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Between 7 p.m. on Monday and 8:05 p.m. on Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker held the Senate floor, offering a speech that broke the record set by Strom Thurmond in 1957 when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 24 hours and 18 minutes. Booker lasted 25 hours and five minutes in his nonfilibuster filibuster. His speech was liked on TikTok over 350 million times. In the end, these numbers matter very little. What matters is that for anyone who has toggled between the “profoundly broken” and “exceedingly numb” poles of the emotional register in recent weeks, Booker blew the doors off and reminded us of a whole lot of things we knew already but which have been hard to retain top-of-mind amid the devastation that Donald Trump’s authoritarian forces have been wreaking on American democracy. Booker, though, confronted those forces head-on. “I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker opened. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

Oh my God. Finally.

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Here are five things I forgot to remember until Sen. Booker reminded me of them just now:

1. Adulting Requires Admitting That You Were Wrong

One of the first lessons we teach toddlers is that everyone makes mistakes, and that our job on this planet is to admit to them and correct for them. We all know this to be an essential component of competence and ethical growth, yet the leadership style of Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, future former co-president Elon Musk, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, et al. rests on unleashing disasters upon the country, seriatim, and then variously screaming “witch hunt” and “fake news” while angrily blaming others. Booker did the grown-up thing and took the fall for his small part in this disaster. Rattling off essential government agencies and services that have been decimated by DOGE, he asked, “What will we do in this body? What will we do in the House of Representatives? Right now the answer is nothing.” Partway through his speech, Booker said: “I confess that I have been imperfect. I confess that I’ve been inadequate to the moment. I confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say, ‘We will do better.’ ” And just like that, he reminded the country that when leaders take responsibility for their mistakes and missteps, they earn back our trust in turn.

2. Senators Are Human, Too

When Booker announced, without much fanfare, that he intended to take to the Senate floor and speak until he could not speak any longer, he requested that his colleagues in the Senate ask him questions to give him breaks and spare his voice without him having to yield the floor. What ensued was a kind of goofy family portrait of Senate Democrats romping around free in their natural habitat that was far more compelling than the scripted hearings/fundraising-letter/tone-deaf politicking we have come to expect from that chamber. Booker is well aware that Democrats are furious at the generally crap leadership they have seen from their elected representatives since Trump’s reelection, which culminated in capitulating on a spending bill that has enabled so much more of the hellscape that followed. Booker also, though, took the time to say something over-the-top and deeply personal about why he adores each of his colleagues—including the goofballs and the weirdos. Senators were then free to demonstrate deep knowledge about climate change, Social Security, the economy, the Department of Veterans Affairs, SignalGate, and the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The result wasn’t just the performance of generosity and humility that gave Booker’s officemates a little credit for their work; it was also a slick reminder to frustrated voters that their representatives are people with biographies, expertise, and complicated faith practices, and that showing grace in the face of a crisis is also an essential part of politics. Trump promptly fires anyone who steals his limelight or makes him appear less than godlike. Booker modeled what a team sport demands of team leaders: Sharing the credit harms a leader not one bit.

3. Democracy Is, Indeed, a Team Sport

Booker said over and over again some version of the formulation that he had no idea how the Senate would stop Trump, but he knew that the people themselves could do it if they tried. Booker read from a letter sent by Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman in 1868 when she was a relative unknown and he was extremely famous, in which Douglass conceded that:

Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, “God bless you,” has been your only reward.

Booker followed that quote with an admonition that the answer to the question “What can I do?” is: “Something. do something.” He asked everyone listening to just do one thing more than they are doing now. That was the entire invitation: Do something.

4. Real People Are Still Visible to Real People

We have been living in Trump’s Barbie World for so long that we sometimes forget that while the oligarchs currently running the White House travel in private planes and reside on gated golf courses, tens of thousands of real people are suffering terrible harms, and someone in leadership still sees them. As a centerpiece of his speech, Booker read letters from veterans, those facing the loss of health care, former USAID workers, and the many “terrified people” who were sending him mail. Elon Musk has famously derided the supposedly debilitating impact of empathy on Western society. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk told Joe Rogan in February. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” But of course the real truth is that the demonization of others and outsiders and the marginalized is the fundamental weakness of society and a sort of collective sociopathy. What Booker reminded us of was that the suffering of actual American people is real, and that government exists to alleviate suffering, and not just to enrich wealthy nutbars. This too, hardly seems a lesson that warrants relearning, and yet there it was, being painstakingly retaught. At a moment in which the human toll of illegal renditioning and slashing health care and benefits is almost beyond measure, it took Booker 25 hours to name it and grieve for it so the rest of us had words.

5. Words Matter

There were no fancy sets, no rose ceremony, no plot twist, no resolutions. Were this a reality show, it would never have been picked up. Indeed, even as a democracy show, it was streamed online but not carried on any network. This was 25 hours of Constitutional Convention–type speech, interrupted by tiny sips of water and some gratuitous intramural nice-offs. But it was also The Matrix, Shakespeare in the Park, and Schoolhouse Rock. In a politics of Botox, preening, shock, reversal, you’re fired, and “does he really mean it,” Booker’s performance was the politics of moral seriousness. The reason that felt so weird and alien and even titillating? We are gasping for it.

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Booker’s 25-hour untelevised telethon felt briefly like it was setting the entire world spinning in the right direction again. Up was up again. Truth was true. The inevitable workshopping and market-testing and public temperature-taking happened in real time. Will it change the course of history, democracy, or America’s current oligarch-fueled authoritarianism trajectory? Probably not. But oligarch-fueled authoritarianism ate it in Wisconsin on Tuesday and thus far “Liberation Day” is proving that simply calling things the opposite of themselves is beginning to lose its limited charm. Maybe the thing Booker modeled above all is that we each have something at which we excel, and that now is a good time to step up and try to do it in service of good trouble. Working nonstop in the dark. Getting no credit. Speaking truth to fabrication. Showing kindness and grace. With no promises and with whomping humility. We knew all this stuff already. But for anyone who had gone numb as to why it matters: It matters, and now we remember why.

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