Is Democracy in Retrograde?

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There are few reasons to feel hopeful about the current state of American politics, as any regular reader of The Handbasket can tell you. (Sorry about that.) But even in the most dire of situations, it’s essential to leave room for hope—and that’s where the new book Democracy in Retrograde comes in.

Sami Sage, co-founder of Betches Media, and Emily Amick, former counsel to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came together to write a book that’s both eminently practical while being decidedly hopeful. It’s in many ways a self-help guide to realizing your own outlook on democracy and then determining the best way to engage civically that’s sustainable and meaningful. “Our thesis is that civic engagement can ultimately be a form of self-care,” Sage says.

I chatted with my friend and fellow Long Island native Sami Sage on Wednesday about writing the book (which is available now), maintaining hope in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and recognizing how this year might be our last chance at saving democracy as we know it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

(PS- I’ll be giving away free copies of Democracy in Retrograde to the first three Handbasket readers who upgrade to a premium subscription! You’ll receive an email from me in the next few days letting you know if you’ve won.)

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: Where did the idea for this book come from?

SAMI SAGE, CO-AUTHOR OF DEMOCRACY IN RETROGRADE: So, Emily [Amick] and I actually met right after January 6th. We slid into each other's DM’s because we liked each other's coup content. And over the following years became friends and bonded a lot over the way we see the political system and what we see as potential solutions. And ultimately we wanted to create a guide for people to help them understand what's going on in our political system and then find an actual tailored, personalized, practical way that they can get involved in their communities and in our democracy—and find something that reflects their values, interests, passions, skills and time.

We've both been creating political news content on the internet for several years and we would constantly get questions, like “What should I do? I feel so hopeless. Why does it feel like nothing I do matters?” We could only respond in two sentences to a DM, when we really wanted to say all of the things that ultimately ended up in this book. We could have taken an approach like how to organize politically or run a campaign or run for office or make it hyper-political. But what we wanted to do was create something that was a bit more leaning on the social side of this. Our thesis is that civic engagement—however, that looks for you—can ultimately be a form of self care, as well as a major help to the loneliness epidemic that we're experiencing as a collective.

KABAS: So would you say in some ways it’s a self-help guide?

SAGE: Absolutely. I mean, part of the idea came from the fact that there are endless self-help guides about how you can be a better parent or better your career or be a better friend or a better spouse. But there isn't really any concept that we have for the relationship that we each have to the collective as citizens. What is our relationship and what do we owe to the people we don't know and may never meet but who co-exist in a society with us, whether it's in our towns, in our state, in the entire country? And we wanted to really articulate that that relationship is a real thing that is important. And that when we all engage in it, we end up with a more representative multicultural democracy that actually reflects the interests and values of us as a collective.

KABAS: It sounds like you’re saying that we each start the change within and then project it outward.

SAGE: Yeah, that is exactly what this is about. So, it’s a self-help guide, but it's also eminently practical. Our goal was to help people find their own unique path into community and civic engagement. We always recommend that people turn immediately to page 91 and take the civic personality quiz. Find out which type of civic personality you are. We have four of them: leader; connector; giver; creator. And within each section describing those personalities, we make a ton of suggestions for how people can get involved if they have a few extra hours a month, if they have a few extra hours a week, or if they wanna make a lifetime commitment to a particular issue. It’s premised on the fact that we know people are busy, taking care of their kids, of their parents. They're trying to practically live their lives and not everyone can or wants to engage in the news cycle the way people like you and I do. 

KABAS: I thought the quizzes were interesting because they made me stop and think “how do I see the world before I get to helping?” Also with certain ones I felt like I was in between categories.

SAGE: None of these quizzes are medical diagnoses. They could all be subject to a second opinion. People are obviously nuanced and unique. It's meant as an overall framework to kind of pivot the way people think about their relationship to the collective and to politics. Because part of this—and part of what we say—is that everything is political, whether you like it, whether you believe it and whether you participate or not. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the fact that you can safely live on the fifth floor of a building—all of these things are due to policy and political decisions. And something that we want people to walk away with is that it can be a good thing when we're more highly engaged and when the system is hopefully more fair and representative of our actual collective interest.

KABAS: What would you say are the politics of this book?

SAGE: So technically I would say this book is nonpartisan and that we don't advocate for a particular candidate or a particular political party. But the overall goal that we set forth is that we wanna create a multicultural democracy that is more representative of the American people. We want people to be physically safe, financially secure and socially free. And that is what we're really advocating for. And we're not just advocating for that because those are our values; we are advocating for that because actually, more Americans agree with those values than don't agree with them by a lot. So, while our elections are really close and our congress is really split, that's actually not reflective of the American people and their actual feelings and desires for what they want in this country. 

I've heard from people that they just want to be able to take a break from thinking about what the President's doing or worrying about what Congress is doing for just a few days. And I think ultimately when more people are collectively engaged and turning out to vote—like, if we had 95% voter turnout, I think we would not have to watch our representatives so closely all the time because we would all be involved.

KABAS: It reminds me of when I was doing choir growing up, and when we were singing a piece and there was a really long sustained note, the choir director knew that not everyone could hold the note the entire time. So he said take intermittent breaks when you need to and the rest of the choir will still keep the sound going.

SAGE: That's exactly the analogy.

KABAS: So I think you're talking about building a political infrastructure where we're all singing as much as we can. But if we need to take a break, we know that everyone will keep the melody going until we're ready to jump back in.

SAGE: That’s exactly what we're positing in this book.

KABAS: In the book you say “hopelessness is a civic engagement killer.” And to be perfectly honest, things feel pretty hopeless right now. I would love it if you could explain how this book can help get people out of that hopelessness spiral.

SAGE: The first thing is that there were billions of dollars spent to create this feeling that we're all feeling. So, the idea that it's our fault or you're somehow failing is a farce. And it's a farce that was intentionally created to disengage us and to make us feel like nothing matters. You know, we're both from New York. So I'm sure we both heard people say a million times—and I too have said this—”I'm from New York. My vote doesn't really matter.” And that's actually not true. Just look at the 2022 midterms: the house was lost in New York. But we’ve been led to believe doing our civic duty of voting is not that valuable or not that important.

In the book we talk about how hope is the antidote to despair. But it's also a practice, and it's not this fuzzy emotion, like a happy ending is coming on the last page. There is no end. Democracy is a project that we have to work on all the time and that we are lucky we get to work on, especially from the perspective of where we are now. This might be one of the last phases that we have the chance to work on it in this way, at the voting booth, where it will count. And we're allowed to say what we want and we have a free press and independent journalism.

KABAS: What was it like hearing about the US Supreme Court’s decision to grant the president partial immunity from prosecution and knowing that you have this book coming out that is supposed to be about hope?

SAGE: Well, it was timely! Emily [Amick] likes to say that the Supreme Court is a political problem and it has a political solution, and we have to all be part of driving that solution and driving our representatives to see what they need to do. Think about the student loan debate. Five years ago it was just totally out of the question that student loans would be canceled. But people kept pushing on their representatives, and President Biden has done everything he can to try to cancel student debt. Even when the Supreme Court ruled against it, he pursued other avenues and he's continuing to do that. So, yes, the Supreme Court is absolutely in the tank for an autocracy, but we are not there yet and this is our chance to turn it around these next four months.

KABAS: So it's not a dead end. It's a cul-de-sac. 

SAGE: It's either a cul-de-sac or you're driving through someone's yard. 

KABAS: You talk a lot about the importance of conversations as tools of civic engagement—and I'm sure the book has inspired quite a few conversations. Tell me a bit more about that.

SAGE: People having conversations with their friends and trusted confidants is the most effective way of changing people's minds and of increasing voter turnout. And that's why interpersonal relationships are so important. And if you wanna take it to the other extreme, an autocracy is a society in which interpersonal relationships are monitored and controlled. And in that way, having real connections with people, with your community, with friends, can be something of an act of resistance. There's a reason that authoritarians wanna monitor your contacts and ban books and limit ideas.

KABAS: I realized that I didn't ask a very important question at the top, which is about the wonderful title of the book. Where did “Democracy in Retrograde” come from?

SAGE: So much about the MAGA movement is about aesthetics, and we wanted to create an aesthetic and a tone that drew people in that capitalized on pop culture. Obviously it’s a reference to Mercury in retrograde, but it also speaks to the fact that when things are written in the stars, it sort of takes away your agency. But what we all need in this situation is agency to turn around this retrograde trend. The Supreme Court's immunity decision is another example of sending it further into retrograde. Dobbs, Citizens United, Shelby County, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, all those decisions have degraded democracy and made it less representative. But what we wanna do is reverse that trend and show people that it's not predestined.

I think subconsciously the title might have been inspired by a conversation that we had had when we were first conceiving of the book. We were talking about how on the right it's very easy for them to act in community with each other because of religion. So when you think God doesn’t want anyone to get an abortion, it's very motivating. There's a monoculture. And we were saying how on our side, everyone's much more siloed. And we were talking about what represents modern day spirituality and kind of joking that it’s astrology girlies. 

I'm not a diehard astrology girly, but I do think there's some value in it. But I don't believe in leaning on it entirely. We wanna help people build personal agency rather than feeling like whatever the horoscope on election day is predetermined.

Reminder: I’ll be giving away free copies of Democracy in Retrograde to the first three Handbasket readers who upgrade to a premium subscription! You’ll receive an email from me in the next few days letting you know if you’ve won!