85 Things You Can Do To Help The United States Shake Wide Awake By Joy Pullmann for The Federalist
We don’t need a majority. Revolutions never have. We need a minority of Wide Awake Americans to coalesce, to see, judge, and act.
While helming Fox’s “Primetime” last week, Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech developed in his nightly monologues the theme of Americans becoming, not woke, but “Wide Awake.”
The “Wide Awake” label comes from another fraught period in American history. It was the name of a highly effective grassroots political movement in the pre-Civil War era.
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“There were hundreds of thousands of [Wide Awakes] in 1860, and their organizations stretched from Maine to California,” Domenech explained last Monday. “They were a militaristic fraternity dedicated to human liberty. They had banners and marches and baseball teams. They carried oil lamps, wore capes, and wielded bats, and they stumped for a rising Republican rail-splitter named Abraham Lincoln.”
Throughout the week, Domenech called on Americans to consider this historical example to inform our actions today, in another era of despair, mob rule, political corruption, and a brutal coalition of elites and lowlifes against the aspiring middle class. Amid lockdowns, rising inflation, state-sponsored racism, doubt about the security of elections, the fecklessness of politicians, and the leftist control of everything right down to whether we can show our faces, many Americans feel hopeless and in rout.
This, Domenech argued, is the time not to slide into the sleep of despair, but to stomp our feet on the sleep-inducing fumes and shake ourselves awake for action: “The American crisis can be the opportunity for American renewal. That’s why it’s worth doing. It’s only by doing hard things and overcoming them that we find genuine happiness.”
“What does it mean to be wide awake? What are you prepared to do if you are?” Domenech asked in his Friday conclusion to the week’s series.
Fight wokeness by getting involved in your community. https://t.co/byYZga5t4u
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) August 7, 2021
I’m not quoting Ben because he’s my boss, but because he’s 100 percent right, and he has more heart than I do most days, and that’s right, too. To follow up on this theme, I and several Federalist staff have compiled the following idea list of ways to develop your capacity for self-governance. Many people are feeling despair right now, and the truth is that things are likely to get worse before they get better. But for them to ever have a chance of getting better, we have to be willing to suffer today.
