By Chris Satullo
The other day, I was chatting with someone whose work centers around voter education. One of her biggest challenges, she said, is the sense among younger (and other non-regular) voters: Well, we turned out in 2020 because you told us it was important – then nothing changed.
This person knows her stuff. I’m sure she’s right. But I have a few curmudgeonly questions for those voters she’s describing:
Nothing changed? Really? How would you know whether anything’s changed, if you don’t pay attention and have little clue how government really works?
Another anecdote about another recent conversation:
I had a chance late last year to talk intently for a while with an underclassman at a local university. Great kid, an engineering student with a lively intelligence and a strong moral sense. Had an artistic side, too, playing violin in a regional youth orchestra. When I asked what he was thinking of doing for a living, he said he might want to use his scientific training as a climate change activist.
No issue was more important, I agreed. So, I wondered, what had he thought about the big climate change bill that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden had just dragged through a divided Congress and gotten signed into law.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I explained that the law, trickily named the Inflation Reduction Act, has been called “the most significant climate change legislation in the history of the United States” by the International Monetary Fund. I told him the act would channel $369 billion into boosting domestic clean energy options and slicing America’s carbon emissions, putting the nation back on track to reach its emissions reduction pledge by 2030.
“Huh,” the young man said. “Hadn’t heard about it.” The act had passed Congress two months before this mid-fall conversation took place.
Remember: This was not some drunken bro I bumped into in a bar on South Street. He’s a smart kid, who cared enough to show up at night for an optional event about public issues, who had a science background and a declared passion for the climate change issue. He didn’t know that just weeks before the president he’d backed with the first vote of his life had shepherded into force the most impactful climate change law in American history.
Nothing changed…That sentiment among people who voted blue in 2020 isn’t limited to Philly college kids. You’ll find that sentiment in barber shops and bodegas around Philly and other cities, on factory floors in the Lehigh Valley, in hipster coffee bars, and in leafy suburbs where progressive professionals gather to sip chardonnay and lament the ignorance of the bubbas.
And, to a degree, I get it. Cops still beat and kill Black kids with scant or no provocation. Automatic rifles still spit death in Walmarts and warehouses. Jobs disappear at the stroke of a finger sending a callous text. For so many people, paying that last bill at the end of the month remains a daunting challenge.
Yes, the stubborn endurance of injustice, bigotry and neediness can sap your spirit.
Which is precisely why hope needs to be bolstered – and cynicism and apathy kept at bay – by a clear grasp of the time, effort and approach needed to fix the bad things that arise in a broken world. It also requires an accurate sense of what has been accomplished, recently and throughout American history, by people who had the savvy and persistence to get the clunky levers of government to do the right things.
Government – like golf – is not a game of perfect. Slow progress is not no progress. Wicked problems do not yield to simplistic slogans. Readiness to compromise doesn’t signal a lack caring or courage. It speaks to the calm maturity needed to get real things done.
Yes, the digital age means you can get umpteen Google results in a nanosecond, and you can complete an Amazon order in less time than it takes to brush your teeth. But, even with Instagram at hand, it still takes much, much longer to unwind injustice, to unravel the accretion of decades of bad policy, to recover from the cascading impacts of an historic pandemic.
And Joe Biden, despite all his malaprops and bike accidents, actually made a great start on that in his first two years in office, along with those canny old pros, Pelosi and Schumer.
His was one of the more consequential starts to a presidency in my lifetime. Besides the climate change bill, Biden’s executive branch and his congressional allies got these change-making things done – not all perfectly, but still impressively:
- Organized an effort that got more than 600 million COVID vaccines and boosters into American arms.
- Enacted the American Rescue Plan – which, yes, likely fueled inflation to a degree, but also helped get the jobless rate down to an historic low and offered an important new support for families with young children. (Presidents always get too much blame or credit for the national economy, which they can’t control, but they can tweak usefully or unwisely around the margins.)
- Enacted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which will spend as much money on bridges, roads, and internet access in red states as in blue.
- The Chip Act, which will boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing (with similar benefits for red states).
- Enshrined the right to same-sex marriage in federal law.
- Ended Washington’s endless dithering about seizing the good idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
- Did a needed, if imperfect, reform of the Electoral Count Act, to make the Stop the Steal plotting of the winter of 2020-21 less possible.
- And in doing all this, modeled a civility of language and willingness to compromise which was routinely ignored on the right and regularly mocked on the progressive left as a sign of his out-of-touch geezer-hood.
Don’t know about you, but that list sounds like some serious change-making, particularly for a president saddled with a skinny majority that included a complement of unhelpful, preening mavericks on both the Democratic right and left.
Now, thanks to the most recent election we can’t expect anything useful to get done in Washington. With the Republicans running the House, we’re set up for two years of futile and annoying partisan posturing on Capitol Hill, but very little serious legislating.
How did we end up here? Well, it’s in part because rafts of Democrats stayed home in last November’s midterms, allowing House Republicans eke out their slim majority that they in no way deserve and have no plans to use productively.
You perhaps have heard that the under-30 vote perked up in the last mid-terms, allowing the Dems to avoid the oft-predicted red tsunami. And it’s kind of true. The young voting rate almost doubled the dismal one of 2014, all the way up to…wait for it…a still puny 27% of eligible voters. No doubt rage over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled this modest improvement.
But as long as people fall so easily into the lazy narrative of “we did our duty, then the lazy pols didn’t do anything and nothing changed,” any hard-won gains in policy and tax law achieved by Democratic majorities and presidents will always be fragile, subject to reversal every two years after apathy among blue voters puts Republican “no government is good government” radicals back in charge.
It happened to Clinton in 1994, Obama in 2010 and 2014 and to a lesser degree, Biden last year.
So, a message to sometime voters: If you want to see big changes, you’ll have to change your habit of losing focus and sitting out non-presidential elections.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia