Anat and I were joined this week by Stasha Rhodes, who has been leading coalitional efforts to defend democracy since long before most people realized that it needed defending. Most recently, she’s been focused on the Roberts Court specifically through her work at United for Democracy.
She just published a beautiful piece about Callais and her family history in Louisiana that you all should read: “The System My Grandfather Deserved: Our Political System Isn’t Broken. For Millions of Americans, It Was Never Built.” Stasha’s grandfather, Gustave Rhodes (not her great-grandfather — her grandfather) was a sharecropper on a sugarcane plantation in South Louisiana. Gustave organized his fellow workers and successfully sued to collect the wages they had been denied. But then, realizing that “Winning one battle inside a deeply unequal structure was not the same thing as transforming the structure itself,” he moved into voting rights organizing and worked alongside John Lewis.
The conversation covered, among other things:
Why the South gets ignored until something explodes. Stasha talked about how Washington dramatically underestimates how widespread the feeling of institutional powerlessness actually is, and how it cuts across party lines. That convergence is both a warning sign and a political opening — if organizing can meet people where that feeling lives.
The incremental reform trap — Stasha emphasized that things like same-day voter registration and stronger ethics rules absolutely matter. But incremental reforms become a trap when political leaders offer them not as steps toward bigger change, but as substitutes for it.
“Ragency” — Anat brought in a word from organizer Ashley Fairbanks: rage + agency = ragency. Stasha pushed it further: anger is only power if you’re organizing it toward something.
What we owe the next generation. The democracy we want to leave our children is one that’s inclusive enough to hear every voice, representative enough to reflect every community, and resilient enough to hold through whatever economic, political, or technological changes that come next. That’s substantively different from what we have now, which is a system built with deliberate exclusions that have never been fully reckoned with. The question this moment is asking us is whether we’re willing to name that gap honestly, and organize at the scale it actually requires, instead of continuing to negotiate against ourselves before the fight even begins.
More is coming soon from me on the Roberts Court, Callais, and where all of this fits into the larger picture.
