Last week I had the opportunity to contribute a short essay to The Ink: “Stay in the game.”
The Ink is the fantastic Substack of the journalist and author (and previous guest of this newsletter)
.1 Over the past few years, The Ink has served as one of those rare sanctuaries of hope, community, and thoughtfulness on the internet.To that end, I hope, “Stay in the game” explores a (potentially) liberating and empowering way to think about the work ahead as we approach a second Trump presidency.
Rather than aspiring to stop fascism or defeat the MAGA agenda or rescue American democracy in this moment, I suggest in the essay that we might instead “embrace the fact that our task right now is not to ‘win,’ whatever that means, but to choose to hang on, to endure, to keep moving, to pick each other up, and to give future America the chance to reclaim the hope and patriotism and sense of possibility that feels so out of reach right now.”
The title comes from a mantra that has proven particularly meaningful for me lately. I hadn’t planned on sharing it, but once the idea started bouncing around in my head, I realized that the only way to get it out of there would be to write it down.
You can read the full essay here (and below): “Stay in the game.”
I’m grateful to Anand and
, The Ink’s managing editor, for publishing it.
For those interested: Below is a link to my December 2022 interview with Anand about his book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, which I had previously reviewed for The American Prospect.2
In that review, I described the “foundational aim” of The Persuaders as something that feels even more urgent today: “To convince the pundits and politicians, power brokers and party elites, activists and organizers, volunteers and voters—everyone who might be in a position to shape the left’s political approach—not to give up on people.”
https://adaml.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-anand-giridharadas-part-i
https://prospect.org/culture/books/progressive-persuasive-case-for-politics-of-persuasion-giridharadas-review