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JVL is normally a pessimistic sort of guy. I read him every day, but usually with a grain of salt.

So I was gobsmacked by what he wrote today- not only because it was uncharacteristically optimistic for JVL, but also because it hit some of the same themes that have been rolling around in my heart and brain for the past few weeks.

The subject is Cory Booker’s speech, and the reaction it might spark in the rest of us.

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Let’s start by setting some baselines, before I get carried away.

Cory Booker is not Seneca. He’s not FDR. He’s not a great statesman or a figure of historic consequence. He’s just a guy.

Don’t get me wrong: Booker is, by every account, a good guy. He’s liked by pretty much everyone he’s ever come across. And while he’s a politician, with all of the innate ambition that includes, he’s still the kind of guy you’d enjoy having a beer with, no matter what corner of life you hail from.

Also: Cory Booker’s filibuster didn’t “accomplish” anything. He didn’t stop a piece of legislation from being passed or forge a new political coalition. He didn’t launch a political movement or bring down Donald Trump. The world spins on today precisely as it did before he stood up to talk.

But by God, Cory Booker’s filibuster mattered. Or at least it mattered to me.

Let me explain.

It is painfully easy to get attention these days. Just do a Nazi salute, put it online, and watch what happens. Post selfies while wearing a Camp Auschwitz hoodie. Go into public and claim that immigrants in your community are eating your pets.

You’ll get loads of attention.

The catch is that in order to get attention, you have to be terrible. You have to lie or embrace evil. Civic blasphemy is how I think of it. In the attention economy there is enormous demand for civic blasphemy.

What’s hard is getting attention for messages about truth, or virtue, or love. Not a lot of demand for that stuff.

The problem is: That’s what we need. We need to rally against the nihilism and cruelty of this authoritarian moment. But how do you get attention for that message in a world that is already being ground down?

That’s what Cory Booker’s filibuster was about. He realized that in order to get people to pay attention, he had to do something extraordinary. There are only a hundred people on the planet who are allowed to filibuster. He is one of them. So he used the platform he had.

Booker’s filibuster was categorically different from the other entries in the genre because it was a coherent whole. His message wasn’t the length of his speech. The 25 hours and 5 minutes he spoke was just the hook—the message was his actual message.

Booker and his staff planned out the entire performance. He had a detailed map for the speech. He was not reading the phonebook or Dr. Seuss to pass the time. He treated the speech as though the words themselves mattered. He had a message. A throughline.

The throughline was that we are in an extraordinary moment, that the center is not holding, and that only people can save us.

If you didn’t see it, I’d direct you to a section at the end when Booker went on an extended riff about his relationship with John Lewis. It starts around the 24:03:20 mark and it’s utterly charming. But also, he builds to a devastating point: That the civil rights generation is fading into history;¹ that this moment is the calling to a new generation; that while this moment is extraordinary, evil can be defeated, because when the people come together, they are powerful; that the only answer to a regime which employs armed mobs and uses secret police to disappear people off the streets is love.

Love.

I am sorry, but that’s a pretty forking radical idea.² Certainly a lot more radical than doing a Nazi salute.

Different people will see different things, but to me Booker’s performance reads clearly as an act of Christian witness.

He did it during Lent. He fasted for days ahead of time, preparing his body for what was, in essence, an act of spiritual struggle. He spoke against authoritarianism, but not the authoritarians. He spoke of his own failings and the failings of his party. He fixated on forgiveness. He loved his neighbors while gently, but purposefully, insisting on truth.³

This touched me in a very deep place. I have become used to seeing Christianity co-opted and perverted in America to the point where it has been largely subsumed by the political project of nationalism.

The experience has been painful. Booker’s testimony was a balm.

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2. We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For

To those saying Booker’s filibuster didn’t achieve anything, I agree. It was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. It was a call.

And calls can mean something, even if they don’t “achieve” results.

It meant something to know that Booker has seen the same things we’re seeing and that these things made an impression on him, too.

It meant something to know that Booker understands the moment.

It meant something to know that there are more of us than we believed.

It meant something to know that others are willing to stand up, too.

Here’s one passage from Booker that hit me hard:⁴

I don’t know what John Lewis would say right now. I know what he said in 2017, but I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what he would say right now.

But John Lewis would say something.

He would do something.

He wouldn’t treat this moral moment like it was normal. John Lewis knew what King said. That what we have to repent for—all of us here will have to repent for—is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of so-called “bad people.” What we will have to repent for in our day and age is the appalling silence and the inaction of good people.

This is our moral moment. . . .

Are we going to do something different like John Lewis would call us to do? He would call us to get into good trouble, necessary trouble.

Yes. Yes.

Not going to lie: Sometimes I listen to Sarah’s focus groups and I feel real despair. I do not understand how a person could live in the world and not see what is happening. Or if they see it, not be repelled by it.

Abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.

Stopping the efforts to track down stolen Ukrainian children.

Sending secret police to snatch people off the street.

Disappearing innocent men to foreign gulags.

The Bulwark community is real and it is growing and it is wonderful. But sometimes I listen to those Real Americans and I think, “We aren’t big enough. We’ll never reach these people.”

But building a solidarity movement doesn’t happen overnight. You add voices, one at a time.

Cory Booker added his voice. I am so grateful.

That’s how this movement will grow. Liz Cheney stands up. Kamala Harris stands up. Phyllis Fong stands up. AOC stands up. Cory Booker stands up.

We stand up.

One at time, together, no matter how dark it is. Because “the power of the people is greater than the people in power.”

Yesterday I was full of rage at what the government did to Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Cory Booker reminded me that rage isn’t going to save us.

The courts won’t save us. The law won’t save us. The Democratic party won’t save us. As much as I love institutions—and I am, at root, an institutionalist—none of our institutions will save us.

The only thing that will save us is us. And we’ll do it with courage and with love.

So yeah, Booker’s speech mattered a lot. To me. Maybe it did to you, too

So yeah, Booker’s speech mattered a lot. To me. Maybe it did to you, too

Do you think it mattered to many people? Most people don't follow politics, and to a rough degree of approximation, zero people watch C-Span. So while Booker probably will get some discussion and some clips played during the first news cycle after the speech, it's hard to see anyone outside of political junkies ever being aware this even happened. Maybe it fires them up a bit....but since the speech was apparently notable more for length than content, will that really be the case? Maybe this feat of endurance and commitment affects Booker's standing within the Senate, especially as there might be changes in leadership in the near future (most of the approximately zero people who watch C-Span are Congresscritters and their staff). But will it make a splash in the attention ecosphere?

Maybe it fires them up a bit

In the Gallup universe it won’t matter a bit. In the “Democratic leader circles” it has (in my view) pushed him up about 4 rungs on the ladder. That’s not nothing.

In the Gallup universe it won’t matter a bit. In the “Democratic leader circles” it has (in my view) pushed him up about 4 rungs on the ladder. That’s not nothing.

Well, he already holds the #4 position in leadership, so four rungs isn't possible. But that's just quibbling.

I guess my real question is whether this would mean anything to other Senators. It's a modestly savvy way to push through the clotting mass of the attentionsphere and get a few headlines....but is that anything that would make U.S. Senators more likely than they were before to support Booker over Durbin or Klobuchar? An endurance test like this is impressive, but it's not exactly a demonstration of any particular skills that you would need in a Majority/Minority Leader or Whip.

Don't get me wrong - I think this was definitely a beneficial thing for Booker to do, for the Democrats. Little symbolic victories are all they can really have right now. But I'm having a hard time seeing this as particularly important or consequential, beyond that modest benefit.

You're right. I didn't know it was happening until he was more than halfway through. I didn't watch any of it, only hearing about it in the news (and now here).

I suspect it gained him, personally, in his career. If he runs for POTUS at some point, I'm sure a lot of quotes from that speech will be used. Hopefully he didn't say anything stupid. A lot of quotes from that speech likely will be in the news for a week or so, and may be a balm for many people that hear/read them.

I'm not sure it can be called a 'victory', but it was something that the Dems could do. And, as a very minor plus, he seized the record from racist Strom Thurman.

It is sad that more people won't know about his speaking truth to power. Some sources I've read say it wasn't an actual filibuster, just a speech that halted "business" until it was concluded. Maybe that's a distinction without a difference?

Well, he already holds the #4 position in leadership, so four rungs isn't possible. But that's just quibbling.

I didn’t mean it literally, I meant in in the context of those who pull the strings and have the levers of power in deciding future candidacies, if the monied people who have so much control of the political process, and perhaps peripherally gives lower level party activists across the country who might have been meh about him to sit up and take notice.

It doesn’t guarantee anything, obviously, but as i say “it’s not nothing”.

I didn’t mean it literally, I meant in in the context of those who pull the strings and have the levers of power in deciding future candidacies, if the monied people who have so much control of the political process, and perhaps peripherally gives lower level party activists across the country who might have been meh about him to sit up and take notice.

It doesn’t guarantee anything, obviously, but as i say “it’s not nothing”.

Gotcha. Sure - it's not nuthin', as they say. And you have to do things to keep your name in the conversation, and to move the team forward, as much as you can. This will remind the youngest and lower level activists in the party, who might not recall his 2020 Presidential campaign (which lasted longer than Harris'!), who he is and that he's actually a fairly prominent Senator within leadership. Certainly this was a better look than Al Green's display, or those silly paddles.

I'm not sure it changes much with TPTB, though. Again, a more thoughtful - and much more difficult - display of defiance against the Administration than the performances during the Not-A-SOTU....but I have trouble seeing it as being as consequential as some pundits have made it. Nice posthumous kick in the teeth to Thurmond, though, which is always nice.

Nice posthumous kick in the teeth to Thurmond, though, which is always nice.

That alone makes it worth it in my book.

I don't know yet, but what might be the better story is not the actual words of his speech or the holding up of the Senate's business for a day. It might be the personal commitment he put into it. Fasting for a couple of days. Dehydration. Preparing remarks to have material for 24+ hours. Unlike most filibusters, he didn't resort to reading irrelevant material into the Senate record. He spent the entire time talking about the current state of government.

--Peter

I think his speech may have had several million people listening/watching at one point or another during it. His intended audience was only a few hundred or thousand. Those are the people on the front line in the war against the authoritarian takeover of the government. Those are the Members of Congress, the governors, attorneys general, and the judges.

Here's another point of view.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/202...

Do you think it mattered to many people?

There are several youtube videos of his speech, or parts of it.

The one by Associated Press that I watched, already had 2.4 million views by midafternoon today.

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