The progress we’ve made

I’ve been working really hard on my campaign this Summer and accordingly have had a lot less time for blogging than I hoped. I have several drafts I haven’t had any time to polish but such is life. At the very least I have been doing really good work. For instance, check out what I quickly made before leaving for vacation this morning:

The voter registration dataset I was working with had a row for each month in each county which meant if I used vlookup() I would have to gone through for each section by hand to select which column it should pull from. Instead I figured out how to use index(match(), match()) which allows me to find a value by both column name and row name which is super cool! I have been noticing a lot of personal growth in technical skills like this which I am very proud of.

Despite working so hard, I have had plenty of time for one leisure activity: reading. Driving along the long Iowan roads has given me plenty of time to enjoy various audiobooks. I’ve been shredding through impactful sociology and politics books from Bowling Alone to The Reactionary Mind. Overall, this has been a lot of fun. However, I have formed several critiques of trends I’ve seen in these books that I wanted to share as they seem representative of discourse on the whole.

Namely, a lot of authors and people in general argue the right has systematically won on every issue it has pursued since the 1970s. A form of this argument, taken to various extents, is laid out in some manner in The Reactionary Mind, White Fragility, and Goliath among other books. They point variably to issues such as the growing economic inequality in America, the monopolization of the American economy, the Republican entrenchment of minority rule, and the continued power of what some have called Jim Crow 2.0 (More modern versions of this argument also include the fall of Roe).

These are all serious and important issues which demand attention. However, they do not support the conclusion: there are plenty of life changing issues where the right has lost. In the last 20 years alone the left triumphed in many extremely meaningful ways. In 2002 most people would have thought it preposterous that 20 years later gay marriage would not only be legal in every state in the United States but also supported by 71% of Americans. In 2006, 40% of Americans thought America wasn’t ready for a Black or Female president (I suppose in some ways they were right but still).

Our victories haven’t just been in social issues either. The Affordable Care Act remains the single most important healthcare bill since at least LBJ’s great society. Even during Biden’s term, we have passed major bills! In the last few months we have passed major bills on gun control, national semiconductor production, climate change, infrastructure, and more.

I understand the urge to minimize our successes and focus on where we need work. However, this does a disservice to those who fought for all the things that have been achieved thus far. Of course, there is more to do. There will always be more to do. Given that, we also should look back and reflect on the extraordinary progress we have made, which has truly been life changing for countless Americans.