No matter what happens, we promise the text messages will not stop

As the election draws to a close, we understand that tensions are high and a view of the future feels particularly opaque. In these trying times, what we offer is consistency—and a promise. You’ve received hundreds (thousands, if you’re lucky) of text messages from unknown numbers asking for your support, your money, and your personal information. Whatever the future holds, fear not, for we are with you. No matter what happens today or in the following weeks, months, and years, we promise that the text messages will not stop.

You may have questions. For instance: will quantity affect quality? Of course not. We’re dedicated to bringing you a constant barrage of unfettered communication, without sacrificing our artistic vision. You expect innovation, and we aim to provide it today, tomorrow, and beyond.

You’ve enjoyed critically acclaimed hits like:

(damn it) we will LOSE Wisconsin without YOUR support. Click on this unidentified LINK to save DEMOCRACY

and

6X-MATCH: SAVE PENNSYLVANIA, SEND $20 TODAY. ALSO WHAT IS YOUR SSN

and

OH NO we have not HEARD from you. Text us your ATM pin NOW

Yes, indeed—you expect unending notifications from us, and we have never, ever let you down. But you may still be concerned that our journey together ends with this election cycle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once we have a firm grasp of the results, after we’ve weathered the fallout, and even after we’ve settled into a new reality and a new one after that, we’ll be reaching out. Repeatedly. Without warning.

Your phone will continue to vibrate, tricking you into thinking an old friend has reached out or a job offer is imminent. Instead, when you open your messages, you will see things like:

We’re STILL fighting. Are YOU? PROVE it by scanning your CREDIT CARD at this LINK

and

For the next 60 MINUTES your donation will be DOUBLED if you make TWO donations

and

If we raise $1M by tomorrow, YOUR voice will be HEARD four years from NOW

The end may feel near, but this is just the beginning of a beautiful, one-sided friendship. We will never run out of new unidentified phone numbers from which to text and call. No matter how many times you delete-and-mark-as-spam, we will be back from an area code similar to your own to say: Do not go gentle into that good night. Go, instead, bombarded with texts long into the next morning and at all hours of the day. For long after the votes have been counted, long after democracy has been saved or lost or recognized as having never truly existed in the first place, we will still be sending you texts. It’s who we are. It’s who we’ve always been.

It’s like we’ve always said:

Don’t miss OUT there’s only 1 HOUR LEFT before we TEXT YOU AGAIN

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America in Retrograde

Eli here. Not calling you from an unknown number. Yet. If you enjoyed that piece (above), you’ll probably enjoy my book (best when ordered in bulk).

As we lurch collectively toward the next rusted fork in our nation’s underfunded, creaking railway of representative democracy, I can’t help but wonder, is this train metaphor dated? Let’s try a different track:

Astronomers explain that the apparent retrograde motion of planets is an optical illusion—for a few months of the year, Mercury appears to move backward, but it’s not actually changing direction.

My hope is that America is in retrograde: an illusion of decline created by some scary, tangible steps backward, but a reality of a slow and steady movement toward justice in the aggregate. The arc of the moral universe, as MLK said so much better than I just did. Good for him.

My fear, of course, is that Mercury really has changed course. That the astronomers are about to do a cartoon-like eye bulge while looking into their telescopes. That America’s new dance move is the backslide. So what, right now, is there to do about it?

In what may seem antithetical to my satirical essay “Situations in Which the Only Solution Was to Vote” from my essay collection This Won’t Help, my answer is: If you haven’t already—vote!

Vote locally for those who will protect abortion access, bolster tenants’ and workers’ rights, fight for gun control, support asylum seekers and immigrants, prioritize community over the police state, back universal healthcare and gender-affirming care, tax the wealthy, and promote harm reduction.

Then, vote nationally against the backslide. Against authoritarianism and the realization of retrograde. In short, against Trumpism.

And finally, vote for anyone offering to replace the water in the water fountains with soda. That would rule.

To those who are unsure, on the fence, or considering sitting out this election: At the executive level (this may be hard to believe, given anything I've ever written) there have never been viable candidates whose policies overlap entirely with my own beliefs and principles. Somehow, even with all the money that billionaires have pumped into politics, that continues to hold true.

I know this much, though: A second and much more violent, organized Trump presidency will pull us further down a path toward fascism (elections are nice, let’s have more of them!), induce a national abortion ban (I know he said he wouldn’t allow one, but I think for the first time in his life… he may have lied!), further endanger trans people across the country, encourage violence against journalists, impose a dramatic increase in the horrors already facing immigrants and asylum seekers, foment islamophobia and antisemitism, push racist conspiracies like the great replacement theory, and extinguish any chance at ending the seemingly endless atrocities in Gaza funded by our tax dollars.

As in every election, we are once again presented with only two candidates who have a realistic shot at the most powerful job in the world, both of whom will continue to grease the wheels of the imperialist American War Machine to varying degrees. How can someone reconcile a choice that isn’t, at least in the context of militarism, a choice? The only answer I can muster for those grappling with this is harm reduction—and not just as it pertains to a growing list of other policy alarm bells, like doctors across the country being unable to perform life-saving procedures because they may face criminal charges for administering reproductive healthcare, or the rollbacks Trump wants to make on EPA regulations that protect our air and water—but also as it relates to the continued suffering of the people of Palestine.

Consider Trump’s response during an interview a few weeks ago:

“Biden is trying to hold [Netanyahu] back… I’m glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do.”

As a coalition of Arizona Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim community leaders wrote last month:

“In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people…

…the Republican Party coalition offers zero opposition to unconditional support for Israel and zero support for Palestinian human rights. Instead Republicans urge the US to join Israel in bombing Iran, call to “bounce the rubble in Gaza” and “kill ‘em all,” and would likely support the Israeli far right’s drive to annex Gaza and the West Bank.”

Another Trump presidency will not be an illusion of a changing trajectory. It will be Mercury hurtling out of orbit, and there will be fewer and fewer and perhaps nearly no ways left to engage with change.

This year’s voting booth is a last stand for quickly eroding rights like those to a safe abortion, a cleaner climate future, and for the potential to engage with the future rather than get run over by it. It’s a question of who to organize against—and the answer is either a typical politician, or someone who has explicitly stated he will sic the military on dissenters.

In a conversation with Raphael Magarik of Jewish Currents, Rania Batrice put the fraught choice this way:

… part of the conflict I’m feeling is the thought of our democracy as being only a form of harm reduction. My deep desire is to be somewhere different, for it not to be just about harm reduction but to contain the possibility of actually dismantling and rebuilding a system which is in service of something we can believe in, rather than just trying to put our fingers in all the leaky points. That’s obviously incredibly aspirational, especially this election cycle. For a lot of people, especially young people, there’s this idea of a complete exit from electoralism, an urge to burn it all down. And I understand that urge. I feel it. But I still think that when we completely exit, we have no impact. We have no influence. We have no part in what is happening now—the harm reduction—but also no part in what is hopefully going to be built in the future.

Where I’ve landed, for those on the fence or in a swing state, is that a vote for Harris is not, at the risk of pure tautology, a vote for Harris. It is a vote for a future that can still be affected.

All of this is to say: I’m writing in Taylor Swift.

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