I’m grateful you told this story the way you did, without polish and without pretending it resolved cleanly. There’s real courage in naming disappointment without turning it into bitterness, and real generosity in refusing to turn decent people into villains just because a system failed.
What stayed with me most wasn’t Forward itself. It was the quiet loss of an assumption many of us carried for a long time, that somewhere inside the machinery there were adults with a plan. People who understood the stakes more clearly than the rest of us. People who would know when to move, how to move, and how to protect what mattered when things turned dangerous.
This reads like the moment when that belief slips away.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just the slow realization that proximity to power doesn’t grant clarity, and experience inside the system doesn’t guarantee steadiness when the system itself starts to give way. That’s a hard truth, especially for people who entered politics out of good faith, seriousness, and a desire to prevent harm rather than accumulate status.
I also don’t think your broken ankle is incidental. It illustrates something we rarely say out loud about how constraint actually works. Not through spectacle or overt force, but through timing, dependency, and the plain fact that people can’t always walk away when bodies, families, or health coverage won’t allow it. That isn’t weakness. That’s how pressure operates quietly and effectively.
What you describe about leadership being just as frightened and unsure as everyone else landed hard because it rings true. Many of us were raised on a civic story that said competence lived somewhere above us, that confidence reflected knowledge, that the system had buffers built into it. Watching those buffers fail has been disorienting in ways we still haven’t fully reckoned with.
I appreciate that you didn’t turn that realization into despair. You let it become sobriety.
The moment where you say no one is coming to save us doesn’t read as resignation. It reads as clarity. Not because people are cruel or indifferent, but because the structures we trusted no longer hold under this kind of strain. That recognition hurts, but it also strips away illusion. And illusion has been one of the most dangerous comforts of the last decade.
The sheriff race at the end matters for that reason. Not as a redemption arc, and not as proof that everything works if we try harder, but as a reminder that power hasn’t disappeared. It’s smaller now. More local. More contingent. More dependent on people acting without guarantees and without the fantasy that someone else has it handled.
This didn’t feel like a story about failure to me. It felt like a story about growing up politically, about losing a comforting fiction and learning how to stand without it. That kind of adulthood is painful. It’s also necessary.
Thank you for telling it plainly, and for trusting readers with what you learned when the curtain got pulled back.
Dino, I think your assessment of my piece is better than the piece itself! Thank you for this. I’m glad that the points I was trying to make landed exactly as I hoped they would.
I’m pleased I was able to access it. You write well and it’s enjoyable to read. Actually, even though we all seem to be circling the same stressers, your approach is less direct, more scenic, if I can call it that. As soon as I can manage the sub I’ll contribute to your publication.
Thanks for this narrative about the beginnings of the Forward Party. I was a reader of the Topline published by Stand Up Republic and RAM several years ago.
I’m grateful you told this story the way you did, without polish and without pretending it resolved cleanly. There’s real courage in naming disappointment without turning it into bitterness, and real generosity in refusing to turn decent people into villains just because a system failed.
What stayed with me most wasn’t Forward itself. It was the quiet loss of an assumption many of us carried for a long time, that somewhere inside the machinery there were adults with a plan. People who understood the stakes more clearly than the rest of us. People who would know when to move, how to move, and how to protect what mattered when things turned dangerous.
This reads like the moment when that belief slips away.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just the slow realization that proximity to power doesn’t grant clarity, and experience inside the system doesn’t guarantee steadiness when the system itself starts to give way. That’s a hard truth, especially for people who entered politics out of good faith, seriousness, and a desire to prevent harm rather than accumulate status.
I also don’t think your broken ankle is incidental. It illustrates something we rarely say out loud about how constraint actually works. Not through spectacle or overt force, but through timing, dependency, and the plain fact that people can’t always walk away when bodies, families, or health coverage won’t allow it. That isn’t weakness. That’s how pressure operates quietly and effectively.
What you describe about leadership being just as frightened and unsure as everyone else landed hard because it rings true. Many of us were raised on a civic story that said competence lived somewhere above us, that confidence reflected knowledge, that the system had buffers built into it. Watching those buffers fail has been disorienting in ways we still haven’t fully reckoned with.
I appreciate that you didn’t turn that realization into despair. You let it become sobriety.
The moment where you say no one is coming to save us doesn’t read as resignation. It reads as clarity. Not because people are cruel or indifferent, but because the structures we trusted no longer hold under this kind of strain. That recognition hurts, but it also strips away illusion. And illusion has been one of the most dangerous comforts of the last decade.
The sheriff race at the end matters for that reason. Not as a redemption arc, and not as proof that everything works if we try harder, but as a reminder that power hasn’t disappeared. It’s smaller now. More local. More contingent. More dependent on people acting without guarantees and without the fantasy that someone else has it handled.
This didn’t feel like a story about failure to me. It felt like a story about growing up politically, about losing a comforting fiction and learning how to stand without it. That kind of adulthood is painful. It’s also necessary.
Thank you for telling it plainly, and for trusting readers with what you learned when the curtain got pulled back.
Dino, I think your assessment of my piece is better than the piece itself! Thank you for this. I’m glad that the points I was trying to make landed exactly as I hoped they would.
I’m pleased I was able to access it. You write well and it’s enjoyable to read. Actually, even though we all seem to be circling the same stressers, your approach is less direct, more scenic, if I can call it that. As soon as I can manage the sub I’ll contribute to your publication.
Many thanks, Dino!
Thanks for this narrative about the beginnings of the Forward Party. I was a reader of the Topline published by Stand Up Republic and RAM several years ago.
Thanks so much for your comment, Mike! As the editor of The Topline, that’s so nice to hear.
Some great writing, puts you in the heart of it as a reader
Can feel your frustration 🫤
❤️