Was Bernie Right All Along? Bernie Sanders says that the Democratic party broke its vow to working people.

• See the edited transcript here.
• Sanders says that Trump was able to convince people that he would be their protector, despite evidence that he will not be.
• Sanders says we need to step away from the big money interests and re-center the needs of working families.
• Sanders spells out how he thinks the party can prepare for 2026 and 2028.

From the World of Fighting Climate Change

The Energy/Water Nexus. Well known anglers group shows how dangerous fossil fuel power generation is to our water future.

• This is a shocking report.
• AT LEAST 889,000 homes-worth of water every year goes to cooling dirty fossil fuel power plants.
• There is certainly more wasted, because this report could only access public data for 17 of 57 power plants in Arizona.
• The utilities are planning to install at least 8 more dirty methane power plants over the next 5 years.
• Trout Unlimited is a trusted alliance of folks who love fishing. This is not a leftie environmental group.
• If you are concerned about water in Arizona, we must urgently push Arizona Public Service – APS, Tucson Electric Power and Salt River Project to move toward solar, wind, battery back-up and to support more energy efficiency in homes.

Locking in Biden Clean Energy Reforms. Biden locks in $6.6B for TSMC chip factories, ensuring Trump can’t rescind CHIPS Act deal

• There is a huge rush right now to lock in huge chucks of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) before #47 rescinds it in favor polluting fossil fuel donors.
• The IRA has resulted in millions of clean energy jobs across the country, and tens of thousands in Arizona.
• The IRA is bringing manufacturing back to the US –something that #47 promised during his first term and never delivered on.

Taking Advantage of Navajo, Again. Tucson Electric Power is abusing desperately poor communities for profit.

• 50 years ago, Tucson Electric Power (TEP) gave Navajo communities a raw deal, paying a one-time payment of $34,948 for 5 decades of leasing rights for a long power line across Navajo land.
• A huge percentage of Navajo residents don’t have power in their homes, but they can see these lines in the distance. 
• Now they are trying to renew this lease by getting approval resolutions from Navajo chapter houses without disclosing what a raw deal they got in the past.
• TEP needs to give the Navajo Nation a share of the ownership of this line.
• Lease payments, even if they are more fair than this, don’t contribute to intergenerational wealth, and only serve to keep Navajo communities under the thumb of utilities.

Well, I had all the intentions of publishing this video when I first got back from my western states tour in early October.

But life happens. I had a conference to prepare, then we had an election to lose.

This video is an interview with Chris Braun, Chief Technology Officer with the Mountain Regional Water District near Park City Utah. I was there back in August to shoot the video, but they asked me to hold it until after their official launch in September.

I thought you’d be interested in this topic, given the huge number of reservoirs and canals that Arizona uses to keep people alive in the desert. The Gila River Indian Community is building out solar PV on their canals in order to save water, generate energy and be better stewards of the land.

Maybe we could apply some of those lessons in other areas of the state.

On Nihilism

On my van tour this summer, I spoke about my struggle with the cancer that is nihilism since 2016. I’ve heard a lot of folks saying that we need to just allow the nation to feel the pain of Trump’s policies, so they will learn their mistakes. So, they say, just sit back and allow Trump to have his way such that people learn.

In my depths of nihilism, I had similar thoughts about climate change. After all, humans won’t seriously change their personal wasteful behavior, nor will they hold politicians accountable until they feel the real pain of global warming.

One can make the argument that masses of people in Germany and Italy had to feel the full pain of falling in behind fascistic governments in order to see that for the dead end that it is. One can further that point by suggesting that humans, with their myopic views and refusal to study history, will probably advance tyrants about once every 100 years because those who remember the last tyrants are gone and the siren songs of the authoritarians are too strong for those younger generations, who did not experience their poison, to resist.

Only after cataclysmic disaster will power be given back to those with a more tempered world view. To be clear, the theory in both the context of climate change and Trump, that means destruction, pain and even death.

There is a problem with that. Aside from the obvious problem that millions could be displaced, traumatized for generations or killed, accepting that as a reality relegates us to a life that is “nasty, brutish and short.” History shows that there have been many times where people were able to avoid a return to rule under despots. Most notably for us, the American Revolution and President Washington’s decision to leave office rather than become a king provide an example of people choosing human progress over power.

The other problem with this way of thinking is that standing by and allowing Trump’s Christian Theocratic and oligarchic allies to “teach them all a lesson” does not give those people who are being harmed a north star, a way out. Take the person who voted for Trump because they believed the lie that Biden was responsible for inflation loses their job and can’t find a job because Trumps tariffs have tanked the economy. If they don’t hear from Democrats that there is a better way (without shaming them for their vote), then that person may turn to even more extreme politicians with even simpler and just-as-unworkable policy ideas than Trump’s.

I’ve also seen many people talking about how they need to gear up for violence. That is a choice. I lived in Sarajevo for about two years, just as the war was ending. Ask anybody there and every one of them will tell you, they wish they could rewind time and find a way to stop the first shots, to find better ways to communicate with others in their country and to resist the leaders who lead them down that horrible path.

Hoping that things will reach a bottom in order for things to get better is a lazy way out, which will only result in more problems that we could never predict.

On nonviolence

When I was getting my graduate degree from the American University I was getting a mixed degree with two focuses: conflict resolution and US foreign policy.

I had a professor named Professor Aabdul Aziz Said. He had a long career spanning back to the 1950s in which he served as an advisor for government and powerful people all over the world. He told a story of the days during the First Intifada (1987-93) in which he was trying to advise the leadership of the leaders at the time, the Palestinian Leadership Organization (PLO).

He implored them to study and adopt the nonviolent tactics of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others. He made the case to them that, a well-disciplined nonviolent army will gut the power of the narrative from the Israeli government, which had for years by then been forcibly removing people from land their families had occupied legally for generations. If, as they ultimately did, they resort to violence, they are simply providing their foes with the justification they needed to continue what they were doing.

He explained that it was one of the biggest regrets in his career that he could not convince them that they would be better off with a nonviolent strategic approach.

On the issue of Israel, by the way, I firmly believe that you can disagree with the decisions of a government while still agreeing with their right to exist. This is not the topic of this blog series. But it is worth saying. I didn’t disagree with my country’s right to exist, just because I thought the US’s approach to using drones in Afghanistan.

There are several problems with attempting nonviolent protests in our modern world. First, many police authorities have figured out how to disperse nonviolent protests easily. Second, opposition is very good at triggering violent reactions in the crowd in order to justify a response. Third, the “old” tactics that got attention in 1960 illicit nothing more than a yawn today.

But, if you know that Trump is going to do everything he can to undermine voter rights, women’s rights and the entire power structure of our government irreparably before he can be held accountable in 2018, then we have no choice than to gum up the works as quickly and creatively as possible.

However, like with the Frist Intifada, if you choose violence, you are giving Trump, the Proud Boys or whatever paramilitary groups he empowers a reason to blame it all on you.

On our moment

If you read your history books in high school, or watched your period piece drama in the theater, and you thought, “I would have fought on the right side of history,” now is your time.

We already know that the people making excuses for Trump and his band of miscreant leaders would have been the people who were on the wrong side of history in those dramatic movies.

For my part, I’ve been invigorated by this moment. After years of feeling lost, feeling that none of it matters, feeling that I was not part of progress anymore, I can see that I can be. We all can be.

A nihilist will tell you that nothing you do has meaning, so just live for the moment. Every empire will fall. Every person will die. The Earth will fall in to the sun.

But they are giving away agency for their lives to people who will happily take it from them and throw them aside like used tissue. They are making their lives flat, grey and disposable. They will tell you that your government is too corrupt to fix so that you will feel deflated. They will tell you not to trust any information so that the public will look only to them for their information. They will tell you that “other” people are a threat, depriving you of the exquisite bouquet of variety that makes life the most delicious meal anyone could ever eat.

It does not matter whether our country falls apart in 200 year or 100 years. What we know is that the people we value, the ideas we value and the country we value are all here now.

Why would you not want to be in the thick of the fight to save it?

I don’t have all the answers, and perhaps this entire writing exercise has been my way of processing grief. But I hope we can be inspired together to ask the questions, find the best path forward and fight like we know we are on the right side of history.

How the Tortoise Can Win the Race

This old fable may not be the best for our current predicament. After all, in that story, the hare lost because he was too cocky. Trump certainly failed in his first term because of his arrogance and narcissism. He also proved that their propaganda machine was strong enough to right the ship after he tipped it over.

But the difference, as we all know, is that he is surrounding himself with people who will not push back or stop him. If you listen to no other podcast that I share with you today, at least listen to this episode of On the Media. The section on the man-o-sphere is insightful, but what I really want you to hear starts at 28 minutes. Masha Gessen is a journalist with the New York Times who fled Russia as Putin became increasingly autocratic. They cover their rules for surviving autocracy.

Be assured that, just as with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the right will try to change the rules very quickly at the federal level which, even if Democrats take back marginal control, they won’t be able to change back to what we thought of as “normal.” This is final phase toward autocracy is called “autocratic breakthrough.”

So, my friends, we are up against a rabbit that may have learned its lesson from the last race. But, that does not mean that we can’t leverage the pain that his policies will obviously cause –and to the very people who voted for him in this election.

But, it requires that we move quickly and get in place. If we do not, we will see that autocratic breakthrough.

I’m hoping these series of questions can guide us to make certain they can’t recover in the very likely case that Trump’s hand-picked Q-anon staff fall all over themselves trying force their ideological tenants to a real world that will resist.

I’m confident that you will think of questions that I have not.

1. Why did 11 million stay home?

I mentioned this one previously, but I think this is truly our first goal. Everything we choose to do flows from what we learn.

I know some folks are already gearing up to find out. Stay tuned. I’ll report on what I hear.

2. Can we protect and teach without finger wagging?

We have an important job right now. In addition to protecting those who will be most hurt by Trump’s policies, we must become patient teachers. We must observe, record and show the general public (without finger wagging or condescending) how these policies are hurting them as well.

One of the biggest reasons MAGA people ran to him is because they didn’t want to be told how wrong they were. Is that our problem? It shouldn’t be. But it is. We need to be the ones now to help them see their way out of the cult. In fact, in the interview I mentioned above, they made the great point that the phrase “voting against their own interests” is deeply condescending and ignores that people have become so fed up with government not delivering on promises that voters are willing to risk an autocrat in order to shake it up.

Becoming patient teachers does not mean that we should retreating to the cheap seats to watch it all unfold, or accept when people are being particularly terrible. It means active and strategic watching and preparing the disasters that are coming, and being ready to show a better way.

And I want to say this again, because I am just as guilty of this as are most liberals: we have to resist the tendency to scold and talk at people. Now is the time to be patient in the face of ignorance and be persistent in building the trust with those whom we think we can save.

I’ve been disappointed for years in my inability to patiently, dispassionately talk to people on the other side to make the case that they’ve been mislead about so many things, especially the environment and clean energy; especially in my own family. I’m even terrible at simply building trust with the other side so that their defenses don’t go up.

I’d recommend listening to a recent This American Life podcast called “A small thing that gives me a tiny shred of hope” in which one couple that was deeply divided by our media environment was successful in finding some common ground through a news source called Tangle. I’m just getting to know the site myself. But at least this podcast makes the case that this news site has broken through in some ways.

This is not capitulation on the injustices that MAGA world advocates. For sure! But we’ve been missing so many opportunities for human connection and conversation.

I do know one thing, though. We can’t reach people through debates on social media. It requires direct and meaningful connection built on trust.

So, I’m not the one to drive that train. I studied conflict resolution in grad school, but never really applied it after returning from Sarajevo.

But so many great people are doing amazing work on breaking through with trust-building conversations. We should learn from them and elevate them.

Who will be our best teachers? Let’s find them now.

3. Can we exploit Trump’s incompetence?

Yes, project 2025 is scary. But I refuse to believe that they will be able to implement it as easily as they think they will. You can’t turn an aircraft carrier on a dime and you can’t dismantle the US government completely before the 2026 midterms.

So, what does “exploit” mean? Based on how we’ve seen MAGA dominate social media “education” and story telling, we need to double, triple, quadruple down on that arena. We need to have just as many influencers that we support. The difference is that where Trump corralled them with fear and lies, we will need to teach while we tell stories.

If we are not taking the time to help people understand how government is designed to work, and how it has worked in the past -and how reasonable reforms can help us all in the future- then we are not repairing the damage. We are just replacing one set of propaganda with another.

Educated people will see his incompetence. They don’t need to be told, “I told you so.” They need to see that there is a better option for almost anything that Trump has told us that he planning.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. The MAGA machine knows that there will be failures and they are already finding ways to convince those young men that it was Joe Biden, rather than Project 2025 that took away their access to Pornhub.

For a population that has lost faith in government, there is nobody left standing but us to empower people to get involved, reform the system and fight back.

Who will be the people on the ground and in social media who will be the first to reach folks when the shit hits the fan?

4. Can Democrats (and the left) regain trust with the working class.

We all know that Biden did more to bring back manufacturing (citation) in his four years than Trump could ever dream of. But after Clinton’s mis-steps and the right wing’s propaganda advantage, we have to catch up. It won’t take two years. It will take 10, assuming we can get back in to power and focus on protecting workers and unions. In the short term, that takes education. In the long term, that takes education.

While I believe that many union Trump voters will see evidence pretty quickly that he never cared about them, they won’t believe it. Can we be there in those moments to help them see that there are many better ways to protect workers and their families than tax cuts for billionaires and tariffs on “Chiiiiinnaaaaa.”

The answer to this question is grander than my little brain. But I do have faith that there are millions of union folks across the country that are just as disgusted as I am, and I know they can help us answer these questions.

What is our process for getting that conversation started? Perhaps we need listening sessions, which will hopefully begin a longer process of dialogue.

5. An army of 10,000 Petes.

What is the plural of Buttigieg? An army of Buttigiegs?

It doesn’t matter. Pete was doing what so many on the left stopped doing. They stopped going on Fox. But for good reason. The interviews were designed to make them look bad. They were talked over. The hosts changed the topics on them last minute in order to throw them off.

What is great about Pete is that he calls them out on their tactics, he does not speak down to people or finger wag, he knows his shit and he helps people understand.

Do you remember that, after Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth, he went out and did training sessions all over the country to help people make the case for positive change on climate? He trained the front line and he “trained the trainers.”

The model works. Apply it to great persuaders. Be like Pete.

It is notable that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. Here’s another article about that, if you don’t pay for the WP anymore.

6. Invest in deep canvassing.

I already said it, but we should dig in on this. Deep canvassing rests on the premise that you will have a greater chance of changing a voter’s mind if you take time to build trust and if you help them see you as human. It got its start during the most intense years of the same-sex marriage rights efforts. It is not a far stretch to see that, given the prominence of Project 2025, we will need this again for that particular issue.

But it can be applied to so many other topics. This should be a year-round, door to door, community to community effort.

When I learned how to market myself as a realtor, they taught us build our our “sphere of influence”, our “SOI” marketing. You touch base with people, even if you are not talking about selling a home that day, you educate them on one valuable thing every time you talk with them and you foster that relationship. You build trust. If you don’t, you won’t be able to have those important conversations later.

It runs contrary to what left-wing funders have been doing. That takes time.

And, just in case you think this idea is pretty out there, see this article from the New York Times from earlier this year which detailed how the right-wing turnout machine Turning Point USA used SOI marketing tactics to build relationships with millions of voters all over the country.

And, of course, we need to apply what we learned from polls and focus groups about why those 11 million did not show up in 2024.

7. Win back at least some men.

I’m not saying that we have to accept their bad behavior (I’m looking at you incels). But people are all the same. They need to feel needed. They need to feel that their lives have a purpose.

Something happened over the last 30 years to convince a whole lot of men that they weren’t needed.

My fellow libs, we are smart. We know that two things can be true at the same time. On one hand, women deserve everything they have fought for (and more) and men can be shitty. On the other hand, we need to help those men who have floundered to find meaning that is positive and constructive. We don’t need to give up ground on women’s inalienable rights in order to do that.

I’m not going to pretend to know how to do that. But we have a huge, robust therapy, social worker and human behavior industry that can guide us.

8. Build a new media reality.

One thing is clear. We must reject the current media landscape, both right and left. Eliminate what does not serve you.

In addition to the toxic media environment, the right wing was able to build a powerful and participatory media environment which told a compelling story to its viewer or listeners, while the left found itself defending a very flawed status quo.

We need to build up influencers, like the right has, but we need to get ahead of them for once. We need influencers who, like Pete, can reach build those relationships I spoke about above. Trump’s influencers, while successful, are capped at how many people they can pull over. What does it look like, what does it take, to start pulling people away from them?

Bryan Tyler Cohen, one of the left’s well-known influencers makes the point that the left should no longer seek the warm embrace of organizations like MSNBC as a refuge from the storm. Their corporate backers are not our friends. Plus, the right fully understood the power of niche marketing. Their information ecosphere is dependent on 30 different hosts representing 30 different niche markets, all sharing variations of the same toxic message.

Let’s do that with a non-toxic vision for the future.

The New Republic‘s today, Michael Tomasky made the case in this article (summarized here) that people supported Trump, not because of inflation or the economy, but by how they perceived those issues, and that makes a difference. The right media machine “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky said. Right-wing media is bigger than traditional media and it speaks with one voice. “…(T)hat voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”

Perhaps I am a Pollyanna, but I do believe that the left can counter this with true, accurate information. But we need to change from a “big news” model to a niche marketing model.

9. Find the divisions in their coalition.

When I was in the legislature, the Republican leadership in the House and Senate were masters of dividing Democrats against themselves. We need to get better at this. Find the wedge issues. Voters don’t want big government in their lives, but they want protection for air quality, food safety and personal reproductive rights. Republican politicians in urban areas can be pressured to oppose many of the things that rural Republicans want.

Do the polling and focus groups around possible wedge issues. Run the legislation. Use a stronger ecosphere to make people see that the MAGA coalition is getting “regular people” nowhere.

10. Be clear about our new coalition.

I mentioned the Powell memo earlier. When he wrote that, he realized that their strongest coalition was made up of businesses and religious, mostly Christian, Americans.

The coalition that rose up to fight Trump’s fascism is made up of liberals as far left as Bernie Sanders and former Republicans, like those at the Bulwark, who see Trump’s party as a threat to their idea of what makes America great, to personal freedom and to the security given to us through the NATO alliance.

The Powell memo aligned interests that have been very stable overtime. The business leaders could appeal to the fears of Christians to get them in line with what the business leaders wanted. Over time, they tightened that relationship in to what we see now, with its fascistic tendencies, with their social hierarchies, corporate abidance to authoritarian policy in order to protect profits, and fear of the outsiders.

This brief episode of The Daily provides an interview with Reid J. Epstein, who covers politics for the New York Times. In it he mirrors the question that I raise here about what drives and binds each of the competing coalitions.

On the right, there is a general desire to see a specific set of outcomes. The left, however, is an ever-circling and subdividing coalition of smaller groups that must be re-assembled every two or four years in order to win elections. Further, says Epstein, the increasingly small groups within the left coalition have been empowered to demand more attention to their issues, to the point that the entire left coalition is defined by issues that affect a very small fraction of the coalition.

This is an explosive thought for some groups, as Bernie Sanders is finding out right now. How, for instance, can you protect the rights of trans people without allowing the entire coalition to be defined by it –to the detriment of our larger socioeconomic goals? However, we must address this if we are to become a unified and winning coalition.

To dig in further in on that explosive thought, and as a counterfactual example, what would have happened had the GOP of the 1980s centered the demands of the Christian theocrats, who now control the Republican party? Back then the Christian theocrats were a small sub-set of a larger conservative, religious coalition. I am certain that many in that coalition in the 1980s would have bristled at the ideas that are now bantered about by leaders in the GOP.

To illustrate the point, watch this 1986 debate in which Frank Zappa told those assembled that we are heading to a fascist theocracy, to many “tut-tuts” and “harrumphs” from the group from the group of “main stream” conservative.

Let’s be clear, I am in no way equating the fever dreams of the Christian theocrats with the very real needs of trans people, asylum seekers or any number of important groups that make up our coalition. This is a thought experiment about strategy and messaging discipline. Is there a way within our coalition to protect the rights of very, very marginalized people without giving the spinmeisters at the RNC something to scare people so badly that they forget who actually cares about the middle class and the poor?

As a larger question, what stable interests create the glue in our coalition? The other side had a 50-year plan and they stuck to it. What would it look like for us to do that? Is the glue economic? Is it about personal liberty? Is it about protecting people from the corrupting influence of wealthy billionaires. (The progressives of the 1890s were very unified around that one.)

The best way to recover is to build a coalition that has a broadly appealing message while protecting those most marginalized in the coalition with a plan that we all agree to, and stick with it.

11. Can we be the reformers we’ve always professed to be?

Many observers have noted that the reason about 11 million possible Democratic voters stayed home is because they feel the system is not working for them. The tax system is rigged. Congress is rigged. Government is helping more wealthy people than it is people like them. So, why even participate?

We can do all of the other things listed above, building an army of Petes, creating an information ecosphere, talk patiently to people until they leave a cult. But if all we have to offer is a government that feels fundamentally corrupt, what do we have?

Corruption works for the MAGA Republicans. They pay off billionaires with tax breaks, give cushy positions to well-connected society grubs and then use their media power to convince the public that the Democrats are the corrupt ones.

Here’s the thing, they are not completely wrong. Democrats have not stood up to put lobbyists in their place, as they could have, even though the lobbying industry hurts working families more than it does the rich. Democrats embraced dark money, out of necessity at first. But now you’ll have to pry their dark money out of their cold, dead hands. Too many Democrats, like the soon-to-be-gone Kyrsten Sinema worked harder to create safe congressional districts for themselves than to create a greater number of competitive districts.

No wonder nobody trusts them.

In all my years of advocacy and six years in public office, one thing has guided me: election reform. It does not matter which issues you care most about –climate change, human rights, immigration, etc.– we will not make any progress until we make a policymaking system that respects the will of people over monied or connected interests.

People say to me all the time, “Politics has always been corrupt.” Yes. Yes it has. But the question is how well the system creates transparency so you can catch corruption and how well you create a system that shows people that they can have faith in policy outcomes, even if they don’t get their way all the time.

It was sad to see how many efforts at ranked choice voting failed this year. Unfortunately, it is a system of voting that is best experienced, rather than explained. So, I have hope that we can build support for it starting from the local level, one city, one town and one voter at a time.

But there are so many other reforms out there which, if they actually seek to empower regular voters over the powerful, will bring people back to participation in our elections.

On to part 4, or back to part 2

So, Here We Are

Let’s start with a fact that we can all agree to: voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 did not show up in 2024. In 2020, Biden got 81,283,501 votes. Trump got 74,223,975. In 2024, Trump stayed basically at that same level this year with 74,535,879, as of the writing of this post. Harris has 70,858,899 as of this moment. Votes are still being counted, but not much will change.

This is important. Just as he has done in polling for years, Trump was at his ceiling. He just can’t do better that this. But the Dems lost about 11 million voters since 2020. (And, no, conspiracy theorists, they were not just made up votes in 2020. You can say it until you die, but it won’t make it real.)

Were these people simply not as inspired as they were during COVID? Were they not inspired by Harris? If so, why didn’t we see that lack of enthusiasm in polling or focus groups? Were we too blinded to see, cozy in our information bubble watching videos of celebrities supporting Kamala? Or, was the MAGA niche market influencer machine pulling them away? Did some of them fill the hole in Trump’s support left by those evacuating never-Trumpers? Or, did they just decide to stay home?

We need to find this out.

But as we wait for the pollsters and focus group profs to unearth that, we need to understand how the right has been setting up the conditions for this. While we can talk about what Harris or the Democrats may have done wrong in the campaign, I’m not sure that, in hindsight, none of the available Democratic presidential options could have overcome the system that the right wing has been putting in place for decades.

The road rules

The rules of the road we drive on today were established over 50 years ago. As prescribed by the Powell Memo, the right has created hundreds of “think tanks” under the cover of very loose tax laws allowing for “charitable giving” to what are essentially propaganda factories. Their jobs have expanded, but they were initially designed to convince the public that economic things like trickle down economics was a real thing that benefited workers.

Read Dark Money, by Jane Mayer on how that world of taxpayer-supported propaganda scams came to be. Many of us have been fighting dark money since the Supreme Court legalized that form of corruption. I’d never be able to run a campaign in this state without APS, for instance coming out hard against me. It might have been that shareholder protest I ran against them to fight their dark money being spent at the Corporation Commission.

But anyway, those “think tanks”, like the Goldwater Institute here in Arizona or the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) nationally, have undermined public education, boosted for-profit religious teaching at taxpayer expense, undermined efforts to get money out of politics and generally held Arizona hostage. Most the iconic Arizona corruption can be traced back to this clown car, one way or another.

Non-economic spin-offs from the “think tank industrial complex” pushed an religious agenda. The marriage of convenience with run-of-the-mill Christian conservatives in the 1970s and 80s metastasized to total control over the Republican party in just the last few years by the most extreme wing of the Christian nationalist theocracy movement.

It further extended to environmental protection, among other areas. The fossil fuel industry buried its own studies showing that climate change was real over 40 years ago, and spun out think tank studies that distracted the public with greenwashing stories about “carbon capture” or “clean coal.” Following the cigarette industry’s model, and with a handy piggy back ride from Fox News, the petrochemical industry was able to delay any meaningful response to global warming by 30 years. Just think about how much further ahead Arizona could have been as the “solar capitol of the country” were it not for Fox.

Sadly, those who will be hurt the most are the same people that Fox and the right wing have been able to convince to think that Democrats abandoned them.

And they are not entirely wrong. After a decade of losses in the 1980s, the left turned to Bill Clinton’s conservative Democrats to find a “third way,” a way out of the hinterlands and back in to power. It came with a price. Supporting NAFTA was a short-term win that eventually drove working class voters away from Democrats and toward Trumps populism. The most stinging element of this topic in this election is that we know that Trump’s tariffs will only hurt workers more.

It is one of many reasons that this election is so painful. Sure, history shows that Trump meets the very definition of a fascist. Definitely, we will watch as people die in the Ukraine at the hands of a despot with a far too cozy relationship to Trump and his growing cadre of oligarchs. You can be sure that, while the Biden approach to finding peace in Israel and Palestine was spineless, so much more suffering and injustice will occur under Trump (if not a regional war). His right wing coalition in America will empower the right wing actors in Israel that have slowly assumed power over the last forty years, with horrendous goals in mind.

There are so many other examples that we all know: the prison industrial complex, “patriotic correctness” which hampers real discussion of military corruption at the cost of our volunteers in uniform and, a greedy health care industry that bleeds people dry of their money, even though we know better models have been working around the world for a century.

What is the unifying theme here?

Education.

We know that much of what has oozed forth from the business-backed right wing is not real education. It is not set in reality. It is propaganda of the most insidious kind. It tells people that we don’t have a shared, common interest in healthy people, educated youth, campaign finance reform, workers’ rights and many other topics that even many in the Trump-supporting working class fundamentally want –though they will find out soon enough that they are not in the cards for them.

Democracies die without accurate information. Just like the other side has built hundreds of think tanks to push faulty information, we need to support more and avenues of education, in addition to truly good journalism. Journalism needs to go nonprofit, become relevant to people’s lives, stop talking down to people, stop confusing infotainment with real journalism, and build trust by being up front when it makes mistakes.

What I advocate here is that we build our plans going forward on long-term, slow, deliberate and one-on-one education, backed by more trusted news sources. It is something I’ve been bringing up in every campaign I’ve worked on since 2004, but big funders can never seem to find their way to do anything other than dump lots of money in ads, GOTV, ground game and pleas for participation in the last nine months of a campaign.

“Deep canvassing” works, but never gets enough funding early enough.

Without going in to tactics or revealing things about recent campaigns that I’ve been involved with, I can tell you that deep canvassing works. Done correctly, it humanizes the conversation. It builds trust around information and it has a more lasting effect on people’s beliefs.

I started this multi-series think piece saying that, if you think you know the answer of what to do, you are wrong. Don’t mistake this advocacy of deep canvassing for a prescription of how the left can rebound. Deep canvassing models are the tactic by which we implement whatever larger coalition plan we get behind.

Thus, in the next installment, I’m laying out some topic areas that I hope we all will build a process of discovery around.

Back to previous article in the series here. On to the next one here.

It feels like there are a lot of people rushing to be the first with prescriptions of what we need to do to dig our way out of this giant festering hole in our democracy.

How many of them are trying to figure out what they personally got wrong?

That’s my goal here. Well, that and maybe if I don’t get these ideas out of my head I’m going to melt like that guy in Raiders of the Lost Arch who opened the Arch of the Covenant.

So, do you wanna join me as I try to figure it all out?

Agree. Disagree. But let’s do this together.

I wouldn’t pretend to have the answers. God knows I’ve gotten so many things wrong in my often miscalculated political career. I’ve been in politics and public policy for over a quarter century now. I have some strong opinions on some things, but if there ever was a time to reflect, this is it.

I do know this: we need to take this time to rest in our communities, reflect on what we saw and respond with the largest, most unified coalition that we can imagine.

And, we don’t have long. We need to stop this madness by the next mid-term election and we can’t rely on the other side fumbling the ball.

Our respectful exchange can help us focus on creating a structure in 2025 that will lead us down the best path together, rather than a thousand different influencers giving their individual and contradictory analysis. Eschew internal division, finger pointing and recrimination.

So, what you will see here are some suggestions but also a whole lot of questions that I hope will guide a process, so we are not all over the place. I’m also gonna talk a bit about how I’ve gotten things wrong.

The first sections of the following blog posts are level-setting, at least from my years in politics. The second set of sections is where we get in to the nitty gritty of how we might move forward.

If you are looking for 240 characters and pithy memes, Twitter is still there for you. We’ve done so well with that model of information sharing, after all. For my part, I think our organizing needs to take on a longer format, and I’ve been guilty of letting the social media bubble hold me tightly like a warm blanket on a cold night.

So, grab a glass of wine or tea and settle in.

As I wind down my real estate business, I’m repurposing this website and newsletter for political commentary, historical perspective and catalyzing action. Please sign up for the newsletter here. If I get a positive response, then I may move over to Medium, or some other platform that my deer friends keep pushing me to do.

If so inspired, please share this.

Now, on with the show.

The Tortoise and the Hare

This isn’t the first time that I totally miscalculated the strength of the Republicans. And it is in no way shocking that it was a similar appeal to populist and short-sighted instincts of the public.

In 1994 I was sitting in a dark room at the Democratic National Committee building in Washington DC, with the east coast November gloom outside. I was with my then-boss, Kitty. She was an impressive person who could remember any phone number you told her, had met everybody you could think of in DC, saw Muhammad Ali levitate three inches above the ground, and was balancing eight precariously stacked piles of documents on her desk at any given time.

We didn’t work for the DNC, but they called her in to help that night and she said I could tag along. Together we squinted at an AP wire computer, with ghostly green lettering scrolling on a infinitely black background. I was not sure what I was looking at. But in just one moment she went quiet and said, “Ken, the Republicans just took over Congress.” We were some of the first people in the country to witness the 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives, brought to us by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America.”

We thought what we called the “contract on America” was brutish then. It is a soft white cheese by comparison to the Project 2025 agenda today.

Kitty and I sat in silence, weighted down with the immensity of it all. The feeling of dread pulled on us like a wet wool trench coat. This political shift in congress upset a political reality that had been in place since FDR, and from which the Democrats have never been able to recover.

Three years earlier, when I was an intern for Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, somebody organized a tour of a unassuming little mock TV studio, just across the courtyard from Union Station. There they trained Republican members of Congress how to appear more approachable on the three major networks and the relatively new Cable News Network (CNN). At the time, they had a real problem connecting with audiences because they had not yet learned to use dog whistles as well as they do now. They would say the quiet part out loud and that alienated voters. But they learned.

Of course, now Republicans can say the quiet part out loud because Fox News has conditioned its viewers since 1996 to fear 1,000 different boogymen, as a brilliant way to capture their eyeballs and sell them more products. I’ll never forgive Fox for turning my previously center-right, pro-choice, gun regulation agreeing parents in to talking point-repeating binge watchers.

Fox News founding editor Roger Ailes had pledged during the Nixon impeachments that he would create a “news” source that would prevent any future accountability for any Republican president. As we know now, he succeeded beyond than his wildest dreams.

Democrats were behind the game. Very behind. In the early years Fox built its talk shows in the image of the good versus evil story telling of the then-World Wrestling Federation. They brought liberals and Democrats on to their programs and rigged the game so they could use them as punching bags, to make them look stupid. It was always about showing them as evil. We know this. We’ve seen it ourselves and people over the years who left Fox told us about that secret sauce.

Little did I know, that these early years were really the only opportunity I had to build some suspicion about the Fox machine with my family. To be fair, I didn’t know as much about how government worked in the 1990s as after I started working in it. But I did not have the skills to open a values-based conversation, and avoid it breaking down to an argument.

When MSNBC moved to capture a left-leaning audience during the GW Bush years, they just couldn’t keep up with the growth over at Fox. Two decades of right-wing AM radio prior to Fox’s launch had primed the pump perfectly. Fox had done such a thorough job of blurring the line between straight reporting and right wing commentary “infotainment”. Old school reporters who fought to keep that distinction on MSNBC were eventually drowned out.

And, frankly, did it matter much? Liberals would seek comfort in the “reporting” of Rachel Maddown, Chris Hayes and more recently Jen Psaki. Though I largely agree with them politically, they are just MSNBC’s answer to the Fox infotainment model: tell the audience what they already believe and then sell them whatever the advertisers want.

They are not journalists. We should stop watching them as if they are. Though they may be skilled and experienced people, they are commentators dressed up by their network as journalists. You cannot have served in a political party or an administration and they convince anybody that you are a balanced conveyor of the news. They may have the trust of their tribe, but we’ve all lose through tribalism. I feel we should have fought harder to expect more from our news sources than a copy of the Fox model.

Still, even though they are owned by a huge corporation with its own agenda, MSNBC made liberals feel that they at least had some response to the barrage of half-truths, lies and misdirections (notably on the climate crisis) coming from Fox and AM radio. Liberals sought refuge primarily in MSNBC or the Daily Show, among a few others in the liberal chat-o-sphere.

But the right was already another step ahead. Over the last 10 years, they put money behind a whole list of influencers who, jointly, had tens of millions of loyal followers. These were people who presented the trappings of journalism without the Journalism Code of Ethics and Standards, without editorial oversight, fact checking or retractions. I mean, at least Fox news had editorial oversight, even though it was lax, and the other three items were never taken seriously.

Like Joe Rogan, they didn’t like answering to advertising bosses or editors, and they convinced their audiences that they were more fair than traditional news sources–even though the information they were sharing was often demonstrably false. They were “just asking questions.”

There are easily over 30 right wing influencers on social media, with followings starting at 1 million, and as high as 15 million –each reaching a different niche market that left-leaning cable news or John Stewart, John Oliver or Stephen Colbert can’t reach. Those niche markets include sports-plus-Trump, hunting-plus-Trump, Christians-plus-Trump and probably even vision boarding-plus-Trump.

It was one of the reasons for the rise of the “manosphere”, detailed brilliantly in this Code Switch podcast, which also details the rise of the “black manosphere.” This is an amazing insight in to why so many black men may have voted for Trump. Apply the same formula to Latino men, Asian men, and so on.

Days before the election Joe Rogan unquestioningly listened on as Trump spurted the same set of debunked lies to his 15 million listeners about everything from climate change to telling people that Kamala Harris wanted to turn all illegal immigrants in to immediately-voting Democrats.

People believed it because, despite over 1 billion dollars from the Harris campaign dedicated to ground game, there was not a sufficient way to respond to each of these niche markets.

This leads us to where we are now, and in the next post in the series, I want to talk about the landscape we are fighting in now, and what we liberals contributed to it.

Click here for that.

Gotcha! Made you look!

I’ve not put one of my curated reading lists together for a while. So, I figured now would be a good time.

Before I start, though, please make note to follow my YouTube Channel and my Facebook Page. I’ll be rolling out short explainer videos on every one of the 13 ballot measures that will be on the Arizona ballot this November.

For now, check these out.

Energy Efficiency Rebates are Almost Here. We are starting to see the energy efficiency rebates for consumers beginning to roll-out in Arizona. These were part of the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s taken a while for the EPA to get all the rules worked out. In short, you could save thousands on things like hot water heaters, heat pumps and induction stoves. This is a huge benefit for home owners, especially as we have a greater number of hot days in Arizona. Watch this handy website for news of the roll-out in Arizona.

Putting my Realtor Hat On for a Moment. In my mind its never been difficult to connect climate change, clean energy, clean air and water to your investment in your home. But this article is a great summary of how specifically renewable energy is affecting the Arizona housing market.

Sick of Solar Companies Knocking on Your Door? Confused by fly-by-night solar install companies? Please share this with friends in Flagstaff, Sedona and areas in Coconino County. Join Solar United Neighbors’ co-op. You get access to lower install costs for solar + batteries. You can feel safer about the quality of the work because the installers are vetted. Plus, you can learn more about solar and batteries from SUN’s educational briefings. NOTE: SUN creates these co-ops all over the state. So, stay tuned for when they are in your area.

Fighting Misinformation. I’ve been seeing a ton of misinformation and disinformation about renewables recently. What’s new, right? I thought I’d share some of these slides that push back on that madness.