I've been thinking a lot about this quote:

“In moments of extraordinary politics, in moments of transition between eras, the struggle is not to save the old regime, and political hardball is not a permanent status. The struggle is to achieve a new equilibrium.”

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It's from @GaneshSitaraman’s “The Great Democracy," and I think it's right: We're in a period in which the kind of political system we will have is being decided.

The hardball will ease when one side or the other wins, and the rules become stable again, at least for awhile.

Republicans understand we're in that period, and are becoming more and more explicit about what that means, and what they want. They fear democracy, the rising power of a more diverse, more secular, more liberal generation. https://twitter.com/senmikelee/status/1314089207875371008

Democrats are, slowly, coming to realize the reverse: They want America to be a democracy, and that's going to mean fighting to make it a democracy.

Their agenda is dead, their values betrayed, if the public cannot turn their votes into power. They need to change the system.

Obama, in particular, has become very explicit on this. In his recent @PodSaveAmerica interview he says:

"There comes a point at which you just have to change how the system works. The filibuster would be one. I would argue that around voting...

us going ahead and just making it easier for people to vote, making it harder to suppress the vote, is not partisan. It is an expression of our democracy. It will be portrayed as partisan, but that’s an argument I think we have to welcome."

Melissa Schwartzberg, a democracy theorist at NYU, told me something that clicked this together for me. I asked her what the conditions were in which democracies survive, and thrive. She replied:

“The really important question is when do electoral losers think that it’s in their interest to go along with their defeat, and when do they think they’re better off resisting and revolting?"

"It has to be that they think they have some better chance of obtaining power in the long run by continuing to abide by the rules of the game.”

A lot of key players on both sides don't feel that way right now, and here's the thing: *they may be right*. If we are at a moment of transition, where the winners will rewrite the rules of the game, then losing becomes very, very consequential.

Which leads to this piece, which I won't try to summarize in total here: The stakes of this election are so high because the system itself is at stake.

Both sides intend to use power to change the political system itself, and the GOP is already doing so. https://www.vox.com/21524807/donald-trump-joe-biden-2020-election-voting-suppression-democracy