On Happiness and the Election

By Max Teirstein

On June 5th, 2020, journalist Ezra Klein sat down with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the critically-acclaimed analysis of racism in the United States, Between the World and Me, and posed a simple question: what is the purpose of government? At the time of the interview, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans were leading a national uprising to push the government to stop wielding the police as a tool to murder people they love. In their conversation, Klein and Coates highlighted the hypocrisy of the prevailing media narrative: that Black people were expected to adhere to nonviolence in their civil disobedience, even as the state’s violent disregard for Black life went largely unquestioned. This line of thinking brought the two writers to wonder: what if the government were held to the same standard of nonviolence as are Black people and their allies? What if the state was not only nonviolent, but, moreover, sought to protect its citizens’ happiness?

I listened to this conversation, published on Klein’s Vox podcast, while on a jog near my home in upstate New York. As I was running, Klein and Coates’ central question lodged itself in my brain and has remained there ever since. At Zumwalt Acres, where everyone in our house dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to organizing around the election ahead of November 3rd, it has continued to consume my thinking. It’s hard for me to picture a government so deeply invested in all of its people. I have only arrived at the bleak understanding that our government is so failing in its directive to promote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that it cannot even guarantee “life” for all of its citizens, let alone the freedom to pursue that which brings them joy. Healthcare, housing, clean air and water, a livable future—none of these does the U.S. government ensure. In fact, the state has spent much of the past three centuries seeking to withhold these rights from all but a select white, male, affluent subset of its citizenry.

The Trump administration is no exception to this. The President and his gang of Republican legislators have continued to strip away protections from the working class, while stoking fear and prejudice so as to scapegoat Black and Brown communities for the myriad economic woes that conservative theories of economics have engendered. The election two weeks ago, while no stunning rebuke of the President—he and the rest of the GOP have been exceedingly successful in their fear-mongering—did promise at least four years free of his leadership in the highest office in the land.

However, the election did not hold the promise of a government that will finally step into its duty to ensure its citizens their basic rights. Our President-elect opposes the universal right to healthcare, the right to housing, the right to humane treatment and rehabilitation even for those who have broken the law, the immediate and full-scale transition to a zero-carbon economy—the list goes on. It is a mistake to believe that a Biden presidency will promise anything more than a return to the Obama-era status quo, which wasn’t humane by many standards (see: 2.5 million deportations, drone strikes on civilians, 88% growth for the oil industry). Incrementalism, in the face of the seemingly insurmountable crises in policing, healthcare, the economy, the climate, and the criminal justice system, is not victory. With a likely Republican Senate, which will be sure to prioritize gridlock for Biden over a meaningful policy agenda, we may not even achieve incremental change.  

So what do we do? How do we ensure that our community members most vulnerable to these crises are able to pursue joy freely, when our government seems, at best, disinterested, and at worst, oppositional to helping them maintain that most basic of human rights? The answer, I firmly believe, lies in our communities. If we can’t count on our government to look out for us, then we need to look out for each other. 

At Zumwalt Acres, where community is our priority throughout our work, the way we communicate with one another, and the way we make decisions about our future, we must rise up to meet the moment. Mutual aid—an act of radical love that Black and Indigenous, trans and genderqueer, low-income, and disabled communities have been employing for generations—must be a guiding tenet for places like this little community we’ve built in Sheldon, IL. At our weekly “Context Conversations,” where a rotating facilitator plans an hour or two of discussion around the historical and cultural context of our work, we have returned repeatedly to the question of how our farm can provide our resources and university connections to other regenerative and BIPOC-led agricultural initiatives who may not have access to the same prosperous networks. Our farm seeks to inspire a revolution in Midwestern agriculture, but we also recognize that our regenerative techniques are not new; they have been practiced by Indigenous communities all over the world for eons. We therefore owe everything we have to those communities, and must engage in meaningful efforts toward mutual aid in order to ensure that it is they, and not we, who lead this large-scale rejection of conventional, industrial farming.

Personally, I’m quickly realizing that there is simply no more space for visualizing myself as a part of a broader community of Americans only for the months ahead of an election, and then disconnecting myself from that mindset for the rest of the year. My months at Zumwalt Acres have shown me that so long as the government continues to fail to be nonviolent and to maximize its citizens’ happiness, I must fill the void left by the state by building community and cultivating a sense of responsibility for the joy of the people around me. I’m also keenly aware of the fact that our record-turnout election saw only 65% of Americans cast a vote. What would the government look like if 100% of voting-age Americans had access to both the information they needed to know why their vote mattered as well as an easy way of casting their ballot? Would we have chosen incrementalism? Or would we instead create a state that cherishes people’s basic rights, so that we don’t have to take on that responsibility ourselves? Until the day comes that our government fulfills its presently-empty promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, community is all we have.