Saving Democracy is Easy

Dear Friends:

Recent calculations have shown I might not finish revising the memoir before the fall semester starts. There are worse problems to live with. One solution = put Shenny back on hiatus. But no longer being on social media (for reasons this week’s Main Matter spells out) puts you in a kind of cave. Writing a book, without publishing short stuff here and there, does the same.

So here’s another Shenny, right on time, to help me feel less enisled. And here’s another expression of gratitude for all of you reading.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Summer Semi-Hiatus Edition

In the interest of balancing Shenny time and memoir time, I’m re-endorsing old timely endorsements this week, from summer-y issues from long ago. New to some readers, skippable to others.

1. Aunt Ghyneth’s Baked Beans
One forgets that baked beans were once a recipe, a process of baking beans in the oven and not just warming up what you opened in a can. No summertime family cookout growing up was absent of Aunt Ghyneth’s baked beans, which have this sweet, tangy, rich depth of flavor, and something of an actual texture to them. Structural baked beans, let’s say.

Aunt Ghyneth's Baked Beans

56oz Campbell's* Pork & Beans
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp dry mustard
1/2 cup Heinz ketchup
6 slices raw thick-cut bacon, chopped into 1-inch pieces

Stir all ingredients in a bowl and dump into a casserole dish. Bake at 325° for 2 hours.

* Aunt Ghyneth (i.e., Mom’s dad’s mom’s cousin’s daughter; the closest thing I have to an aunt) warns off swapping brands. Van Kamps will disappoint you, I promise. When Ghyneth first shared her recipe, Campbell’s sold 28oz cans, but now in America we all get less than we used to. So try Dollar Tree, where I’ve found 19oz cans, and buy 3.

2. Raglan-Sleeve Tees
Or baseball T’s, people sometimes call them. ‘Raglan’ refers to any shirt where the sleeve pieces go right up to the neck, named for FitzRoy James Henry Somerset Lord Raglan, a British army officer who lost his arm at Waterloo and took to wearing such shirts. They seem suited for men who’ve lost something, mainly their youth. Anytime I see a man over 35 in a raglan tee, I think about dads who play on softball leagues, not fully out of shape but no longer in the shape they were once proudest of (that whole mien = very sexy). Also, they make great retro band tees, which in my own youth I called poser-y, but now at 44 47 I'm embracing my Jason-Bateman-in-Juno tendencies, and trying to be a little gay about it, hence this, my favorite T-shirt (from Bread & Water Print Shop in Pittsburgh):

Saving Democracy is Easy

These last couple weeks, I’ve been paying more attention that I should to the New York City mayoral primary race, which Shenny’s publishing schedule has led me to write about before the news is in.¹ So, to be quick about it….

The big news is that Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a socialist, is surging in the polls over a serial sexual harasser from an old political dynasty. His name is Andrew Cuomo. You might remember him as the governor of New York who stepped down amid the rise of abuse claims he and his lawyers all settled out of court. Also, his dad was NYC mayor.

There are a lot of reasons I can’t imagine a worse candidate for the world we have in 2025 than Andrew Cuomo, but the one I want to focus on this week is money.

The way we can save democracy is to vote against money.

Excited about the possibility of a people’s mayor for New York—who wants a flat tax on millionaires, a $30 minimum wage, free buses, and publicly owned grocery stores—I went last week to Zohran’s website to donate money.

I wasn’t able to.

That is, there was nowhere on the website where I could send them my money. I persisted in finding a donate page, where I learned the campaign had already raised the $8 million they are legally allowed to spend.

Now: you can donate all you want to Cuomo’s campaign. Not because they haven’t raised $8 million yet, but because your money will go to ‘Cuomo for NYC, Inc.’, a PAC corporation not barred from any spending limits.

Cuomo has all the money in this race, and all the wealthy elites in NYC and elsewhere are spending everything they have (most of us can’t really tangibly fathom how much they have) on getting him into power again. Pro-Cuomo PACs have broken campaign finance laws on their ad spending, and city housing-depleter Airbnb spent $1 million on digital ads attacking Zohran with lies about how not giving Airbnb free rein will … make New York more expensive?

I don’t need to tell New Yorkers (esp. those who lived there from 2002 to 2013) what it’s like to have a billionaire mayor. But if you want to know what it’s like to have a billionaire mayor in 2025—with a ‘billionaire’ fascist in the White House and another tech billionaire fascist having just left—just look at San Francisco.

Last year, a billionaire heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune spent millions of his own and his family’s money to essentially buy the job of San Francisco Mayor. Despite never having held public office, he outspent every other candidate ever in any SF mayoral race, and he ran on ‘clean and safe streets for all’—meaning fears of rampant crime, despite crimes being at all-time lows in the city—and that all got him voted in.

Here’s what he’s done just six months on the job:

1. Removed a civilian police commissioner from office because of his work exposing city corruption and working for police reform.

2. Convinced the Board of Supervisors² to let him skirt democratic oversight on city contracts and instead use private donations to fund his ‘war on fentanyl’.

3. Released a budget that cuts public services and city jobs in the name of ‘responsible budgeting’ (i.e. ‘government efficiency’), a budget that also raises police overtime, despite the SFPD’s longstanding failures to recruit and retain cops so as not to need $100 million+ in overtime,³ and even though the mayor’s crime-prevention strategy—i.e., arresting folks for ‘drug-related loitering’ then releasing them without any charges—isn’t working.

4. Allowed a crypto billionaire to donate $9.4 million to the police to fund drones cops are excited to ‘cover the entire city’ with.

5. Totally ‘blown it up’ on Instagram!

In other words, he’s using crony capitalism and social-media talents to shut down public services he can’t imagine anyone needing (because he’s a millionaire, with a millionaire’s poor imagination), in order to give more money to what—for the sake of comparison—I’ll call ‘defense’. It’s all right out of the D. Trump playbook.

Don’t be fooled by party membership. D. Trump was a Democrat. E. Musk voted for Biden. ‘Vote Blue no matter who’ might be the biggest lie Americans have ever been told.

Okay but what does all this have to do with saving democracy? Well, let’s look at this bumper sticker I saw just this morning:

Is every third car on your roads a fucking Tesla? Odds are you’ve seen such bumper stickers lately:

A lot to unpack here. A car is an object, soulless and inert, and couldn’t ‘endorse’ a thing if we wanted it to. The sticker above intends to mean that the driver of ‘this tesla’ doesn’t endorse fascists—and if the sticker said as much, I wouldn’t have an argument.

But it doesn’t say that.

The fact is, when the CEO of a car company is a fascist, continuing to drive that fascist’s car in public endorses the fascist. It agrees that the fascist’s products, the source of his wealth he uses to promote fascism, are good and useful.

Actually, I’m wrong, it’s this sticker that’s the problem. The message is this: I don’t like fascism in theory, but I’m okay helping to fund and buoy fascism in practice.

It’s the message all of us spread when we post on social media.

Democracy means one person gets one vote. We all know the people who hate this idea most:

We know that Facebook and Twitter helped spread the lies that got Trump elected. We know that Bezos bought the Washington Post and turned it into a PR tool for oligarchy. The richest people in tech have made the U.S. less democratic by using their unfathomable amounts of money to buy influence and spread lies to voters.

The weird thing about these people is the source of their power. They weren’t born with wealth. They’re not the scions of some Cuomo-like dynasty. They all got their power from us.

We gave it to them.

Without much money, we’ve done this with attention, devotion. We fret over creeping authoritarianism on Facebook, or post #NoKings selfies on Instagram, or follow progressive podcasters on X—and it’s all like going to the track to try to win what we owe in gambling debts.

We know these toys are bad for us, bad for democracy, but we seem to like playing with them too much.

Which brings me back to the cognitive dissonance of Tesla owners. I get that E. Musk turned into a fascist around 2020, about 15 years after he took over at Tesla, but I didn’t see those bumper stickers when he fought union efforts at Tesla plants. I didn’t see them when he tweeted that ‘pronouns suck’ and made ‘cisgender’ a slur violating Twitter’s discrimination policy. I didn’t see them after he bought Twitter and made it X and amplified claims of ‘white genocide’ in his native South Africa.

But something, likely his one-time role in this administration, tipped the balance for Tesla drivers. And now, instead of just buying a different union-made electric car, and no longer driving around an advertisement for the world’s richest and worst person, it’s: Stickers!

‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’

That’s Audre Lorde. I’ve cited her so many times. It’s likely the wisest thing anyone ever said in the 20th century.

Let me provide more context around that quote, delivered at a feminist conference in 1979:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

If you read Shenny, odds are you’re outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable people, by dint of not having millions of dollars at your disposal to buy whatever influence you need to be safe, secure, and healthy.

We the people have been marginalized by folks like A. Cuomo and E. Musk. (Which is why the wisdom of writers like Audre Lorde is what everyone needs these days.)

And yet that’s strange, because we outnumber the people who’ve put us in this precarious position, and held us there. We have all, just all of the power, and by agreeing that we need social media to stay connected (even in resistance) or that we need Amazon Prime’s ‘free’ delivery (that costs $180/year) because shopping in neighborhood stores is too expensive, we give all that power up to them.

I was wrong up above. The biggest lies we Americans have ever been told is that money makes people smarter, and guns make people safer. More and more people are coming around to the latter. Today, I’m hoping we can start coming around to the former. Please God, please New York, help make Zohran win this election. I need to believe in we the people again.

This week starts a new feature at Shenny, where instead of ending with a picture of an antique I didn’t buy at the antique store, I’m showing you a still from a thing I watched on TV. This inaugural edition is from S04E05 of Downton Abbey:

1. Okay but as of 9pm Pacific last night: Cuomo’s conceded!

2. In related SF money news, we’ve never had a more conservative Board of Supervisors in the 12 years I’ve lived here as we do now. Because only the Democratic Party reigns in SF, they call themselves ‘moderates’. But they’re old-school, non-fascist Republicans who lie about our non-existent ‘progressive stranglehold’ in order to help tech corporations (who’ve funded their campaigns) and real-estate developers (ditto) keep more of their money.

3. Meanwhile, public transit is so underfunded that they’re cutting down bus routes. What Muni needs to be fiscally solvent is one half of what we pay cops for overtime each year.