In the inaugural entry of this newsletter, I reflected on the devastating implications of Donald Trump's re-election—a moment that feels like the darkness of the tomb but may also, as my friend Valarie Kaur first suggested, be the darkness of the womb. We delved into the overwhelming grief and exhaustion that comes with witnessing the collapse of democratic institutions, the erosion of our planet, and the orphanhood of a nation untethered from its story and soul.
This newsletter is about stories—the ones we tell, the ones we live, and the ones that shape our world. Through countless post-mortems and conversations with political operatives, authors, and activists, I've identified twelve commonly cited explanations for why Kamala Harris' story was not victorious.
While some focus on her limitations, I want to put my cards on the table: in many respects, Harris ran what might have been the most seamless campaign in modern American history. It was nothing short of a Herculean effort—launching a presidential campaign with virtually no time and doing so with poise and efficiency. With narrative mastery, she anticipated Trump's sexist attacks on her laugh and, with storytelling jiu-jitsu, transformed it into a powerful symbol of resistance, casting herself as a joyful warrior. Brat Summer channeled this joy into grassroots enthusiasm. The campaign successfully painted Trump and his allies as joyless figures who smiled only when inflicting pain.
Yet, following the debate where she eviscerated Trump, that vibrant energy began to dissipate.
While we won’t have a fuller picture of the data for several months, these twelve reasons highlight significant obstacles that led to the diminishing momentum of Harris's narrative. But the thirteenth reason? It cuts to the heart of something much deeper than this election. It's an invisible force that shaped everything that happened. This thirteenth reason will be the central focus of this newsletter moving forward.
With that foundation laid, let's explore these critical contexts…...
Twelve Contexts That Made Kamala Harris's Story Fall Short
1. Pandemic-Amplified Economic Crisis
Globally, "political long COVID" weakened all incumbents across the political spectrum, but in the United States, it collided with something more profound: five decades of economic precarity. While voters could afford surface luxuries like smartphones, fundamental securities—housing, healthcare, education, eldercare—became increasingly out of reach.
This deep insecurity mirrored the Weimar Republic after 1929, creating fertile ground for anger over hope. Trump provided what Harris could not: a vessel for collective rage and a means to lift societal shame by offering scapegoats. Like the disillusioned citizens of Germany a century ago, many Americans craved not only economic remedies but also an emotional release through a charismatic leader who unabashedly made them feel like their sources of pain were due to the left, the media, and outsiders who poison our once great nation with their inferior genes.
2. Systemic Racism and Sexism
Harris faced entrenched biases that constrained her narrative options at every turn. Trump's baseless claims that she slept her way to the top or had only recently decided she was Black weren’t merely the ravings of a lunatic—they were cold, deliberate attempts to weaponize the ugliest aspects of our white supremacist and misogynist culture. Some, myself included, might call it evil. Harris was forced to navigate an impossible tightrope: avoiding the absurd and offensive "angry Black woman" stereotype while proving she was both relatable and presidential. This double bind suffocated her ability to embrace bold, populist storytelling, as any misstep risked alienation.
3. Limited Campaign Narrative
“We're not going back! carried defiant energy but lacked a clear, positive vision for the future. Unlike Obama's Yes We Can, it focused on opposition rather than aspiration. Its vagueness—back to what—four more years of Trump, the 1950s, the 1330s?—left the narrative open to distortion and failed to unite voters around a shared goal. Harris's prosecutorial strengths, effective in debates, further constrained the campaign’s ability to craft an inspirational story. Prosecutors excel at building cases against wrongdoers, but this mindset isn't designed to inspire collective hope or chart a vision of progress.
4. Missed Opportunity for a Populist Narrative
The campaign's decision to adopt "tough" messaging on the border and align with establishment figures like Mark Cuban and the Cheneys prioritized elite partnerships over grassroots connections. While this approach sought to counter right-wing accusations of weakness, it failed to directly address the growing xenophobia among many voters toward immigrants crossing the border—a fear stoked by Trump’s relentless scapegoating. Instead of reframing the immigration debate with stories of shared humanity or celebrating the contributions of immigrant communities, the campaign leaned into optics of wealth and power. This reinforced perceptions of detachment from everyday struggles. Trump, despite being a billionaire, successfully cast himself as the voice of the working class, exploiting fears around immigration while concealing how he and his allies economically harmed the very voters they claimed to champion. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, Harris’s ability to critique these dynamics was further constrained by a racist and sexist culture that limited her narrative options.
5. Time and Succession Constraints
Harris inherited the burden of an unpopular administration while having insufficient time to define herself as a change candidate. Biden's delayed decision to exit the race left Harris with just 107 days—less than 20% of the time most presidential candidates are given. This severely limited her ability to connect with voters and refine her message.
6. Right-Wing Narrative Infrastructure
Decades of coordinated far-right investment in media, digital platforms, and shadowy funding networks gave Trump a powerful narrative machine. This ecosystem created collective amnesia about Trump's failings while providing emotional permission structures for his supporters. Harris, entering this hostile environment, lacked the robust infrastructure needed to counter it effectively.
7. New Media Culture Wars
Trump didn't just use digital spaces—he transformed them into meaning-making environments. While Harris's team treated podcasts, influencer networks, and online communities as mere communication tools, Trump understood them as platforms to build a shared mythology. From meme wars to viral rally moments, Trump fostered identity and belonging through digital rituals. His grasp that culture eats strategy for breakfast allowed him to, once again, dominate the cultural narrative and, in the process, eat all of us for breakfast.
8. Male Voter Engagement Gap
The campaign's failure to engage young male voters reflected a broader crisis in progressive gender narratives. While Trump offered a regressive but clear vision of masculinity, Harris avoided addressing men's issues directly, ceding crucial ground. This wasn't just about losing votes—it was a missed opportunity to redefine masculinity within a progressive framework.
9. Democratic Institutional Weakness
The Democratic Party's overreliance on data analytics came at the expense of grassroots storytelling and genuine voter connection. While progressive energy successfully pushed for more ambitious economic policies, strategic choices prioritized maintaining base unity over expanding reach. Many working-class voters—including those of color—saw Democrats as condescending nonprofit-led elites. This disconnect — especially around economic anxiety - eroded trust and enthusiasm among key voter blocs.
10. The Gaza Crisis Fracture
The October 7 Hamas attack and its aftermath exposed deep contradictions in liberal-left narratives about democracy and human rights. While past wedge issues could be carefully navigated, this crisis starkly revealed tensions between progressive solidarity with Palestinians and the Democratic Party's support for Israel. But even more so, how could Democrats credibly champion a narrative of democracy and human rights while backing Netanyahu’s corrupt, anti-democratic government and its role in enabling settler violence and killing over 40,000 civilians?
11. The Misleading Victory of 2022
The Democrats' success in staving off a red wave in the 2022 midterms created a false narrative of security. Misreading the political landscape prevented the party from addressing deeper systemic challenges, leaving them unprepared for far more “low-information” voters to show up in a presidential election cycle.
12. The Persistent Power of Trump's Myth
Trump’s carefully crafted persona as a successful businessman and defiant leader continues to resonate with many Americans. Rooted in The Art of the Deal and The Apprentice, his image embodies the aspirational American dream. Selective memories of his presidency’s economic performance—and even assassination attempts against him—cast him as resilient and virile.
While Trump’s 30+ convictions likely bolstered Harris’ chances, the broader atmosphere of his indictments seems to have allowed him to reframe himself as a “gangster,” tapping into America’s fascination with the mafia. Meanwhile, Democrats failed to hold him fully accountable for his catastrophic COVID-19 mismanagement, which caused over 100,000 excess deaths, or his broader agenda to Make America Sick Again—undermining healthcare, clean air protections, and public well-being while under his watch, fostering anxiety and skyrocketing drug addiction.
Compounding the challenge is the enormity of Trump’s crimes and pathology. The scope of his wickedness is so vast that addressing it risks being drawn into a rhetorical black hole. Yet failing to confront it allows that black hole to expand, shielding Trump from accountability and enabling his mythology to endure.
Towards the Thirteenth Reason
The above twelve reasons offer a map of the obstacles Kamala Harris faced in her campaign—structural barriers, entrenched biases, and narrative challenges. Taken together, they reveal a pattern where, given the global environment, there may have been little that could have been done differently. Beyond that, the Democratic Party and its nominees need to start valuing a robust narrative that reaches for the sky—think FDR's Four Freedoms—grounded in authentic relationships and deep listening. They must build long-term communications infrastructure that connects with great empathy to the suffering of the American people while pointing us toward a promise of a beautiful tomorrow.
Now, if this were a typical newsletter and I were a somewhat normal person, that might be the end of this week's entry. But that's not the case. What we’re exploring here goes far beyond winning election cycles—short-term or long-term. There’s a much, much bigger game afoot. Post-liberals like J.D. Vance are keenly aware of this; they recognize that many of the problems they seek to address originate as far back as the dawn of modernism, if not much earlier. While I don’t agree with their conclusions, I do acknowledge their insight in tracing the roots back this far.
If culture truly eats strategy for breakfast, then it’s time to zoom out and examine how these short-term electoral dynamics intersect with a deeper, accelerating divide—what I call the Great Chasm between our material technologies and our cultural technologies.
And that (finally) brings us to the thirteenth point.
The Thirteenth Reason: The Fatal Gap Between Our Technologies
The previous twelve reasons describe surface turbulence, but here's the undertow: since the Industrial Revolution, we've experienced an ever-widening chasm between our two essential technologies. Our material technology—our ability to reshape the physical world—has accelerated exponentially. But our cultural technology—our myths, rituals, symbols, and communities that make meaning of existence—hasn't kept pace.
This isn’t just a gap; it’s a crisis of meaning-making itself. As the late Neil Postman and other prophets of our age have observed, change itself has changed. The velocity of material transformation has become so rapid that our ancient meaning-making tools can't process it fast enough. Our smartphones advance every year, but our stories—the deep narratives that help us understand who we are and why we're here—struggle to evolve beyond frameworks from the agricultural and industrial ages.
We’re living through a paradox no previous generation has faced: we are simultaneously gods and orphans. Through our devices, we wield powers that past generations would have attributed to deities—the ability to be present in multiple places at once, to upload cartoonish avatars of ourselves doing ridiculous dances that can be seen and heard by strangers across the planet in moments, and to access nearly all human knowledge instantly.
Yet this godlike power exists alongside profound helplessness. We can reach millions with a social media post but can’t afford housing. We can create viral content but can’t access healthcare or a plan to support our aging parents. In the digital sphere, we are omnipresent; in the physical world, we are barely staying afloat. This disconnect leaves us reeling, retreating further into our dopamine-laced phones to numb feelings of alienation, loneliness, and confusion. These devices pull us deeper into filter bubbles, feeding platforms that profit from spreading disinformation and tearing apart our civic fabric.
And yet, how can we put these damn things down? Not only would that mean being present with our own boredom in physical space, but it also would mean being more intimate with a reality that was barely expressed during the 2024 presidential election - the entire planet is on fire. And that simple fact is messing with everything about how we see ourselves.
Whether we consciously accept climate change or deny it, we carry the unconscious weight of knowing we've triggered an extinction event worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs. Add to this the vertigo of new wars edging us closer to a nuclear abyss, the shock of surviving a biblically-sized pestilence while burying unprocessed collective grief, and the disorientation of a social Internet that amplifies chaos, now colliding with an AI revolution poised to upend every aspect of our lives—from work to relationships.
Change is changing. We are changing. And it’s scary.
Therefore, the central problem isn't simply that progressives lack a coherent theory of change. That’s true. But the real issue is that we lack a coherent theory of reality. Our weakened theories of change run downstream of our collapsed understanding of ourselves and our world.
While the Right’s worldview might be destructive, it provides a framework for existence, however twisted. It resonates because destruction is simple; building requires far more complexity. For those of us seeking to create rather than destroy, the challenge is far greater: to develop cultural technologies that reconcile humanity’s godlike powers with its animal vulnerabilities.
Destroyers can tell stories that tear down with ease, finding pressure points and igniting chaos. But to create and build, we must truly understand the human condition we seek to elevate. And in this moment of upheaval, that understanding feels almost impossible.
Trump's appeal lies partly in his promise to resolve this gap by forcefully dragging our material reality backward to align with older, familiar cultural frameworks. This dangerous impossibility resonates because it soothes anxieties that are as deep and primal as our need for belonging and certainty.
This is the thirteenth reason—and it provides the meta-context for everything else. Ultimately, we all feel like orphans, untethered from a sense of certainty about who we are and where we are going. As a Harris voter, I feel orphaned by those who supported a figure promising to fill their own void of orphanhood, even as his solutions only deepen the divide. We are all searching for direction, for belonging, and for hope. And it’s hard.
The Apocalyptic Moment
The thirteen reasons above might seem like a descent into darkness. And in many ways, they are. Now, we face the four horsemen of our era: climate collapse, pestilence, nuclear war, and AI revolution. These crises loom over us like omens, each threatening to destabilize the fragile balance of our world. Add to this the rising tide of demagogues, including a U.S. president who seems to embody the darkest instincts of humanity in ways described as "the mark of the Beast," and it’s easy to feel as though we are living in a modern-day Book of Revelation.
And yet, this is what brings me a glimmer of hope. When we strip away the fear and look deeper, we begin to see that moments of great upheaval often signal the possibility of transformation. The word apocalypse often conjures images of fiery destruction and final judgment, but its original meaning is more profound—and perhaps more hopeful. Derived from the Greek apokálypsis, it means to uncover or to reveal. An apocalypse is not just an end; it is an unveiling, a moment when the veils are lifted and hidden truths are laid bare.
Right now, it feels as though the world is cracking open. At first glance, all we see are fractures and chaos. But look deeper: What is this moment asking of us?
What is being revealed?
Hermann Hesse captured this dynamic in his 1919 novel Demian: “The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish—and it will.” For Hesse, this was not a lament but an acknowledgment of transformation. The old world must perish to make way for the new. Just as a bird must destroy its shell to be born, we are standing at the edge of a shattering world—because something new is being born.
This brings us to the metaphor of birth: to honor the pain and mess of this moment as labor pains, to see the destruction not as an end but as the necessary contractions of a new beginning. And speaking of the beginning, in his recent podcast processing the 2024 election, mythologist Michael Meade says, "In many ancient cultures, the idea was when this world becomes deeply troubled, it's time to turn back to the beginnings of this world, it's time to go back to creation stories in order to tap the original sources of life….and when we find ourselves in the dark times, it becomes more important to follow the urging of our souls and the call of spirit, because the beginning keeps trying to begin again, especially when it seems that we are at the end of everything.”
This isn't abstract theory—it's a survival strategy. When humanity has faced existential transitions before, new cultural technology emerged to help us adapt. The agricultural revolution gave us organized religion. The Industrial Revolution spawned modern nationalism.
What will this moment bring? I’m not sure, but I know where to look….stories.
I often say that fantasy is not an escape from our world but an invitation to go deeper into it. Similarly, Meade says, “when we put our personal story and even our collective story into the context of a meaningful mythological story, we can better understand the forces that are affecting our lives and also see more clearly the paths of truth and beauty and meaning and healing.”
And so, we shall continue by looking at both the ancient and the modern myths that are all about orphans facing empires. From Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz to The Avengers, we are drawn to these tales.
These stories speak to our current condition: we are all orphans now—untethered from old meanings, confronting systems of power that seem too vast to comprehend. We need new myths that help us wield our godlike powers wisely, new rituals that bridge physical and digital spaces, and stories that turn alienation into connection and despair into hope.
We are living amidst a species-wide identity crisis—a moment of profound disorientation when we stand simultaneously on the brink of godhood and extinction. This paradox mirrors the labor of birth, a space of immense power and peril.
On that process of birthing, Valarie Kaur so beautifully reflects:
"If we take a linear view of history, then we are sliding backward. But if we see the story of America as one long labor, then we have a different view. Progress during birthing labor is cyclical, not linear. It is a series of expansions and contractions, and each turn through the cycle brings us closer to what is being born."
In this light, we are all that birthing mother—standing in the liminal space between creation and destruction. We face a choice: to cower in fear, retreating into contraction, or to lean into the wild, untamed energy of creation and choose expansion.
The MAGA movement, with its fear-driven attempts to control, embodies contraction. Their desperate grasp of power, including the subjugation of women's bodies, reveals not just a desire to dominate but a deep terror of this moment's transformative potential. They come to this wellspring of creation, leaning not into a sense of reverence but instead, such deep fear, hoping to control its mystery rather than step into its promise.
But we can walk a different path. We can choose courage over fear and learn to ride the undulations between expansion and contraction. As Valarie teaches, we must heed the lessons of the midwife: to breathe, to push, and to trust that something extraordinary lies on the other side of this labor.
A Pregnant Moment
This moment is pregnant with possibility. It aches to give life to a new world—a world that does not yet exist but yearns to be born. Our task is not just to witness this birth but to participate in it, to become instruments through which this energy flows. And when that fragile, raw, and beautiful new world emerges, our work will not be done. We must be there, ready to cradle it with love, care, and lullabies.
Let us choose to become midwives to this moment. Let us honor the darkness not as a tomb but as a womb—a space of transformation, of becoming. May we rise to this calling with clear eyes and open hearts, ready to write new stories equal to our challenges and to shepherd into being a world worthy of the courage it takes to bring it forth.
The Real Question
Ultimately, the real question isn't whether Kamala Harris could have told a better story. The real question is whether we—all of us—can tell the story our species so desperately needs to hear and live it into being.
Leveraging the power of story to explore and answer that question is the mission of this newsletter.
Thank you for being part of this journey. Together, we can navigate the complexities of our time and co-create the narratives that will guide us forward.
A good read. I was glad you mentioned Valarie Kaur later on in your article, and wish you had credited her for the potent language — and the invitation to tell a new story — in your opening words, when you mentioned the ”darkness of the tomb” and the “darkness of the womb.” I was reminded of how incredibly powerful it was for her to pose that question, in a now-famous speech: “What if this (what we’re facing/living into) is NOT the darkness of the tomb… but the darkness of the womb?” For, as you so eloquently put it in this article, we are truly birthing a new time, a new Way, a new story. And birthing DOES come from the womb. So it’s no surprise that a woman (Valarie) put forward that analogy for this time. I honor her here, in that remembrance.