This Is the Most Inspiring Thing I’ve Heard About Democracy at the Supreme Court in Ages

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It’s not every day that a political leader talking about the state of American democracy is able to hit two tricky notes at the same time: realism and hope. Yet in my interview this week with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse for the Amicus podcast, the Democrat from Rhode Island somehow managed to do so. His message offers a powerful and inspiring mantra for what is undeniably a bleak time for our republic, and it’s worth considering deeply and sharing widely.

It’s certainly possible to see Whitehouse as a person who has been warning about something horrifying for so long that it loses its ability to shock—last week, he delivered his 300^th speech in the Senate cautioning against the incalculable dangers of climate inaction. He initiated this series of speeches on April 18, 2012. Similarly, he has, since at least as long as I’ve known him, been doggedly chronicling the dangers of a Supreme Court taken over by moneyed interests. He wrote a book about it. He spearheaded an amicus brief about it. After years and years of sounding the alarm and being met with derision and gaslighting and generalized ennui, he might find it hard to ignore the temptation to don an “I Told You So” T-shirt and check out. For so many who spent years if not decades warning that constitutional democracy was in peril, it turns out schadenfreude has the shelf life of a tub of cottage cheese: It was too soon to panic until it was too late, and nobody wants to hear from the folks who spent years issuing warnings, because WTF can we do about it now?

However, Whitehouse isn’t basking in the glow of having for so long been often the sole correct voice, nor is he preparing to throw in the towel now that others are waking up to the reality he’s been screaming about for at least a decade. Instead, he has somehow managed to merge his decadeslong philippic with the St. Crispin’s Day Speech.

At the end of a lengthy interview about the courts; the justices; Emil Bove, Trump defense attorney turned DOJ hatchet man turned circuit court nominee; and America’s oligarchs, I asked Whitehouse how it was possible to deliver 300 speeches about U.S. political indifference to climate change—across, for the most part, party and ideology—and why he continues to stand with a floppy analog sign in the well of the Senate, attempting to educate people about abstract systems of government, as the U.S. secretary of homeland security produces an endless stream of meaningless viral end-of-democracy posts. His answer, which has been edited and condensed below, might just be my meditation app for the months to come:

I think in a democracy, it’s really important for citizens to understand what’s going on around them. And if you’re in a position where you get a view of things before most other people do, you’ve got a job to explain that and to tell people, and to warn people, and there’s actually a real thirst for that.

One of the things that we’ve noticed—and I’ve got the best comms team in the Senate—is that [thirst exists on] Twitter, which was famously the home of the short, sharp snark. Just for the hell of it, we started putting out, like, 20 chapter tweets about the Supreme Court, essentially an essay in Twitter form. And we figured maybe you will read it, and Ruth Marcus will read it, and Jennifer Rubin will read it, and that’s enough. But as it turned out, we’d blow through a million engagements on those things. People liked the explainer about an issue that concerned them, and so we kept doing that. The most recent one we did, even after it became X, even after the algorithms were torqued to suppress what we were doing, I did another 20 chapter tweet, and it blew through a million again. So the appetite is still there.

And the message that I wanted to communicate through the 300th speech is just Here’s how they did it: It’s essentially the same crew that captured the Supreme Court and turned it into their captured tool and polluted our political process with foul dark money and has run a climate-denial op that has prevented us from solving a very solvable problem—because it would’ve inconvenienced the fossil fuel industry to have to clean up its act—and that those three things are actually kind of the same creature. And whether you’re terrified about our climate future or furious about our frustrated and corrupted politics or just agonizing about what the hell is going on at a Supreme Court that seems to be on cruise control for certain interests, that’s actually a thing you could do something about.

Maybe the most important gloss he added was the following: “It was done. And so it can be undone.” It’s tragically simple, just now, to say that it’s too late to do anything to preserve and protect democracy. But among the herd of Eeyores, the senator from Rhode Island embodies just a lick of Tigger. As he put it:

Behind the gloom and doom of “Oh my gosh, here we are; we have this country at the edge of falling away from democracy and mired in corruption,” there’s also the requirement that we look to the horizon. This was done. It can be undone. We have to understand what the problem is and go at it, but we have the tools to undo it.

I want to associate myself, right here and right now, with the remarks of the senator who concluded our conversation with the oddly sunny reflection that “while I’m usually delivering fairly grim news about how the dirty deal went down, it’s founded in an optimism that when you know how the dirty deal was done, you know how to go back and undo it.”

I keep trying to figure out a path between hopelessness and hope. Here it is: We need to know what has happened and also what is happening. Remember that you can reverse engineer it and keep working to do so until it is done. And it can be done.

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