Editor’s Note: With a new mayor in Richmond and Virginia’s governor’s race on the horizon, alongside ongoing federal redistricting battles and policy shifts, the question of how we build and hold power is more urgent than ever.
In this guest commentary, a reader argues that too much of today’s activism has slipped into performance at the expense of sustained, strategic organizing. They point to low-turnout local races, long-term conservative investment in think tanks and school boards, and the gap between online outrage and real-world power as warning signs for anyone who cares about the future of democracy here in Richmond and beyond.
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By E. Thorne
History doesn’t announce itself with fanfare. It arrives in policy memos and press releases, moving not with the crash of a wave but with the pull of a tide that erodes everything while seeming to change nothing.
So we drift, doom scrolling and posting, while something colder takes hold of the machinery around us. There are no tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, but there are judges being confirmed in numbers that will reshape jurisprudence for decades. Voting maps get redrawn in windowless rooms by technicians who understand gerrymandering better than most citizens understand their own districts. Rules get rewritten while we argue about who gets to hold the microphone.
We’re not being silenced. We’re being distracted. Every time we mistake catharsis for change, they consolidate another inch of ground that will be nearly impossible to recover. While we labor over the perfect tweet, they labor over actual law. While we shame each other into ever-smaller circles of ideological purity, they fund the unglamorous machinery that will outlast every social media platform and trending hashtag.
This isn’t about tone or civility or finding the right words. It’s about power, and we’ve been bringing eloquence to a fight that was never really about language. Somewhere along the way, probably when protests became brand activation opportunities and political identity became something that could be merchandised, resistance slipped into costume. Action became performance, and then performance became the entire point.
Righteous anger calcified into elaborate ritual. We perfected curated outrage, developed weekly rhythms of call-outs and cancellations, engaged in endless parsing of harm and purity until shared struggle collapsed into personal branding exercises. The other side simply got to work quietly, without any particular need to be liked by the cultural institutions we still imagine hold real sway over American life.
They didn’t win by accident. They won by showing up to school board elections most people couldn’t be bothered to Google. They built media empires that told the same story in fifty different voices across fifty platforms, creating an ecosystem of mutual reinforcement. They funded think tanks that spent decades rewriting policy foundations in footnotes and white papers that slowly shifted the boundaries of acceptable political thought.
Yes, they had billionaire donors. But so did we, ours just funded different things. While their money built think tanks and local organizing infrastructure, much of ours fed the outrage economy: viral content, performative campaigns, and platforms that monetized anger rather than channeled it strategically. Money without strategy is expensive noise. What made the difference was patient work building intellectual infrastructure and showing up to unsexy local races year after year. They played the long game while we played ourselves.
We tell ourselves that decency will prevail, as if decency were a natural force rather than choices people make. But decency without strategy is a fool’s errand. Institutions that have been hollowed out serve authoritarian ends just as well as democratic ones.
We’ve spent years mistaking attention for influence, confusing visibility with effectiveness. Politics isn’t fundamentally about being right. It’s about being in charge.
There’s no romance in work that actually wins elections and changes policy. No glamour in community meetings where three people discuss parking regulations, or in local campaigns where victory means gaining a single zoning board seat. But that’s where real power lives—in district boundaries and budget line items, in unremarkable rooms where decisions get made by people whose names you’ll never know but whose choices shape your daily life.
It doesn’t matter how eloquently we speak truth to power if we never learn to take power ourselves, wield it responsibly, build coalitions that can hold it long enough to accomplish something meaningful.
The moral clarity we prize above nearly every other political virtue doesn’t build affordable housing or overturn unjust laws or stop family-separating deportations. Only power accomplishes those things. And power must be built deliberately, brick by brick and vote by vote.
The difference is measurable. While we craft the perfect Instagram story about voter suppression, conservative activists register voters in suburban subdivisions. While we debate petition language that will gather hundreds of signatures, they organize phone banks contacting thousands. While we argue over a candidate’s ideological purity, they walk precincts for whoever can win.
The question isn’t whether your values are noble or your oppression analysis sophisticated. It’s whether those values have been organized into something that can win a vote, hold a legislative seat, shift a budget toward justice, or build something better.
We don’t need another viral hashtag or devastating meme. Instead of sharing gerrymandering infographics, research your state redistricting process and find public hearings. Instead of quote-tweeting school board outrage, attend meetings and see what’s actually on the agenda. Instead of posting about housing justice, show up to city planning meetings where zoning decisions get made.
This isn’t an argument against digital tools. But there’s a crucial difference between using technology to coordinate real action and mistaking online engagement for action itself. We need the unglamorous work of coordination, infrastructure, and long-term strategy. We need coalitions broad enough to win even when they’re not pure enough to satisfy every ideological preference.
It’s not betrayal to build power alongside people who don’t share every word of your political vocabulary, who prioritize different issues or express commitments in ways that make you uncomfortable. It’s survival in a system that rewards coalition-building over ideological perfection.
While we fight each other for moral high ground, the ground itself disappears. Democratic norms and institutions we assume will always be available for reform are being systematically dismantled by people who understand exactly what those institutions were worth and how to replace them with something more favorable to their interests.
The house is already on fire. We can spend remaining time arguing over who lit the match or we can focus on carrying water. Together.
Performance, however satisfying, won’t stop fascism. Only power can do that, the patient accumulation and strategic deployment of political power in service of democratic values.
If we can’t stomach the compromises such work requires, if we can’t tolerate the cold calculus and unsexy logistics of effective organizing, then we should at least admit our limitations. But we should stop pretending American democracy will be saved by the most eloquent expression of our pain or perfectly crafted articulation of our rage.
The choice is ours. We can continue performing resistance, or we can start building power.
Photo by Gilles Lambert
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