In her 1996 book It Takes a Village, Hillary Rodham Clinton quoted the author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville:
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.
Even in the 10th-anniversary edition linked above, her editors failed to note that the quote was actually from an Anglican preacher with a similar name, Henry Melvill, who lived from 1798 to 1871 and in 1855 published a collection of his sermons, one of which included this powerful observation:
Ye live not for yourselves; ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.
Despite the error, the former First Lady’s heart was in the right place. Unfortunately, in 2016, too many voters were dissatisfied with the status quo and could not pull the lever for Clinton, then running for president after a stint as both a U.S. senator and Barack Obama’s secretary of state. She lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump, despite beating the real-estate empire nepo-baby by 2,868,686 votes, a 2.1% edge in the popular-vote category.
“A playbook for building a coalition big enough, bold enough, and tough enough to defeat authoritarian populism for good.”
Regardless of her extensive resume, the somewhat stilted Clinton was far from anyone’s idea of a perfect candidate, but the past decade (for six years of which Trump has sat in the Oval Office) is perhaps the best example in living memory of the old adage “Perfection is the enemy of the good.”
One group that has gone hammer and tongs at Trump since his first term — despite not being many progressives’ idea of perfect political bedfellows — is a motley collection of former Republicans who, in 2018, formed The Bulwark, a center-right organization described on its website as “an independent media company built on good faith, fearless journalism, and a community committed to defending liberal democracy.”
Publisher Sarah Longwell was once president of the Log Cabin Republicans, and while a faction promoting gay rights in the homophobic GOP seems oxymoronic, Longwell’s main achievement was getting the group to withhold its endorsement from Trump in 2016. She’s been beating the drum of anti-Trumpism ever since, and perhaps being an out lesbian within the cold confines of Republicanism prepared her for the skepticism that some Democratic socialist progressives (not to mention everyday Democrats) direct toward her media company. Additionally, Longwell has the distinction of being told she has “stage 5 Trump Derangement Syndrome” by the bellicose Trump loyalist Kellyanne Conway.
You can find out for yourself if these self-proclaimed defenders of democracy are bringing the goods on Tuesday, September 8, when Longwell and the acerbically astute Bulwark contributor Jonathan V. Last sit down together at the 92nd Street Y to discuss Longwell’s book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which the book’s publisher describes as “a playbook for building a coalition big enough, bold enough, and tough enough to defeat authoritarian populism for good. Not with a single election. Not by doing another poll or debating the benefits of being more progressive or more moderate, but by building something new: A modern pro-democracy movement that can create its own communications infrastructure — just like the right has done for decades — achieve narrative dominance, elevate more compelling leaders, and talk to voters like adults.”
Longwell and her crew were right about Trump in 2016, so even if her record as a “knife in her teeth” Republican lobbyist back in the day makes her appear far from perfect in leftist circles, her quest to buttress American democracy against Trump’s assault, and rehabilitate it after he is out of office, might just be good enough. ❖
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last in Conversation: “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time”
Geffen Stage at Kaufmann Concert Hall
The 92nd Street Y
1395 Lexington Avenue
Tuesday, September 8, 2026