The Public Wants a Reckoning, Not Another Performance

The Real Crisis Isn’t Anger. It’s Meaning.

Have you felt it, too? The sense that something essential is missing — even when the Democrats seem to be "fighting" in exactly the way the political consulting class has long insisted they must. The sense that even when Cory Booker stands for 25 hours delivering a marathon speech, when Jasmine Crockett goes viral for grilling a Trump official, or when Chris Murphy gives a resounding town hall address, the moment feels fleeting — impressive, maybe, but hollow. It’s the feeling, deep down, that despite all the hearings, investigations, slogans, and spectacles, the system keeps staggering forward along the same broken path.

You are not imagining it.

There is a deeper reason why the political performances of the past several years, no matter how emotionally satisfying in the moment, have begun to feel hollow. It is not because there are no good people in politics. It is because the system itself — the one most leaders are still trying to defend — has already lost much of its legitimacy.

Chris Murphy at a town hall, credit: AP

The Democratic Party’s central mistake in this era has not been a lack of energy, nor a lack of moral clarity about the dangers posed by the far right. It has been a catastrophic misreading of what the public’s hunger for “fighting back” actually means.

Institutions continue to demand trust, obedience, and emotional loyalty, even as they fail to deliver the basic conditions of a decent life. The rituals of democracy — voting, messaging, performances of resistance — are maintained, but their connection to lived material security, civic belonging, and a believable future has frayed beyond recognition.

As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has argued, this is the deeper collapse: not merely a crisis of policies or personalities, but a crisis of meaning. It is not only that institutions have failed materially. It is that the political language they offer — rights, norms, procedures — no longer speaks to the conditions people actually endure. When official narratives promise opportunity and dignity, but daily life delivers precarity and exclusion, trust erodes. And when trust erodes without a language to explain it, alienation deepens into something harder: a quiet recognition that the whole vocabulary of legitimacy no longer fits the world as it is lived. Hence that strange feeling of trying to pin down this moment — a feeling you, like I, may be experiencing.

The public is not simply asking for louder performances. They are asking for something harder: a real reckoning with the failures of the old order. Yet much of the mainstream political class — campaign consultants, television pundits, party strategists — continues to mistake the appearance of fighting for real action. A fiery speech on MSNBC, a viral fundraising email declaring a once-in-a-lifetime “fight for democracy,” a triumphant Twitter clip of a senator “owning” the opposition: these are treated as victories in themselves. They confuse performance with renewal, noise with transformation. But the public knows the difference. And they are running out of patience.

When Democratic voters express frustration, they are told the problem is messaging — that if only the party could sharpen its slogans, tighten its scripts, and "frame the narrative" more aggressively, all would be well. In clinging to the management of perception, they are clinging to a language that no longer matches the lived experience of most citizens.

We saw this vividly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, where anguished calls for stronger statements and tougher ads raced ahead of any serious federal action to protect reproductive rights. We saw it during the Trump impeachments, with endless fundraising appeals promising a "fight for our future" — crafted to maximize outrage but offering little beyond procedural gestures. We saw it after the murder of George Floyd, when striking images of kneeling lawmakers wearing kente stoles replaced a national political response to policing and racial justice. These gestures were not meaningless. But over time, the gap between symbolic action and structural renewal has grown too large to ignore.

Consultants, pollsters, media strategists — many of them earnest — operate within a system that treats public trust not as something to be earned through outcomes, but as something to be engineered through messaging. The internal logic is simple: if the right message is delivered in the right tone, to the right demographic, legitimacy will follow.

This is more or less the point behind Mitch Landrieu’s “Working Class Project,” funded by American Bridge. They promise to practice “deep listening,” and: "With this deep listening to working-class voters across 21 states, we’ll identify messages, messengers, and new mediums to rebuild the Democratic brand and write a blueprint for victory that we’ll deploy using every tool in our toolbox."

This kind of technocratic language is, frankly, B.S. It’s the same “game plan” that has so thoroughly divorced politics from real meaning that it now operates more like a spectator sport. It’s not that these people are necessarily ill-intentioned, but that they suffer from the same groupthink that has convinced much of the political consulting class that they can message their way out of decades of neglect.

But legitimacy cannot be manufactured in a media strategy room. Trust cannot be restored through emotional catharsis alone. A viral speech or a slick ad may win a news cycle, but it cannot repair what has broken at the level of daily life.

The material conditions that sustain a democratic order — economic security, civic belonging, a believable future — cannot be rebuilt by performances of resistance. They require actual reconstruction. They require leaders willing to confront the reality that the failure is not just rhetorical, but structural.

I’m currently reading Astra Taylor’s Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, in which she argues that democracy and equality were once understood to be inseparable — the foundation of freedom, not its enemy. The French revolutionary slogan — liberté, égalité, fraternité — captured a vision where personal freedom and shared belonging advanced together. But in modern American life, they have been pried apart. Freedom has been recast as the absence of collective obligation, while equality is treated as a threat. This ideological shift has made it even harder for the system to renew itself. A politics that cannot connect freedom to solidarity — that cannot imagine liberty and dignity as mutually sustaining — has little chance of restoring trust.

The public senses this. They know, at a visceral level, that the problem runs deeper than the daily outrage cycles acknowledge. They hear passionate defenses of democracy from politicians who have done little to protect the material foundations democracy needs to survive. They watch solemn cable news panels lament "polarization," even as their own wages stagnate, their healthcare bills pile up, their communities hollow out, and their children’s futures grow more precarious. They are told that democracy is under threat — and they believe it — but they are also living the slow erosion of dignity, security, and belonging that no amount of televised urgency can disguise.

In such a context, yet another viral speech or slick campaign ad does not inspire trust. It inspires something quieter, and more corrosive: a disillusionment that hardens with every empty gesture. The more the performances intensify, the more hollow the promises sound. Over time, the gap between public experience and political spectacle grows too wide to bridge with rhetoric alone.

The public is not cynical because they are foolish. They are cynical because they have been taught, through lived experience, that most of the “fighting” offered to them is a substitute for the reckoning they actually need. We no longer know how to name the collapse we feel. We are given slogans about rights and institutions, but the lived experience of abandonment has no official language. And what has no language eventually demands new forms — or new ruptures.

Until that shift happens — until leaders emerge who are willing to name the full scale of the collapse and confront it seriously — no amount of fighting will feel like enough. Because it won’t be enough.

Real leadership today would not simply fight the opposing party louder. It would fight to rebuild the very foundations of civic and democratic life: the conditions under which ordinary people can once again believe that their participation matters, that their sacrifices mean something, that the future is a shared project worth investing in. And it starts with something so simple: recognizing this as the task at hand.

That would mean material security — wages that sustain a family, not an investor class. It would mean civic institutions where power is exercised, not performed — unions, schools, local governments, community boards. It would mean public goods — housing, healthcare, education, infrastructure — defended not as charity, but as the foundation of equal freedom. It would mean a political language rooted not only in rights but in responsibilities, not only in norms but in shared destiny.

Without these, democracy cannot endure. Those who claim to defend it without confronting this fact are not preserving democracy. They are managing its slow collapse.

The public already knows the difference. We don’t have to tell them. I don’t have to tell you. The only question is whether those who claim to speak for democracy are willing to face it.