WORTH THE FIGHT:

  

Democracy didn't die. Of course it didn't. The existential angst of the past few weeks seems quaint in retrospect. Was the panic real or was it more a matter of romanticism run amok -- of wanting to feel like a revolutionary in a country where revolutions don't happen?

To be sure, election anxiety is a real thing, and it can be difficult to avoid entirely. In a bygone era, I struggled with this. On the night of Trump's surprise victory on November 8, 2016, what started as gallows humour transformed into sheer panic. My brother called me at midnight. "I'm not so much worried about us. I'm worried about mom and dad," he told me. I started to tear up -- the first (and last) time I ever cried about politics. Since my mother wears the headscarf, she is visibly and obviously Muslim in a way that I am not. And Donald Trump had spent the previous 12 months demonising Muslims, a relic of a time when Islam and Muslims had become something of a national preoccupation. In addition to his vaunted "Muslim ban", Trump had expressed support for registering Muslims in a database and refused to disavow the internment of Japanese Americans.

I feel a bit sheepish for crying, not because men shouldn't cry -- they probably should, at least occasionally -- but because no one should cry about an election. In a democracy, elections can be cause for disappointment and even anger, but they shouldn't be an occasion for despair. As I discuss in The Problem of Democracy, to contest a democratic election is to know that there are no final victories, merely provisional ones. The worst thing about elections is losing, but the best thing about losing is that you live to fight another day -- through the ballot box in the next election. It does require patience, however. It also requires that the losers come to terms with losing and think about how they might win. There is always hope, in other words. This doesn't mean that things will get better, but it does mean that citizens, activists, and political parties have avenues of redress available to them.

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