What I wish for in 2024: A fight to save democracy

When my editors at The Inquirer Opinion section asked me to write this short essay on my hopes for 2024, one colleague joked that I could probably keep it to just two words: “Trump. Jail.”

Have my columns become that predictable? (Don’t answer that.) Sure, it’s true that justice for an ex-and-possibly-future president who repeatedly broke the law, most famously in plotting an attempted coup that resulted in a deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, is an outcome that I would absolutely love to see.

But that’s the thing: There are a lot of outcomes I’d be thrilled to witness over the next 12 months, including a humiliating defeat at the ballot box for Donald Trump by a President Joe Biden who got wiser at age 81 and listened to America’s young people about peace in Gaza and phasing out fossil fuels. But then, I’d be nearly as excited if my beloved Philadelphia Union finally stopped being so cheap and signed a world-class striker and midfielder in order to win the MLS Cup.

But soccer is a spectator sport. Democracy isn’t supposed to be.

It’s easy to hope for outcomes. In fact, I think too many of us are doing exactly that — sinking deeper into our couches, open-mouthed and dumbfounded, as America gets ready to toss the principles that were forged right here in Philadelphia in the late 1700s right down the memory hole.

Many of us know people who are so resigned to the most negative outcome — that the United States becomes a dictatorship 20 days into 2025 — that they are seriously talking about leaving the country. Many more are pinning their hopes for 2024 on judges in Denver, or jurors in Atlanta, or some other deus ex machina to swoop down from the heavens to save the American Experiment so they don’t have to.

About 40% of the American public are making it clear they want this nation to become a dictatorship, led by a “Red Caesar” who will suspend the Constitution to smite their enemies at the southern border, on college campuses, and in the “liberal media.” They are a minority, but an organized and determined one.

My hope for 2024 is that the silent majority of Americans who still believe in freedom will stop wallowing in despair and waiting for the worst. Instead, these voters should rise up from their couches, get organized, and start taking action to save democracy now, and not 10 months and one week from now when it will be too late.

There needs to be an active, pro-democracy movement in the United States that is bigger, more visible, and more determined than the MAGA movement that seeks to destroy it. They should be organizing right now, crafting new messages, posting on TikTok, making themselves known, knocking on doors, registering every voter, and talking to — and listening to — millions of disillusioned young people.

We can enter a new year with high hopes, and not existential dread, but we have to remember that hopes only come true through action.