The late John Lewis called your right to vote “Precious, almost sacred…the most powerful nonviolent tool or instrument in a democratic society.”

Since Selma, since the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts, since Shelby County, voting rights have expanded and then been massively restricted all over again.

In Wisconsin and Alabama just last year, Republicans have fought to preserve power, despite state Supreme Court rulings, and against the clear sentiment of voters, exercised despite illegal gerrymanders, threats of violence, and more.

Across America these last five years, despite a growing population, nearly 2000 polling places have been closed amid hundreds of new anti-voting laws and even more bills.

It can understandably feel like the power structures of old will never, ever stop trying to take your sacred voice and vote away from you.

To be clear: they’re trying to take your voice away from you.

And despite decades of bullshit about small government and family values, your voice and your vote are only the first of many human rights they are actively working to take away from you.

Many of you already know this. They never (ever) wanted you to have a voice in the first place.

But through centuries of Compound Action across millions of people, new voices were incrementally, reluctantly allowed, new votes were cast and counted, new faces and perspectives entered the halls of power.

Not that the kinds of people who forbade them in the first place ever gave up.

Oh, fuck no.

Their tenacity, their seemingly inexhaustible resources and penchant for just I guess whisking Supreme Court justices wherever they want to go, oh and also the hate, well, it all makes it easy to wonder if we’ll ever win.

If we can ever take a breath or a year or an election off, if their insidious tactics, outright corruption, all-consuming sexism, racism, and militant theism make defeat inevitable.

It’s a fair question.

But before we answer it, let’s get some elves involved.

Oh, you haven’t even heard of it, because you are a mature, functioning adult?

Fine, fine.

But you signed up for this, so let’s talk about it anyways, because — I promise — it’s actually relevant to how you’re feeling right now about them stripping you for parts.

The Long Defeat theory — specifically converse to MLK’s famous long arc bending towards justice — says that history is “a long decline from perfection to a state of destruction, when the forces of good win only occasional and incomplete victories against those of evil.”

Now, that’s just one fellow nerd’s interpretation, but read this, from Tolkien’s own letters:

Look, I am not on the…friendliest…terms with Catholicism, and perhaps more impactfully, unlike Tolkien, I didn’t serve at all, much less lose most of my friends in the trenches of World War I, either.

So fair game, man.

Like so many who’ve served in whatever age or era, Tolkien never really overcame his experiences and grief. He claimed Middle Earth’s fictional battles weren’t directly inspired by the Somme (and then got shit for his stories not being realistic enough — fucking critics, man), but they sure as hell feel eerily and tragically derived from The Great War.

A war so horrific the people said another would never be fought.

A war with both bayonets and the first tanks, when penicillin was at least ten years away.

Even CS Lewis, another literary legend who loved wardrobes, a WWI vet and fellow Christian who was no stranger to allegory, reviewed Tolkien’s main LOTR series this way:

Tolkien, understandably, buried himself in his work, in his worlds.

He revealed his jaded intentions through his maps and prose.

His fictional world, like ours, would have bright spots, but the forces of evil were just too many.

They would outlast us. They would turn us against each other, and yes, strip us of all we hold dear, our last levers of autonomy, agency, and power.

Perhaps Tolkien’s journey — his perspective — then, is closest to that of the half-elf Lord of Rivendell, Elrond.

Tolkien, as we have discussed, was traumatized by World War I, a war with uncountable costs, that basically ended in stalemate and armistice. That would be enough.

But here’s the thing: it’s actually what happened after World War I — after peace was salvaged on the backs of a generation of young people sent to death — that most inspired his legendary collection, The Lord of the Rings.

For twenty years following the November 11th armistice, Tolkien bore witness to peace, yes, but only briefly.

Soon after came again Germany, the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, and yet another World War (one where his sons were on the frontlines).

Tens of millions of additional lives were lost all over again from Stalinburg to Bastogne to Okinawa. Eventually the Nazi’s fell, but only after an all-out, unheard of effort from the last great alliance, most of whom are now lost to time.

This is a timeline that neatly mirrors the writing, publishing, and backstory to The Fellowship of the Ring*.

Meanwhile (well, not meanwhile, but you get it) Elrond the healer — also a vet of the Last Alliance of Men and Elves — spent a few thousand years recovering in the Montecito of Middle Earth.

Tolkien takes care and time to describe Elrond’s own PTSD, the details scattered across the famous big books and also a bunch of scattered, tiny poems I have multiple copies of.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond summarized the prospects for the future Fellowship:

And later, ruminating more fully on Middle Earth’s own arc towards justice:

I mean this sure sounds a lot like Europe in 1920-1938.

It sure feels like social media, Apple News, Supreme Court verdicts, and Democratic fundraising texts from the past month. Since 2016.

12 steps forward, 42 steps back.

Anyways, good luck Hobbits! No pressure.

What I think Elrond’s saying, and what I think Tolkien was trying to say was, “From everything I can tell, the job is never done.”

From Europe to Rivendell, evil just never stopped stopping.

It was exhausting. It was fucking demoralizing.

The odds were stacked against the Fellowship from the start.

TLDR; they persevered, but long before that, it required a Hobbit stepping up amid a chaotic secret council soaked in bitter in-fighting and dick measuring to say, “Fuck it, I’ll do it”.

Only then did everyone else step up and sacrifice everything.

And it still almost didn’t work.

Whether you love the books or even know them, the climactic turns at the end of The Return of the King are telling:

In the end, at the culmination of three long ages of gods and elves and men, after six months of travel and torment, his dearest friends and thousands of their often-reluctant allies sacrificing themselves as decoys at the Black Gate — enormous losses masking his secret entrance into Mount Doom, Orodruin, Amon Amarth — that Hobbit, the ring-bearer, Frodo, finally…failed.

He failed.

He failed, despite powerful, timely gifts from Galadriel, and despite Boromir’s tragic, selfless fight against a phalanx of orcs, among other timely cheat codes, like Gandalf the White.

The Ring was too strong. Darkness prevailed, as advertised.

Frodo failed when his legs gave out (perhaps inevitably, if you subscribe to The Long Defeat theory), until Sam put him on his goddamn back.

He failed again when Gollum — whom Frodo had previously spared because he’s a way better person than I’ll ever be — gave it one last attempt to take back His Precious, at all costs.

Frodo’s grace blew up in his face, The Long Defeat nearly complete, twice-over.

But here’s the twist.

Gollum got The One Ring, but he also paid the costs, all the way down into the fire, which consumed the ring, too.

Gollum inadvertently saved the day (for now), in what Tolkien described in his letters as a sudden “eucatastrophy”.

Wrote the orphan Tolkien:

(A less poetic version of his eucatastrophy is a deus ex machina, which always feel a little bit lazy, because that’s just not how real life goes, where random shit happens to save the day, but hey, the Writer’s Guild (myself included) was on strike when I wrote the original version of this, so that’s what you get.)

Anyways. Read that again. “A sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back.”

It’s a complicated metaphor to try and apply to America, a wonderful country where the promise of equal rights (and real democracy) remains steadfastly unfulfilled.

Was America’s “out of joint limb” really ever in place?

Not for Frodo, not for deforestation, for lung cancer, for HIV, for malaria, for clean energy, for democracy, for voting rights.

This country has helped lift billions — billions — out of poverty. It is capable of great and horrible tasks.

There are wins and devastating setbacks and cancers that refuse to stay in remission.

Whether you attribute this wisdom to Batman’s dad or Rocky or a real person, the key is what happens when we inevitably get knocked down.

The key is that we get back up again. Over and over again.

However long it takes. However many times we have to crawl back up off the mat.

There’s great news here:

In reality, in modern times (I told you we’d get here), there are some real-world eucatastrophical-type reversals of late that simply wouldn’t exist without Compound Action, without your hard-earned vote:

I may not agree that The Long Defeat is real, but I do agree that bad guys are real, that each of our time here is short, that the work is never done, and we can only do it together.

But that if we do — we can fucking win.

America only continues to hold promise because generations of people before us looked at evil and the odds and said, “Fuck that.”

Because generations of people came here to not only have better, but to make it better with their own bare hands. To lead the largest and most profitable companies that have ever existed. To invent new drugs for terrible diseases. To see us for what we are and what we can be.

I agree that heroic journeys can not be undertaken alone — not successful ones, at least.

I empathize with the very rational feeling that one small person cannot change a huge world. The powers that be want you to feel that way.

These people are obsessed with you feeling impotent and trapped.

I have this enormous, increasingly powerful platform — all of you — and still often feel like it’s all futile.

I didn’t fight in World War I, or any war, I have never had my voice or vote taken away.

I am acutely aware of how grief changes us, and how it can feel inescapable. I have suffered grief on a personal level that I’m super not interested in revisiting, but I’m old enough and self-aware enough to have long-acknowledged that loss is all around us.

It is inevitable.

Loss is what reminds of the stakes, of the ticking clock, it is what prods us to procreate and and galvanizes to fight for air and water and an education and the right to vote.

Fear of catastrophic loss and dark power is what turned out millions of Poles in the recent election, what brought Brazil back from the brink, what may salvage some form of democracy in France, what ended 15 years of conservative rule in the UK just this morning, and if necessary, may help America keep her head afloat in the coming months.

They DEFINITELY don’t want women or Black people to vote, or former prisoners.

Nor do they want to reform or do-away with the Electoral College or admit DC (or anywhere else) as a state. That’s the equivalent of just tossing the ring into the fire. Game over.

They don’t do that. They are bad guys.

In “What It All Means”, I wrote:

Again, the receipts are in.

From The Center for Public Integrity:

So, yeah, we’re gonna have to keep recruiting new candidates, keep campaigning for them, keep electing them, keep marching, and keep fighting for more people — for everyone — to be able to vote, especially, once again, forever, this November.

But while/after we do that, we can/have to make elections themselves much, much better. Automatic voter registration, universal early voting, voting by mail, drop boxes everywhere — you get it.

Rep. Terri Sewell re-introduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act last year, “which would modernize and restore the full protections of the VRA.“

We can choose to do this.

To protect your vote. To make it easier to vote (like Pennsylvania did just this week). For decades, Congress actually did exactly that, over and over again. In a more serious country, ranked choice voting would be adopted everywhere.

Idealism may sometimes be the enemy of progress, and in this case, we just have to fucking win up and down the ballot.

None of the actions we promote here is a silver bullet.

The IRA was among the biggest things we’ve ever done, but the project isn’t done, the legislation was very imperfect, and we’ve already learned a lot from trying to implement — for example — the electrification credits fifty different ways.

We have to walk and chew gum at the same time and then keep walking and chewing. Never stop stopping.

Similarly, again, ranked choice is fucking rad, no doubt — but when there are huge power structures, the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow past still fighting every single day to take away your ability to vote at all, often by literally removing places where you can vote or drop your at-home ballot —

— well, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about ranked choice, a fist full of straws, or a sorting hat — your vote won’t count.

Because sometimes they suppress your vote in subtle ways, in others, not so much, we have to think more comprehensively, from the bottom up. We don’t do gatekeeping here. Just the opposite.

We’ve gotta do it all.

I’m talking about the “moderate”, “centrist”, gerontocracy machine who were born and raised amid an drastically different world than the one we live in now, who are terrified of losing their seats, but especially to people who don’t look like them.

That is, people who have held hourly jobs, student, and credit debt they’ve never had, who’ve suffered through air pollution and flooding and foreclosures they couldn’t dream of, who have failed to find or afford childcare, who worked in childcare, or elderly care, until they couldn’t afford to do the work anymore.

As my friend Amanda Litman of RFS said on Threads:

Look. I love a good, productive, right-sized government. I love paying taxes and knowing a nearby bridge won’t collapse because I did.

But what the current occupants do is they fire up these machines, fueled by vast wealth and their incumbent power, to maintain the status quo, to support other incumbents, no matter how old or toothless, to marginalize young progressive candidates who intimately understand and live the issues and who give a shit, all in the name of you just not….turning out.

That’s right — the recipe is simply, successfully, demoralization.

On the other hand, good news: bad guys are real.

David Brooks wrote:

As the last few elections have proved, having an honest-to-goodness bad guy on one ticket can definitely improve turnout.

But (insanely enough) it’s more complicated now, four years later, than those “Any Functioning Adult 2020” bumper stickers.

Our incumbent president who fully, honestly rekindled American industrialization, the same one who beat the now-convicted felon the last time, has aged just like most people of his age do (which is to say, not linearly). He has done so much, but has also pissed off just enough of the youth by funding the Gaza massacre, has let COVID become endemic, and struggled to keep the cost of living manageable for the middle and lower classes that — incredibly, but perhaps inevitably — running against that convicted felon simply isn’t a gimme this time.

My point is this: if we want eucatastrophy, we’re going to have to make it happen, no matter the candidate up top, by driving power from below.

No one’s asking you to be Frodo and carry the ring to Mordor alone, or even with your best bud Sam. Katniss didn’t do it alone, neither did Furiosa, Psyche, Atalanta, or Rey. They all had people, eventually, to an extent.

And we’ve got people.

Millions before us, and so many — if we get this right, one more time — to come after us, seven generations beyond us.

And there are a variety of amazing groups working right now to turn this ship around, census by census, district by district, candidate by candidate, vote by vote, election by election, and they need your help.

They want you to be able to vote. And then they want you to actually vote.

There are non-partisan voting rights groups, and there are “Get out the vote” groups. And they need your help.

There are groups like the Environmental Voter Project focused solely on getting out environmental voters, regardless of candidate or party.

There are groups like Run for Something who exclusively recruit and support local and state level progressive candidates under 40, and groups like HeadCount who register people to vote at concerts, which must be fun.

There are new organizations like Voters of Tomorrow — by Gen Z, for Gen Z. There are new organizations like Third Act — by voters over 60, for voters over 60.

There are long-term organizations like the ACLU, League of Women Voters, Fair Fight, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Democracy Works, and more, and even more — groups with short-term PACS that support a dynamic slate of candidates, like Climate Cabinet, Swing Left, and many, many more.

Your fears have always been well-placed: they don’t want you to vote.

They certainly don’t want you to run.

They do not want you to have power — with your art, your wallet, your vote, or with a gavel.

They don’t want you to have health care, to be able to afford what they can, to have autonomy and agency over your body.

They do not want you to even feel comfortable in your own fucking body, to read books about our messy history, they do not want you to have time off, they do not want separation of church and state, they don’t mind fascism if it benefits them, they do not want more or any immigrants, despite a profound lack of understanding of how immigrants provide everything we rely on, with so few protections.

And Project 2025 goes far, far beyond all of this.

I’m going to paraphrase the right — if they want our books and voting rights and uteri, our social contracts and public spaces, if they want Medicaid and everyone on it to die, if they want to do away with clean air and clean water, to cancel gay marriage and civil rights — they can come and get them.

We have to fight with our wallets, our feet, our voice, and our votes — again, inevitably — for every single candidate in every single election, from the bottom up.

Little wins down-ballot add up into big wins, which builds long-term power. That’s Compound Action.

Understanding who, what money, and what policies are driving progress — or standing in the way — are key to actually bending the arc further and faster, for more people, and to avoid the Long Defeat, forever.

We’ve got 17 weeks to march on Mordor. Let’s get to it.