With the midterms looming and potentially heavy consequences attached, the collective political attention of the United States is increasingly fixed on electoral matters. This is understandable. There are consequential state-level fights underway, alongside the larger question of how much congressional opposition Trump will face in his lame-duck era. Will Missouri voters fend off an attack on citizen-led ballot initiatives? Will burgeoning voter participation and broad-based organizing overcome gerrymandering efforts in states like Tennessee, and propel Justin Pearson into office?

These races bear watching, and people who feel inspired to engage by canvassing, phone-banking, fundraising, or organizing should do so.

My concern is what happens to the rest of our political lives during seasons like this one. Electoral politics can become the spectator sport of the day, absorbing enormous amounts of attention and political energy even among people who are taking no particular action around a campaign. The drama of polls, gaffes, scandals, and adversarial politics can become as addictive as a tawdry soap opera. Electoral chatter can begin to eclipse discussion and consideration of other forms of political action.

When it feels like everything hinges on Election Day, waiting, watching, and obsessing over every development can begin to feel like a central political task. Merely directing our attention can begin to feel like participation. We can spend hours consuming electoral news, arguing about posts and prospects, and anticipating outcomes without adding anything of substance to our political lives or making any meaningful contribution to our struggles or our communities.

It may be worth checking in with ourselves, from time to time, about what, if anything, our attention is cultivating. We might ask ourselves, how much of my political energy am I devoting to a particular concern? And what does that attention facilitate? Am I attempting to make a decision? Am I materially supporting an effort, or strengthening a relationship? Or am I simply riding waves of exhilaration, indignation, or angst?

Whatever happens in these races, our communities will still need political education, mutual aid, community defense, disaster preparedness, and other projects for collective survival. We need to create as much safety and justice as we can wherever we are, because the dangers we face are much larger than whatever is driving popular discourse on a given afternoon.

The terrain we are organizing on is increasingly dangerous. As what could become a historic El Niño gains strength, the current administration is dismantling environmental protections and clearing the way for extractive industries that intensify climate catastrophe, while powerful actors exploit the resulting instability to consolidate wealth and power. Hundreds of thousands of people have died due to foreign aid cuts, instigated by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, while Trump has repeatedly attempted to condition disaster aid here in the United States, seeking concessions around voter ID laws and cooperation with ICE from states facing emergencies.

Federal disaster requests from Democratic governors have also been denied more frequently than requests from Republican governors.

Billionaires are accelerating extractive practices that are known to worsen climate catastrophes while aid is gamed and imperiled according to the vendettas, agenda, and whims of a would-be despot—whose agents hunt our neighbors on scorched earth, through clouds of wildfire smoke, and amid historic heatwaves. Under capitalism, disaster and repression are inextricably bound, and our current government is conjuring catastrophe while weaponizing destabilization toward fascistic ends.

Our precarity is being amplified and exploited, and whatever electoral course corrections may Widespread public displeasure with Republican governance has raised hopes that the midterms will save us, or at least shift the balance of power. But many of the forces we must confront have momentum that extends beyond Trump. As much as I would like to believe that the tech agenda of AI dominance and corporate rule would be upended by a different administration, recent events provide little basis for such beliefs. There is no indication that a Democratic president would derail the tech oligarchs’ vision of a world broken into tech-ruled corporate states.

The Democratic establishment has, so far, chosen not to attach itself to the growing movement against data centers, which speaks to how much pressure our movements have yet to generate.

Democrats appear poised to capitalize on Trump’s failures without offering anything politically transformative. This is a model of politics that has already been out-wrestled by fascism. Without a larger shift in the balance of power, it will eventually be out-wrestled again. We need leftward momentum, and a level of organization and built power that the Democrats would shudder to defy.

This is a time to build power against Big Tech. It is a time to organize in defense of our migrant neighbors and against the construction of new detention centers. We must build power locally and establish networks of care and assistance before catastrophe strikes, so people are not forced to begin from scratch while the state withholds aid, escalates policing, or abandons whole communities.

We need a strong sense of the political terrain and a culture of preparedness around fascist threats that extend beyond Trump. Elections can change the conditions in which we struggle, sometimes dramatically. But observing and reacting to electoral events will not build the relationships, networks, skills, and forms of collective power that we are going to need.

We have a lot of construction work to do. So where will you lay a brick today?

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