The thing about elections is that sometimes you lose them

America is STILL better than Europe.

Well.
This obviously isn’t how I wanted the election to go!

Eight years ago, everyone I knew was having a nervous breakdown the day after Trump won. I, too, was shocked. I went into the office, and my colleagues were understandably dour. A companywide all-hands meeting was set up for later that week, where people basically just shared their feelings. My best friend at the time, James West, came into my office, and we engaged in some gallows humor. He mentioned how everyone was going to take cyanide or something like that. I agreed. Then he told me that, ironically, of all the people at Mother Jones, I was the one he was least worried about. He didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be rounded up because I was straight or something. He meant that psychologically, I wasn’t going to fall apart.

The Friday before the election, I’d gotten out of a mental institution after trying to kill myself that September. I had spent the entire month of October in a hospital, having coping mechanisms drilled into me so that I wouldn’t try to kill myself again. And the timing of that experience did, in fact, inoculate me against a lot of the hysteria that unfolded in those months. That conversation with James, and the fact that it proved prescient, is essentially the origin story for this Substack.

So, though it gives me no joy, it’s my solemn duty to tell people to calm down.

I said before the election that America is great, and no matter who wins, that will still be true. Guess what? I was right—it’s still true.

One of the reasons I hate the political rhetoric that describes elections in catastrophic, winner-take-all terms is that sometimes, you lose elections. And what then? What do you do when you’ve built it up as a titanic final battle for all the marbles…and then you lose? You’ve told your supporters to walk into the sea. And that’s not something people should do.

Life goes on. It does. We have more elections. It’s one of the nice things about living in a democracy.