Happy New Hampshire primary day for all who celebrate! It’s an event that’s at once all-consuming and barely relevant. There’s no Democratic contest, and what’s left of the Republican fight mostly serves as a comforting fiction for those convinced against all evidence that the GOP cannot possibly, really, seriously, truly do that again.

But the fact that the primary is still happening, and that we’re all paying attention, is a reminder of how easy it is to be complacent in America, to imagine that the ship is self-righting and that so long as people vote, everything will turn out fine(-ish). 

If nothing else, as you pay whatever attention is warranted to the news coming out of New Hampshire, remember it isn’t a horse race — except in the sense that everything you have is riding on the ultimate outcome in November. Take time to reflect not on meaningless margins of victory, but on how easy it is to move from thinking a coup attempt is a disqualifying stain to dismissing it as simply not seeing eye-to-eye.

We know our Ink readers, and we thought you might appreciate some non-horse-race, bigger-thinking reflections on the deeper trends and truths that the charade of New Hampshire is distracting us from. So we compiled these insights from some of our favorite thinkers and interlocutors.

Some are grimly honest assessments of our present condition; others are sparklingly hopeful visions for transcending it. Consider them part of an ongoing wake-up call.

“​​If Democrats, the media, and corporate leaders don’t see that kind of accountability as important to the long-term trajectory of this country’s cohesion and the endurance of our democracy, they’re absolutely missing a sense of history. They’re fooling themselves about how dangerous this is.” [Heather McGhee]

“Institutional change is…like a bank shot to get to what you want; it’s an indirect route. If you’re not happy with your life, the idea that we need to introduce, say, proportional representation is an abstraction. So how do you get people to think in institutional terms? The way to do that is to link institutional reform to the issues that people really care about in their daily lives.” [Daniel Ziblatt]

“That’s a struggle to win back lost trust in people who felt like either the Democratic Party didn’t align with the things that they cared about in their own lives, or that Democrats couldn’t make government work for them. So if you started to feel cynical about government, you started to feel cynical about the Democratic Party. We’re working on retooling that. I think how we flex for working-class people and show them that we’re on their side — that ends up becoming one of the big challenges to fight right-wing fascism and authoritarianism.” [Faiz Shakir]

“We have to save ourselves. This is the essence of democracy, expressing yourself through your right to vote, and your right to assemble and protest. And elsewhere in the world, when democracy has been regained, quite painfully, it’s been through a combination of mass mobilization with electoral strategy and messaging — positive messaging, future-oriented messaging.” [Ruth Ben-Ghiat]

“The way things get done is not by Biden having a religious conversion and saying, ‘Oh, we’’ve got to really work on the climate.’ That’s not what happened. The DNC probably hates the program, but they have no choice, because their popular base is not only demanding it, but is working constantly, hard, to force them to do it. That’s politics. Not the personality of leaders. I don’t know what’s in his mind. I don’t care, frankly.” [Noam Chomsky]

“That’s why this show, at the end, says, ‘Don’t forget our failure. Don’t forget our fight.’ Don’t forget all of the ways that we messed up and of the ways these fights are not over. Don’t forget all the things we won. Look what we did. You can, too.” [Shaina Taub]

“The NRA essentially proved that a small minority can beat a huge majority, and charted out the roadmap how to do it: a) concentrate all your power on a single issue, b) drive your people to actually vote on it, every time, regardless of the other issues, c) have the patience to continue this tactic for decades, because it won’t (and didn’t) happen in a year or two. They had to sustain it for decades.” [Dave Cullen]

“I haven’t talked to a single Republican in my community who thinks that healthcare should be inaccessible and very expensive. Not a person thinks that. But I certainly talked to a lot of folks who really didn’t like the term Medicare for All because of its connotations. So what I found is that really connecting on the level of values, especially if you don’t know the person, you can’t assume that you have everything in common, that that’s how we form human relationships in the first place, is trying to assess where are our shared values and how can we build a relationship off of that.” [Chloe Maxmin]

“What I’m trying to say is that what we’re advocating for is actually really popular, and we should focus on talking about what we’re advocating for, and who we are, what we’re going to fight for. But the thing that’s often missing, and that organizers do for a living, really, is, we’re storytellers. And with storytelling, you think about where people are at, and you meet them where they’re at. And I think that’s important. So how do we tell the story of policy? How does it address their anxieties? I think that’s really important. So I 100 percent agree with you, and I think it’s a place that we can do better.” [Maxwell Frost]

“Your job is to fight back and stand up for others, but, understandably, it’s not an easy process when you’re contending with this level of rot.” [Sarah Kendzior]

And, speaking of hard truths, hard fights, and storytelling, congratulations to avid Ink reader America Ferrera for her richly deserved Oscar nomination this morning!

Photo: Sebastien St-Jean/AFP via Getty Images

This post was originally published on The.Ink.