Margot Ford McMillen

The latest polls show that spirit among the Democrats is at an all-time low. “Demoralized,” “despondent,” “exhausted” are some of the words the media is using to describe the Ds. When I ask a progressive friend how things are going, I’m likely to hear they’re depressed. Folks are mourning the loss of democracy, even if they have never really participated in democracy. Maybe they voted but they’ve never written a letter, attended a lobby day, marched in a protest. And, never having tried, it’s easy to assume it doesn’t work.

Can we continue our citizen activism? Of course. When we know what we believe in, it’s easy to continue the fight. And, don’t forget … we’ve been here before, and even worse. As one that cut her activism teeth in the Vietnam era, I remember when government behaved more badly. The draft. The lies that said we were beating the Vietcong. The dearth of women in government (or anywhere else but the home). We marched, we sang, we wrote letters, we created “underground” newspapers.

And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing the day I heard the radio say that the U.S. was pulling out of Vietnam. I actually pinched myself. “We won …” I said to my empty house, “we stopped a war.” At the time, it felt like we could go forward with anything and win.

But, today, depression and loneliness have become a way of life, especially among Ds. Pundits are kicking themselves for not reading the Project 25 manifesto, which is easy to find on-line. As I’ve said before in this column, you don’t have to read the whole thing. Just look for the parts that interest you—education, media, agriculture, whatever. But instead of getting informed there’s some kind of mass hypnosis preventing us.

OK. The other side won. What we aren’t daring to say is that with some of the principles of their agenda … we agree! We agree that government is wasteful. We hate the deficit. We hate that our military stumbles in to wars almost whimsically. And stumbles out again. According to a House Budget Committee, in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense “confirmed that over $7 billion worth of military equipment remained in the Taliban’s possession …”

But even when we agree with their goals, we hate the way they do things. We hate mass firings. We want the rich, with money in the stock exchange, to pay their fair share of taxes. We grasp at labels—oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism. All of them fit, a little bit. Words have lost meaning anyway in the mouths of compulsive liars. We blame Elon, who actually seems to bore POTUS even when he brings his cute little four-year-old to the office.

The kid, by the way, called “X,” is just another distraction as Musk taps the government coffers for himself. According to ABC News, “Federal contracts to SpaceX doubled at the beginning of the Biden administration, going from $1.1 billion in the 2020 fiscal year to $2.2 billion in the 2021 fiscal year. The contracts continued to grow under Joe Biden, reaching $3.7 billion during the 2024 fiscal year.” From the government to Wall Street.

With E and X in the room, POTUS is mostly there to sign papers. “You’ve got the ideas,” he seems to tell the camera, “But I’ve got the Sharpee.” They are like the guys in the bar down the street, bullying, trying to outdo. What name will they change next? Gulf of Mexico. Gulf of America. Gulf of Covfefe. Why not? If they would only do things in a more—what’s the word? — sensitive? Legitimate? Small d-democratic? way.

We agree that the deficit is too high and still growing. But we don’t think mass firings are how to fix it. We agree that American corporations should do business here and build our workforce but we don’t think tariffs are the way to go. We agree that the health system is a mess but the next pandemic, with a financially-stressed CDC, withdrawal from international agencies and denunciation of vaccines won’t make America healthy.

Which brings us to the food system, my particular hot-button. Living on the cusp of row-crop land and rolling pasture, I know who gets the big subsidies. If you wonder who the winners in your state are, check out EWG.org. You’ll find that commodity farmers, growing corn and beans for ethanol plants, biodiesel facilities, industrial animal factories, also called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs, are reaping the benefits of USDA largesse. And where do the profits for all these handouts end up? Not in rural America but on Wall Street.

It’s time, dear ones, to get busy. Write your lawmakers, join a march, sing a protest song. Don’t complain that democracy is dead. Find its tools and win!

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.”

Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.