The Power We Give Away
We are not powerless. We have simply been taught to believe that we are.
There is a dangerous idea taking hold in American politics: that ordinary people are powerless.
We hear it in different forms. We hear that government is too entrenched to change, that wealthy interests control everything, that political parties are too powerful to challenge, and that there is nothing we can realistically do except choose between two imperfect options every few years.
We don’t believe that. And neither should you.
In fact, convincing people that they are powerless may be one of the most effective ways of keeping them powerless.
The problem becomes especially obvious when we look at the consequences of political decisions. Politics is not some abstract game happening in Washington. It determines whether we can afford groceries, whether our families can access health care, whether we can keep our jobs, whether our neighbors feel safe, and whether our communities are prepared for the consequences of a changing world.
That is why the argument that we should simply keep politics out of our personal relationships can be so frustrating. For some people, political decisions are distant inconveniences. For others, they are existential.
There is a privilege in being able to remain above the political fray.
If a policy means our grocery bill increases by $40 or $50, that may be annoying if we are financially comfortable. If that same increase means someone else cannot afford food, medicine, or rent, it is something very different. If immigration enforcement means someone needs to carry proof of citizenship because of how they look or what language they speak, politics is no longer an intellectual exercise.
It is our life.
That is also why we have a hard time accepting the idea that people who supported harmful policies should simply be welcomed back the moment those policies begin hurting them personally.
We are glad when people change their minds. We want people to change their minds. But changing our minds requires more than becoming unhappy with the consequences.
It requires acknowledgment.
There is a useful analogy in Alcoholics Anonymous. Before someone can begin changing, they have to acknowledge that there is a problem. They have to recognize what they have done, understand why it was wrong, and make amends.
That doesn’t mean crawling on our knees or publicly humiliating ourselves. It means saying: We did this. We understand that it was wrong. We understand how it hurt people. We will do what we can to make it right, and we will not do it again.
That distinction matters.
If someone supported policies that harmed other people and now wants to work toward fixing those policies, we want them at the table. But we don’t think we should pretend nothing happened simply because they have finally become personally affected.
We should not want revenge. We should want accountability and change.
And that standard cannot belong exclusively to one political party.
Democrats can do terrible things. Republicans can do terrible things. Politicians on either side can become corrupted by money, power, ideology, or simple self-interest. If Democrats begin adopting the same behavior they once condemned, we should call that out too.
The goal cannot be to replace one political machine with another.
The goal has to be to build a system that works for ordinary people.
That brings us to the larger problem: concentrated power.
The Enlightenment challenged the idea that a small group of wealthy, powerful people should control everyone else simply because they were born into the right families or accumulated the right titles. The American experiment was built, at least in part, around the proposition that political authority ultimately comes from the people.
Yet somewhere along the way, we began acting as though the people at the top possess all the power.
They don’t.
There are more of us at the bottom.
We build the economy. We elect governments. We determine which businesses survive. We organize, protest, vote, communicate, and ultimately decide who receives political authority.
The fact that concentrated interests currently wield enormous power does not mean ordinary people lack power.
It means we have surrendered some of ours.
And that surrender begins in the mind.
When we convince ourselves that nothing can change, we stop trying to change it. When we believe that politics belongs to someone else, we allow someone else to make our decisions. When we accept that money and influence are simply the way the system works, we stop demanding a better system.
That is precisely why division is so useful to concentrated power.
We fight over culture-war issues while wealthy interests continue accumulating influence. We fight over identity, religion, sexuality, race, and political labels while many of the people benefiting from the conflict remain largely untouched by it.
We need to stop confusing political noise with political power.
The real question is not whether ordinary Americans have power.
We do.
The question is whether we are willing to organize it.
That means building networks, coordinating across political and cultural differences, voting strategically, demanding accountability, and refusing to let ourselves be convinced that we are incapable of changing the institutions that govern us.
If billions of dollars are spent trying to influence elections, that should tell us something important: our votes matter.
If powerful people are spending enormous amounts of money trying to shape what we believe, that should tell us something else: our attention matters.
And if those in power are afraid of losing the support of ordinary people, then we should understand the most important fact of all:
We were never powerless.
We are simply taught to believe that we are.
The work now is to remember otherwise—and to act like it.
ChatGPT was used to transform our transcript-ed conversation into a blog-post format.
