The Election Was Exhausting. Are Liberals Finally Getting Back in the Game?

Election night in November was a haze. As I turned the television on that evening, there was plenty else on my mind, including the end of a relationship. I stared at the screen as the numbers started to roll in. By 10 pm, I turned off the TV and climbed into bed, knowing that when I woke up the next morning, it would be to headlines about Donald Trump returning to office. I was already tired. Already defeated.

I thought that having watched Donald Trump elected president once before would have prepared me more for this moment. But whereas in 2016 I was filled with vigor and determination and a will to fight, 2024 me was ready to dissociate completely. I didn’t have the capacity, especially with the emotional toll this recent change in my personal life was taking on me mentally. Go inward, my brain told me, at least for now. Protect yourself.

In the months since, the drive toward activism that I was certain would naturally return wasn’t kicking in. Other people told me that they shared these feelings. I’m exhausted, they said. What can we even do? At the same time, I know that this attitude is exactly what the other side wants.

Adam Met is the bassist of the multi-platinum rock band AJR. He also has a PhD in International Human Rights Law, teaches as an adjunct professor at Columbia, and co-founded Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit whose mission is to lead a bipartisan response to our global climate crisis. He’s now an author, too. In Amplify, Met takes from his experiences as a musician, professor, and activist to explore how we build community and connection in order to engage more effectively socially. So, at a time where it felt like a significant shift in our political climate was occurring—the fracturing of Trump and Musk, the ongoing LA immigration protests—I asked him what one could do to shake off the ennui and start engaging again.

GQ: Preparing for this chat, I found myself weirdly nervous. And I realized that since November 5th, I have purposefully resisted talking too much about politics. I’ve just had this mindset of, Protect your peace.

Adam Met: I feel like we’re in a moment where so many people on the Democratic side of politics put what they thought was all of their energy into something that ended up being so wildly unsuccessful that they are absolutely exhausted. They’re so frustrated with the establishment that a lot of people have retreated into their own communities and into themselves in this search for peace. And while we’re all aware that the outside world—meaning outside of our communities—is being dissected brick by brick by policies that might be surprising to some and unsurprising to others, we are trying to find this inner peace within our own communities. It’s also facilitating what Trump and others want, which is a sense of being more divided and more isolated. And I think that while this idea is really important to be able to take care of yourself and find peace, it’s also true that we did not try everything during the last election cycle.

As individuals? In what sense?

Meaning we relied on the Democratic establishment and on people in the party to tell us how they wanted to run things as opposed to the people who are in our community—the people who know how to reach audiences, how to talk to people effectively, how to do creative messaging. We are musicians or actors or people in the media who do know how to reach people. We know how to do that. And we didn’t really make use of our own skills to do that. We just followed in the path of what other people were telling us to do. But we know who the audience is and we understand how to reach the audience.

So I think there was a disconnect and therefore it made us all a lot more frustrated and more angry because we were not doing the thing that we know works really well to reach people. We were following other people’s directions. That’s why there’s this need for inner peace right now to re-figure out who we are, find this validation within ourselves that we do know what we’re talking about. And that is going to be the way forward, using those tools in order to reach people. So once we’ve had our time to become ourselves again, I feel like we’re going to come back bigger and stronger than ever before.

Your book mentions how there are eight things that every campaign or every social movement needs, the fifth being to develop ways to engage your audience. You go on to talk about how that’s where the majority fail or falter. Why is it so hard for movements to tap into that, though? I think back to 2008 and Obama and it’s like, “Hey, we have a blueprint for this. We engaged an audience so much.” What happened? How did we lose it?

So the Obama era happened when social media was a single monolithic thing. In the last eight years—and actually more specifically in the last four years—social media has become this really distributed network. During COVID, when we were on TikTok, everyone saw the same TikToks. The things that got really big, you saw the same things that your friends did. It was like how TV was in the 50s. Everyone watched the same television program, then they all went around the water cooler and talked about that same program. That was TikTok. That doesn’t exist anymore. And your TikTok For You Page is very different from mine, is very different from any of our friends. The kind of connection between that and where we are now is the difference between what Obama was and what the 2024 election was.