Evelyn Quartz –

The public is not simply asking for louder performances. They are asking for something harder: a real reckoning with the failures of the old order. Yet much of the mainstream political class — campaign consultants, television pundits, party strategists — continues to mistake the appearance of fighting for real action. A fiery speech on MSNBC, a viral fundraising email declaring a once-in-a-lifetime ‘fight for democracy,’ a triumphant Twitter clip of a senator ‘owning’ the opposition: these are treated as victories in themselves. They confuse performance with renewal, noise with transformation. But the public knows the difference. And they are running out of patience.

When Democratic voters express frustration, they are told the problem is messaging — that if only the party could sharpen its slogans, tighten its scripts, and “frame the narrative” more aggressively, all would be well. In clinging to the management of perception, they are clinging to a language that no longer matches the lived experience of most citizens.

– They know, at a visceral level, that the problem runs deeper than the daily outrage cycles acknowledge. They hear passionate defenses of democracy from politicians who have done little to protect the material foundations democracy needs to survive. They watch solemn cable news panels lament “polarization,” even as their own wages stagnate, their healthcare bills pile up, their communities hollow out, and their children’s futures grow more precarious. They are told that democracy is under threat — and they believe it — but they are also living the slow erosion of dignity, security, and belonging that no amount of televised urgency can disguise.

In such a context, yet another viral speech or slick campaign ad does not inspire trust. It inspires something quieter, and more corrosive: a disillusionment that hardens with every empty gesture. The more the performances intensify, the more hollow the promises sound. Over time, the gap between public experience and political spectacle grows too wide to bridge with rhetoric alone.

The public is not cynical because they are foolish. They are cynical because they have been taught, through lived experience, that most of the “fighting” offered to them is a substitute for the reckoning they actually need. We no longer know how to name the collapse we feel. We are given slogans about rights and institutions, but the lived experience of abandonment has no official language. And what has no language eventually demands new forms — or new ruptures.

Until that shift happens — until leaders emerge who are willing to name the full scale of the collapse and confront it seriously — no amount of fighting will feel like enough. Because it won’t be enough.