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I am an incorrigible optimist. So much so that a dear friend, an adorable Eeyore, once laughingly accused me of annoying him with uncharacteristic hope. But teaching the day after 2016 and teaching today was different and not merely because of the possibility Trump would lose 1/
2/ In 2016, I was teaching my Indian history through film class, with students mostly from the elite northeast, who had grown up under Obama. We discussed, as a segue from discussing the urbanization of India, the erasure of rural USA from national consciousness in media.
3/ One student, her laptop covered in Planned Parenthood stickers, thanked me at the end. She was from a rural area and had been feeling increasingly alienated by the casual demonization of people she had grown up with in the run-up to the election by her urban elite classmates.
4/ That year I focused on presenting rural society as complex, against an already crystallizing discourse of white poverty, which ignored both the traditional GOP affluent base that drove Trump's victory or that his "economic anxiety" voters were not necessarily the rural poor.
5/ This year, not only were a bigger portion of my students civically engaged, I could point to genuine progress in US political life. One I focused on was the natural experiment of Harris County expanding voting access.
6/ Due to decades of organizing against mechanisms designed to disenfranchise Texan voters, the election of Hidalgo and #Covid19 allowed an unprecedented investment in voting access. The results gave lie to the shibboleth that Texans don't vote and when they do they are GOP.
7/ We talked about the fact that not only are socialist values acceptable to many USians, but even the label of socialist does not have the same stigma nationally as it did when I first came here in 2001, barely a decade out of the shadow of the Cold War.
8/ Most importantly, the fundamentalist individualism that I used to think of as characteristically USian has dissipated. There is an emerging consensus that solutions that emphasize our imbrication in society must be part of any healthy and just political society.
9/ So even without knowing the final outcome of this election I see reason for hope. The biggest one is that so many USians now realize that politics and civic life does not begin or end at the voting booth. If Indians had seen this earlier, we may not have lost out democracy.
