I am not disillusioned. If you’re familiar with my work, and especially “Breaking Free,” you’ll have known that Kamala Harris was never going to win this election — the “democratic” institutions in this country, and specifically the electoral college, are not broken. They are working according to their design. (More from “Breaking Free,” below.)

“Voting equality” is an illusion in this country. Also kneecapping the Harris campaign were the Democratic operatives who believed racing toward the ideological center (and right) would secure her victory (when it only secured her AIPAC money). This terrible strategy has been in place for decades: After the Supreme Court decided that Floridians’ votes didn’t count and handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, then-DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe visited students at Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP) to discuss next steps for the Democratic Party. I was president of both the Harvard College Democrats and the Massachusetts College Democrats at the time, and was active in the IOP and attended the meeting. He argued — and I will never forget this — that the Democratic Party needed to pivot toward the “suburban voter,” aka, the white vote, and stop investing in the party’s base (aka, Black and brown and queer voters), upon the presumption that they will vote for Democrats anyway.

And I knew in that moment the party was irrevocably compromised. I left politics so that I could focus my work on creating and disseminating the ideas and language to help us shift critical narratives — this was and remains my agenda in “Breaking Free.”

Project 2025 is not coming. It is here. Our institutions will not save us. They will not free us. Only we can free each other. We need to care for each other, so we need to think about how to create communal care networks that will protect us not just for the next four years but for generations to come.

===FROM “BREAKING FREE”===

“Equality feminism rose to prominence because it put forward a sim-
ple vision for fairness that appealed to the people in power and made
itself a handmaiden to America’s white supremacy in the process. And as
long as men retain their power and, crucially, patriarchal values remain
the bedrock of our institutions, equality feminism will continue to eke
out ‘small wins’ on the path to advancing (white) women’s full participation in society.”

…

“An eternal dangling carrot, equality is the unrealizable feminist dream. The desire for equality is so deeply ensconced in our mindset that we cannot see beyond it—beyond the world that men have created and the values they have established. For more than 150 years, the feminist commitment to inclusion within patriarchal institutions and structures and the necessary adoption of patriarchal beliefs and values have only served to expand and fortify the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy. And expanding the system does not fundamentally change the system.”