Image by Claudio Schwarz.

The Dems have swept the nation and states like mine, Minnesota. A wave of elation and relief in the form of social media posts containing clips of jubilant watch parties and smiling politicians celebrating blue wins and flips from across the country has saturated my corner of the internet since last night. And it terrifies me.

Because the internet likes to treat everything as black and white despite the fact that nothing really is, I have to add this disclaimer to quell the fear of being canceled over nothing: I certainly share in the relief of the idea that the Democrats might be able to stop some of the most pernicious bleeding that’s been flowing from the unprecedented harm that Trump and the Republicans have inflicted upon the country, mostly the most vulnerable among us, since his second installment in office. But that relief is based on hope, and hope is not an action.

“If Kamala had won, we’d be at brunch right now.” That’s the slogan that proliferated at and since the hapless No Kings rallies—the costume-filled walks in which Americans engage in lieu of actual protests which, as our friends in France have demonstrated, require at least some element of disruption in order to be effective. It’s this idea—that if the blue party is in control, everything is and will be good and fine and we can go back to eating our Eggs Benedict and throwing back our bottomless mimosas and the whole socio-economic political project of creating a world that’s fair and just to all of the forms of life that inhabit it will take care of itself—that scares me.

When the Democrats had their last trifecta here in Minnesota back in 2022, their first in 10 years, I reported on what they got up to with their newly elected power for The Appeal. While they did things like limit no-knock warrants, legalize marijuana, and boost pay for public defenders, they also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars of additional funding to police and prisons.

Here’s the important part: the progressive things that did get passed were hardly thanks to the Democrats at all—they were largely the result of the concerted effort of a group of progressive organizations, the Justice for All Coalition, that pressured them into it.

This is the truth that Minnesota’s last Democratic trifecta—alongside embarrassments like AOC’s walking back of the lip service she originally gave to progressive politics and Hakeem Jeffries’ disinterest in removing a convinced felon from the highest office in the land—reveals: the Democrats are a centrist-at-best faux opposition party that, left to their own devices, will merely serve a slightly different set of wealthy overloads than their Republican “opponents’”. It’s through our own organizing, pressure, and action—not relief and hope—that anything gets done around here.

As one of my favorite people I’ve met via the internet has so perfectly put it, your favorite politician will not save you. The Democrats are still our oppressors, not our saviors. We have to understand voting, elections, and our two-party political system in a radical way if we want radical change, which is to understand that every candidate, once elected, becomes our opponent. We cannot go to brunch. We cannot take our eyes off of them. The one and only thing to do now is everything we can to hold them accountable and take care of ourselves in community when they inevitably fail us.

We have to understand that now is the worst possible time to sit on our laurels and think, hope, or expect anything to be fine. Because it won’t be, not without us working tirelessly to hold them accountable to the promises they made and pushing them far, far beyond them to the point that, as April Rosenblum once wrote, they’re forced to defy the special interests of the wealthy and the well-connected to whom they’re otherwise beholden and to meet our demands instead.

The operative word here is demands. Not asks. Not requests. Demands. Nothing less. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again and again because it’s a hill I’ll die on—the one thing we have that our oppressors can never have is numbers. There are far more of us than there are of them. We are the 99 percent. We can make demands. The thing is that we have to do it together.

That’s why now is the time for a general strike.

We have to show them that we’re serious, that we mean it. That shit is going to have to be different because the center cannot hold, the status quo simply will not do. That we’re not going to keep supplying the weapons used to carry out a genocide in Gaza, allow the planet be defiled so that oil companies can rake in billions in profit while flooding covers dozens of miles of Nepal, or tech bros to shove limp dick technology down our throats so they can profit of the speculative market they’ve built around it as we lose our jobs in an economic system that requires money in order to pay to exist. That we’re simply not going to go on as we have before.

Do not succumb to the idiocy that is a demand for a fully executable strategic plan for action towards change as some kind of prerequisite for taking any action at all, for taking the first step, which is simply to stop. Once we do that—once we stop showing up to work and paying our bills and buying things and doing anything besides taking care of each other and all life—we’ll have plenty of time to figure out what’s next.

Remember how quickly nature came roaring back during the early weeks of the pandemic when we were all staying home? Change isn’t easy, but it can happen quickly.

Now, friends, we strike.