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I'm Taking Inspiration From Wherever I Can Get It [1]

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Date: 2025-01-15

These are the darkest days- right? The start of a 4 year grind with Trump 2.0, with a trifecta for the next 2 years and the moment that any president is the most productive. And thanks to Project 2025 we know exactly how terrible these guys plan on being.

So let me tell you about Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions.

I know that not every Kossack is a NFL fan- maybe most of you aren’t. But bear with me with this story of arguably the most misbegotten NFL team.

(Is football a violent game that has long exploited its players? Yep. Is the NFL run by a bunch of creepy billionaire owners who use public resources to enrich themselves? Yep. Do a bunch of the people in the league skew right, give off Christian nationalist vibes, and on occasion beat up women? Unfortunately yes. This is not about praising all things NFL but giving an instructive example involving the most popular professional sport in America)

For non-fans, the Detroit Lions have been about as far from success as you can be. They’re one of 4 teams to never have played in the Super Bowl. However, they have the sole distinction of being the only one of those teams to be in existence of all 59 years the Super Bowl has been played. They have only made the Championship Game (the game you win to get to the Super Bowl) twice in that time, the 2nd time being last year. In comparison, the Pittsburgh Steelers have been to 16 Championship Games and 8 Super Bowls in the same timespan.

When Dan Campbell was named their head coach in 2021 he was a fairly unknown entity. A former player who had been an assistant coach, Campbell came with no real pedigree. Many just assumed he would be the latest hapless coach to oversee a bunch of losing in Detroit. Sure, he was an ex-player who stands 6’ 5” and looks like he could still play, and he did make an impression at his introductory press conference about creating a team culture so intense that his players would be biting kneecaps, but so what? It was the Lions.

His first year started off 0-10-1 onto a final record of 3-13-1. The second season started 1-6. Typical, right?

But that 2nd season ended with a winning record, 9-8. The 3rd year the Lions would go 12-5, win their division for the first time in 30 years, win 2 playoff games and end up a game away from the Super Bowl. This year they just finished 15-2, are the # 1 seed in their conference, and are heavily favored to reach the Super Bowl for the first time ever.

So what does all of this have to do with politics?

Imagine the Democrats as the Detroit Lions: it’s not hard to do. Sure, they are one of 32 NFL teams while the Democrats are one of the 2 major parties. Sure, they’ve won numerous elections big and small in the past 57 years.

But right now the Democrats are in a bit of a no man’s land. In DC they are out of the White House and in the minority of both chambers of Congress (yes, just a seat or 3 in the House). That the right hates them is obvious. Much of the far left act as if they are the same as the GOP. The average American is inundated with propaganda against them to the point where too many people see them as the right wants them to- both nefarious at pulling off sinister actions yet incapable of doing anything beneficial for anyone.

In other words, like a losing team that no one wants to be on and no one is rooting for.

Like the Detroit Lions in 2021.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it is instructive. This is how Dan Campbell and company helped turn the Lions from the bottom of the NFL to a top team where players want to go and the fans are furiously supporting:

- he addressed the Lions history of losing head on. From the first press conference he talked about how bad the Lions have been and how the city of Detroit was starving for a winner. To that end, he promised to build a culture of winning.

- he had a vision of the sort of team he wanted. Though almost comical in his description, he wanted to build a team of hungry and intense players that would want to be there and would give everything to win. Note that the NFL is a league filled with millionaire players where the average career is 3 years long. One sign of a losing team is players “giving up” on their team, especially when defeat looks certain. This is always a big obstacle in turning around a losing culture.

- he remained committed to sticking to his vision. Those 0-10-1 and 1-6 starts early on made many question that Campbell knew what he was doing or that it would ever work. But, to his credit, Campbell stuck with his method. Having been a player, and then a coach, on both good teams and bad, he had a sense of what it took to turn around a situation that had been losing for so long that the notion of winning was somewhat delusional. He even said as much, from the start, that there would be a ton of struggle before his way would pay off. Sticking with it when your record says it isn’t working and everyone is writing you off is tough.

- at the moment, Campbell has proven himself right. His slightly unorthodox way of coaching and running football games- he is highly aggressive and takes a lot of risks- is not just paying off. He believed in building a team with a “winning mentality” (my quote) by getting them used to being aggressive- even though it would cost them in the beginning. He gambled on going for it in games when his teams were far less likely to succeed. He purposely wanted them to get used to having that confident and aggressive nature- even at the cost of losing in the short term.

Maybe by now you get the point.

The Democrats don’t need a Coach Dan Campbell (whose politics are unknown but I suspect not friendly to us). This goes beyond any one “savior.”

We do need, however, the Dan Campbell attitude.

Many of us are counting on Trump and the GOP on screwing up so much- or at least enough- to give Democrats a window to at least take back the House in 2 years. It’s not a bad bet, especially since Trump is singularly incompetent and self-destructive, and the GOP is made up of people that really hate the majority of Americans.

That’s all well and good, but we’re going to need a bit more than that to go from here to there. The Democrats are playing a game that is rigged against them in every sort of way: if you’re here reading this, you already know how. Playing in the same manner that many elected Dems in DC know and have been doing for decades isn’t going to cut it. At the same time, those Dems are highly unlikely to change at this point.

The aggressive attitude that I described in Dan Campbell needs to come from….well, us, I guess.

Who else? This is going to be truly a bottom-up movement because so many other players- safe, secure, powerful players- have shown themselves to be too afraid, too cautionary, too whatever to do what’s necessary.

But we need that attitude that Campbell brought to the Lions to come to the Democrats. We need a culture shift that will fight MAGA and the GOP. We need the attitude to stand up for what’s right, regardless of how many billionaires don’t like it, or how many bigots, racists, and sexists hate it. And we need the conviction to stick with it when things don’t go our way and things are at their worst. Just like we’re facing right now.

So how does that work beyond the pages of Daily Kos? I honestly don’t know other than there is the need for a response out in the world that matches the inevitable terrible parade of actions that we are about to get. And I’m not talking about street protests, which have been marginalized to a large degree by the right and the MSM.

The worst people are at a height of hubris right now. Trump and his cult feel that he is untouchable. Billionaires talk openly of running everything. No one fears the Democrats getting more money than the GOP, let alone being able to win enough elections and remake the courts to create any real change.

Again, this is a real Detroit Lions moment.

The moment for all of us to intake that Dan Campbell attitude and determination to tough it out and take it back from the other guys- not today or tomorrow, but in the end. The Lions in 2021 looked as hopeless as they ever did, winning 14 games out of 48 over the previous 3 years. Nothing indicated that anything was about to change or that Campbell was the person that would and could make that change.

Again, I wish I could lay out right now exactly how all this can and will work. But it starts with the attitude and the conviction. At the very least, we have to have that.

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