Politics in Meantime: How Pro-Democracy Groups Navigate Multiple Realities While the Temporal Landscape Crumbles Underfoot

• In Event: Culture and the Construction of Expectations & Outcomes

Abstract

Between 2015-2025 in the U.S., groups of “loyal Democrats” and “leftists” were working towards the same general visions. Yet, each of the two kinds of group complained, saying (in nearly identical words) that the other kind of group was “not thinking about the future.” Both sides were all right, in some ways: None were making plans for what to do if there was a Trump take-over. Our ethnography in several campaigns in these two types of groups (loyal Democrats who focused solely on getting out the vote for Democrats, and leftists who said that mainstream Democrats would disappoint and quickly infuriate voters, thus leading back to Trumpism) shows how, and why, each type of group managed to ignore what the other was spotlighting; and how, in the process, neither focused on planning for the possibility of a Trump election, either in 2016 or 2024. Pragmatist theories of “multiple realities” and of democratic publics gets us part of the way to an answer, by drawing attention to how people decide a situation is “a problem,” how they engage with their society’s “materials at hand (such as customs and institutions)” to work towards “ends-in-view.” But this approach needs more attention to groups’ styles—their everyday conversational methods of lighting up some political paths and obscure others, producing a sense of solidarity and hope.

Authors

• Nina Eliasoph, University of Southern California

• Kennedy Chi-pan Wong, The King's University

• Birgan Gokmenoglu, London School of Economics