Everything is politics lately.
Every conversation. Every news brief. Every text message. There is no escaping it. From Pakistan to Portland, from dinner tables to social media feeds, people seem consumed by one question: what comes after Trump?
Josh Hammond, a writer here (At The Break Of Day), recently suggested that if Americans are serious about changing course, they need more than outrage. They need visibility. They need a mass march to the ballot box. Not a riot. Not a tantrum. A spectacle of democracy itself. Citizens showing up in such overwhelming numbers that the act of voting becomes impossible to ignore.
It seems everyone is trying to figure out how to dump Trump.
That got me thinking about the work of Nobel Peace Prize recipient and peace activist Leymah Gbowee, who helped mobilize women to end Liberia’s devastating fourteen-year civil war in 2003. Their movement understood something many political strategists forget: symbols matter. Slogans matter. Public action matters.
The women who organized for peace didn’t have armies or political power. They had visibility, persistence, and a message powerful enough to capture the public imagination. The phrase later immortalized in the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell about how ordinary women, Christian and Muslim, put their religious differences aside and donned white T-shirts and joined in unison to stage a protest outside the Presidential Palace.
They didn’t meet warlords with weapons; they met them with unyielding presence and a refusal to move until peace was won.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell became a memorable expression of their determination to confront violence without becoming violent themselves. It reminded me that democracy, too, needs symbols people can rally around.
So, borrowing from that spirit, I came up with a slogan for our own political moment:
Vote the Devil Back to Hell.
Not with violence. Not with vengeance. Not with conspiracy theories or fantasies of revenge. With ballots.
Because hell is the breakdown of the rule of law and the normalization of chaos. We don’t need to annihilate our neighbors; we need to purge the madness.
If democracy is going to survive its latest stress test, the answer is not another screaming match on cable news.
Anger is cheap. The most terrifying sound to a demagogue isn’t a crowd shouting back; it’s the absolute silence of a million citizens quietly standing in line, filling in a circle, and reminding politicians that power still belongs to voters.
The most dramatic act in a democracy should not be a coup, an indictment, or a social media meltdown.
It should be Election Day.
No sirens.
No tear gas.
Just a long-ass line stretching around the block, moving forward,
one quiet step at a time.
This is democracy.
This is a United States of America.
