By Matthew Brake

“I know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail nonetheless.”

Many of us recognize this quote from the peak of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

After ten years of movies, and six years after his debut in a teaser at the end of the first Avengers movie, Thanos had arrived in Avengers: Infinity War.

As the movie began, Thanos tortures a beleaguered Thor, who watches as Thanos’s servants slaughter survivors from Asgard. These survivors thought themselves safe after having escaped the destruction of Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok, only to find themselves facing brutal execution at Thanos’s hands. And no matter how much Thor tried to fight back, he found himself bested by the far more powerful Thanos.

I know how I felt when I went to bed on election night 2024. I knew which way the numbers were going, but I still woke up with all of those emotions that come from grief: anger, sadness, denial, numbness—all on loop.

It’s not because I’m a “political party” guy. I can handle Democrats losing. Apparently, they’re pretty good at it (for reasons that I partly address here).

No, it really was the foreboding that came with a Trump presidency in particular (I’ve written on my problems the man here).

And truly, he’s being as irresponsible and cruel as I thought he would be (I’m not going to recount all the reasons why here. I will, however, recommend some reading material for your perusal here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It sucks to lose. It sucks to feel powerless.

“It’s frightening. Turns the legs to jelly.”

It sucks to fail and wonder, “What comes next?”

It feels like all you can do, like Captain America, is fall to the ground, despairingly whispering, “Oh God,” as the terrible realization of failure sinks in.

MLK, Civil Rights, and Facing Setbacks

As a way of consoling myself and looking for guidance for the future, I’ve been reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here, the last book he wrote before he was assassinated. He speaks of the “agonizing setbacks” that he and others have and will experience as they seek to advance civil rights, and really, any goals related to political or economic justice.

Truly, if there’s any movement that knows about agonizing setbacks, it’s the civil rights movement for racial equality in the U.S.

The American Civil War provided the promise of freedom from slavery and forty acres and a mule as recompense, only to revoke the promise of any sort of reparations while introducing vagrancy laws, which basically re-enslaved the Black population.

The way for Reconstruction, Black self-determination, and racial reconciliation and societal improvement were also opened, only for Blacks in the south to be betrayed, for Reconstruction to end, and Jim Crow to be introduced.

Black communities sought to “better themselves” and “show themselves to be respectable” by working hard and building wealth responsibly, as Booker T. Washington and many opponents of Black equality argued for, only to see their own affluent communities destroyed by racial violence, as in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre (See Kendi for his commentary on the problem of moral suasion).

By 1965, both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed, only to start being gutted almost immediately (with the Voting Rights act meeting its seemingly-functional demise in 2013). This was followed by a War on Drugs whose implicit goal was to target and criminalize Black communities (this is laid out here).

The election of the first Black president was followed by questions about Obama’s birth certificate (which would never have happened if he were white, and I’m sure if it came out that Trump wasn’t born in the U.S., his followers wouldn’t care).

The Black Lives Matter movement (which yes, was accompanied by some riots, but there were worse riots that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement as well. Baby, meet bath water) was followed by an initiative to eliminate any discussion of race in public life (under the auspices of banning “Critical Race Theory” and “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” practices, but truly, it seems that any serious discussion of America’s racial history gets lumped in with these. P.S. If you want to know what Critical Race Theory really is, I recommend Victor Ray’s book, found here).

In the face of this history (some of which King was not around for), we would do well to meditate on King’s words: “No one can know the true taste of victory if he has never swallowed defeat” (146).

But as I noted, defeat is frightening.

So what comes next?

What Comes After…

Many of those upset with Trump’s election have wondered what resistance to the Trump regime looks like moving forward. Some have adopted the mantra, “Wait for the mid-terms,” but that rings hollow. Given the speed with which DOGE has decimated various Federal agencies and the way some of Trump’s supporters seem to be attacking the independent judiciary (forgetting that there are three co-equal branches of government), we cannot wait two years to resist. It must start today.

I realize many of you may still be suffering from the “1000 yard stare” after Trump’s election, and I want to encourage people to maintain their self-care.

But might I recommend King’s prescription for political discouragement and setbacks: “Their life raft in the sea of discouragement was social action” (163).

Now, no one person can do everything.

But we can each do some things according to our ability.

A guidebook for me during this time has been Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (a book that I will freely send to anyone who asks me for a copy: popandtheology@gmail.com).

Among Snyder’s lessons are “defend institutions” and “give to good causes.”

In an age where our institutions are under attack, we can’t all defend every institution, but we can defend some of them. For instance, I care about humanities education in public and higher ed, so I have started giving to the National Humanities Alliance.

I also recognize the need for strong local and regional journalism (as opposed to 24 cable news garbage), so I’m giving to Rebuild Local News.

I have also found myself compelled by Reverend William Barber to begin giving to the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement that tries to carry on the multi-racial coalition of economic justice that King himself was spearheading when he was assassinated (some of you may want to check out Rev. Barber’s book on white poverty here).

Movement politics is important, but so is institutional politics.

King writes about the need to engage in day-to-day efforts to bring about social change, including how to engage with institutional levers of power. Institutional and party politics are imperfect, but per one of King’s own influences, Reinhold Niebuhr, we have to learn to work with the imperfect even as we strive towards the better. The need to remain active and engaged to hold our leaders accountable never goes away.

It might be a good idea to start giving to a political party, especially in strategically important special and mid-term elections, as well as state and local elections.

Perhaps it’s time to join a union (an imperfect but important organizational tool in the worker’s toolkit).

There’s an app called Five Calls that provides a script for calling one’s congressional representatives and senators about the issues of the day (it even provides you with a script to use).

It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t change right away.

But the snowball will gain momentum.

Conclusion

I know the world feels more unsure for many of us than it did a few months ago.

I know that dictators and oligarchs alike feel emboldened, marginalized communities are scared, and democratic norms and rules are being thrown out the window.

In his book, Democracy Matters, Cornel West advocates for three elements that he says fan the flames of “democratic energies” (16):

1. Socratic Questioning
2. Prophetic Commitment to Justice
3. Tragicomic hope

Socratic Questioning involves honest “questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma, of parochialism, of fundamentalism” (16).

Prophetic Commitment to Justice has its eye particularly on the poor and marginalized.

But it’s that last one, Tragicomic Hope, that I think is most important to draw attention to during this time. As West writes, “The tragicomic is the ability to laugh and retain a sense of life’s joy—to preserve hope even while staring in the face of hate and hypocrisy—as against falling into the nihilism of paralyzing despair” (16). When we become discouraged by the imperfections of human life and history, tragicomic hope maintains us.

In Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers wait for five years to act because they see no way forward to undue the damage Thanos has done.

Friends, I hope I have offered you a few small ways forward, to get back into the fight, and to hold off despair through social action.