The hope you deserve on Inauguration Day

Reflecting on resilience, activism, and how we build the communities that will carry us forward.

Today, I'm publishing a conversation with Emily Amick, former counsel to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, author of New York Times bestseller Democracy in Retrograde, and the influencer @EmilyinYourPhone.

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Here is the transcript of our conversation, edited for ease of reading. Our goal is to make this a conversation between all of us; let us know in the comments what drives you, gives you purpose, and how you prepare for the next four years.

EMILY: We first met about a decade ago when you were advocating for passage of gun reform legislation, which meant you were going around from office to office in Congress talking to staffers trying to convince us all to move a bill that would take until 2022 to get passed.

I've always wondered how those meetings felt from the other side. From your side? From the Senate side, I was working incredibly hard to win Republican votes, and I remember being frustrated that the outside groups couldn't galvanize the public to care in a way that would work. When you came in, there was at least some passion and excitement from people who wanted to see change happen. I was so inspired. How did it feel to you?

SHANNON: Back then, I knew little to nothing about gun violence, organizing, politics, or legislating. I'd had a career in corporate communications, which were the skills I brought to Moms Demand Action. I was in my early 40s, and I'd been spurred into action by the horrific school shooting in Newtown. So suddenly, finding myself in Washington, DC, sitting with survivors and volunteers on the other side of a desk from Congressmembers, including your boss at the time, Sen. Chuck Schumer, was astounding. But honestly, we were so outraged by the Sandy Hook School shooting that we didn't have time to have imposter syndrome or feel intimidated. Our instincts kicked in, and we were hellbent on doing whatever it took to protect others. I think lawmakers sensed that these moms weren't fucking around; we were going to hold them accountable publicly and vocally, and that scared them. In just a few years, the number of Democrats in Congress who had A-ratings went from 25 percent to zero. But we had no idea at the time what a huge mountain we were climbing.

EMILY: I'm blown away by how much you have accomplished. You transitioned from communications exec to being a stay-at-home mom to activism. It feels like we have no choice but to constantly evolve these days. You're such a role model, but it also seems exhausting. Have you ever considered tapping out?

SHANNON: Never permanently. There have been times throughout the years when one of my five kids was struggling, and I had to step back, but anger is my go-to emotion, and I sometimes worry that if I don't channel it into righteous action, it could turn into something unhelpful. For 11 years, leading Moms Demand Action gave me plenty of fodder for turning my anger into action, from lax gun laws to police shootings to gun violence becoming the leading cause of death among American children. When I stepped back from my leadership role at Moms Demand Action at the end of 2023 and widened my lens on the world, I found plenty of other things to be righteously angry about, from abortion bans to a lack of access to menopause education and treatments to a lack of equality for women.

I obviously also need and have cultivated habits and practices that help me with burnout, including meditation, travel, exercise, and hobbies. I also go to therapy. Over the years, I've learned that activism is a marathon, not a sprint, but a relay race. When you're tired, it's essential to pass the baton to someone else and let them run for a while. I promise you, the work will still be there when you're rested and ready to return.

What about you, Emily? How has moving around within politics and switching to influencer advocacy helped you grow?

EMILY: I spent a long time moving around within traditional politics. I had jobs in journalism, advocating from the outside on several different issues and working inside the Senate before I shifted to bringing information directly to the public. I don't think I could have sustained working in any one of those jobs for the entirety of the 15+ years I've been doing this. So often you are repeating the same fights year after year and you become either inured to it all or emotionally overwhelmed. For me, my coping mechanism has been shifting to new jobs and new positions where I can take what I have learned from the previous one and build on it.

A lot of us are broken down by our political system. But I wouldn't have stayed in it if I hadn't seen a lot of positive change. I've continuously worked on projects that have had legislative success, not immediately but after a couple of years. It takes time. And that's what I want to shout from the rooftops. I've seen real progress happen, and I've seen the impact of my actions. It helps me maintain perspective that change can happen, even while we regress in other areas!

Politics has always been my vocation. It's my job, it's how my mortgage gets paid. But, I am also very personally invested in a number of issues and it's incredibly frustrating when it feels like we are going backwards on things like reproductive rights. How do you deal with that frustration?

SHANNON: The benefit of having been 41 years old when I became an activist is that I had the wisdom to know that most significant change is slow, complex, and–this is a word some people really dislike–incremental. Showing up is how the work happens, even though our culture often views activism as something that burns hot and quick. Too many people believe that one post, one protest, one policy can somehow solve complex problems. But the reality is it takes years of small changes to lay the groundwork for big ones. I don't really understand football, but someone once said to me, "Sometimes entire football games are won by field goals." And that idea, that incrementalism leads to revolutions, really resonated with me.

My strategies for staying engaged are:

1) Celebrate every win, no matter how small. It's easier to stay in the fight when you know you're making progress.

2) Don't give up when you lose because it's inevitable, and you're learning something to help you win the next time. I call this "losing forward."

3) Prepare for the long game. Remember that most of the freedoms we take for granted took a long time to come to fruition. It took 100 years to win the right for ALL women to vote. It took 100 years to pass child labor laws in all 50 states. It took 40 years to legalize same-sex marriage after the first state lawsuit was filed. It took 20 years to implement drunk driving standards in all 50 states.

And on days when this work has been hard, I remind myself that if those activists had given up a few years in, we wouldn't be here today. That's why I often share a quote from a Jewish rabbi that goes, "You are not required to finish your work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it." In other words, we may not be able to completely achieve a goal in our lifetime, but because we are so blessed to live in a democracy (fingers crossed) we are obligated to keep going and not give up just because change is hard.

EMILY: I am an exceptionally pragmatic person, and my honest answer for how I stay engaged has always been - what other choice is there? To be a member of a community is to care about the people around you and want to make it better. I think everyone's life has seasons, for you the activism season started after kids. For me, it might be the other way around (who knows!)

I also think that we too narrowly define what it means to be civically engaged. Organizing a book club counts. Bringing your neighbor food when they are sick counts. Mothering children and caring about other kids' wellbeing counts. We've really let the conservatives define "good motherhood" for the past couple of years. How can we take motherhood and caregiving back?

SHANNON: A pastor who spoke at a Moms Demand leadership conference once told our volunteers, "It is the women, not the warriors, who change society." I believe–and have seen firsthand–that there's a lot of power in being a middle-aged woman or a mom, and that that power is often underutilized. In part because middle-aged women–especially Black and brown women–are invisible in society. Women are the secret sauce of activism; they uniquely understand the strategic importance of doing the unglamorous, heavy lifting of grassroots advocacy. And even when faced with a powerful adversary, we don't back down–we double down. Persistence is our superpower.

But I also believe the mantle of motherhood, which has been a potent agent of change in every nation, has come to be seen by progressives as anachronistic or cliche. The right recognized this shift and capitalized on it, resulting in groups like Moms for Liberty. It's important that progressives remain pragmatic; we must pull the levers of power available to us and, right now, mothers are a powerful voting bloc feared by Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike. Moms Demand Action volunteers have pulled every lever of power available to them and changed the culture, candidates, and course of history on the issue of gun safety. We've normalized talking about gun safety on the campaign trail, in classrooms, and in our communities. I think it's a model worthy of replicating for a whole host of other issues, from abortion rights to the harms of social media.

What are your thoughts on this, Emily?

EMILY: I think about this a lot, especially as a woman without children. I truly believe that the Democratic Coalition (the whole tent) has failed to engage in long-term strategic infrastructure building in a way that is sufficient to combat the efforts of the right. Not that it's easy, but the reality is we have failed to get the votes we need and to build an infrastructure to create the change we need. It doesn't matter if 80% of America cares about something if there aren't enough votes in the Senate.

There are so many issues that reflect this but gun violence is a great example, there is no bipartisan solution to gun violence (I wrote a very long article about this last year.) We need the votes.

The same goes for the courts, we (Dems) focused on issues and they (Republicans) focused on winning seats on the Supreme Court. And they won. They have more votes. This is clear in so many issues, but especially when it comes to gun control.

Every single school shooting seems to activate the same formula on social media of dismay, outrage bait and calls for inaction followed by silence and inaction. What can we actually do to disrupt this cycle going forward?

SHANNON: On the one hand, it's important that whenever there are preventable, senseless shooting tragedies, we insist that pundits and politicians acknowledge the reason for it: America's lax gun laws. That's why we have a 26 times higher gun homicide rate than any other nation. On the other hand, it's incumbent on all of us as citizens to relentlessly demand action on gun violence given that mass shootings makeup less than one percent of all gun violence. We can't just care when our own kids are endangered; we must care about all forms of gun violence, from homicides to suicides to unintentional shootings in suburban, urban and rural areas.

I'm often asked if I think Americans have become numb to gun violence. I can't imagine there are many people who think it's acceptable for over 125 people to be shot and killed every day in our nation, while hundreds more are wounded. But I do think gun violence is so prevalent that it becomes background noise until it reaches our own communities. And, given the growth of the crisis, that's inevitable. So get off the sidelines and get involved in fixing the culture, the laws and the lawmakers that have enabled America's gun violence crisis in whatever way works for you: join an organization like Moms Demand Action or run for office yourself. But like Michelle Obama says, "Do something."

EMILY: And in doing that something, in getting together with other people who care about the same things as us, I believe we are also able to address something that you and I have both talked about a lot recently: needing a village. When my health got bad last year I desperately needed support and I often felt like I had failed in cultivating the "village" that would be there for me when I needed it.

You once wrote that you woke up at 50 with no real friends and took concerted action to try to change that. How did you do it? I think we need good people in our lives more than ever as we prepare for this next Trump-era, but cultivating friendships can seem exhausting.

SHANNON: A few years ago, I was listening to a podcast about friendship. An expert said, "Everyone should have at least five people they can call in the middle of the night in case of an emergency, not including your family." When I tried to summon the names of five people I wasn't related to who would answer a call from me in the middle of the night, I couldn't even come up with one. So at age 52, I set out on a year-long journey to make more friends. I listened to more podcasts, I bought books, I surveyed my followers on social media, and I asked my kids about how they made friends. Along the way, I've realized I'm not too old to make friends, but the process has been harder than I imagined. So far, I've added about five women as friends to my life–not best friends, but women I really enjoy spending time with and want to get to know better. I'm not sure I've met anyone yet who would drop everything in the middle of the night to help me with a crisis, but maybe in a couple more years, I'll find the fortitude to ask if they'll add me to their emergency contact call list.

How do you maintain friendships and community, especially given that the next four years are likely to be tumultuous?

EMILY: There was an article in Slate a couple months ago called I'm Starting to Think You Guys Don't Really Want a "Village." Jo Piazza and I have talked about it on our podcast, but also in so many random texts, sometimes in the middle of the night. In it the author argues that we all have developed very specific metrics for who we want in our village and how those interactions should go, The problem is that is not, in fact, how organic relationships work. I think life has become incredibly transactional, in part because work takes up too much time and we don't have bandwidth for anything other than trying to keep reaching for some impossible perfection.. But with that, there is a massive personal loss.

I turned 40 last week, and I wrote about trying to figure out my intentions for the next decade.Two of them really interact with each other: one is working less and the other is building my village.

I have made a couple changes already, I've been very focused on showing up for social events even when my inclination is usually to stay home to work. I'm trying to call people more just to chat. I'm trying to show up with a joyful attitude for people in my life - and not in an insincere way, in a truly profound way.. I'm pushing myself to be excited, to care deeply, to want to be in community with others - because I know that will come right back to me and because it is what I want, even if I am coming at it from a place of exhaustion.

I know that community is both a survival technique for the next four years AND the way we solve some of the problems facing the democratic coalition today. Yes, there's a lot of inside baseball about tactically what can be done better, but there also needs to be a lot more people who are actively engaged in building a democratic coalition that wins and I think that depends on people truly being in community together. We get to choose our leaders as we move forward, and we get to do that together.

There needs to be less waiting on a leader to emerge and more rising up from the grassroots to lead in our own small ways.

I truly believe that in seeing other people step up and do this work, I will find a never ending source of hope and motivation to keep fighting. It will be hard. This weekend we have seen Trump earn billions (BILLIONS WITH A B) with his crypto drop. We are standing on the precipice of a regime that is going to do immigration raids, a regime who will control a ridiculous amount of power over the technology that disseminates our information.

The world is going to change in ways we never could have imagined, but I still think that standing together with good people who believe that we can win this fight will make a goddamn difference.

Please join us.

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