Electoral campaigns are too fleeting to sustain political unselfing

Evidence

The trouble is, a presidential campaign isn’t capable of making good on a promise like that. By definition, an electoral campaign has a finite life span, and it ends when the candidate wins or loses. When Bernie lost and that end arrived, the unselfing we felt so powerfully on the campaign trail seemed to end right along with it. Shut in our homes by the first wave of strict lockdowns, severed from the movement that had held us together, so many of us who had been overcome by the power of “us” felt as if we had just been summarily dropped into a deep sea of “me.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1093

Categorization

• QUESTION: Klein locates the collapse of post-2016 movement energy in the campaign’s inherent finitude plus lockdown isolation — but this explanation brackets the larger question of what permanent containers could hold unselfing. Worth revisiting against the book’s closing prescriptions.
• XREF: connects to: A Bernie-style campaign could aim to build lasting infrastructure beyond the election — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 325