John, I want to tell you about one of the biggest hurdles we have to overcome in politics:
“Why should I care?”
I talk a lot about the need for the rules to be fair—because when people see that the rules they’re playing by aren’t fair, when they see that working hard and doing what they’re supposed to isn’t enough to bring them the success and opportunity they need to thrive, they stop playing. They flip the table and walk away, and that puts our economy and our democracy in a very dangerous place.
Because that’s the thing, right? As Democrats, the most central part of our message is that we need to uplift the people who’ve been left behind. We need to actually live up to the American dream and ensure that at the end of the day, hard work really is rewarded with success. But the system isn’t yet so broken that no one is succeeding in it—and sometimes it can be hard for people to see the cracks when they’ve personally benefited.
But the truth is, we’re all in this together. For our economy to continue functioning, more or less everyone has to buy in. Our capitalist system works off of participation—and if the system is only working for some people and not others, people are going to see that the game is rigged. They’ll walk away. And that threatens the system with collapse.
Because after a certain point, when people lose hope, they decide that walking away from the table isn’t enough. If they want to change things, they decide that the only alternative left is to break the table: consequences be damned.. And if that happens, then it won’t matter if you and your family have managed to carve out success under our current system. The system won’t be there anymore.
I mean, just ask the 18th century French aristocracy what their prosperity was really worth in the end, when the lower classes got sick and tired of their lack of economic mobility.
The English philosopher John Donne famously wrote that “no man is an island”. Our lives are all interconnected, bound together by the rules we’ve established for our society. And we all
have an interest in ensuring that the rules are fair enough for people to buy into them.
And that’s why this election is so urgent: because it’s not too late to save the system. It’s not too late to make a level playing field where peoples’ hard work is rewarded with opportunity. Where they feel like they can have hope. To really make change, we’re going to need a movement that’s much larger than just this campaign: but it has to start somewhere. Let’s start it here.
We’ve got just under two weeks until our primary is over, and then we need to be ready to hit the ground running against our Republican opponent in the general election. If we flip the Treasurer’s office, there’s a lot of good we’ll be able to do—creating great returns for taxpayers, protecting our state employees and teachers, investing in our communities—but it’ll also send a message that it’s not too late to reinforce the foundations of our system and make sure it works for all of us. It can be the start of something much, much bigger than just one race.
John, help me send that message. Make a contribution today. Anything you can give will help us get there.
