Make Them Carry It
Trust doesn’t come back with better language. It comes back when people in power can’t do damage and then act like they deserve your handshake.
People are tired of paying for other people’s decisions. Tired of being told to accept it. Tired of watching the folks responsible keep their hands clean. This piece is about the one thing that changes politics in places like ours: making power carry what it does.
Everybody knows what consequences feel like.
You learn them in the small humiliations that come with being broke or one bad week away from it. Fees. Penalties. “Past due.” The letter that reads like a threat even when it’s dressed up in polite fonts. The way one mistake turns into three problems because the rules are written for people who have extra money and extra time lying around.
Now look at the people who run things.
They can make a call that tightens the screws on your life, and they don’t carry any of it. They don’t carry the stress. They don’t carry the long drive. They don’t carry the waiting list. They don’t carry the bill. They don’t carry the embarrassment of explaining to your kid why something “isn’t in the budget.”
They carry a title. And the title protects them.
A decision gets made, and the damage gets scrubbed clean. It becomes “complicated.” It becomes “hard choices.” It becomes “we hear you.” Then it becomes last month. Then it becomes nobody’s fault. And the same people who signed off on it are right back out front at the next community event soaking up respect like they earned it.
That’s the part that makes people snap. The clean hands of it all.
And it’s a big reason Democrats keep bleeding trust in places like ours. People don’t think we’ll hold onto anything long enough for it to matter. They think we’ll say the right words, take the picture, and move on. They think we’ll let the folks doing harm stay socially spotless.
Folks are trained to think politics lives somewhere far away. Like local government is just potholes and proclamations, and the “real stuff” happens in Washington. That belief is a gift to the people who benefit from nobody paying attention, because the decisions that shape your day are made close enough to hear the gavel.
It’s the budget meeting where the numbers are settled before the public walks in. It’s the board vote framed like a formality. It’s the contract buried under a bland agenda title. It’s the enforcement choice that decides who gets hassled and who gets waved through. It’s the “we’ll look into it” that really means “we’re waiting for you to get tired.”
If you’ve ever sat through one of these meetings, you know the routine. The language can be thick on purpose. The real item slides by fast. Public comment comes after the decision, when it’s safe. Then everybody files out and the people who just took something from the community stand around smiling like they just did you a favor.
That’s the advantage of owning the room long enough that people start treating it like weather.
The first piece in this series was about the national party choosing secrecy and calling transparency a “distraction.” That wasn’t a process squabble. That was the same pattern voters recognize from every institution that asks for trust but refuses scrutiny: protect the people at the top, manage everyone else.
This is where it stops being theory and turns into a demand.
Because the same instinct that hides the autopsy is the instinct that dodges confrontation. It’s the desire to keep things neat, to keep conflict contained, to keep the room comfortable. And when that instinct runs the show, the people responsible for harm get to float above it. They get to keep their standing. They get to keep their respect. They get to keep their clean hands.
People notice that. They notice it faster than they notice any ad. They notice it because it matches what they already believe about how power works.
So here’s what I mean by consequences. I mean refusing to let harm evaporate.
When a public decision hurts the community, the people who made it should not get to step back into public life as if they’re neutral guardians who deserve automatic respect. If you wanted the authority, you don’t get to dodge the weight.
This isn’t about being loud. It’s not about being cruel. It’s about making sure the story stays attached to the people who wrote it.
Say what happened in plain language. Name the decision. Name the person. And don’t drop it the moment someone tells you it’s “time to focus on the next thing.”
That last part is where Democrats keep failing. We treat memory like it’s optional. We treat pressure like it’s impolite. We act like repeating ourselves is beneath us. We want to be the reasonable adults in the room while the other side counts on the fact that reasonable people get tired.
Meanwhile, regular people are living in the results.
People in counties like ours aren’t sitting around debating whether Democrats have the right vocabulary. They’re watching one simple thing: when someone powerful hurts the community, do we let them slide, or do we pin it to them and keep it there?
Paid subscribers get this first, then it’ll open up for everyone.
Because the lived experience most folks have with power is that power doesn’t listen, it doesn’t explain, and it doesn’t pay. So when Democrats sound managerial, when we talk like the point is to keep everything orderly, it lands like just another institution asking people to swallow it.
That’s why the label gets heavy. That’s why “Democrat” becomes a punchline before you ever say a word. Not because our values are secret. Because our posture looks familiar: ask for patience, ask for unity, ask for time, ask for trust… and don’t make anybody important uncomfortable.
You can’t rebrand your way out of that.
If Democrats want people to show up, donate, volunteer, run, and take the social heat that comes with stepping into this work, we need to offer something sturdier than inspiration. We need to prove, in public, that decisions have owners.
That means when they vote for something that hurts the community, they don’t get a clean reset the next morning. They don’t get to change the subject and keep their standing. They don’t get to be celebrated while people are quietly paying the bill.
Make them answer for it. In the rooms where it happened, and in the rooms where they want to be congratulated. Hold it there long enough that people watching understand that power can be made to feel pressure again.
And once you’re willing to do that, the next question isn’t “what’s our message.” The next question is where you press so it actually breaks the grip, where the local machine is soft, where the story can’t be smoothed over, where the people in charge can’t talk their way out of what they did.
That’s where we’re going next.
This is The D Word series. It’s not branding or vibes. It’s a hard look at why trust collapsed and what it takes to rebuild power where the decisions actually land.
