America, build institutions.

Every American I know who identifies as a Democrat or who is sympathetic to the Democrats is on a pike right now. So am I. We feel this way because we know what’s about to happen. Mitch McConnell, who four years ago denied President Obama the right to appoint a Supreme Court justice nine months before Election Day, saying that on general principle the American people should be involved in the decision, is about to allow President Trump to appoint a third Supreme Court justice six weeks before the upcoming election.

When this happens, it will be the most egregious demonstration of what has become increasingly obvious: that Republicans are engaged in a total war against Democrats, in which the basic rules of order go out the window if necessary, and ultimately nothing is restrained if it hurts the enemy, even if it denies officials acting in good faith the right to Constitutionally granted powers.

Democracy is nothing but agreements. Every last process in the operation of a democracy is just ink on a page, just electrons in hardware, unless it lives vividly in the minds of the people who implement it. If people with sufficient power choose to violate agreements in sufficient numbers, there is no inherent power in that ink or those bits of data that forces events to be otherwise. The violation simply happens. And things are worse afterward. And life goes on in that new condition.

I am tempted to scream until I am blue (no pun intended) that if you support Republicans in any unqualified way after this you simply cannot claim to be a person of goodwill anymore. And what good will it do? No matter how right I am or am not about it, little is likely to change in Republicans’ unique, unmistakable dance with the devil. People who support Republicans will return to their list of grievances against Obama, and Biden, and the Clintons — the legitimate fact-supported grievances, the context-less cherry-picked grievances refashioned into political weapons, and the outright manufactured grievances used to galvanize the base around essential falsehoods. These people will remain convinced either that total war against Democrats is appropriate or, at least, that there is enough malfeasance on all sides that they need not be particularly concerned. They will remain loyal to a party that continues to steal of a half-generation long political advantage in one branch of government — even while the president consolidates his chances of re-election by discrediting the country’s astonishingly efficient electoral process, and by hobbling this year’s essential election mechanism, the US Postal Service.

Again and again I return to the understanding that these are not essentially political problems. America’s problems are not primarily political problems; they are sociocultural problems, and the Supreme Court battle is a particularly illustrative example.

The rounded-off narrative is that Republican interest in the Supreme Court is rooted in the conservative Christian battle against abortion. And the way it’s framed, you can see where the desire for total war comes from. What wouldn’t you do to stop soulless people from killing babies?

But what apparently never takes root in conservative Christian movements is the understanding that lasting change could be achieved through persuasion — or, in fact, that it is best achieved this way. Thirty years later, Bill Clinton’s eloquent notion that abortions be “safe, legal, and rare” still goes undigested. Instead of embracing the real work, the hard sociocultural work that would make abortions rare, the Religious Right fantasizes about an America made more wholesome from the top down, through political force. In their battle to establish, or perhaps restore, what they perceive to be a more wholesome America, they will tear apart the basic agreements that hold America’s legendary democracy together, and they do not notice that it still leaves us with society more or less as it was — except more angry and divided — while at the same time rendering America’s most sacred political artifact ever-more wrecked, loose, and truly, immanently vulnerable to the kind of despotic takeover that has been considered unimaginable in the most developed societies for three quarters of a century.

Again, they choose this instead of taking responsibility for the difficult work of persuading people in the culture itself. After all, what could possibly persuade that many people that much?

Meanwhile, what have liberals done in response to this recent crisis? They’ve spent money. ActBlue reports an explosion of donations since the announcement of RBG’s passing. The hope is obvious: Biden, Biden, Biden.

And there is simply no doubt that a Joe Biden presidency would be much better for the health of the republic than another Trump term. When there is clear-eyed, legitimate concern that the U.S. will have a fair federal election and that the president will honor its results and, past that, where there is now regular, visible talk about civil war among what would otherwise be considered everyday people it’s hard to fathom how far down a dark road America has gone in four years.

Biden’s presidency will stem the tide, without a doubt. It is likely to restore the function of government substantially: Employees across agencies will be allowed to be candid about the reality of climate change again. The CDC will be free to air its views as they occur, and will not be restricted to the statements that don’t impugn the president. The Justice Department will no longer compose the legal team that defends the president’s personal affairs. We may have public conversation about the ways Russia has conspired against our nation, the kind of conversation one would have expected years ago already, which will raise American awareness to a useful greater level of responsibility.

All this is likely to occur. But beside these basic restorations what else will a Biden presidency substantially improve? It’s easy to predict that the already total war waged by the right against the left will only get more total. There is every indication that Trump supporters who have grown accustomed to the fronting of their sociopolitical narratives will approve any measure to get back to that feeling of dominance. There is also every indication that Republican political leadership will look for every single way to make that possible — again, with ever-decreasing regard for the costs to the general functions of democracy. And there is every indication that the lies about the nature of this war will only continue to metastasize, recruiting a third of the American electorate in an existential conflict that does not actually exist.

It is easy to hear the magical thinking that underlies the Democratic fundraising: The election will be the turning point.

But I don’t think that it is destructive of anything essential to say it: The election will most certainly not, of itself, be the turning point. It will be an improvement. But it will absolutely not of itself be the end of this long night.

It will not end the long night, because the political system fundamentally lacks, and was never meant to have, the leverage to effect the kinds of change that Americans want. I am just one little voice out here in the wilds, but I am adamant: If America is to plot any decidedly upward course at all, Americans simply must learn about the importance of a wider base of healthy institutions, and it must start building them anew.

Americans as a whole are certainly capable of a fervor for cultural reform, but as it stands this fervor is often fractious, quickly abandoned or, when it persists, ignorantly headstrong. In no small part, this is because the principal American cultural idea is to recur to Americanism, and without articulating a clear set of live-giving values to define that idol, the iteration of this empty tenet, as it has drifted without true guide, has resulted in a flaccid, consumptive, selfish culture with guiding tropes that are easily more than half falsehood.

Meanwhile a strong society relies on wise stories held in common, and it relies on wise, healthy organizations that direct people in healthy ways. When Americans get organized these days, often it’s to effect some legislative or electoral outcome. Americans need to learn how to get organized not around creating political reforms that they want to have, but around actually creating ways of life that they want to live, and actually, directly creating the society in which they want to live them.

To be clear, Democrats are nowhere appreciably wiser than Republicans in this regard. The Democratic hope that Biden’s election will somehow prove to be a decisive cultural achievement lies atop its own mass of Democratic policies — including, arguably, The Green New Deal — that are comparably haunted, as the pro-life cause is, by a desire to pass the Civil Rights Act without quite having a Civil Rights Movement.

What institution can hold a full conversation about the disproportionate killing of black people by police officers? See, finally and clearly: It is not the political system. This institution must be built.

What institution can lead America out of its unregenerate and unsustainable habits of consumption, into a future where technology continues to add to our lives, and yet we live in life-giving synergy with the rest of the living world? See, finally and clearly: it is not the political system. This institution must be built.

What institution can address the growing income inequality in America, not by imposing price controls that will inevitably restrict the labor market, but by stigmatizing greed and creating a deep cultural agreement that we will not abuse our stations in life by taking excessively from others, and by agreeing that those who do exploit others will enjoy only qualified inclusion in society until they repent?

Please see, finally and clearly: the political system will never do this either. The institution that will has to be built.

What institution will call Americans back to critical thinking and back to thoughtful, reflective intelligent lives? Certainly it is not the political system, which has become addicted to distortions — and in some places more than others. Perhaps some of these institutions exist. But at very least, they must be reformed.

First and foremost, Americans must become again people who are capable of collective action. Today countless meetings languish in self-indulgence, beginning with a good agenda that is almost immediately forgotten as participants free-associate with one another’s statements, opening folder after metaphoric folder on the desktop, gratifying themselves but reaching no conclusion, defining no follow-up and yet bewilderingly satisfying everyone involved. And countless summits consist of leaders trying lead the leaders, creating pyramidal discipleships of emergent would-be leaders, and purifying the assembly of co-operators with the capacity to co-operate with other co-operators.

American individualism is no longer a cultural predilection. It is essentially a disability. We must awaken to that plain fact, and rehabilitate ourselves.

I would like to locate an historical precedent to inspire the effort, when a high society in a state of decline reversed its course substantially. I don’t know of one, and that is perhaps telling.

But I do believe, quite strongly, that American renewal relies on a few simple steps:

1. Take the inner journey. Find the way of living that makes you inwardly rich, wise, loving and clear. Get real about the compromises you’ve made; the still, small voice you ignore. Get real about the state of your own psychic basement. Get serious about better, gentler care of your soul. Consider the extent to which this work is essentially spiritual. Find that still, small voice. Consider what’s out there to help you better enter through the gates. Go there.

2. Make the journey with others. Find, create the groups where people begin ever more deeply and significantly to say similar things in similar ways. Don’t become a bubble; grow a flexible, clear-eyed unity.

3. Cross pollinate with others groups. Open, listen, flow, and while you also gently define.

When we make the conditions for life to return, then life will return. I’ve much more specific ideas about what’s involved, but if you’ve gotten this far I have undoubtedly monopolized your attention enough. I’ll save those for another rant.

Personally, I don’t find it easy to be hopeful for the country. But what I can be hopeful about is the principle of renewal itself. Someday, somewhere, society at large will stop looking like old things in decline and it will start to look prototypic of new, good things. Perhaps this is already beginning to emerge somewhere. But whether or not it has, there is no doubt that it will.

But for that to occur it seems to me that we are left first with the essential process of our own journey. And fundamentally, it is time to see the leaky ship of our political system for what it is once and for all. We don’t have to abandon the ship altogether — we shouldn’t, in fact, and some people are doing this too much.

But we do — absolutely, unmistakably, inevitably — have to get off the leaky ship, onto the undiscovered land on which it now rests, into the wilderness of ourselves, our relations, and our actual nation and its people.

So go. Again, go. The clock has been ticking for years now. Go.