And the next election? Dave Winer says, “It must be about everything.”
Imagine the 2026 election being defined narrowly. Imagine that center-left politicians retake control of Congress. Maybe they pass laws that require serious screening and training for ICE officers. Maybe they limit the operations of ICE. Maybe they abolish it and replace border — actual border — security with a new agency.
Narrowly defined like that, the problems of 2026 leave open all the back doors that made the present catastrophe possible. How long have corporate lobbyists seen no need to wait in the lobby because they were welcome in offices upstairs that we citizens never see. Putting a muzzle on ICE doesn’t touch that part of the problem.
On various levels, Congress hasn’t really worked properly for years and years. The Supreme Court has been an inside job for some time now too. Putting a muzzle on ICE, say, won’t touch that. The wealthy and their corporations will still feel free to walk without embarrassment into the room where things happen, and close the door behind them until their business is attended to.
Government is always being hollowed out, in every generation, and every generation must defend and rebuild its deepest functions. Voting is essential for fighting back, but this is a much bigger matter than any typical election. That’s probably why Dave Winer wrote about the 2026 election, “It must be about everything.”
Many fellow citizens don’t vote, don’t engage in group activism. The powerful love that. Voting is absolutely essential, but it is not enough. We face problems that voting alone won’t address.We face problems that voting alone won’t address. We face problems that voting alone won’t address.
Voting is an absolutely essential act of citizenship but a vague one. A vote says, I want something from over there, not the something we see over here. If we can speak with great force, many votes and boycotts and phone calls and more, we can start to get much more particular about what the country needs, and build a more detailed discourse and vision and set of demands. Then we can vote in force to support the things the more explicit discussion would now support. But because all the back doors to the districts of power stand open most of the time, we need the discussion to be far-ranging.
After Apartheid, South Africa said to itself, we’re going to need a lot of discussion to have a hope of understanding, acknowledging, and moving out of the profound wounds and systemic flaws of our nation. In a situation like that, a country should say to itself, as Dave Winer suggests, the discussion should be about everything.
A crisis of this magnitude might make this possible. Enough people might see the need, might build the skills for it. But five years from now the moment will probably have passed. The election of 2026 needs to be about everything. The Republican party doesn’t believe in it, and the Democratic party probably doesn’t have the vision or the guts for it. So that leaves the citizens to put everything on the agenda, or to fail to.